Not stop trying to measure it, mind you. Just stop your social media efforts.

According to the article, “Is it time for you to get Anti-Social” in Entrepreneur magazine, that’s what some businesses have done and it’s actually helped them find the measurement they were searching for.

Often, when we talk about measurement we talk about quantifying what has been added and how it drives business. But if you were one of the many companies that started your social media program before setting any goals or benchmarks for it, you may find it easier to see what goes away when you stop posting.

For instance, after one company mentioned in the article ‘went dark’ for a while on their social media platforms they realized that, while they couldn’t attribute actual sales to their social media efforts, they were able to see how social media coincided with demand.

Knowing this  – and what specific social tools drove demand – allowed them to rework their social media strategy to fit more appropriately with how their business was affected – or build a strategy in the first place.

Many companies that are involved in social media quickly grow frustrated when they try to tie time spent and employee effort to business or marketing outcomes. To them – the measurement story is a nightmare. But while it’s important to keep in mind – as the article states, that just because you can promote your business on every social network available, doesn’t mean that you should” – the dream aspect of this whole story is that you can always just stop every now and then to gauge what’s really happening and make sure what ever is happening makes sense.

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Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith

This post was featured as the social media dream segment during the November 11th edition of PJA Radio.

Yet even in 2010, the channel remains the ugly stepchild of direct and inside sales. Even as office overhead and direct sales salaries continue to rise and companies are in search of more highly efficient ways to burnish their brand equity and market share out in the world, value-added resellers and distributors remain an afterthought for too many companies.

If it seems like there’s an internal contradiction going on here based on the benefits the channel can offer, there is: most channel marketing managers and channel sales managers report to, wait for it, the corporate Sales Manager, who controls both direct and channel sales. Channel sales managers often have to fight harder for budget, are expected to tell the partners to sell identical solutions faster than direct sales, and are often directed to survey (and re-survey, and re-survey) their partners every six months, and yet provide only the barest sustenance of marketing support.

What kind of marketing support do channel marketers need? Here’s a short list we commonly use:

* Well-constructed pull campaigns versioned for the channel to establish the value proposition to end users and build demand for the channel partner

* An implementation guide to help channel partners identify and quantify how various marketing materials work

* Counsel on how to write a great marketing plan at the local and regional level

* Ideas and training on how to frame technologies as solutions to business challenges and brand yourself as an industry expert

* Steps on how to incorporate social media into a marketing mix

* Instruction on how to tell the difference between marketing leads and sales leads

* A process to put together effectiveness metrics and track a campaign, including what the metrics should be capturing and recording

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get any channel marketer started. And if you’re looking for a best practice, look no further than Cisco. They know how to treat their channel. For validation, see under “Generating 80% of your revenue with the channel.”

* Sustained IT spending growth won’t be back until 2012 or 2013. By that time we’ll have decided what to call the decade that ends in 41 days. One bright note is that healthcare IT spending will continue to rise. As it should (as you’ve probably noticed, way too much healthcare information is still being taken down in paper form).

* 2010 is the new 2008: most spending levels will crawl back to pre-Great Recession levels next year, but won’t go much further than that. For manufacturing and financial services it looks worse.

* ROI and proof of concept will be under the microscope like never before for vendors, and as virtualization really takes hold some of that hardware spending will never come back. Even IT services are slated to rise only 4.5%. From our perspective, that means that marketing has got to hold itself to the standard of solving business problems.

* Purchases across the board are likely to become smaller and more strategic, the retail equivalent of the way Hermes sales rose after 9/11 because people wanted that one, perfect killer app of an item.

And a real wow moment: hardware spending was down more than 16% in 2009. That’s the IT equivalent of half the US population making holiday gifts at home out of Popsicle sticks and glitter.

So here, too, like everywhere in our terrestrial world, a New Reality takes hold. Not a bad name for the decade right around the bend.