Measuring the Unmeasurable

February 7, 2008

bpeopleI attended Jeremiah Owyang’s webinar last week, and did a brief comparison to another seminar that I had attended the day before.

But, even more important than that comparison about the old and new media way of thinking about things, is one of the larger points that were brought up during his webinar. In his blog, Web-Strategist, Jeremiah went on to point out that one of the often asked questions was, “how do I convince my management to embrace this new social media world?”

Jeremiah makes a distinction between digital lifestyle “natives” and “immigrants,” which is a very adept way of stating the issue.

At my own company, I’m dealing with this problem. My company is a new one and is still suffering from the “velocity over sentiment” ideas that Brij Singh pointed out. So, when I tell them what I’m doing to help raise awareness about the company and our product, they ask me for concrete numbers.

The problem is that there really are no scientific measurements for what social media accomplishes. And, the measurements that exist are largely intuitive.

Jeremiah says, “Campaigns are happening off your servers, so you cannot easily measure [them].” His new measurement attributes are:

  • Attention
  • Interaction
  • Velocity
  • Sentiment
  • Quality
  • Impacts

And, as you can see, not all of them are nearly as effective to a proof-based corporate management structure as, say, Google’s Analytics.

So, how can you introduce new ideas into the culture?

In my experience, I’ve found that the best way to deal with old media ideas is with old media facts. I appreciate the idea that Jeremiah mentioned in the webinar, about pointing out how children are communicating (through IM, texting, social networks, etc), but that doesn’t work in my situation. The idea is sound, but it’s hard to pitch.

Measuring social media and its effect on your marketing or PR campaign starts with defining specific goals for your “immigrants.” And the best pitches start by defining results.

Here are a few questions to ask:

Why are your immigrants hesitant about social media?
There are as many reasons for being hesitant about using social media as a marketing or PR platform as there are people who are hesitant.

You can make assumptions all day, but until you actually determine why your immigrants feel the way they do, there’s really no way to assuage their doubts. So the first thing you need to do is find out what, specifically, is the problem they have with the medium.

What is it that the company hopes to accomplish that can be helped with social media?
This is the most important question, of course, but it’s an easy one to overlook. What are the specific problems that need to be addressed, and what are the goals that will resolve the problem? In other words, what are the concrete facts/numbers that need to be improved, and how are they measured?

How can you narrow broad ideas?
If the problem is that there aren’t enough hits on the website, then obviously there is a way to measure that. If the problem is something more complex, for example: “We need to develop a love of our brand by consumers,” then you’re being too broad and you need to break it down into more specific issues.

Ask yourself what the first step toward your lofty goal is. If you define the first step, you can define the first goal. And, goals are what your immigrants want to see.

If you define the problems and goals with your immigrants, they will be able to see them as clearly as you can.

The best way to lead the way on a brand new path is by showing the people following you how similar it is to the old path.

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under blog 

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