Your feed reader brings you everyday fresh updates about what's happening in the social media space: "...[brand] just invented a new way to use MySpace to attract housewives between 35 and 44...", "...[brand] is launching a new minisite that perfectly integrates comments from a Facebook group promoting their product...", "...[Company] launches an iPhone application to show all of their branded stores on a map and vote your favorite one..."

I bet you often ask yourselves practical, result-related questions, like "What's the point of doing this?" and "How can this generate ROI?" or just "Will it work?". Ok, then: you're like me.

There's one thing you can do to get some of your answers: wait. And follow this easy steps to track social media initiatives.

1. Scan daily through the post headlines that your feed reader pulls to find interesting actions you are just curious about (AdAge Digital is surely a good starter, but you might want to add Adverblog to it, for instance);
2. Read the article and visit the digital places where the initiative is active;
3. Ask yourself questions related to the initiative success. Good starters are

• Who is this brand trying to talk to?
• How is the initiative going to be useful for the target?
• Why is this initiative interesting for people the brand wants to reach?
• How can this initiative be successful?
• Will the brand support it in long term or is just something momentary?
• Does or will this initiative integrate with the brand's overall brands social media strategy?

If you see some of this questions have no immediate answer, than it's time to keep track of the initiative;

Jump on the social media time machine

4. Starting from the post / article visit the place where the initiative is held: website, community, Facebook page, MySpace profile... Add this page to your del.icio.us profile (you might want to keep it private and you're saving it to del.icio.us for future reference), and (this is important) add to the bookmark as a description all the questions that have no answer;
5. Add a unique tag to this bookmark: something that will let you recognize it easily;
6. You'll never remember to look at how the initiative ended up unless you Create an event in your calendar. I suggest you put 3 alerts: 2 weeks from now; 1 month from now; and 3 months from now. Include in the event the direct link to your bookmark (http://del.icio.us/yourprofilename/tags/yourtag);
7. Follow your calendar and get back to your bookmark, adding the answers and updating it.

This sort of Social Media Time Machine will allow you to find which initiatives maintain their promises and how many don't.

I've been doing this for 3 months now and I found a lot of surprises.
This is my Social Media Machine, how's yours?
Do you have different methods?
How do you measure success of social initiatives through time?
But, most of all... Do you think we should share the results of tracking?

Why would you use the time machine?

It's about leveraging on one of the most powerful things you can do with social media: learning by doing. The plus here is: someone else does it, you learn. This exercise is good to think about what needles to look at in a project, to learn from what's wrong and what's fine and to adapt future actions to get the best out of this experience.

Photo credit: Polyman