(This post is also featured on the Euro RSCG Worldwide Social Media Site www.eurorscgsocial.com)

Social Media has enabled Brands to become more human than ever before. Community managers are facebooking and tweeting on behalf of the Brand, and the good ones embody the brand’s essential characteristics and tone the best.

Pretty cool stuff, and a real development in the history of Branding.

With the increase in marketing-focused social media, we need to have ways to measure how good a brand’s social media activity is. Since Brands are acting a whole lot more like, well, people, it seems worth while to look at how Social Intelligence is measured in us humans, and then see if that can be applied to brands.

Once of the pioneers in understanding Social Intelligence on a human level is Dr. Karl Albrecht.

His understanding of Social Intelligence includes 5 key dimensions:

Situational Radar: The ability to “read” situations, understand the social context that influences behavior, and choose behavioral strategies that are most likely to be successful.

Presence: Also known as “bearing,” presence is the external sense of one’s self that others perceive: confidence, self-respect and self-worth.

Authenticity: The opposite of being “phony,” authenticity is a way of behaving which engenders a perception that one is honest with one’s self as well as others.

Clarity: The ability to express one’s self clearly, use language effectively, explain concepts clearly and persuade with ideas.

Empathy: More than just an internal sense of relatedness or appreciation for the experiences of others, empathy in this context represents the ability to create a sense of connectedness with others; to get them on your wavelength and invite them to move with and toward you rather than away and against you.

All of these seem to apply quite readily to the digital social media space as a way to evaluate a Brand’s  social media activity.

Situational Radar: Are you aware of what’s going on – are you listening to the posts as well as the context of  those posts? Do you modify your actions in response?

Presence: Does your social media have a voice? Are there regular posts? Is it engaging and u- beat or has your social media personality lapsed into a wall-flower?

Authenticity: This is the big one. There have been far too many examples of brands getting busted for dishonesty through social media.

Clarity: This is almost a must have for today’s social media. 140 characters required clarity, one way or another!

Empathy: Creating connectedness is one of the critical things in social media – not just through tone and attitude, but though actions as well. Are you leveraging social media to promote your environmental or humanitarian activities and goals?

You get the sense that you could easily create a score-card out of these criteria to measure your social media, identify weak spots, and plan for improvement. It could be the starting point for surveys and research into a Brand’s social media efforts.

To me its very interesting and revealing how well Albrecht’s Social Intelligence  framework applies to social media. At the end of the day, we’re people, and , we want to be treated like people. Not only by our friends, families, and employers, but also by the brands and businesses that we engage with as well.