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| Vol.
8, No. 5, July 2009 |
To The Editor
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by Katie Delahaye Paine If you're from New England, you know well the expression, "Light dawns over Marblehead." Marblehead being a quaint little New England seacoast village, and "marble head" being a reference to someone's incredibly thick skull. It roughly translates into "Duh!" Which is what happened to me while sitting through the umpteenth discussion about measuring social media at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in DC last week. Don't get me wrong, it was a great conference. There were dozens of stories and case studies on how the use of social media is changing government -- making it more open and transparent, facilitating brainstorming and collaboration, speeding up response time, and generally making it easier to deal with bureaucracy. And that's when light really did dawn over this marble head: As long as we call it social media, we want to measure it the way we do all other media -- with hits, or impressions, or column inches, or AVEs, or eyeballs, or GRP, or some kind of old-fashioned metric. Why do we think an old-fashioned metric is the right way to measure a very newfangled thing? Here's the rub: Social media isn't really a medium. OK, yeah, it's a communication medium. But, for measurement purposes, what's really important about it is what happens because of it. It's a way of doing business. It's crowd sourcing, it's opening up the kimono and getting everyone to throw ideas around. So... it's time to take the "media" out of social media. 75 years ago there were probably people trying to measure the effectiveness of the telephone by counting how many people were on your party line. At some point, the telephone had proven its ROI often enough that CEOs stopped questioning its value. It became a workgroup tool, a process improvement tool, a must-have-to-do-business tool. And the telephone measurement industry went the way of the buggy whip and corset stay companies. That's what I predict will happen for at least part of social media. Sooner or later, monitoring and listening to what your customers have to say will be as obviously valuable as picking up the telephone or asking customers what they think. No one has to justify listening to customers any more. So if we just call it "listening" and not "measurement," chances are everyone will adopt it. But more to the point, the metrics that we need to use to measure the effectiveness of social media are totally different from anything that PR or marketing folks are familiar with. We need to be working closely with the data geeks and the market research folks and measure the things that happen faster and better because of social networking:
...you
get the idea. It's the change to our business habits and efficiency
that we really should be measuring. Not how idiots track success. |
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