Mediaboss Marketing

With the growing number of social media monitoring and community management software products, the definition of a marketing dashboard seems to have taken numerous forms.

For the purpose of this article, a marketing dashboard will be defined as "the digital display of the most important information needed to track activity related to achieving one or more objectives."

In the context of social media, a relevant example was an article published by Search Engine Watch author Nathan Linnell nearly two years ago that resulted in one of the top five most popular SEW posts of 2010: "6 Key Metrics for a Social Media Measurement Dashboard".

Over a year prior to that article, two friends of mine, Tom Markiewicz and Derek Scruggs, also had a vision about tracking key metrics specific to social media.

While most marketing dashboard products of the time were helping to track various forms of field sales activity and common web analytics Markiewicz and Scruggs recognized few were addressing the kind of real-time data and social media metrics that could facilitate a level of predictive analysis that might impact immediate decision-making.

In 2009,Markiewicz and Scruggsworked the business plan together, articulated the value proposition and delved deeply into the feature set. Their new company, StatsMix, was selected to participate in the TechStars (early-stage business) accelerator program, and quickly piqued the interest of investors who intuitively understood they were onto something big.

Sample StatsMix dashboard, combining web orders, customer phone support and social media metrics.

But as they raced to achieve their minimal viable product and continued to collect feedback from early beta customers, they soon became aware of a stark reality that completely altered their development roadmap over the following two years.

Beta customers began asking a common set of questions that seemed very rudimentary, and not relevant to what StatsMix originally had set out to do.

The rest is here:
The Truth About Social Media Measurement & Marketing Dashboards