In just over four months, Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley has grown to be among the largest in the country. Last Friday about 150 people turned out to hear Aaron Newman of Techrigy talk about social media monitoring and measurement at SMBTV #3.

It was a much broader crowd this time, with a lot of fresh faces and several people who were relatively “new” to social media. While I’ve worked hard as the SMB organizer to keep the event from being at too much of a 101-level (because there are plenty of those events), there were a lot of general social media questions that Aaron did a good job answering.

Aaron asked that the presentation be interactive and he wasn’t disappointed. There were so many questions that at one point I had to ask people to hold them until the end just to make sure we could get through Aaron’s slides in time! A lot of attendees had great social media stories to share and it was good to see everyone networking and enjoying each other’s company.

Here are some of the key ideas I took away from Aaron’s presentation:

• Monitoring, measurement, and analysis are often used interchangeably when talking about social media but they’re really three very distinct phases.
• There are lots of things you can measure in social media, but what you should measure depends on your strategy. Start with strategy. Always.
• Computers don’t understand sarcasm, so measuring sentiment is still a challenge. Not all monitoring can be automated.

Lots of great content was generated about/around the breakfast itself, too:

• To see pictures from the event, check out the new SMBTV Flickr group.
• The Twitter transcript of #smbtv is here.
• Justin Lowery live-blogged the breakfast.
• MZA Multimedia live-streamed the event and the video recap is here (there are several clips because the Internet connection kept cutting out).

I’m quite amazed at how quickly Social Media Breakfast has grown in this area and what a great networking and community event it’s become.

The next event is in December and will feature a panel of fantastic blogging minds: Greg Dahlmann, Lara Kulpa, Christina Gleason and Amanda Magee. The College of Saint Rose Communications Department will be sponsoring.The American Red Cross has offered to host us and I’m working with them to try and combine Social Media Breakfast with a blood drive.  More details to come!

Image via Flickr user amymengel (wait, that’s me!)