A metric system for social media?

Couldn't make last night's Chinwag event on measuring social media, a pity as its a subject dear to me own heart (its damn hard!) - so here is a summary of some notes from last night.

Wadds kicks off the game:

For those that missed it, the debate went like this: We need to measure social media! You can’t, it’s about people! We need to measure people! We are doing it! No we are not! It’s complex.

Then, Simon Collister sez:

...the idea of 'social media measurement' got me thinking: why do we seek to measure social media? The thought led me to two immediate answers:

1. Because as the management rule goes - if you can't measure it, you can't manage it
2. Because we need to justify ROI for a) clients b) investors c) advertisers

But then I asked myself are these two reasons the best and and most compelling reasons to try to measure social media? Possibly according to the following counter-arguments:

1. the opportunities offered by social media are born of the fact that as a (social) medium it resists management and control, so why try to measure it in order to manage it?
2. is commodifying or monetising members of online communities and their networks and itneractions the best way to measure and judge ROI?

I'm not saying we shouldn't measure social media per se, but rather asking why we need to measure it?

Stuart Bruce (Expurgated Version of his post below) drives towards the same question:

Measuring social media is easy

Measuring social media is easy, as there are a myriad of tools available to provide you with numbers. The difficult bit is evaluating it - how you interpret these numbers and what you do with your findings. The problem is that a lot of the numbers are misleading and fool people into thinking they have some meaningful data.

Focus groups are dead…

… all you need to do is monitor online conversations. Yeah, right how dumb is that? Online and social media, although absolutely an essential part of any corporate communications strategy, are only half the story and will only ever be half the story. There are not only millions of consumers who will never contribute anything online, but millions more who aren’t even that interested in online.

It’s not that you can’t measure it, but you have to ask why?

Advertising and web people are the ones obsessed with measuring social media, mainly because that’s their background. Those of us from a professional public relations and corporate communications background have a much more relaxed attitude.

I think that it was Will who gave the best bit of advice of the evening when he said: “understanding is more important than measuring.”

Brendan Cooper starts to structure an answer:

My take-aways are, not necessarily connected or in any order…

Numbers

CEOs love them because they usually come from accounting backgrounds. But how can we boil all this qualitative, subjective, ’squishy’ material down to one number?

More importantly, how can we cook these numbers back up into something that we can get ROI from? And when?

This is something that PR hasn’t even cracked yet. It’s incredibly difficult to measure influence and motivation, but someone somewhere needs to know when the money’s coming back.

Standards

Standardised metrics of some kind would be nice.

We already have this for other media, so why not the web? Even if it’s just a set of questions, or some framework for understanding and measuring.

One suggested framework was ‘Kudos’ - looking at whether a blog/post/interaction is knowledgeable, useful, desirable, open and shareable, that is, do you get kudos from it. It was also quite possibly the speaker’s company’s USP so full marks for divulging that one.

Games

If we do get metrics, can they be gamed? As soon as people know what they are, could we not just hire bazillions of people in India or China to push the right buttons?

Quite possibly, but only for a short while, and when you’re found out you will be in deep doo-doo. You only have to look at the very recent Guardian blog situation to see that the truth will out, sometimes astonishingly quickly.

Remarkable, Watson

If you want your product/brand/service/company to stand out, you need to make it remarkable.

I really like this term. It’s more than ‘buzzworthy’ or ‘notable’. It means quite literally ’such that people remark on it.’

This is the goal of copywriting too. If you can craft your piece such that people will chat about it in the pub, you’ve won. It’s probably the goal of any communications initiative. And, even better than that, the only way you can be remarkable is in the eyes of your audience.

So, clearly there is a benefit in metric systems, but could it be that those who know aren't telling, asked Liberate?

One hypothesis for the night had been the notion of establishing industry-wide agreement on measurement standards. This wasn’t discussed in great depth, but there seemed to be a reluctance to address the concept and debate how it could work. This underlined my major disappointment with the evening - that being that everyone was talking from their own individual agendas. While social media is inherently about honesty and openness, the data experts were keeping their cards very close to their chests, and not so willing to reach conscensus on anything. While I appreciate this was a discussion, it would have been nice to see more willingness for collaboration, from an industry operating at the heart of social media.

Daljit Burji noted that measurement may be use specific rather than standardised

In my mind Social Media techniques need to be employed to address specific marketing and business challenges and to reach out to specific audiences. The objectives and desired outcomes of a campaign whether it’s to directly drive sales, mitigate a crisis, reshape a reputation or whatever are going to be so particular to the client concerned that developing a one-size-fits-all set of metrics really misses the point.

Ultimately, with Social Media as with so much else, it’s not measuring it that counts but what you do with it!

Chris Hambly noted that:

It sounds simple when you look at it in print, but not one person mentioned that very important fact, in fact the very cornerstone of Social Media. Now regarding how to derive a metric from your community, I’m not sure about. Perhaps a call to action on a vote, an act, will in fact yield a metric. For example if 25% of my Social Media community act on a call to action, I do in fact have a metric, numbers, something for the CEO to consider. I know that’s not measuring engagement, connection, depth of experience, blah blah … but it is a number which CEOs “get”.

Net net, the one hypothesis I have had proved is I'm not the only one struggling with this stuff. I'll sum up the evening with a comment via Robin Grant but slightly out of context - we'll do this because:

“it’s opportunity for us to do things that no one else has done.”

(thanks too to @jennybee for pointing me at all the blogs)