Nice post. I knew about finding out on Digg, but the Del.icio.us tip was a new one for me. Thanks!

How about tracking visits to your website and lead generated?
Tracking this stuff is like tracking the number of cold calls a salesperson dials or the number of people they exchange business cards with at a networking event.
I'm not saying it's not worthing tracking the metrics above to inform your marketing moves, but if you don't track how it impacts the business, why bother?

Nice post, but it's really low hanging fruit isn't it Mark? How about some advice on tracking itunes subscriptions to podcasts or tracking views on other video sharing sites like blip.tv , which provides a very nice embedded player without the ugly watermark like Youtube and tracks views too! Of course another day could be spent just teaching folks about monitoring feeds with something like feedburner.com . . .

Todd brings up a good point. You could spend a few days trying to aggregate all this data. I can see why these things might be leading indicators for people trying to increase brand awareness.
But, for the majority of b2b, small and mid sized businesses, ecommerce sites, it's about visits, leads and sales.
Since these things can drive traffic, I'd certainly advocate doing them. But, can't you measure most of this activity from concrete results?
Sorry to be a broken record on this. But, I think it's important to not confuse business owners and marketing professionals with more and more metrics that don't really demonstrate how this stuff benefits the top and bottomlines of the business.

Yes, but Todd is focusing on video and podcasting. For normal websites and blogs, these are important tools and tracking them will help you in the promotion of your company. Why did you get dugg more one month than the next is a good indicator of something people want to read from you. It's more about refining your art than it is about jsut tracking what is happening.

I agree that for B2B sites, at the end of the day, leads and sales is the key metric. However, if you want to measure something further up the funnel that has a shorter time span to it (many times a B2B sales cycle is 3-6 months) I think these are good suggestions.

Great post. just want to know why you didn't include stumbleupon as that also provides a healthy amount of traffic.

I agree that StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool to send a lot of traffic. But I was trying to find statistics you could measure. How would you measure how powerful you are on StumbleUpon?

Hai,
The topic regarding the idea of how to measure marketing effectiveness is interesting and suggestive .

Great post. Thanks for that info.

After spending time trying to create a presence the biggest frustration stems from not being able to monitor the leads. I have been able to track StumbleUpon referrals, but like others mentioned, concrete results that show impact are minimal.

@Chad - My experience (tracking our results automatically using HubSpot software) is that StumbleUpon converts into leads and customers at a really small rate (like you said), but other sites like LinkedIn and Facebook convert at a much higher rate, and they can be good ways to get leads.

Good post, but not to sure on the worth of Digg anymore after media found out that digg had favorites and everyone else didn't have a chance. They are very harsh on SEO companies banning them for spam sites. I would like to see Stumpleupon on here.

This was very helpful and a real eye opener for me. 
 
 
 
Thanks! 
 
 
 
Paul Castain

all are great designs..good

Thanks for a lot of tips ;)

Thank you for the useful tools and tips. You demystified De.licio.us for me.

Thank you for this great info. I really appreciate it. I'm still relativly new in this cyber marketing world, and need all the help I can get, not to waste my time going down the wrong paths :-)

Came here from a link in the free website report just gotten from you - very useful information thank you and the report is a !