Metrics! We must have metrics! Get the excel sheets out! Download the web statistics! I want pie charts and graphs on clicks and followers and lead generation.
Whoa whoa whoa. When did metrics all of a sudden become the must have thing? Every social media marketing post this side of Palo Alto proclaims the necessity of metrics in social marketing campaigns. Don’t get me wrong; I love metrics and am happy to incorporate them into my services. But the insistence on the presence of metrics is getting just a little bit ridiculous.
Do Metrics Drive Creativity?
Since when did advertisers or consultants ever focus so heavily on metrics. Do advertisers and PR companies engaged in traditional forms of print marketing demand metrics left and right? Do they request metrics with the same level of intensity and frequency as they do now? Do the metrics determine the creativity and goals behind campaigns?
The answer is no, and the reason is because social media is about to revolutionize marketing and almost everyone in the business either knows it or suspects it. Either way, they sure are feeling it. So by focusing on the metrics, the metrics, THE METRICS, they hope they can slow down some of the hype surrounding social media.
Here is the thing: they can’t. Even though they did slow me down. I’ve spent an in inordinate amount of time focusing on the metrics of my clients’ social media activities. Beyond estimating, collecting and analyzing all the data, I’ve also spent way too much time focusing on them as if metrics are the only things that count. When you are buried in statistics about Twitter followers, unique visitors, Facebook fans, RSS subscribers, App Sales, etc., I just look up and wonder if this is what its all about. If all those creative people at all those creative agencies are as immersed in data as I am.
Of course their not. In fact, they couldn’t be even if they wanted to be, which is what this is really all about. Social media marketing, for the first time in the history of advertising, solves the question of exactly what parts of a firms’ marketing budget is actually working. Try getting those analytics from a static $40,000 ad in a glossy magazine. How many people read the ad? How many people skimmed right over it?
The Lasting Importance of Brand Equity
But you know what you hear when you question THEIR work? You hear things that aren’t so easy to measure. You hear terms like brand equity. Well, hey, guess what? I believe in brand equity and I think its really important. And I believe that having a competent, well thought out and well executed social strategy is one of the most important things a brand or business can do to earn the trust of people.
But a concept like brand equity is nearly impossible to measure. Because its a concept. Not a concrete thing to be measured, recorded and downloaded. So let’s all calm down a bit when we talk about metrics as if they are the only thing that is going to make social media marketing the revolutionary force of nature that it so clearly is. Let’s take our measurements, lets improve our processes for analyzing them, but the worst thing that creative people can do is let the metrics start dictating when, how and why of our business.
Image Source: Blmurch on Flickr
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
“Do advertisers and PR companies engaged in traditional forms of print marketing demand metrics left and right? Do they request metrics with the same level of intensity and frequency as they do now? Do the metrics determine the creativity and goals behind campaigns?”
ummm… yes, yes and yes? If you think clients dont care about the reach of the publications PR firms are getting them into, you’re wrong. If you think the Superbowl ad isn’t still the gold standard in reach, you’re wrong. If you think the measurement portion of the campaign isn’t the most important part, you’re wrong.
Whether the same metrics we use for advertising are relevant to SM efforts is another story, but a focus on measurement is not a ‘new thing companies use so that they dont have to use twitter’.
Jeremy Meyers´s last blog ..The difference between wanting help and being ready to accept help
Jeremy, Sorry it took me a few days to get to this. Bad karma on my part!
Thanks for the comment and keeping me in check on this. I think the point is that in traditional advertising the measurements are much harder to calculate. So Vanity Fair has 1 million paid subscribers, and maybe 1.4 million readers after multiple copies get tossed around…
But companies or PR firms really have NO idea how many people will interact, enjoy, love, hate, share those advertisements.
Marketing using social media and on the web for the first time gives us the ability, not to see a perfect picture, but alas a much sharper one…
What say ye?
Agreed Zach.
The modern version of Brand Equity is social currency. I believe brand equity existed to determine how much goodwill a brand could afford to lose. At best, it indicated a degree of brand loyalty.
Social currency measures what people can be moved to do for a shared interest.
Because the interest is mutual, the connection is way more powerful. It’s power of strangers spending time posting answers to blog-posts. That sort of enthusiasm can be measured quantitatively, as in how many you get, but not qualitatively, as in how many people are touched by it.
I think old school metrics for a new model and degree of engagement is the dying gasp of a business model that measured proponents success in sales. Now that the channels are open for discussion, brands of the future are beginning to measure their succes in relationships–how many people will sell FOR you.
Fun times.
So trur barry, i love the way you think!
Aww.
Barry Martin´s last blog ..Everything I Needed to Know I Learned on Twitter
I think the real problem, gents, is that clients/advertisers are applying a print mentality to web-based and social media marketing. My fave was always “impressions.” That works fine for assessing how much print ads might be worth (maybe), but it’s way off-base for web and social media specifically. Clients shouldn’t worry how many times people see their logo (an “impression”): They need to boost how much people actually care about their brand.
The only metrics that MIGHT have meaning are numbers of comments, threads created (length), and other interactions. Stickiness, too. But that doesn’t address quality or the passions Zach mentioned. I’d look at comments scanning for words that express those passions (i.e., “love you store!”). Take a look at Ritchey Dairy’s Facebook page and scan the comments that people have lef ton the Wall. Only 542 members but check out the love:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=131418737171
Totally agree with Zach. It’s about eliciting expressions of love, joy, hate, and, most of all, the desire to share.
thanks Barth! You are right that we cannot apply 20th century metrics…its all So different on the social web and in the socially aware world.
how many people will i tell about your brand today because you did something great yesterday? How do you quantify that?
the hum of the universe
I am with you. Metrics are not everything. But as you state. It can help and people love to reduce the complexity of conversations to sheer numbers. It looks so simple.
I am a “me too”.
We are also creating a social media metrics application at http://www.twentyfeet.com that will centralize all your web stats in one place. We only have twitter, facebook and bit.ly so far. But I would love to get feedback from you guys about it, as soon as it gets live in the next weeks.
We do not focus on measuring your “brand” in social media. We just centralize your stats and perform scientifically valid analytics with the time series. Is that a concept, that you would approve?