what’s the point?
February 22nd, 2009 • posts i've written
Mike just wrote an excellent post about measurement.
As budgets shrink and companies demand closer accounting of every penny they spend, “measurement” has suddenly become the hot new industry buzz word. Clients are demanding a new level of accountability from their digital agencies, and it’s long overdue.
The implications of this shift, though, go well beyond a renewed interest in metrics that the client should have been getting all along. Clients are also seeking a greater level of detail in statistics across all marketing disciplines and executions. More granular statistics can uncover a world of new insights about a brand’s health online. Best of all, tracking these additional metrics over time can give brands an incredibly deep and well-rounded long-term perspective on their overall success.
I foresee a giant tsunami wave on the horizon of back lash against social media. It’s become such an incestuous industry (and it smells a bit too much like the PR industry, for me). Accountability is the only way to survive. Undercurrent is pushing hard to lead the charge on digital metrics. We’re working with software firms, talking to major platforms, and bringing global brands together to track and measure like never before. More on that later.
But we also have to ask the question, “Why?” Why are we compiling this massive backlog of data? Nothing turns my knob like a good spreadsheet, but what’s the point? It’s impossible to connect your Facebook fan page back to your sales data, just as it’s impossible to account total sales with views of your :30 spot. We don’t know exactly how advertising works. We just know that if you do a shit ton of it, people do start to buy your product more. No matter how much data we compile, we’ll never understand, with certainty, why our products are purchased.
The problem is that consumption and culture are inextricably linked. Consumption is culture and culture is consumption. And for that reason, you have to set objectives to work against beyond selling more product. You should be asking yourself questions like, what defines culture for my audience? How is culture communicated, distorted, remixed, and made whole again for them? Where does it take place? Where do I fit in? You have to build metrics off having an impact in the places culture is communicated and defined for your audiences.
I said in a recent slideshare, a dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on R&D, recruitment, loyalty, and longevity. It’s time to define objectives in those terms, too. You should set an objective for product innovation, hiring, share of wallet, and long term value. The more actions beyond sales we can define, the more actionable we can make our data and analysis.
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4 Responses (add your comment)
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Wholly cosign. I think a lot of the metrics used to measure value in social media are actually relics of old media. The idea that someone with +3000 follow/ers on Twitter automatically confers worth is poppycock.
IMHO it’s similar to the MySpace morass. The danger is that heaps of Twitterati are in the SM industry.
I do hope that your deck on the value of Fans gets read + understood. Quality > Quantity…
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Many of the marketing programs I work on require measurement. Usually we will expose a population to a marketing message and measure results against a control–pretty simple. Marketing is very quantitative when done this way.
And incremental sales can surely be calculated for commercials. Regional TV spots have been shown to correlate with upticks in revenue–again employing the control pop hypothesis.
But you’re hitting on a different point–the why. Just because we know that the advertising may have instigated a purchase, we do not know why it happened. Perhaps the customer’s behavior was reinforced by word-of-mouth or another channel. This is a completely different beast…
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I agree a redefinition of measuring success is needed. I think this is a cultural aspect that goes beyond dollars and cents.
But in specific reference to social media’s impact on the marketing world; the rise of using social media techniques has been very quick. Really the term in reference to marketing is only five years old. It comes from a lot of younger people like you and me who have an interest in experimenting with the marketing world. While I fully believe your sentence “a dollar spent on R&D, recruitment, loyalty, and longevity” is a good thing. I can’t help but to realize that it is such a leap from what more traditional marketing represents and what traditional marketing was able to measure so well. In the UK these traditional marketing agencies are hurting bad, while younger pocket digital strategy things are thriving (most are hiring even). It almost feels like these old agencies are trying to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. They feel threatened and yes I think some backlash is coming.
Although, this backlash won’t be from people actually engaging in social media, maybe just some brands putting money behind it. By research and measurements that I’ve read social media is growing at an astonishing rate (esp. in Europe). People are talking. If brands hire agencies to continue help give context, space or even guide conversations then they need to understand what they are asking for. Social media isn’t a coupon code and a brand’s expectations need to be properly set to understand holistic results.