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How Do You Measure Social? Some great tools can help you monitor the online conversation, ranging from free (e.g., Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to, uh, committing (e.g., TruCast, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony). The more expensive tools are worth what they cost, but the free tools are easy to set up and, well, they're free. And sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. You may just want to get something going on the cheap, show the value of your effort, and lobby for a robust, programmatic solution to monitor online activity and engage your customers where they hang out. You'll be surprised how much you'll learn, and you'll probably really enjoy it. The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous. So don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.

URL shorteners do two things. First, they shorten URLs. Second, they create a unique URL to a destination, which can be tracked. That's the key element for marketers. In fact, one of the up-and-comers in this space, bit.ly, has built analytics directly into its interface. By using URL shorteners, you can begin capturing some excellent insight. For example you can see how many times a particular community forwards a message compared to another community. That is, since you can create two unique short URLs to the same page, put one on Twitter and embed the other in an e-mail. You can then analyze the clicks you get in standard A/B testing. You can also measure pass-along rates. Since the recipient of the original short URL will most likely pass along the short URL (not the original URL), you can see how far down the particular path you've created to a page goes. Not Just for Other People's Content and Twitter The cool thing about URL shorteners is that you can shorten anything. Sure, the traditional way to use these services is to shorten a link to someone else's content and send it via a medium that requires you to be terse. But there's no reason you can't use the same method on links to your own site. Or put it in an e-mail. Or on your own site. Fact is, URL shorteners provide an easy way to track traffic you're generating via social media channels. Like most things on social media, the cost of entry to use these tools is free. They're definitely worth a try.

When you must prioritize, here are a few techniques you can use to make sure you've truly covered the most important pages: Go into your Web analytics tool and identify the top pages receiving traffic. Go into Google Webmaster Tools and get a list of your external links, so you can identify all pages that have received external links. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to identify the top pages listed there. Site Explorer tends to list the most important pages first. Next, make sure that the search engines find your 301 redirects. While it's common advice to update your sitemap to the new site on day one, consider leaving the old site's sitemap in place for a period of time, to help the search engines see the 301 redirects (hat tip to Stephan Spencer for this idea). How long should you leave it that way? That depends primarily on the size of your site and the number of pages that the search engines crawl on a daily basis. At a minimum, make sure that the prioritized pages list we developed above has been thoroughly crawled.

Have you guys seen any good 404s?Yes, we have! (Confession: no one asked us this question, but few things are as fun to discuss as response codes. :) We've put together a list of some of our favorite 404 pages. If you have more 404-related questions, let us know, and thanks for joining us for 404 week!http://www.metrokitchen.com/nice-404-page"If you're looking for an item that's no longer stocked (as I was), this makes it really easy to find an alternative."-Riona, domestigeekhttp://www.comedycentral.com/another-404"Blame the robot monkeys"-Reid, tells really bad jokeshttp://www.splicemusic.com/and-another"Boost your 'Time on site' metrics with a 404 page like this."-Susan, dabbler in music and Analyticshttp://www.treachery.net/wow-more-404s"It's not reassuring, but it's definitive."-Jonathan, has trained actual spiders to build websites, ants handle the 404shttp://www.apple.com/iPhone4g"Good with respect to usability."http://thcnet.net/lost-in-a-forest"At least there's a mailbox."-JohnMu, adventuroushttp://lookitsme.co.uk/404"It's pretty cute. :)"-Jessica, likes cute thingshttp://www.orangecoat.com/a-404-page.html"Flow charts rule."-Sahala, internet travellerhttp://icanhascheezburger.com/iz-404-page"I can has useful links and even e-mail address for questions! But they could have added 'OH NOES! IZ MISSING PAGE! MAYBE TIPO OR BROKN LINKZ?' so folks'd know what's up."-Adam, lindy hop geek