The Measurement Mavens of the Month: Four Who Score -- Gailanne Barth, Sue Burke, Al Orendorf, and Krista Thomas

I love my job. Think about it: People who want to be accountable, measure results, and constantly improve have to be the smartest people in business, right? And that’s pretty much who I get to talk with every day. If you don’t care to be measured, don’t want to be accountable, or to improve, you’re just not going to call me, right? That's a nice self-selecting sample.

So this week I was particularly blessed with four meetings chock full of smart, accountable, fascinating communicators. They all get this month's Measurement Maven of the Month Award:

There’s Gailanne Barth, Director of Marketing Communications, Corporate Strategy, and Communications at IEEE (the electronic standards body, publisher, and conference organizer). She introduced herself at my PRSA workshop and said that they were already collecting click-thru data, and measuring results from promotions, their image in the media, and another half dozen things. I truly wondered what I could teach her. But, as it turns out, she was there because she wanted to learn how to pull all those different data streams together into a meaningful dashboard. Turns out her boss is a data wonk, loves measurement, and really wants to make data-based decisions. Prospective clients don't get much better than that.

And then Sue Burke, Manager PR / Social Media for Conagra Foods, needed some tips to measure an 18-city rollout of a new product. I suggested some A/B ANOVA testing. Not only did she totally get the concept, she was exited do the collection and analysis. This is the stuff my fantasies are made of. (See Conagra Foods Foundation's Facebook page.)

And there’s Al Orendorf of Genworth Financial. Al’s been a measurement wonk since his days at Allstate, where we fed him all kinds of data for years. He now wants to get his whole team into the “data-driven” head space, so they brought me in. As it turns out, they’re measuring all kinds of good stuff already. They have a wonderful Facebook page for caregivers, which is the epitome of how a B-to-B corporation can use social media right. Does it sell stuff? They don’t know yet, but -- guess what? -- they have analytic tools in place to find out.

And there’s Krista Thomas and the folks at Thomson Reuters, who gathered more data wonks in one room than I’ve seen this side of an eMetrics conference. Web analytics, PR, social media, and marketing all working together to define metrics. That's my idea of a dream team.

Runner up goes to OMMA’s Measurement and Metrics conference, where I was a speaker and got to listen to all the web analytics guys talk about how we’ll soon be measuring mobile and video and all kinds of cool stuff. They’re definitely believers in measurement, even if they don’t always get it right (see this month's Measurement Menace Award). The best part was learning how Discovery and Pepsi and others were really using social media metrics to make better decisions. -- KDP