Making an impression on social media measurement
August 15th, 2008 by Lloyd Gofton
On our quest for social media measurement knowledge, we’ve come across a range of intelligent and well presented arguments. One such post comes from Jason Falls over at social media explorer, which contains a veritable feast of information and insight into the issues of a client-based query on measuring social media impressions. The post also contains additional comment from K.D.Paine at KD Paine & partners. If you’re not familiar with KD Paine & partners, they specialise in PR and marketing measurement, having developed global measurement systems for the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Proctor & Gamble and Mastercard, so certainly worth paying attention to.
The post details Jason’s conversations as he answers the point on measuring social media impressions, which he argues is not possible to achieve. In fact, K.D. Paine confirms “The only way to accurately calculate impressions for blogs is to ask each blogger whose site your brand appears on and how many unique visitors he/she gets in a month. And even then, you’re assuming they’ll tell you the truth.”
There are many more pearls of wisdom in the post, which i’ll leave you to digest at your leisure, but it also got me thinking about how we are sometimes tempted to apologise for social media and its measurement, as it does not/cannot utilise traditional measures, such as impressions.
Just yesterday i was sitting in a meeting discussing a client’s experiences on Twitter, and as soon as we switched the conversation away from how Twitter can be utilised in a traditional sense to its values in the social media framework, everything clicked into place for the client. So, should we apologise that social media measurement won’t always equate to traditional measurements? No, we need to help our clients, colleagues, whoever to understand that the rules have changed, and previous measures of success simply won’t always be useful. This shouldn’t be a scary issue, as measurement must move on, just as the communications landscape has moved on. Furthermore, if we are truly embracing a social media-based approach, measurement around conversations, sentiment and tone will ultimately be more useful to our objectives than mere impressions alone.
It may sound obvious, but standing fast and explaining the reasons we cannot provide traditional measurements in the face of a results-focused query, really is the only way to move the measurement discussion forward.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Oh THANK YOU! Not just for the shout out, but what you’re saying isn’t obvious at ALL! (or as my Irish relatives would say, “at all at all…”
The rules have changed and who CARES about the old ways of counting things. What matters now is the impact we’re having on the business. And the good news is that more and more, we’re able to show that!