I loved Michael Lewis' book Moneyball when it came out back in 2003. Not just because I'm a baseball fan, but because it is a fascinating look at how breaking old thinking and applying new metrics can improve efficiency and generate better results.

Moneyball was written about baseball. It shows how the Oakland A's took an analytic approach (see sabermetrics) to evaluate players when everyone else was going off hunches and generalized stats. The A's were a small market team with a limited budget. To compete, they had to be smarter. They stopped thinking about buying players and focused on buying runs. By making decisions based on organizational productivity, they built a winning team at a fraction of the cost.

Some have called this the best book on marketing that's not about marketing. I'm one of them. Articles and posts applied the principles of the book to the concept of "Moneyball Marketing" where new technologies enable marketers to be smarter about their media planning and optimization. At the time the book came out, paid search was changing digital media and the new science of marketing was becoming just as important as the art.

Now its 8 years later and a feature film about the book is coming out next month. (see the trailer, it looks real good) Everyone is talking about Moneyball again, but a lot has changed in that time. Most baseball teams now have sabermetric analysts on staff and marketing departments are driven by ROI analysis.

But why don't more companies take the same approach to marketing in social media?

There are a million ways marketers can spend a lot of time and money in social media. New platforms and tools are popping up, existing ones are evolving and there are communities on just about every niche topic. Consumers are just as varied. Many follow brands quietly, other are looking for freebies, while some can be valuable and influential advocates for your brand.

Without reliable analysis, how do you determine where to spend your time and money? A lot of companies do it based on their gut, personal comfort levels and general metrics without a lot of meaning. The fact is tools and practices are in place for measuring advocacy, sales volume and ROI.

These are the Moneyball metrics of social media marketing. Focusing on these measurements will improve your marketing efficiency and generate more sales wins.