Joel Postman, in his book SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, quotes Einstein saying “…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” This statement is true for beginning to measure new social media. But measuring the outcome of your blog has become more important than measuring how many people see it. Reach isn’t as important as who sees your blog and what they do with the information you put out.
For how many blogs out there, it is sort of like how the advertising market has become. People are overwhelmed by how many advertisements that are pushed at them that they are now refusing to see the ads and skipping over them. They are now specifically searching for what they want and overlooking the rest. Blogs are being created everyday. People might be not be bombarded with every blog that comes up, but there are an overwhelming number of blogs people might stumble upon. While someone might reach the site of your blog, you do not know if they stayed and read your blog or just kept going on to something else. Knowing how many people passed through your site could be helpful, but not in the long run. It would be much more beneficial to know how many relationships you are creating that will be sustained over a longer period of time, than just a few seconds that it takes to glance at a screen and move on.
Knowing who is reading your blog and actually using the information you provide is important to know for anyone trying to create a successful blog. You will want to know the impact you are having on your audience before you continue. You want to know this because if you know who is regularly visiting your site, you can tailor information to suit more specific needs. Angela Sinickas says in her article, Measuring the Impact of New-Media Tools, it is better to know who reads your blog, so you can know the impact that it can create. It would be better to know that a reporter read your post and wrote about you than knowing that 30 people visited your site today.
You can create better outcomes for yourself if you can target whom you want rather than how many people you want because if you get the right readers, they will communicate and more readers will come.
February 27, 2009 at 3:03 am
Knowing how many relationships you created through new social media is by far the better approach to measurement. Katie Paine elaborates on your point in her blog, http://kdpaine.blogs.com/. She explains that new tools that allow you to count purchases and engagement are now available. For example, Google Analytics allows you to see where people who visit your site are coming from and how they interact specifically with your personal site. Not only do these new tools provide accurate measures, but they also help improve your online results.
Paine compares her views on measurement in new social media to Andy Atherton’s post from
“Advertising Age”, http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=134818. Atherton mentions the scale and value of TV, a traditional form of media. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between traditional social media and new social media. Is measurement the main reason that traditional media like TV and print are moving online?
February 27, 2009 at 6:04 am
Thanks Mandy. Katie Paine is a very good resource since her blog is specifically about measuring new social media.
To answer your last question, I do not think the measuring of traditional media is the reason that new media is moving online. I think it would actually be a reason why companies would avoid going online. Measurements for new social media are not as well defined as measurements for traditional media. For traditional media, companies might only get a certain audience responding to their surveys or phone calls, but they knew how to get in touch with their publics and how to quantify the data. I feel like companies are still working through the kinks on reading the results for new social media.
February 28, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Hey Heather,
I agree it is definitely more important to know who is reading your blog and if they are actually reading it; rather than visiting. After reading our assignment in PR 2.0 this week I thought CEO of FASresearch.com, Neil Gorenflo, expressing similar concerns. The interview he gave for the book also explained ways bloggers can establish better measurement for blogs, and how simple segmentation of race and gender is not enough. Gorenflo said you need to start with understanding how the information flows and then create the ideal structure to measure it. You may want to check out their website. I’m sure you could find great information on new forms of measurement.
February 28, 2009 at 9:23 pm
How to measure social media is a conversation that is happening a lot lately. I found a blog by Don Bartholomew, Metrics Man, called Proving the Value of Public Relations. In one of his posts, he discusses the future of PR measurement. He acknowledges these may all turn out to be wrong, but generally he thinks there will not be one way to measure outcomes. Many measuring applications will become available and word-of-mouth measurement will be important for PR measurement. What he describes as “Cross-platform/domain measurement” is a concept that will be interesting to see how tools can be developed in order to measure the impact an individual has on a topic through several media and word-of-mouth sources. The Metrics Man also lists a useful blogroll on other measurement blogs that point to different ideas and case studies.
http://metricsman.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/the-future-state-of-public-relations-measurement-2013/