Measuring social media is easy, evaluating it is difficult

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This post started as a comment in response to KD Paine’s comment on Seb’s post about last night’s Chingwag Live on measuring social media.

I was at the Chinwag event with Seb and his post only includes snippets of what was discussed. My main reason for going along is that in all the social media consulting and public speaking I do this is the subject that I feel most vulnerable on.

I came away both pleased and disappointed. Disappointed because I didn’t feel that I’d learnt a great deal. Pleased because I now feel far more confident about my own and Wolfstar’s views and expertise in this area.

Will McInnes and Robin Grant both made some good contributions, that were broadly in line with what I think. Some of my other thoughts following the event include;

Measuring social media is easy

Measuring social media is easy, as there are a myriad of tools available to provide you with numbers. The difficult bit is evaluating it - how you interpret these numbers and what you do with your findings. The problem is that a lot of the numbers are misleading and fool people into thinking they have some meaningful data. Seb’s example of AVEs (advertising value equivalents) is spot on. AVEs are totally and utterly discredited, yet lazy public relations people continue to use them, often with the excuse that it’s “what the client wants”. My response is “Show a little backbone and consult” - you’re the expert and it’s up to you to educate the client that AVEs might be a measurement tool, but they have absolutely nothing to do with evaluating the effectiveness of a public relations campaign.

Focus groups are dead…

… all you need to do is monitor online conversations. Yeah, right how dumb is that? Online and social media, although absolutely an essential part of any corporate communications strategy, are only half the story and will only ever be half the story. There are not only millions of consumers who will never contribute anything online, but millions more who aren’t even that interested in online.

You can’t even evaluate the success of many online campaigns, without looking at the effect offline. One successful social media project I did would have failed every test if you measured it online. It was a blog with very few readers, only a few comments and very few links to it. It was also a brilliant success in that it achieved every single one of its objectives in that it got people talking offline about the issues discussed online. But you wouldn’t know that if we hadn’t done a paper-based postal questionnaire and a focus group.

It’s not that you can’t measure it, but you have to ask why?

Advertising and web people are the ones obsessed with measuring social media, mainly because that’s their background. Those of us from a professional public relations and corporate communications background have a much more relaxed attitude.

Contrary to popular belief it’s not too difficult to evaluate the success of a public relations campaign. However, it is frequently too expensive. On a multi-million pound advertising budget you can do some clever and effective measurement and evaluation for a tiny fraction of the total budget. On many PR campaigns you can do the same measurement and evaluation, but it takes a big percentage of the budget. Money that is usually better spent on running a better campaign.

I think that it was Will who gave the best bit of advice of the evening when he said: “understanding is more important than measuring.”

UPDATE: Just seen a good post by young Mr Collister at Simonsays with a great comment from David Brain: “The biggest lie in marketing is ‘if you can’t measure it don’t do it’. Measurement should be seen as a useful tool not some sort of holy destination.”