The key marketing metric is customer engagement and social media expert and radio show guest Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights tells us all about it.

People have always gathered around peers with similar interests, values, or concerns. Whether it’s in a tavern or at the water cooler, social conversation has long been the most trusted resource for making decisions on everything from picking a paint color to choosing a doctor.

Today, social media is transforming this process. Online communities are popping up everywhere and almost instantly. Social media is a gold mine of customer intelligence, if you have the strategy and tools to understand the insights. The key to unlocking this intelligence is understanding engagement.

Engagement is the new metric for social media, telling companies the degree and depth of customer-to-customer interaction. The old measurements of click-throughs and conversions are not meaningful to customers, which is particularly important when it comes to advertising placements and media buys. If ad placement is based on engagement, advertisers know that the advertising is more relevant to the people that see it because it is based on the topics and people that they engage with.

Measuring social media also can unlock innovative approaches to marketing, media, product development, and overall customer relationships. For customers, social media offers new ways of connecting, sharing, and organizing relationships and information. For companies, social media offers candid access to the collective wisdom and potential influence of people in ways traditional media cannot. It’s an organic two-way conversation.