Tomorrow I head up to New Hampshire for the Institute for Public Relations 5th Summit on Measurement to sit on a panel with measurement guru Katie Paine, Shel Israel and Todd Parsons of BuzzLogic. I need your help.
The name of our session is “How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media,” and it is a question that I have struggled with on this site often. Katie wants us to answer the following questions, and knowing that my readers are very informed, I would love to have your thoughts on the following questions:
- Should there be standards for measuring social media? And if so, what are the barriers to their being created?
- Should we even be measuring the ROI of social media? Or is it so fundamentally valuable, like the telephone, that we can’t do business without it?
- If we should measure it, what should we be measuring?
- What is so different about measuring social media, can’t we just apply traditional PR and Marketing metrics? If not, why not?
- Traditional advertising and marketing needs numbers? Do we really need those numbers and if so what should those numbers be and how should they be derived?
- If you are looking to measure the “ROI” of social media, what does the “R” stand for – -in other words, what return should we expect.
- How reliable are the current measures of social media?
- What does the industry need to do to improve the reliability?
The brainchild of Katie Paine, the summit looks to be one of the most information-packed conferences that I will attend this year and I think that the focus on measurement for social media could not have been more appropriate.
Related posts on measurement from me and others:
- Communication Overtones Measurement Category (measuring audiences, measurement tools, etc)
- “Engagement” Is Not A Metric, It’s An Excuse » Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Measuring Social Media Efforts : [chrisbrogan.com] - Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand (check the comments in this one for a list of resources)
- My Measurement Delicious Link, subscribe to get new measurement info as I find it (link is at far right on bottom of the page)
tags: Measurement, Social+Media, IPR, Institute+for+Public+Relations
