The M Word in social media

I love the fact that Jeremiah Owayng has declared this the year of Measurement for social media.  Maybe, it's because  Robert Scoble has said  the big companies are starting to ask whether social media increases sales. His answer is that there are lots of things that organizations do that can't be tied to sales so why should social media be held to a higher standard?  I have to agree. I think using sales as the only measurement is wrong. I also agree with Josh Hallet that the page view is a very dangerous measure. Yes, media uses it to show the "eyeballs" so people are comfortable with it, but  counting eyeballs becomes increasingly meaningless in a world where we "snack" on media and pay so little time with most of it that we can't remember what we saw where.  Similarly, the  fallacies of clickthrus are being brought to light  as organizations realize that attributing all the "sales" to the last URL is ridiculous. Are you telling me that the last pop-up or Google Adwords is the reason I bought my computer? of course not. I talked to Richard@Dell  and a bunch of other people about laptops, looked at on-line reviews, asked about it on Twitter, and finally went to Staples because I wanted to touch it and feel it first.
My alternative to these overly simplistic metrics is to look at what you're trying to achieve. Most social media programs are designed to engage customers -- or some audience -- in a conversation. The reason might be to learn more about what the customer wants, or it might be to improve the relationship, or to get ideas. Does  Dell's Ideastorm increase sales?
It probably stopped them from losing a few, but far more important is the ideas it creates. How do you put a value on an idea? Consultants and Ad Agencies do it every day. Will it increase sales. Maybe, someday. Can companies exist without them. Of course not.
So why the reluctance to measure what you're trying to achieve? The problem is that most organizations can't articulate what it is that they want to achieve. So my suggestion is pick one:
1. Improve relationships with my customers/employees (Metric: Improvement in Relationship Scores)
2. Generate traffic to a web site (Metric: Web Analytic improvement)
3. Persuade someone to do something (Metric: Increased donations, pledges etc.)

I'm sure there are lots more, but unless and until organizations get much clearer about what it is they're trying to achieve in social media. This will only be the year of Measurement theory, not practice.

Comments

[laurent]

In several organizations where I worked in the past, often surfaced the objective to be closer to the customer. Some of the metrics I've seen were around 'talk to x customers each week'. I think talking to customers is something that can be achieved through social media. That's a metric in the 'customer relationship improvment' which could be used. Monitoring how many relevant conversations a marketing team listened to, how many they engaged in and so on.