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| Vol.
8, No. 9, Nov 2009 |
To The Editor
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The Measurement Maven and Menace of the Month Awards The Measurement Maven of the Month: Philip Sheldrake Phil pulled together the first Influence Scorecard meeting a couple weeks ago in New York's Buckingham Hotel. And while it didn't have the glamour and glitz and guest list of the Copenhagen Summit, in its own way it may have as much impact on the conversation about social media measurement as Copenhagen will have on the conversation surrounding climate change. (Read details about the Influence Scorecard meeting here.) What Phil did was put together a nicely diverse set of perspectives, from traditional ad agencies (Diane Meier), to bleeding edge firms like The Conversation Group (Ted Shelton), from integrated communications measurement firms like my own (KDPaine & Partners), to social media tracking firms like Sysomos. And thanks to a collective commitment to stick to our objective, we actually got a remarkable amount accomplished (perhaps the Copenhagen folks could learn something). And if it hadn't been for the vision that Philip articulated at the beginning of the year, it wouldn't have happened. So, thank you Philip! -- KDP The Measurement Menaces of the Month: Everyone Who Confuses ROI with Results, and Measurement with Counting First, let's get this straight: ROI is not synonymous with "whatever results." ROI (Return on Investment) refers to a financial return on a financial investment (in dollars, or pounds, or rands, or whatever your currency is) and it's expressed as a percentage -- the percent you made on your money. That's what ROI is. And if someone tells you differently, they're either lying or intentionally obfuscating. Or, to be generous, they're not really sure what they're talking about. Yes, yes, yes: Nowadays PR and social media people are always "ROI for this" and "ROI for that." And they are almost always in error. In an effort to sound business-like, they've borrowed a term from the hard-nosed guys in accounting. But what gets lost in translation is their credibility. (See Shel Holtz' blog for an excellent discussion of this problem.) Secondly: Counting is not measurement. When you google "social media measurement" you'll find some 3 million items. Nary a day goes by that I don't get yet another announcement of a PR firm or a new technology or a new startup that is going to "measure" social media reputation, results, or success with a new "tool." The reality is that most of this "measurement" and most of these "tools" are nothing of the sort. They not only do not measure reputation (or results or success), but in reality they don't measure anything at all! Measurement is not counting. Or monitoring. It is not the number of followers, friends, rankings, or scores. Measurement is a process that requires you to compare results to something -- either to your competition or to your own results over time. You note the change, analyze the reasons why, and improve your program accordingly. Yes, of course, followers and friends are important. And it is important to monitor and count them as part of the measurement process. But if your stated goal is to increase your presence in social media, then the measure you want to work with is the percent increase in that presence over last month, or last week, or last quarter, or least year. Then you analyze why that change occurred, make an adjustment to your program, and thereby improve your results. And there's another thing, too: It devalues our profession to suggest, as Robert Wynne did in this article in Forbes.com, that counting something actually demonstrates the value of PR. And even worse are what I call the "parlor games" of social media. Like the online TweetPsych that claims to psychologically profile a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. Tools like this are just frivolous fun until someone actually proves they have legitimate value. An algorithm is just someone's opinion expressed in an equation, until and unless someone actually tests it. So, for instance, does your mind really dwell on the past? Or do you just happen to use the past tense a lot? Are you really an agreeable person? Or are your tweets just lacking disagreeable words? Not to be lacking in agreeable words myself, I just have to wonder on what basis anyone find these tools accurate or useful? And I would love to hear from TweetPysch or anyone else on this. So let's all make a New Year's resolution: No more fuzzy semantics. ROI is a financial calculation. Monitoring is not measurement, Counting is not evaluating. --KDP |
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