Back in April I wrote a blog post about how effectively measuring the success of social media campaigns was frequently sought after but seldom achieved. Fast forward only eight months and it appears that a noble contender has finally arrived on the scene with the promise of delivering the social media analytics we’ve all only dreamed of. What’s this truly awesome company called? Actually, it’s called awe.sm.

If you’re familiar with bit.ly, the popular url shortening service, then you’ll easily understand how awe.sm works. Essentially, awe.sm creates and tracks custom, shortened urls for links that get broadcast on social media networks. Maybe it’s a link to your new blog post, new product landing page, or the download page of your latest software release. When people click on this link, in addition to getting forwarded to the full-length URL on your site, awe.sm tracks all the information of the interaction and stores it. After the tweet or facebook post or tumblr share has been shared over and over, these recorded interactions leave a breadcrumb trail that tells the entire story of who did the sharing, when it happened, and most importantly, what the effects were.

To get a sense of what a huge improvement this is, take a look at the paltry amount of information you get from a bit.ly tracked link. We launched an awesome screen saver earlier this year with a custom bit.ly link, and here is the page with the tracked statistics of how the link performed: https://bitly.com/l6vsHH+ Sure, there’s some information there, but not enough to draw any real conclusions.

Awe.sm takes link analytics about twenty steps further, providing true insight on a digital campaign. Awe.sm claims to map how a message spreads across a network and even show a social media campaign’s added value as an actual dollar amount. Can they really do all that? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to try the 30-day free trial to find out.