Interactive marketers know they're not good at measuring the effectiveness of social media: On average, they rate their own efforts to measure social initiatives at only 4.5 out of 10. Marketers fail because they focus on the metrics that are most easily available instead of the metrics that best correspond to the objectives they're pursuing. Instead, marketers should: 1) identify a marketing objective; 2) choose measurement categories that match that objective; and 3) find a way to track those metrics in the social technologies they're using. Start considering measurement during the planning process, and ignore the metrics that don't relate to your stated objective.