Now that I've got your attention, I'm just kidding. The day there is a CTR for conversation, I'm officially throwing in the towel.
In this Adweek piece, Brian Morrissey (who it must be said, is without question doing the best job in the new marketing reporting space right now) pens an article about the $64,000 question: metrics/measurement in the social media space.
Although it seems as if the same subset of execs (all intelligent and all friends) are being interviewed for the the same articles (hint, hint), it's hard to ignore pearls like this one:
"Social media measurement is like radar," said Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "You can't fly a plane without radar. The question is how much radar do you need."
Ian Schafer offers a new suggestion for the ultimate social media metric: T-shirts. He's referring to a program for Flight of the Conchords and ultimately, why it is so important to customize or even invent unique proxies of success based on everything from engagement to communal activation.
Social media, he said, is like figuring out if you have a good marriage: Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. "You can't assign a number to that," he said.
To Ian's point, what's missing is not so much the "metric", but the meaning behind the metric i.e. the interpretation, context and actionable insight that helps perpetuate and extend the learnings and ongoing conversation.
One other problem is the fact that as long as we continue to expect short term results from longer term opportunities, we're going to continue to stumble our way through understanding the true and longer term impact and potential of conversation.
