The most common method of measuring social media effectiveness is to track activity-based metrics for each channel such as likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter, etc. Many organizations benchmark these metrics against the comparable measures for their competitors. In addition, tracking the growth in these metrics per dollar spent on social media campaigns is a widely used approach to monitor the efficiency of your social media spending. Less common, more difficult, but more telling is the tracking of leads for sales related social media efforts. Tracking leads from social media requires a combination of web analytics for monitoring the sources of your website traffic and sales conversions for e-commerce activity along with customer surveys or point-of-sale data capture in order to determine the source and sales conversions for your retail, phone or mail order sales. Despite, the additional effort and process required to get this data, the results will enable you to compare the cost of generating leads and sales via social media to your other advertising channels - ultimately enabling you to optimize your marketing spend in the best channels for your business. Check out this infographic on measuring social media effectiveness.

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The U.S. market for higher education technology is between $20 billion and $25 billion according to Eduventures.

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The Altman Z-Score is a model for predicting corporate bankruptcies based primarily on the quality of the balance sheet. The Altman Z-Score has been shown to be successfully predictive of bankruptcy about 75% of the time. While the Altman Z-Score is the most widely used model of its kind, there are other similar models, some of which have shown better performance than the Altman Z-Score, such as the CHS model, the Ohlson O-Score, and Merton's Distance to Default. However, many of these alternatives are more complex than the Altman Z-Score and incorporate metrics that are only available for publicly traded companies.

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Evaluating the quality of a social media consultant or manager requires an assessment of the results they have consistently delivered across multiple social media campaigns. While many businesses (and consultants) measure social media effectiveness solely on activity-based metrics such as likes, follows, etc, more concrete social media ROI measures can be applied to social media campaigns with disciplined tracking of leads or support requests from social media sources through to sales or issue resolution. These measures can include conversions of social media activity into sales or tracking the cost of supporting customers via social media compared to your traditional means of customer support. A qualified social media consultant will be able to provide you with reference clients and the results of each of their social media campaigns, so that you can objectively review the actual results of their efforts in assessing the effectiveness of the consultant (you should also get to speak to some of these reference clients in order to validate the campaign results). Comparing the outcomes produced by various social media consultants (and seeing the process each one uses for measuring success) should enable you to identify a consultant that meets your needs.

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An average business will have a score that falls into D&B's Financial Stress Score Class 3. Note that the "average" takes into account all businesses tracked by D&B that are seeking commercial credit. See D&B's Financial Stress Score breakdown for specific score ranges.

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SOX compliance can take on many different forms in each organization, but it essentially boils down to the documentation and ongoing verification of the controls you have put in place to ensure that your public financial reporting is accurate and timely. In order to communicate that message to your management team, I find it best to share common examples of the types of controls that are typically put in place by public companies as part of their SOX compliance efforts including controls related to governance, public reporting of material events (8-Ks), and record retention policies. UpCounsel's summary of SOX compliance provides some useful examples - see the link. https://www.upcounsel.com/sarbanes-oxley-and-corporate-governance

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