Here's an old parlor trick of SEO folks from the late nineties. The SEO agency would tell you that they would be happy to be paid on performance and then define "performance" as keyword ranking. They told clients they promised page one ranking on Google for a great term like "big yellow bananas in Tallahasee." They achieved the ranking. And of course, client's business didn't change one bit. And SEOs developed roughly the same ethical image of heroin smugglers.

Then smart SEOs and clients said, "Let's measure how much business comes from search. Our keywords may be on page one or page two or page five of the search engine results, but what really matters is this: looking at all the traffic that comes from search engines, are we getting more leads, sales, media coverage, voters, donors or members then we were before?"

Then a few years back we all started to realize that we need to pitch bloggers like we pitch reporters. In the day, blogger pitch plans had a crazy number of target bloggers: "We'll e-mail 200 blogger for $5,000 and 500 bloggers for $10,000." Then, (and I'd like to think Webbed Marketing was one of the first to figure this out) us online PR folks figured out that it's really dumb and inefficient to reach 500 bloggers, but if we find the three or five or 10 most influential bloggers in any space and build great relationships with them, we have much more successful campaigns.

Now, social media is going through the same evolution in figuring out what to measure. A year ago people just said, "Get me some of that Twitter." Then we all decided we need to set goals and track success. The easy way to do this is to set goals on number of followers. So, 150 followers is better than 50 and 1,000 is really great.

Well, maybe.

See let's take it down to the business goal. If Oprah retweets you and drives 500 people to your Web site and you sell a lot of books, which is a great thing -- even if she is your only follower. Now let's say there is this guy John you have never heard of. But John has connections on Facebook with editors and analysts. And on LinkedIn, he's connected to CTOs from Fortune 500 companies. And on Twitter, he is followed by your Governor. And when John talks about your products and services, your Web site traffic triples and your leads from your site quadruple. That's what I'm talking about.

The bottom line? Tracking number and types of social media connections is important, but followers and fans don't make payroll. Stick to the business goals. If social media is driving more sales, leads, media exposure, or whatever your core success metric is, then the program is successful.