Show me some numbers is a phrase that echoes through the halls of every advertising, marketing, P.R. and public affairs office nowadays, and for good reason.

Just a decade ago, the request might have been Make up some numbers. But with the rise of digital publishing, Web advertising and social media --- all of which can be tracked at a click-by-click level with considerable accuracy --- there's no more need to fudge the numbers. You can't get away with it, anyway. Throughout the business world, government and nonprofit sector, people are savvy enough to know what can be tracked, and they expect an honest accounting.

More important now is knowing which metrics to use to put your best face forward. Just because web traffic can be tracked down to the umpteenth click doesn't mean that you should stop there in your reporting. After all, your web traffic may represent just a fraction of your overall reach. And perhaps it is not as central to your organization's mission or strategy as encouraging social media sharing, signing up email newsletter subscribers, or attracting visitors to your bricks-and-mortar location. Fortunately, there are ways to measure these objectives too, and paint as thorough a picture of your brand's health as you are willing and able to.

Below we outline 32 different metrics that can be used to gauge the health and reach of your organization's brand. Many will be applicable to your org, and some will not. Taken as a whole, they offer the brand manager, frontline marketing/P.R. staff, and senior executives a bevy of ways to view and measure a brand.   

Essential Metrics for Monitoring and Managing Your Organization's Brand   
 

1.  Overall satisfaction surveys

Satisfaction surveys, such as the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, offer a glimpse of what users are actually thinking as they interact with your brand, be it online or at bricks-and-mortar locations. They can be especially useful for government agencies that don't have sales figures to help get a read on public sentiment.

2.  Website satisfaction surveys 

Your website is the virtual hub of your business or service, so how users react to it can be a useful leading indicator of the overall health of your brand. Properly deployed, website satisfaction surveys will let you know what your customers are thinking, wanting and --- maybe more importantly --- hating, as they navigate your website.

3.  Web traffic statistics

Where are users going on your website? How long are they staying? How are they arriving and leaving? These are all part of the basic portfolio of web stats you should be watching. Total page views and monthly unique users remain the gold standard of web metrics, but other data --- time on site, top entry and exit pages, the search keywords that led them there --- will help round out the picture.

4.  Volume and tone of comments

Web analytics services are fairly good at determining degree of engagement, but not the sentiment of that engagement. While any news may be good news in traditional P.R., public opinion is doubly important for government officials, where the next election or budget round can mean not just a drop in market share, but the end of their jobs. Pages with a high volume of comments signal that you're hitting hot-button topics, while the tone of those comments --- positive, negative, neutral --- can offer qualitative feedback for your team. The biggest challenge: sifting the wheat from the usual chaff. 

5.  Mail from constituents

Good ol'-fashioned snail mail may be a 1.0 way of communicating, but as a gauge of how your brand is resonating with the populace, it's still very much a relevant indicator. People who take the time to write and send letters are passionate, potentially vocal advocates or critics, so tracking what they say is a useful metric in your overall brand monitoring. Measuring the volume of mail you receive is a no-brainer. Keeping tabs on the sentiments expressed --- good, bad, meh --- can be done with varying levels of sophistication, but there's no harm in starting with a simple 5-point scale.  

6.  E-mail from constituents

Much like snail mail, your incoming e-mail is a barometer of your brand, with a more immediate return. Monitoring the volume and tone of the messages to your "customer service" inbox will show you which issues are resonating, which are dying and which you'll have to deal with in the future. And because its already in digital format, keeping tabs on it is a step easier.

7.  News coverage volume

Are media organizations paying attention to what your organization is doing or saying? If they are, you'll see this reflected in a higher rate of news mentions. The strongest brands find a way of staying in the news in good times and bad. You want to be part of the broader conversation taking place - it's an inexpensive way to generate publicity and gain influence.

8.  News coverage tone

Analyzing how your brand is presented and perceived in the media, especially in the context of which media outlets are doing the presenting, can give insight into how different segments of the public feel about your brand. Can't afford fancy sentiment tracking? Set up your own simple grading tool. But invest in a service that will help you monitor all of your mentions --- you don't want to be tripped up by stories you didn't see soon enough.

9.  Twitter followers

Your follower count should not be the sole measure of how well your organization is engaging on Twitter. But it's still an important one, thanks to the network effect. More followers means more potential for second- and third-degree connections, and thus greater reach. If your org has multiple Twitter handles, remember to consider them in total as well as individually --- you may find instructive patterns in the behaviors of the various accounts.

10.  Facebook fans

What applies to Twitter followers also applies to Facebook fans, or "Likes" as the new terminology has them. Numbers do matter. It's almost always a good thing when your fan count is going up, and a bad thing when it's dropping.

11.  YouTube views

On YouTube, videos not people take center stage. So the popularity of your content --- the number of views that videos garner --- remains the more useful metric to you than, say, the number of subscribers your channel has. (Not many channels on YouTube have rabid followings of subscribers.) The difference between views on your YouTube page vs. those occurring across the Web doesn't necessarily mean anything for the health of your brand, but may indicate how viral the spread of your content has been.

12.  YouTube comments

Look below a popular YouTube video and you'll usually a depressing display of utter drivel - comments that make you wonder whether the Internet truly has made people dumber. But 99.9% of videos don't become Internet sensations, and for the rest of the millions of videos, the comments section can be more illuminating. What users take the time to post is worth a glance, and, depending on how vital YouTube videos are to your marketing efforts, perhaps even a basic logging like your email and snail mail.

13.  Volume of Facebook "likes" and comments

If your org maintains a Facebook page, you'll want to track the activity taking place there. Facebook's own "Insights" data gives you a read on visits to your page, likes, comments, and a few other metrics --- handy built-in reporting that will save you time. Of course, it will be up to you to evaluate the tone of comments if you choose to do so.

14.  Volume of Twitter mentions

As goes Facebook, so goes Twitter... at least in terms of measuring how often your org is being mentioned. On Twitter there are two basic forms of direct (public) engagement: the mention and and the retweet. Mentions, with a capital M, refer to Twitter posts addressed to you personally, by someone placing your @handle as the first word. More broadly, you can think of mentions, small m, as any tweet that references you, by your handle or just your name. Depending on the uniqueness of your name, the latter may be difficult to track accurately without spending a fortune.

15. Volume of Twitter retweets

Retweets simply ricochet a post of yours --- or one about you --- to a wider audience, with or without added commentary. When considering the broader category of mentions (small m) of your brand, retweets will partly overlap. But they are important to consider as an independent metric.  RTs are fairly easy to locate using any of the leading Twitter applications, such as TweetDeck or HootSuite, but compiling useful reports of trends and benchmarks will require a third-party solution.

16.  Slideshare views and shares

Are you on Slideshare? If not, why not? This business-oriented content network is centered around presentations --- yes, the dreaded PowerPoint deck --- and attracts a professional audience looking to get things done. Adding your non-proprietary slide decks on the site will likely nab you new readers and fans. Slideshare lists basic usage metrics so you can count views and downloads of your material.

17. Subscriptions to RSS feeds, podcasts, etc.

Some tech pundits have claimed RSS is "dead," but there is still a loyal contingent of people across the Web who manage their information overload by reading news via RSS feeds. Chances are your website or blog publishes at least one feed, and quite possibly a bunch of them, divided by subject or author. How many subscribers do these feeds have? You should know, and add it to your slate of traffic measurements. 

18. Polls

Your organization or brand may not be one that will show up in public research polls, but if you're in politics or manage a well-known brand, polls are going to be a fact of life. Watch what they say. Track them against your many other metrics. Do the poll results correlate you're your Facebook and Twitter activity, or the sentiments expressed in emails and blog comments? Each poll comes with its unique biases and faults, so you shouldn't take any single one as gospel. But if you're fortunate --- or unfortunate --- enough to be the subject of many polls, looking at average and aggregate results will reveal truths about your brand's standing.

19. Attendance at events you hold or sponsor

Are you playing to a standing-room-only crowd when you host a luncheon or seminar or press conference? Keep track of attendance --- even rough guesstimates --- at all the events that your org hosts or sponsors. It's generally easy to do, and again can be correlated with other metrics to give you potential insight into both your specific event marketing tactics and overall brand power.

20. Event and Conference speaking invitations

Invitations to appear or speak at events are indications of your influence, a clear sign that you're in demand! Hopefully it's not a Groucho Marx scenario, where you don't want to be a member of the clubs that will have you. One tab of your master brand management spreadsheet ought to be for tracking key events where you or a representative from your organization was asked to attend or speak. Also worth noting: events where you should have been on the dais, but never got the invite. You'll want to be ready for the next time.

21. Traffic to bricks-and-mortar locations

Going hand in hand with #19, if you maintain a publicly accessible physical location --- a storefront or library, office or gallery space --- you should be clocking the number of people who show up. People do vote with their feet. While not applicable to all organizations in our Internet-heavy economy, any organization with a bricks-and-mortar location ought to know who's coming and going and evaluate it alongside other metrics. Colleges wanting to measure the loyalty of alumni and their propensity to donate, for example, would benefit from tracking their graduates' visits back to campus. 

22. Appearances in "Best of" lists

Trivial as some of them may seem, lists are powerful influence shapers because it is easy to remember who fared well (or terribly, as the case may be). Decide which lists and publications matter to you and your brand, and track your performance in them. If you're not there at all, or lag behind where you rightfully think you belong, start lobbying the editors now!

23.  Opinions of industry experts

Who's talking about you in the news media and inside industry publications? What are they saying? You should know the names that matter as kingmakers and opinion-shapers, and keep tabs whenever they're talking about your brand. For every mention that columnists or analyst makes in print or on TV, chances are good that he or she is saying the same stuff to numerous closed-door audiences and dinner companions. The private whisper campaign may be the more powerful one.

24. Mentions in academic studies

Most organizations must reach a certain level of fame before they garner attention from academia. But once they do, the research can be highly influential, to the detriment or benefit of the brand. If Google searches for your organization turn up research papers (by university researchers or reputable private-sector firms), ignore them at your peril.

25. Tone of Wikipedia entry

Wikipedia may have already reached the zenith of its influence, but it's still omnipresent on the Web and worth watching for changes in your org's entry. For many Google searches, a Wikipedia page (if one exists) will still appear in the top few results. If your org is large or prominent enough to have multiple pages, track them all, including any personalities --- the people behind the brand matter too!

26. PageRank

Still the gold standard for search, this number represents how influential Google views a webpage. The higher it is on a scale from 1-10, the more likely the page will surface high in search results, and the more traffic your page will see as a result. You can view the PageRank of any webpage by installing the Google Toolbar in your browser and navigating to the URL.

27. Presence of advertising on Google searches for your brand

Is your brand powerful enough that other organizations want to piggyback on it? There's an easy way to measure this. Look for advertising next to Google searches for your brand, whether it's a product name, company name or person. Be proud, but also be wary: these other advertisers could divert traffic to their own sites when the searcher's intention was to find your site. Knowing the main keywords that bring people to your website (as mentioned above in #3) will help you concentrate your brand "defense" where it is most valuable.

28. Popularity on social bookmarking sites

Few metrics offer the depth or honesty of social bookmarking, where intent and engagement are rivaled only by the shared nature of the action. This is a working model of a metabrain, or the collective consciousness of users across the demographic spectrum, collecting every idea, issue and brand deemed important. Are you represented? Reddit, Digg, and Delicious have been leaders in the social bookmark space for years, but there are other players too.

29. Newsletter subscriptions and content downloads

The last few metrics have been about attracting people to your website --- for those who do visit, consider looking at not just what pages they visit or how long they spend, but also what information they take with them. Two main takeaways are 1) the email newsletter, which has the added advantages of being social and recurring, and 2) document downloads, in the form of PDF white papers, reports, marketing brochures, flyers, and so forth. Each of these takeaways indicates deeper engagement by a visitor than merely reading text on the page.

30. Second-degree reach

Everyone knows the "six degrees of separation" game thanks to Kevin Bacon, but for brand managers and marketers, the first two degrees of any social network are the most critical. That is, your immediate friends, and your friends' friends. (In Twitter speak, these would be your followers and everyone who in turn follows them.) This second-degree reach can be measured, at least roughly, with just a little math. Because the people in these first two degrees are the most likely to bear fruit in terms of viral marketing, it is worth measuring your success in widening this circle.

31. Job applications received

Much of the data discussed in this article is externally created. But some of the most important metrics to gauge the health of your brand are already sitting in front of your eyes. The number of job applications coming into your organization is a telling sign of how desirable a brand you've got. People love playing for a winning team... and if your org is perceived as such, you will likely see employment inquiries and applications surging, whether or not you are actively hiring. So be sure to make this a part of your overall marketing metrics picture. 

32.  Growth rate of Twitter and Facebook fans

The raw counts of fans and followers are one thing, but the rate at which your respective Facebook and Twitter fan clubs are growing is a more powerful and revealing metric. This summer, an OhMyGov study of Facebook fan growth rates for members of Congress uncovered that Republican House members outpaced their Democratic rivals by 100% in the rate at which they were adding new fans. While fan totals can be skewed by popular figures like John McCain and Sarah Palin, looking at growth rates evens the playing field. Thus, we were able to foretell that the House (with its drastic GOP lean) would change hands in a historic landslide, while the Senate (which saw insignificant differences between Ds and Rs) would be much closer. Download the complete study here.

Interested in talking to OhMyGov about developing your own organization's media metrics strategy? Contact consulting@ohmygov.com 

Mike Perkins contributed to this story. Have comments on what we missed? Or which metrics have worked well for you? Please let us know!