The Recent Backstory on Social Media Metrics

So you probably read Brian Morrissey's  piece in Adweek on social media metrics: Conversation Quotient.  Hyper-relevant given the dustup at recent conferences and the intense heat and bright light on the topic.   I certainly scurried over there with butterflies in my stomach hoping to see the ever elusive bullet, the silver bullet.  Low and behold a bunch BBs scattered on the page with a roundup of Twitterati and their accurate, but less than definitive postulations.  Quite a bit of dodging and parrying from agency brethren on the hopes, fears and shoulds with Social Media and its impact on communication and marketing.

Then I ran across Max Kalehoff's follow up giving much more detail on his discussion with Brian.  If you start to extend social media through an enterprise beyond just marketing, you can see that there is a much broader impact to be accounted for.  Both in cost to implement as well as what and how to measure.  Much much more opportunity and data points to consider to assign value.   A quick quote from Max's post below -

"However, the major point I made in our interview, which he wasn’t able to unpack in this short article, is that social-media metrics are expansive and applicable to nearly all business processes, from innovation to product development, from strategic and communications planning to communications management, from marketing effectiveness to loyalty, as well as customer service, experience and beyond."

The measurement question comes up every day - social media, site traffic, clips, blips, pass-alongs, GRPs, etc .  As I've written before, it takes a hell of a long conversation - and commitment to come up with what to watch and why.  Most clients, agencies and affiliated aren't patient enough to work through it.  There's a silver bullet out there somewhere!, right. Some clients have set arbitrary values to impressions in an ad-equivalencyish approach.  In those cases I've recommended units as opposed to dollars or cents,  because it just doesn't make any sense to use the completed flawed ad model to measure anything.

Brian, I like your idea of an additional story about the enterprise. Maybe a meet-up at the Silver Bullet Lounge?

Comments

[David Alston]

Hey there Matt. Was just talking to someone else about this topic today. I joined a comment thread on a recent Mediapost article that dug a little deeper on the roles in the org. Here's the link to it. http://blogs.mediapost.com/metrics_insider/?p=47

Cheers. David

[Matt Mantey]

David - I hadn't seen that post. Interesting for lots of reasons. Not the least of which is how radically different an agency like that would be. I read Kevin Hillstrom's blog (http://minethatdata.blogspot.com) everyday with many of the same ideas. Thanks for stopping by.