Jim Sterne, who has written six books on Internet advertising, marketing, and customer service, tackled the complex world of social media metrics in his morning keynote at SES London 2010. Sterne, who is also chairman of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, revealed some findings from his upcoming book, which, coincidentally, is entitled “Social Media Metrics.”

According to Sterne, social media is now where the World Wide Web was in 1995. Everybody’s talking about it but best practices are far and few between.

We know it’s important, valuable and catching on. What we don’t know yet is how to measure the business results of our business investments in this new communication medium.

Sterne said reach, frequency, and traffic were still important to measure. But so is influence, sentiment analysis and a whole new way of measuring marketing.

You can get a sense of his point of view in his latest ClickZ column entitled “Being Indispensible by the Numbers.”

You can also get an idea of what he said at the conference by reading Mel Carson’s post “Quoting Jim Sterne at SES London 2010” on the Microsoft Advertising Blog.

And read what A UK SEO posted about “SES London Day 3.”

Or, watch the interview by Byron Gordon of SEO-PR on SESConferenceExpo’s Channel. Yes, you didn’t hear wrong. Sterne talks about sheep and chickens.

Hey, I don’t make this stuff up. I just report what he said. Check it out.

Social media metrics with Jim Sterne, Chairman, Web Analytics Association at SES London 2010

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