With the hype that surrounds social media these days, and with the various strategies that are used by several companies with great success, the question still remains: How does one measure the success of so complex a task to which the response can vary from person to person?

Of course, since the bottom line of most clients being return-on-investment (ROI), almost every marketer must ask themselves this question as sooner or later, their clients will.

And for this to be able to happen, one must not only be able to recognize but also plan out the social media success metrics based pertaining to the unique strategy that they are using for a particular project.

Let’s say that you are setting up a Twitter account for one of your clients, a quantitative approach would demand that you track the traffic that you generate and that will inevitably generate leads for your client. Along with this, one can also factor in the savings that the company has made in the areas of customer relationship management, recruitment of new staff and call center costs that might have been otherwise needed.

If one wants to measure success qualitatively, one can also track the kind of communication that this approach has had with potential customers, the quality of these Twitter followers and how this has translated into engaging with customers. Of course, these metrics can also provide feedback as well as vital market information as well.

Several years ago, as it became clear that there would be a shakeout in the PC manufacturing industry, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell sat down in a series of talks billed as the Yalta of our time. 

Determining the future of the market, they shut out other manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard from their discussion. Today, Hewlett-Packard is the largest PC maker in the world; with its strategy that brought it out from underneath Dell, the stuff of legends. 
In the mobile platform market, it was starting to become apparent that Microsoft and current smartphone market leader Nokia were the ones starting out behind as mobile software platforms began to shift toward Iphone and Google Android-like feature sets.
The recent announcement, therefore, that Nokia is jettisoning its longtime labor of love, Symbian, and embracing Windows as a smartphone platform, took many people by surprise. 

Even Nokia employees were shocked to hear about the scope of the changes, with Linked In and other social networking sites seeing a sudden flurry of activity as software engineers started to update their external connections.
For Nokia, a company that started out selling tires and moved on to making cellular phones, the challenge will now be to avoid becoming just another commodity equipment manufacturer. For Microsoft, the idea is that by combining their efforts, Microsoft and Nokia can do the same thing that Hewlett Packard was able to do in the PC market; combine with another maker- and then win in the marketplace. 

With critics’ reviews of Windows Mobile 7 trending towards the positive, they may have already taken an important step in that direction.