SXSW: The Discussion About Metrics That Never Happened
by Brian Reich | 9 Mar 2008, 3:00am
(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto SXSW blog)
The last panel discussion of the day promised a discussion of social marketing strategy and metrics. It featured some heavy hitters - Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy, Brian Magierski from BSG — and others. The moderator said the discussion would be at the ‘intermediate’ level, meaning they were going to skip past the basic stuff. The room was packed and buzzing about the possibility of solving this vexing challenge once and for all.
Big let down. Same old discussion. No new ground broken.
I won’t quote from the panel, it really isn’t worth the effort. But I will share a few quick insights that I gained while listening from the back of the room.
1) People are looking for a simple solution. There isn’t one. One panelist suggested the problem was that we knew there was an ROI for social media but we couldn’t demonstrate it to our boss/client. Their solution? If someone could just create a tool, a piece of technology, that could measure all the different elements of social media conversation then we could demonstrate the value. Um, no, that’s not the right answer. A piece of technology will not solve this problem. We can measure most everything that happens online. But people haven’t spent the time to figure out what it means, how it relates to their goals and the work they are doing.
Why is that?
2) People are lazy. The benefit of the online world is that everything (or nearly everything) is measurable. The drawback of course, is the same thing - that everything (or nearly everything) is measurable. And when you measure everything, reams and reams of data are produced — data about every person on the web, what they are doing, the content they are promoting, and everything else. But nobody, it seems, reads all that data, they just look at the summaries. Nobody it seems, is asking the tough questions about what the data says, instead of just passing along the numbers and suggesting they represent the answer. Nobody, it seems, is wiling to take a stand on what something means, for fear that they will be wrong.
What is missing is analysis, opinion, perspective, insight. If we are so smart about how people use technology to communicate, how people use the web, what works and what doesn’t, and we truly understand the people we are talking with online (or are even representative of those people ourselves), then we should be able to look at the numbers and understand what they mean. We should be able to offer opinions and insights that inform real actions.
Why don’t we?
I think I do (and I demand that the people I work with do the same). I love numbers as much as anyone. I geek out over the crosstabs when I do polling; The summary memo isn’t nearly as interesting to me. I wade into the comments when my client has a blog or similar and listen to what people are saying; counting how many people are commenting is not enough.
So, I challenge my fellow marketers to embrace the data and spend the time learning what it means. I challenge my fellow marketers to provide their opinions, their informed insights drawn from years and years of experience communicating online, about what to do and how to do it. I challenge my fellow marketers to use their brain, to trust their gut, to take a stand, and to use the process of measuring and analyzing to try something every day until we feel good about what we know.
Then we can come back and have a better discussion about this issue and what we have all learned in the process.
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