Social Media Reporting – when will it become a “real” channel?

Ok I admit the title was intentionally provocative. 😉

Typically organizations are organized with someone owning marketing and/or sales, someone owning customer service, someone owning the retail line. As I described in this post the digital “channels”, e.g. website, mobile touchpoints, kiosks or other digital signage typically fall under marketing.

Lately the use of social media to solve different types of problems have matured, in the sense that it’s gone from experimental to clear articulated purposes and with that demands for bottom line impact and measurements.

Something I’ve always enjoyed when working with call centres is the detailed measures on effectiveness. It is typical to get numbers on AHT (Average Handling Time), Availability (incoming calls vs answered calls), categorizations of types of questions, sales per minute. This is delivered weekly, every second spent gets a $ amount and changes and operations are thoroughly reviewed. Anyone working with website analytics or PPC is also used to detailed reports and breakdowns of virtually everything, ROI calculated and improvements identified. But… I have not seen any examples of that type of weekly reporting from a social media initiative that have entered a Business As Usual state.

This is really an open questions, but for the service focused initiatives out there do you have the weekly excel report of number of contacts, average handling time, or is that the next step? What KPIs do you report on? And tying back to the organizational questions above – who gets the report? Or is it not needed, and if so, why? I’m curious…