Will Social Media Measurement be a reality for all in 2009?
February 4th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton
2009, the year social media measurement becomes a reality. I believe I may have mentioned that milestone in a number of posts last year, and we’ve certainly seen more good attempts to make it so. However, are we really any closer as we settle into February? Probably not, it’s pretty much as you would expect one month in.
So why the post now? Allow me to explain, my fear is that we are still missing one key ingredient to make social media measurement a reality for all.
Before I continue, let me say that this post isn’t a rant aimed at the great work that many people are putting into social media measurement, some are working on internal projects, others have joined together in groups containing uber brains to sort it out collectively, others still are testing and perfecting on their own terms. We have tried a bit of everything, and are working to build out our own theories and frameworks which are providing great conversation and progress with our partners and clients.
Great, I hear you say, why aren’t you sharing it? Well, there is so much noise going on in this space that I really don’t think another set of projections and pontifications are going to help until we have some fact-based results and evidence, which is what we are working on and will then share.
Back to the missing ingredient, which i believe is this: so many people are still hung up on finding the killer ROI metric or are not confident enough to push back when asked to find it.
I feel I might be repeating myself here, but i think it’s worth revisiting. Simply because we want a score that says ‘this month I’m doing better than last month’, does not mean it is viable measurement. If that was the case we would have all stopped talking about measurement a long time ago.
I see two main problems with the killer metric approach. One, if that one metric really can tell you that your social media campaign is succeeding, can it tell me the same about my campaign? We do have different objectives; different communities and vastly different levels of engagement, but it’ll still work basically won’t it? I doubt it.
Two: Great, so if we improved so much last month, let’s identify the core elements behind our success and evolve our campaign accordingly, what were they? What do you mean ‘not sure but the number went up so it must be good’?
Okay, so that’s a fairly obvious and simplistic view, it’s been said before and it’ll be said again, but my problem is we’re still not moving beyond this discussion quickly enough. The bottom line is some of our clients and bosses demand this ‘killer metric’ and we have to deliver, right? Wrong! That’s exactly why we won’t make social media measurement a reality this year, because we’re too busy defending our ideas and recommendations against the ‘killer metric pushers’.
So, to get beyond this sticking point, and really make all the thinking and discussion work that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, let’s get it out of our systems and stop the rot. If you really have a killer metric that works and can be adapted for multiple campaigns, please reveal all and the prize will be yours.
If not, please stop banging on about it, and get on with the real challenge. Let’s not destroy a reputation that we’re all working so hard to build by claiming that an obsolete model will work in this environment, because when that killer metric fails to deliver it’s going to be the reputation of the industry that suffers.
Can we put our energies into the task at hand and continue developing usable frameworks that we can apply, test and build upon with real examples.
To help you on your way, here’s a link to a post that has one of the best social media measurement resources that I’ve come across, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So rant over, do you agree? Disagree? Is it time we moved on or should I eat my words? I would appreciate your thoughts.
Tags: social media measurement
February 4th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Thanks for linking to my Superlist of Social Media Metrics.