Social media is getting a great deal of buzz these days. But CEOs, CFOs and CMOs are all asking the same question, “How can I measure a social media campaign?”

Well, there’s good news. Despite what some people will tell you, social media can be measured in a very tangible, specific way. But the first thing you have to do is figure out what you want to measure. Do you want to measure the dialogue about your brand? Or do you want to measure the dollars generated from the campaign? (Of course, you could always measure both, which is the best approach.)

To help us get a better understanding of this, we sat down with Raphael Rivilla, who runs the Interactive Media department at BKV (one of the sponsors of the 60 Second Marketer). BKV has more experience than most agencies at measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns.

Just what are some of the things that can be measured? With a little homework, Raphael and his team can tell you the following:

• The positive/negative split about your brand in places like Twitter, the blogosphere, LinkedIn, Facebook, User Forums, etc.
• The specific, relevant comments made about your brand on blogs, Twitter and other social media sites
• The demographics of the people within your “community”
• The percentage of your community who have active internet profiles
• The percentage of names in your database with active internet profiles
• A breakdown of users who have 1 to 7+ internet profiles
• The percentage of users who are using widgets
• A gender analysis of your customers across social media websites like Amazon, Flikr, MySpace, etc.
• An age analysis
• A geo-location analysis

But if you’re just measuring the dialogue, then you’re only accomplishing half of the task. The second (and more important) task is measuring the dollars generated by the campaign. According to BKV, not only is this possible, but once you measure how many prospects converted, you can to wag your finger in the CFO’s face and say, “See, I told you. Social media is measurable!”

(We wouldn’t actually recommend wagging your finger in your CFO’s face, but you get the idea.)

Here are just some of the things BKV can measure with regards to the conversion of your prospects to customers:

• Which set of websites, social media sites and blogs converted the most customers from your behavioral targeting campaign
• How many prospective customers opened, click-through and converted on an email campaign
• Which website landing page converted the most customers and why
• What “real estate” on an email was the most valuable. In other words, which space converted more prospects — the “free shipping” space or the “save 10% on blue widgets” space
• How many customers converted from a paid search campaign and which version of the campaign outperformed the other
• How people navigated through your site. Where did they get stuck? Where did they actually convert?

There are a number of ways to measure a social media campaign. But the starting point is to decide what it is you want to measure — do you want to measure the dialogue about your brand? Or do you want to measure the dollars generated by your campaign? Or do you want to measure both?

Once you’ve got that figured out, the rest is easy.

Well, it’s not easy. But it’s easier.