Can Science Deliver The Answer To the Measurement Challenge?
by Brian Reich | 9 Mar 2008, 3:00am
(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto Blog and the SXSW EchoDitto Blog)
Ahhhh, science. The prospect of finding the answers to life’s most vexing challenges always seem to come from science (or faith, which in the case of online marketing and communications is important, but certainly not for everyone). So, this morning I sat in on a panel about the ’science of designing interactions’ in the hope of getting some additional clarity on this whole measurement debate.
The panel featured two folks, either professor types or PhDs, with thick accents — usually a good sign when you are talking about a complex subject (ok, totally unfair generalization, but tell me that you don’t agree with the statement at least in part) And, like so many other panels, this one promised metrics for determining the success of your social media/marketing efforts.
Sadly, like so many other panels, no metrics emerged. But, all was not lost. The moderator presented an interesting framework for ‘designing interactions,’ — seven patterns as he put it. Those patterns are:
1 Focus on designing interactions (the goal is to have people engage - with content, with each other, etc.)
2. Build experiment and measure (there is no single answer, no right answer, no way of knowing when you are done - so keep going)
3. Give user metrics of his standing (if you know that you are only 75% complete with a task, you will proceed through and complete the remaining 25%. If you don’t know, how do you know if you should go forward)?
4. Help the user decide actions (guide them, explain the meaning of what they are doing)
5. Frame interactions and costs, rewards risk (give the user an opportunity to understand the implications of his/her decisions, don’t decide for them)
6. Introduce currency for interactions (reward and incentivize people to take whatever action you want)
7. Create mechanism for discovery (collect data constantly, always be learning what your audience is doing and what it means to you)
What I learned?
Try not to tackle everything at once. Break down a big problem into many smaller problems and then look to various audiences/sources for help in solving those little problems. (The example of Amazon Turk was used to represent this concept). This seems to be a strategic blind spot for most people trying to communicate online — they try to create the ultimate experience, the ‘do everything’ technical solution, and inevitably they fall short somewhere. But, if you look at the individual attributes of various platforms (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) you will see lots of little successes.
There is a spectrum of activity that any user falls on — it stretches from interacting with just content (save, annotte for self, privately star, etc) moves to “mostly content” (comment, amazon review, share to audience) “some balance of both” (twitter, forward) and on the far right you get “interact with other people (wall, fan)”
And finally, focus metrics on users - at the end of the day, it is engagement we are interested in, not just activity. We want to know where the audience stands, how to improve, and how to contribute more. If you keep the focus narrow and deliver on the expectations of the user, you’ll discover your metrics in there somewhere.
Getting closer to the answer. I think.
