When talking about analytics, we are usually referring to hard marketing: banner ads, AdWords and e-mail.  Our goal is to generate the best return on investment or ROI.

In social media, ROI stands for return on influence.  The influence and the trust we earn through our positive actions in the social media offer great rewards.

It is hard to measure the influence we’ve earned in the social media, but new technology is being developed regularly to help us measure the effectiveness of our actions.

Some basic measurements will always be important, such as subscribing to Google Alerts and using Twitter search effectively to keep track of who is talking about you or your company.

The grader Web sites such as Twitter grader and Facebook grader are a good starting measure of how well you are using various platforms based on Hubspots measure.

One of the key first statistics of how well your blog is doing is based on unique visitors. You can use sites like compete.com or Google Analytics to discover your visitor counts as well as from where your traffic originates.

Next are your subscribers. Using a service such as FeedBurner allows you to keep tabs on the number of people who have selected the option to receive your RSS feed in their favorite reader or e-mail.

Comments to your blog are a measure of community. Many bloggers are noticing a drop in the number of comments to their blogs, which may be attributed to people expressing their opinions elsewhere, such as Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets.

The link-shortening sites are developing into excellent jumping off points to post information in the social media.  Sites like bit.ly are now offering more than just link shortening. They also have basic analytics for each of your posts submitted through the service.  The measurements are basic,  such as a timeline, number of clicks and retweets. But, this is more information than we’ve had in the past.

Su.pr, still in beta, is taking link shortening to a new level by combining the valuable StumbleUpon service with unique analytics.

There are few sites that offer free analytics designed for social media.  The link-shortening sites offer promise until similar and expanded solutions are integrated into our favorite social media platforms.

If you are interested in more powerful paid services, consider omniture.com, which just released analytics for Facebook along with their other suite of online tools; Sysomos, which offers its “business intelligence for social media” with free tools due out later this year; and Radian 6, which has developed an excellent reputation for it social media monitoring for companies.

The future is still wide open. Quality analytic tools for social media are still being developed. My observation and instincts tell me the new tools will be coming fast over the next year.  Keep an eye out and share them with us.