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The “golden ticket” of social media measurement
By Justin Goldsborough | July 31st, 2010
Today marks my one-year anniversary at Fleishman-Hillard. When I started with the agency last July, one of the first things I was hoping to find was the “golden ticket” of social media measurement that had eluded me in my past job. What I found instead was a bunch of colleagues with differing opinions (kind of like a microcosm of measurement conversations on Twitter) and a bunch of clients focused on what they had been focused on before social media — impressions.
Now, I am not at all knocking my colleagues or clients. After all, the same measurement debates are going on in agencies and online communities across the world. And PR pros in all types of companies have talked impressions, are talking impressions and will keep talking impressions. That conversation is not going away.
The real “golden ticket” I found at Fleishman is that there is no “golden ticket” of social media measurement. However, there are clients that have pre-existing PR/Marketing measurement models and supervisors they need to help see the value in all the work they do, not just social media. So how do we help them do that?
Well, I think we help them do that by educating over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that good stuff. The point being that we’re not going to change measurement models and mentalities that have been around for decades in one fell swoop. If you’re able to, stop what you’re doing, write a book and start a speaking tour. I’ll be your agent.
The first step to educating is asking our clients questions:
- What are your organizations’ business goals? Communications goals?
- How does your boss, company define success?
- Do you feel like you can explain the value of social media to your boss and colleagues in general? As it relates to your brand? To a specific campaign?
High-level philosophical discussions about social media measurement are great to have. They make us think. But in the end, as one of my good friends says, we are still responsible for delivering results in the client’s world. We are also responsible for keeping our clients up to speed on emerging trends in measurement and how they might try to look at and explain social media differently. The key is to balance the two.
- How are you balancing the two?
- Have you found any other “golden tickets” of social media measurement?
- How awesome would it be if a candy bar company really ran a golden ticket promotion?
July 31st, 2010 at 10:58 am
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August 2nd, 2010 at 4:24 am
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August 3rd, 2010 at 7:07 am
Hi Justin
You’re right. Not silver bullet ;-).
Like for all good projects, having an objective helps a lot with knowing what/how to measure. As of today, my belief that SM measurement still requires a bit of manual analysis to get to a ‘trustable’ measure. Granted there are tools that grab content and count ’stuff’ but how reliable are they and how much can you trust the output. Like all discipline in its infancy, social media is and will remain a mix of technology/manual analysis in order to get meaningful and actionable data.
Laurent
August 7th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
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August 9th, 2010 at 11:36 am
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