Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are one of the most over-used and little understood terms in business development and management. They are too often taken to mean any metric or data used to measure business performance.

The role KPI’s play is much bigger and more important. In fact, KPI’s are one on the most important guideposts for any business. Every business should have them.

Here’s one of the best definition I’ve heard: KPI’s are an actionable scorecard that keeps your strategy on track. They enable you to manage, control and achieve desired business results.

This is something to benefit every business. This brief video from Erica Olsen of mystrategicplan.com not only explains them clearly but shows simply how to set up the road map for keeping your business strategy on track, the “KPI Dashboard.”

You don’t need a lot of metrics, but you do need to carefully select, report and take action from the handful you choose. Of course, that’s one opinion but there are others. Here’s how 12 experts define Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

1. “A metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” – Avinash Kaishik
2. “Measures that help decision makers define and measure progress toward business goals. KPI metrics translate complex measures into a simple indicator that allows decision makers to assess the current situation and act quickly.” – KAIZEN Analytics
3. “A KPI: 1) Echoes organization goals, 2) is decided by management, 3) provides context, 4) creates meaning on all levels of the all organizational levels, 5) is based on legitimate data, 6) is easy to understand and 7) leads to action!” – Dennis Mortensen
4.  ”The most important performance information that enables organisations or their stakeholders to understand whether the organisation is on track or not.” – Bernard Marr
5. “The selected measures that provide visibility into the performance of a business and enable decision makers to take action in achieving the desired outcomes.” – Aurel Brudan
6. “The data necessary to understand the implications of whatever he/she sees and the wherewithal to take appropriate action.” –  Shalin Shah
7.  ”Measurable industry, department or task relevant performance metrics that are evaluated over a specified time period, and compared against acceptable norms, past performance or targets.” – Allan Willie
8. “Measurements of activity that is a vital gear in your business machine.” - John Standaloft
9. “Help organisations achieve organisational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organisation and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors.” – Bruce Clay
10. “A set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals.” – James Oh
11. “High-level snapshots of a business or organization based on specific predefined measures.” – Amit Mehendale
12. “Should not constitute every company metric for analysis and evlaution. Rather, KPI’s should reflect the most important objectives of the business.” – Evan Godfrey

It’s been said we watch the Super Bowl as much for the commercials as the game. Maybe that helps explain why this year advertisers, on average, paid $3.5 million (+$500,000 versus last year) for a :30 commercial.

This year’s Super Bowl reached a record 111.3 million viewers; 300,000 more than last year, the previous record holder. Social media proved commercials were the most talked about topic according to Networked Insights.

Super Bowl commercials don’t sell products so much as entertain, often with great storytelling. Even considering the cost, a primary benchmark for success is the Water Cooler Factor, the brand buzz and many conversations that occur after the game that cause us to like the brand and keep it top-of-mind throughout the year.

Super Bowl commercials are measured mostly by media metrics – Reach, GRP’s and Nielsen Ratings.  But, because “Like,” “Buzz” and the Water Cooler Factor are success metrics, shouldn’t social media measurements play an important role?

Here are 7 social media measurements that matter for Super Bowl commercials.

1. USA TODAY/FACEBOOK AD METER: This year, for the first time, USA Today and Facebook teamed up to create a People’s Choice award for Super Bowl commercials. People rated commercials by logging into their Facebook account on a 1 to 5 scale. Here was the people’s top choices for 2012 and the commercial voted #1:

The image above is of one hand clapping. Perhaps it’s coming from the marketing plan that relies on only one type of media.

It makes sense social and traditional media would work better together but, as with any new form of marketing, social media has more to prove so the two are sometimes compared as if they were in competition.

Here are 12 case studies that prove social and traditional media were meant to work together.

1. CLEVELAND CLINIC: Was not the first in healthcare to experiment in social media, but it achieved success where others failed. By structuring a cross-functional team to enable education, collaboration, and smart governance, Cleveland Clinic deepened engagement with its consumers around the globe – both providers and patients. They used Facebook and Twitter for daily wellness tips; LinkedIn for professional recruitment and YouTube for content on diseases and patient stories. Since the Cleveland Clinic established social media as a cross-functional discipline, it has seen a noticeable increase in website traffic, attendance at health lectures and new patients making and keeping appointments.

2. CLOROX: Used traditional media to communicate the many uses for bleach in the home but supplemented with social media to encourage usage in places outside the house. Clorox launched an online community, CloroxClassrooms.com, with blog and Twitter effort on Labor Day weekend at the beginning of the school year.  The Twitter page was among the Top 10 trending topics over Labor Day weekend and the blog was recognized by the Marketing to Mom Coalition and mommy bloggers for excellence in terms of delivering sharable information.

2. COCA-COLA: Used social media strategically and achieved the strongest global marketing integration ever with Expedition 206, a social media promotion where a small group of travel ambassadors went to 206 countries over 365 days to “generate happiness” and published on social networks.  It enabled global promotion execution and integration among 3,500 Coca-Cola marketers around the world.

4. COLGATE WISP: Changed the target for the launch of a new, disposable toothbrush, from the traditional Moms to young, urban men and women 18-25 who were active daters. They supplemented the traditional media plan with 8 ”Be More Kissable” viral videos. They created a Facebook App called “Spin the Wisp” and partnered with 8 online publishers. The videos received over 4.1 million views and the App was downloaded over 40,000+ times. Colgate learned the value of engagement because Colgate’s U.S. market share in the toothbrush category increased 5.6 points to a record 35.6% driven largely by the Wisp.

5. FORD FIESTA: Gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, “agents” used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. Fiesta got 6.5 million YouTube views and 50,000 requests for information about the car—virtually none from people who already had a Ford in the garage. Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales. The results came at a relatively small cost. The Fiesta Movement is reputed to have cost a small fraction of the typical national TV campaign.

6. FRITO-LAY: Launched “What’s You Flavor” contest, as part of an integrated campaign, where social media was used as the vehicle for consumers to capture the diverse flavors and the diversity of people’s imagination in India. It leveraged the Frito Lays brand as a household name in India in a way that connected emotionally. The campaign attracted more than 500 press coverage worth 54 crores, the biggest in Frito Lay India’s history.

7. H&R BLOCK: Has learned in the weeks prior to April 15th, every question that is not answered immediately is a lost sales.  Tax preparation is a highly seasonal business.  H&R used Facebook and Twitter to provide immediate access to a tax professional for Q&A in the “Get It Right” social media campaign.  The effort secured 1,500,000 unique visitors and answered 1,000,000 questions for a 15% lift in business versus the prior year when there was no social media in the marketing mix.

8. HARLEY DAVIDSON: (HDTalking.com): Harley owners created a website and social community totally funded by users and user-generated content.  Here, Harley owners trades photos, jokes, where to find hard to find parts, advice on Harley models and ownership plus there are at least 7 mechanics on-call at all times.  HDtalking.com now has 56,000+ and cost to Harley is negligible.

9. HOULIHAN’S: Showed that social media drives ROI for small businesses. The restaurant showed that social technologies can be used in different ways to drive customers. Houlihan’s in the U.S.has around 100 restaurants, compared to their main competitor Applebees, which has over 2,000. With a small marketing budget, their marketing manager managed to drive sales directly from a private social network, run via Ning. The network was called ‘HQ’ and was launched in early 2008. By combining their social media campaign with email marketing, they managed to quickly build up 10,000 members and estimated that “7,000 to 13,000 people heard about our newest promotion because of an HQ member”. This shows the strength in running your own social network and how sometimes a private network may be the way to go, to offer people exclusivity and also encourage word of mouth.

10. JETBLUE: Started a Twitter account to have more direct relationship with customers and to listen and respond how they could serve them better and deal directly with any complaints.  They now have over 1.6 million followers.

11. MTV: Premiered Skins — an Americanized version of the acclaimed British teen drama. In addition to traditional media and Skins.tv, a central community regularly updated with content (including trailers and sneak peeks), a Tumblr blog – we are skins, Twitter handle –@skinsTV and a Facebook Fan Page, MTV used a number of innovative social apps to develop awareness and brand affinity for the show: Skins drew 3.26 million total viewers, outperforming the launches of competitive scripted shows across both cable and network in its core demo (12-34), including CW’s “Gossip Girl” and ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars.”

12. OLD SPICE: Managed to gather some pretty impressive stats that show the money where the buzz is. The reach of the Old Spice campaign is not in doubt, but did it actually impact sales? Since the original campaign launched with ‘Mustafa’, sales increased by 27% year on year. But in the 3 months after the height of the campaign, sales were up by 55%, reaching 107% in the final month of the social media campaign. And of course, Old Spice is now the #1 body wash brand for men. However you choose to look at the campaign, these figures stand up to show that a social media campaign, well executed and combined with traditional media, can drive significant ROI.

Do these case studies prove social and traditional media work better together to you?

Social CRM represents an important marketing milestone because it combines social marketing and science.

Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) marries mass, word-of-mouth, personal interactions with the principles of a sophisticated and software-based discipline; one that is more associated with 1-to-1 than 1-to-many relationships and B2B than B2C marketing. Because it connects many audiences plus is digital and measurable, Social CRM holds great promise for many marketers.

It is still early in its life cycle so there are different definitions and some think Social CRM is more of a buzzword than a real thing. But there are very smart CRM experts who believe it is a powerful tool that is going to with us for some time as the chart above shows.

To judge for yourself, here are 21 ways Social CRM is explained and shown by experts.

1. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationship with more meaningful interactions. - Altimeter
2. [Social] CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interaction in a business environment. – Oliver Blanchard
3. Social CRM is the process by which organizations make clients an integral asset in the management of productive relationships. - Mark Bonnell
4. Social CRM is a business philosophy that expands the borders of traditional customer relationship management beyond information, process and technology to people, conversations, and relationships. - Jas Dhillon
5. Social CRM captures both the tools AND the processes around the tools to: 1) leverage crowd sourcing customer ideas, 2) apply the wisdom of crowds to those ideas, 3) create a public customer ecosystem, 4) take the customer experience and communication to the time, place and method the customer prefers and 5) increase customer intimacy and empowerment. - Michael Fauscette
6. Social CRM is a strategy for harnessing communities to support customers and prospects, as well as sales, marketing and customer service organizations, along a purposeful and mutually beneficial business process - Gartner
7. Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s control of the conversation. - Paul Greenberg
8. Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty. – Harish Kotadia, PH.D
9. Social CRM is customer relationship management fostered by communication with customers through social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. – Jacob Morgan
10. Social CRM is a strategy to engage customers in a mutually beneficial conversation through the use of various technology platforms. - Tim Sanchez
11. Social customer relationship management (Social CRM) refers to the use of social media and social media techniques to engage a business’s customer base. - Technopedia
12. Social CRM is the integration of social media and CRM. Literally: Social + CRM. If you don’t have both, you don’t have Social CRM. - Bob Thompson
13. Social CRM or SCRM is a business strategy that enables brands to proactively identify, engage and build advocacy with customers through social media in real time. - Kohiben Vodden
14. A process to monitor, engage and manage conversations and relationships with existing and prospective customers and influencers across the internet, social networks and digital channels. - Martin Walsh
15. Social CRM builds upon CRM by leveraging a social element that enables a business to connect customer conversations and relationships from social networking sites in to the CRM process. - Webopedia
16. (Social CRM) is the use of social and traditional CRM tools and processes to support a strategy of customer engagement. – ZD Net

Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, here are 5 charts that show how Social CRM is defined.

From Brent Lear

From CapGemini

From CMSWire

From Mashable

From Social Media Examiner

And here’s one more definition – my own. Social CRM is the knowledge and tools to build personal and social relationships that result in business growth and profits that are measurable and scalable.

What’s your expert opinion on Social CRM?

Forbes began this year with the prediction “2012 will be the year of content.”  They say “content marketing and social media marketing should be a part of every brand’s marketing plan.”

But is your content share-worthy? After all, what good is putting it out if it doesn’t create a community of advocates who help spread the word.

Here are steps 18 content marketers take to make their content share-worthy.

1. FIND YOUR AUDIENCE: “Find your target audiences’ online hangouts, spend some time listening to the conversations happening on those sites. What topics are important to them? What gets them excited? This allows you to create your own content strategy to best meet your target audience’s existing wants and needs.” – Susan Gunelius, Forbes
2. PROVIDE INSTANT GRATIFICATION: “Providing instant gratification is all about effectively delivering high-quality content in bite-sized pieces. It’s about making your blog readers’ lives easier. Take a look at Seth Godin’s blog. He’s the undisputed master of instantly gratifying, bite-sized blog content.” - Amy Porterfield, Social Media Examiner
3. USE YOUR KEYWORDS: “Spend some time doing some research to find what people are typing into the search engines to find you. Use those words in your post titles and in your blog to make your content easier to find. Don’t over do this. Having easy to read posts trumps lots of keywords any day.” – Michele Scism, Social Media Coach and Speaker
4. MAKE CONTENT A PART OF EVERYONE’S JOB: “Companies that really buy into content marketing are increasingly taking the “everyone” approach. Clearly, when the job is creating lots of content, it helps to have lots of contributors.” – Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, ClickZ Network
5. SEED STRATEGY: “The most effective seeding strategy when it comes to facilitating sharing behaviour is to distribute the content via social media itself. But most businesses lack a truly engaged audience within Twitter or Facebook. If this is the case, seed the content via more traditional channels. Linking to the content from your customer email newsletter is a great starting point.” – Jamie Duthie, SEO People
6. RELEASE A LIST: “Every smart marketer knows that ‘top lists’ have the ability to generate a lot of buzz and traffic to your site because this type of content is highly shareable and linkable.” – Amanda Maksymiw, OpenView Venture Partners
7. REWARD YOUR EXISTING FANS: “They’ll feel a deeper relationship with your brand and that will increase sales.” - Lauren Drell, Mashable
8. RECAP YOUR MOST POPULAR SOCIAL CONTENT: “Include a list of your ‘best of’ content from your social channels. Include your most popular blog posts, your most re-tweeted tweets or your most commented Facebook posts. Whatever people find interesting in your social channels will likely spark the interest of your email recipients, so including popular social content in your emails can create additional interest.” – Adam Holden-Bache, Social Media B2B
9. OPTIMIZE FOR RETWEETS: “Twitter is a very powerful platform for getting people to engage and share online. To encourage readers to share your content on a site like Twitter, try creating content targeted specifically for Twitter sharing. You can use a tool like the Most ReTweetable Words Finder to find words on any topic, and then include your favorite recommended word in the title of your post, video, or photo, or use it to retweet your own content.” – Tiffany Monhollon, Digital Content Manager, ReachCast (The chart below shows the click-through rate Twitter delivers to substantiate what Tiffany is talking about)
10. MEASURE IT: “If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.” - Dan Zarella, HubSpot
11. SHOW COURTESY: “Do you reply to your comments? Do you thank people for sharing your posts, tweeting them, and linking to them? Your sincere ‘you attitude’ makes you courteous—and it makes you likeable. Courtesy is politeness growing out of respect and concern for others. Be thoughtful, appreciative, helpful, and truly respectful to your readers. Remember you are building a community here, so you want to promote values that define you as a person.” – Darren Rowse, ProBlogger
12. ADD MORE MULTIMEDIA TO YOUR PAGE: “By multimedia, I mean photos, images, videos, audio, infographics, slide shows and videos. Readers seem to prefer pages which combine text with one or more multimedia elements.Yes, they’ll appreciate your well-written, informative text. But they also like to watch video, browse through a slide show of images, study an infographic or listen to an audio interview.” - Nick Usborne, Author and Coach
13. DO RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND WHAT CONSUMERS ARE LOOKING FOR IN VIDEOS: “Many companies want the profits from viral videos. Unfortunately, very few companies do the research to understand exactly what consumers are looking for in videos online. As a result, companies often invest in videos without receiving much of a profit in return”  - Spencer Belko, Search Engine Journal (Here is a chart to show the types of video that are shared most often)
14. YOUR GOAL SHOULD BE TO BECOME THE AUTHORITY: “This will increase your brand value and your reach. And in the same time the people who listen when you speak – publish content. This makes it easier to build relationships and to get long lasting business ties.” - Dragan Mestrovic, inBlurbs 
15. FIND THE NEW: “News has never traveled faster than it does today through social media. Of course, following ‘unfolding events’ is one kind of ‘new.’ But there are of course other ways to think about content newness. For example, new can also mean a podcast that contains a unique way of looking at an old issue, or a post that -brings some novel insight to the fore, or a video that summarizes a complex topic in a way not done before.” – StrategicBit
16. DO A SURVEY OF CURRENT CUSTOMERS: “Talk to the people on the front line – frequently” – Jeff Ogdon, HubSpot
17. THINK LIKE A PUBLISHER. “Have a clear idea why you’re doing what you’re doing.” – Joe Puluzzi, Junta42 and Founder of the Content Marketing Institute 
18. WRITE KILLER HEADLINES:  All of the writers in this list expressed this point. One emphasized it particularly well by saying: “Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.” - Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Will you be making the effort so your content is share-worthy? Do these steps point you in the right direction?