On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your ability to measure the impact of your social-media initiatives? Be honest. Because if you're like the marketers who graded themselves for Emily Riley of Forrester Research, it's likely you see plenty of room for improvement. "The average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10," reports Nate Elliott at the Forrester blog. "Not a great score—especially given that accountability is one of the key selling points of interactive marketing."

What's wrong? With so many platform-specific metrics at a their disposal, and so little insight into the importance of each, marketers might gravitate to easily available—but potentially irrelevant—information (e.g. simply counting followers or fans). Alternately, they might try to force data through established analytical programs. "[M]arketers are much more likely to tailor their social media measurement to the tools they're using," notes Elliott, "than to the objectives they're trying to achieve."

To get your self-assessed score as close as possible to a perfect 10, Elliott recommends this process:

• Restate your objective. "If you don't know what your goal was," he says, "you'll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded."

• Determine the type of metric that will determine success. Match measurement to the behaviors and sentiments you hope to see. For instance, "If your goal was energizing [customers], success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand."

• Identify which metrics you will use for each social-technology platform. "This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report [from] Facebook or Jive … are most important."

The Po!nt: Get back to the basics for social-media analytics you can be proud of.

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