Social media metrics just aren’t what they used to be.  We can’t determine the success of a social networking campaign, or fully measure the influence of one outlet or another based on the basics like size, or number of hits.

Consider other things, like link-sharing and blog posts.  A virtual handshake is turned into a recommendation for a custom experience with multimedia.  This ranges from games to bookmarking, buying a digital birthday card or sharing your wishlist.

But size as a visualization is still helpful, when you incorporate all of the factors listed above.  We came across one such visualization, representing summer 2010’s volume of social media activity on the world map.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a scientific approach behind this one, rather a mashup of metrics from Google, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, Askimeet, and a host of other seemingly related sources of validated information.

Check out the size of Facebook, and look at Twitter’s activity versus YouTube and MySpace just beyond?  Or how about the size of FarmVille and Happy Farm overall?

A bit of whimsy for your Friday, but metrics continue to generate good business.  With more ways to gather data, there’s more ways to twist it around for our many perspectives.  More social media sites like AddThis tack metrics to their offerings, i.e. Twitter and its latest round of data liberation. Facebook’s site upgrade included a twinge of data portability, a topic that will become increasingly relevant as social media metrics become incorporated into business methods and marketing.