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SEO consultant Indu Priya recently wrote a post for the site Quick Online Tips about measuring return on investment (ROI) when it comes to Twitter. While the piece was not directed at lawyers, its messages were well taken and certainly apply to our practices. As the author notes there, it is notoriously hard to measure results on new-media platforms like Twitter; to discern what works from what doesn’t. But there are a number of tools available for those who want to measure their Twitter results and extrapolate their ROI. 

Obviously, to assess how close you are to your destination you must know where you’re going. Some firms have gone to the length of assemblying a marketing plan in order to set goals for themselves – but if you ask me a simple outline will do until you find out whether your aims are realistic, achievable, or economical. Consider these well-known Twitter success stories:

Dell famously uses Twitter to disseminate offers and discounts, as well as to listen in on market chatter. To guage success Dell counts the number of Twitter-based discounts redeemed by consumers, comparing those figures with the number of purchasers overall. The difference should represent the difference that Twitter makes in its customer-count.

Barack Obama’s Twitter account is the stuff of history – launched during his lightning 2008 presidential campaign, its goal was simply to touch as many people as possible and allow them to communicate with one another. Once their common Twitter friend (the Obama campaign) brought them together, the key metric measured b y the campaign was the number of posts (tweets) that were circulated (retweeted) by followers. After that the multiplier effect took over and delivered the vote.

Of course not all goals are measurable or even achievable; but most can be reached following some creative planning. In the meantime, consider these ROI measurement tools for Twitter and find more on OneForty: 

• twifluence     track the growth rate of your Twitter campaign
•  twitalyzer     analyze how many times others refer to your posts
• tweeteffect   find how many people are responding to your posts
• klout              measures influence on topics across the social web
• twitoaster     measure and view respones to blog and Twitter posts

Talk about your rapid deployment cycles. Google Buzz only went into general release last week (web-only attached to Gmail) and there are already plans to spin it off into its own app and, now, a third-party developer brings us this desktop Buzz monitor. And a very cool one at that. All of which points to the fact that Google has really gotten the hang of identifying creative ideas, bringing ideas to users, then tweaking the product while it is in the field. Not only that, but Google knows enough to make its API freely available so that 3rd party developers can get in on the action. The result with Wave and now Buzz is that changes can be made in real time based on customer comments (not canned feedback or inputs from a few opinionated beta testers). No sir: comments made about Buzz by users of Buzz  were apparently picked up by Google, examined for feasibility, and implemented within hours.