It’s quite difficult now to keep up with the myriad of changes that are taking place in digital marketing and social media.

Every day there are news announcements of what Facebook is up to, what’s happening on YouTube and the relatively new kid on the block Twitter is constantly punching above its weight for media attention.

The beauty of realising that no matter how hard you try you will never be at the cutting edge of this wave of new marketing opportunity is that you relax and begin to focus on the things that really matter. The trends, the networks and the people who will actually make a difference to your organisation and the profits it so desperately needs in these difficult times.

It’s called a Social Graph, a kind of dashboard that allows you to focus on what really counts and the things that will both make a difference to your customers’ journey and lifetime value at the same time as creating profitable new business.

But what do you put onto your dashboard of things to watch, measure and analyse? Simply the things that matter. A balance of financial, marketing, innovative and process things that can feed upward to deliver your marketing goals and to your organisational goals beyond.

If you aren’t watching then you can’t measure and if you don’t measure you can’t prove the return on your investment of time, resource and budget and if you can’t do that then the Smiths and Jones of this world will quite rightly steal business and customers and social media engagement from right under your nose.

For more ideas and news of the latest trends I’ve been monitoring have a listen to my Social Media summer briefing.