It's boat launching season here in New England.
Everyone I know is madly getting their boats ready to put in the water so they can be on the water for as many of the few short weeks of a New England summer as possible. Our faces all wear permanent grim smiles conveying mixed feelings of anticipation and terror.
That is very much the emotion that I have today as we finalize and launch the effort of The Conclave, an18-month herculean feat carried out by some three dozen volunteers that establishes the first cross-industry, vendor-neutral standards for social media measurement. After four decades in PR this is without a doubt the most signficant effort with which I've ever been involved.
The Conclave is a broad coalition of B2B and B2C companies, PR and Social Media Agencies, and Industry associations that work with paid, owned and earned social media. Driven by growing client confusion and demand for some order in the chaos that was social media measurment at the time, The Conclave initially convened at Shankhassick Farm in Durham, NH in October 2011 to establish standard definitions and best practices for Social Media. At that meeting it established a set of priority issues that required standards. Those areas are:
- Content and Sourcing
- Reach and Impressions
- Engagement and Conversation
- Influence
- Opinion & Advocacy
- Impact & Value
The Process:
Each area was addressed by a subcommittee of members. To ensure the highest level of consistency across the industry, the subcommittee frequently worked in concert with other organizations who were also in the process of developing standards, As each set of standards was written, it was posted to our website www.smmstandards.org for review and comments. After two months, the comments were aggregated, the standards were updated, reposted to www.smmstandards.org, and declared interim standards.
The standards for Influence, Opinion & Advocacy and Impact & Value have just been posted and are open for comments until July 31, 2013.
To get a copy you can download it here, Download Complete standards document or visit www.smmstandards.org. Feel free to throw tomatoes or roses at us. We expect this to be an iterative effort.
If you would like to participate in this process, please comment on our site, or get in touch ([email protected]) to be put on the mailing list.
Spread the word
The only way these standards can help bring order to the markeplace is if they are adopted. So please help us spread the word. Go back to your team, your bosses, your agencies, your providers and whatever professional associations you belong to and ask them to formally adopt them. So far the organizations that support these standards include:
- Institute for Public Relations (IPR),
- International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC)
- Digital Analytics Association (DAA)
- Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
- Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)
If you would like to add your name to the roster, please leave me a comment below.
And a huge thank you to all my Conclave committee members for their amazing generosity of time and spirit over the last 18 months.
It was very informative, thanks for sharing it!! I have adopted it already :)
Posted by: Leonie | July 04, 2013 at 07:41 AM