Even though I’ve been writing about this collaborative space for a long time, I never cease to be amazed at the generosity of organizations who give out their knowledge with no strings attached. The The Altimeter Group has published a step-by-step approach to social media to bring some clarity to an an area that is hard to pin down. Measurement.

Authored by Jeremiah Owyang and John Lowett, it has been published under theCreative Commons license.

As Jeremiah Owyang notes, both toe-dipping and deep diving into this thing is risky business. The focus of this framework is on measurement, and how to gauge what you are presently doing, and what you are up against. They talk of the four business objectives of a social media strategy:

• Dialog: involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its ow
• Advocacy: activation of evangelism, word of mouth, and the spread of information through social technologies
• Supporting: customers may self support each other, or companies may directly assist them using social technologies.
• Innovation: The business objective of innovation is an extraordinary byproduct of engaging in social marketing activity.

Here’s a good place to take it all in –via a SlideShare presentation. You can download it, and in the spirit of the CC license, ‘share, remix and reuse.’ The remix mart is key in this case. Because, as the folks at Altimeter note, each organization needs to customize the framework to suit their needs.

I would add a fifth business objective –something I always recommend: Insight. I get –and promote– the evangelism part. But for management, insight is priceless.