The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

New! Read 10 Public Relations Measurement Blogs at the Same Time

Here's a new way to keep up on the major public relations measurement blogs: Visit The Measurement Standard's Blog Feed Page. Read them all at once!

Vote for Katie Paine's PR Measurement blog at PRWeek's blog competition

PRWeek is hosting a blog competition, and we encourage you to vote for Katie Paine's PR Measurement Blog. Well, actually, we encourage you to read a few of her posts first, then go over and vote for it. (She is, after all, the publisher of The Measurement Standard, and we like to support the boss.) Please note that the PRWeek competition page is not very clear on just how to vote. Go to the bottom of the page and try to use the BuzzDash boxes. --WTP

What's Up with the Social Media Backlash?

I'm amazed at how many people love Loren Feldman's sock puppet satires of social media guy Shel Israel. And I notice a number of people respond very favorably to Drama 2.0's criticism of Shel and Jeremiah Owyang and Kami Huyse's rollercoaster research.

Is it just me, or is there some kind of backlash against social media? If the sock puppets are just satire, as Tom'sTechBlog claims, why is the satire so well received? Are people responding to the over-hyped world of 2.0 by being just a little too hard on some of its promulgators? --Bill Paarlberg

Who Are Bloggers? New Demographics from BIGresearch

Bet you didn't know that over 50% of bloggers' Internet searches are triggered by magazines, and almost that many are prompted by broadcast TV. Or that 38% of of Libertarians blog regularly, as opposed to 27% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans. (That's a lot of blogging.)
More great blogger demographics from BIGresearch can be found here.

Social Media Measurement, Blogging and Ego: I Think I'll Blog About What I Think About That

Last Thursday afternoon at the IPR Summit on Measurement there was a panel discussion entitled "How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media." Near the end of this I stood up and asked a question that went something like: "It's obvious that there's a lot of ego involved in blogging. In fact, the panel maybe has been talking so much about what blogging means to themselves -- about their links and their comments and their conversations -- that perhaps they haven't talked enough about the impact on the readers. What about readers that don't care so much about you, that are just there for the information?"

To be honest, I was trying to yank their chains a bit. But still, with so much ego involved in blogging, doesn't it sometimes get in the way of objective measures of impact?

Well, the session was almost at a close, and the panel could respond only briefly on the topic. I made a point of talking to each of the panelists afterward; some had taken the question in stride and some seemed a bit taken aback. Our talks brought out some great points about social media measurement, blogging and ego:

1. Content is what brings readers. Regardless of links or comments or whatever ego the author might have, if the content isn't there, the readers aren't there. Three of the panelists, Shel Israel, Kami Huyse, and Katie Delahaye Paine are well-known and accomplished bloggers; their readers come for their content. Whatever personality or ego is also expressed is secondary. (The other two panelists were Todd Parsons and Donald McLagan, both also experts on social media and its measurement. All the panelists had important and interesting things to say, see Lee Aase's blog.)

2. Links, comments and conversations, while very gratifiying to the author's ego, are also the connections that make blogging so powerful. They are the social part of social media and in part are the source of its amazing power. One blogger's link is also every reader's link, and that's why they are important to count.

3. What the hell's wrong with a little ego involvement? Social interaction, in any context, has something to do with status and self-image and self-gratification. It's the nature of social media to involve the ego of the author, and surely ego is the source of a lot of it's power and popularity.

Kami Huyse has some excellent thoughts and data on this exchange. (I am "Bill from the audience" that she mentions in her post.) -- Bill Paarlberg

Measuring Social Media and the Death of Page Views: Beyond AJAX, Where Is Social Media Measurement Headed?

Kami Huyse at Communication Overtones makes some interesting points about "meaningful measures of the relationships a site or blog is building," see her post ("Eight Meaningful Measures of Social Media").

I second her view that page views is crude and uninformative. The reason it is used is because it's an easy number to get, not because it's a particularly meaningful measurement. Social media is about relationships. Measuring social media with page views is like measuring a friendship by the number of phone calls. It says something, but not much. (With some exceptions: "Hey, you don't return my calls anymore?")

(By the way, here's the best presentation I've seen of why page views are dead: "How RSS Kills Banner Ads" a great little tutorial movie from The Ronin Marketeer on how RSS feeds are making banner ads obsolete.)

Let's think big picture for a minute... We can anticipate that social media will continue to expand in complexity of interactions, as technology allows. Where is it going? We can bet that AJAX is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tricky things to measure. (See Mike Shields' Mediaweek article "Ajax Puts Web Ad Sales in Peril")

Here's a prediction. I suggest that, as technology develops, social media will get richer and more complex in the nature of the interactions it allows between people until those interactions are at least as rich and complex as the real-life social interactions people are already comfortable with. People interact most meaningfully when they are face to face, talking to each other, like sitting around a table at a meeting or a meal. So our eventual measurement target will be to measure relationships with that level of interactive complexity: face-to-face, sitting around a table. Imagine interactive video blogging, how are we going to measure that?
--Bill Paarlberg

Your Measurement Reading List: Three Books About Blogging Reviewed

YOUR MEASUREMENT READING LIST
Book Your Ticket To Blogistan
Three books on blogging reviewed:

• The Corporate Blogging Book, by Debbie Weil


• Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble


• Dispatches from Blogistan by Susan Stefanac

Book reviews by Katie Delahaye Paine

As blogging moves from fringe to center stage, bookstore shelves are filling up with books about blogging. Search Amazon.com's book section for "blog" and you get almost 5,000 results. Personally, I think reading a book about blogging is sort of silly. The art is evolving so quickly, you're better off reading blogs than reading a book about blogs...