PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Continuing the blog post cascade (Mike began with Advertising Shouldn’t be a Faith-Based Initiative, decrying the need for more metrics, then Hugh continued with the 37% Solution, giving us some concrete suggestions for making marketing more relevant and measurable), I’ll take the opportunity to look at what’s happening in measurement from the social media marketing world.

In some ways, the social media world is still in its infancy - the concept has been around for about 2 years - yet it continues to change at an amazing pace. New sites, new tools, new ways to collect, share and interpret information. So there must be some cool new metrics that follow, right? Not exactly.

Blogging expert Tris Hussey riffed on Steve Rubel’s recent post The Imminent Demise of the Page View, saying that the page view wasn’t going to go anywhere. Sure, there are plenty of new widgets and gadgets and add-ons, but the bottom line, according to Hussey, is that people need to know what’s popular on their sites, and that translates to page views:

This isn’t an advertising challenge, it’s a pure and simple metrics challenge. I remember when HTML frames came out. W00t! easier page design. Damn, they suck for metrics. Okay, kiss frames goodbye. Flash sites. Wow they were cool. Sounds, animations, wait no data in the logs, later days Flash-sites. This is really no different. Once people figure out that these cool sites are hard to measure, they will be changed so they can be measured, or abandoned. Simple as that.

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. In my experience, when traditional marketers (or non-marketers, as the case usually happens to be) hear about blogs, podcasts and the like, invariably their first question is “How many people are reading/listening?” Wrong question. The questions that are more relevant for these niche sites is “How many times have readers/listeners returned? What links do they click on? What other blogs link to yours?”

These questions and others like them underscore the importance of relevant content that you are providing to your audience that makes them connect with you and with each other. (Notice I didn’t say brand engagement.) Whomever is assessing your social media marketing mix should understand that you don’t have to demonstrate sheer volume, that an audience of 100 people who are 100% interested in your offering is vastly superior to an audience of a million people who are 1% interested. But that still begs the question: in the social media space, what should you measure?
A great place to start is with the definitive list of 31 Things Every Company Should be Monitoring. In addition to external sources, you can build your own by using a simple tool like SiteMeter that allows any blogger to track the country, URL, referring site, outgoing links and time spent on their site. I use it on both of my blogs.

But sometimes, it’s not enough to know how many people are talking about you and you need to know what people are saying about you to each other, a partner such as Cymfony will analyze the tonality in the blogosphere, online communities and message boards. And if you’re actively blogging or podcasting, your content will be actively encouraging comments, so you’ll have a first-hand method of understanding what your audience thinks of your ideas or your company.
So, the page view isn’t dead. But I wouldn’t necessarily call it the the life of the party either.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Measurement, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.