A short while back, most likely near the beginning of January, I printed out a document titled, "Social Media Measurement 2011:  Five Things to Forget and Five Things to Learn.  I most likely came across the article as I was determining my own predictions for the upcoming year.  It's written by "metricsman" or after a quick Google search, Don Bartholomew, VP of Digital Research at Fleishman Hillard. Let's see what he had to say.

First, Don tells us to forget about impressions.  Historically, success has been reported through the lens of quantity vs. quality.  I would add that advertising measures successes in much the same way.  You could easily generate millions of impressions without seeing one result.  Then again, there's something to be said about general awareness and branding rather than measuring against a strict figure such as sales results. 

Don goes on to say that we also need to worry less about fans and followers.  Once again, I'd agree with his point. It's great to measure fans/followers as a benchmark for influence, but I don't think it can be a catch-all resource for measurement.  For instance, if someone says they are a social media superstar or "very active" on Twitter but they only have 37 followers, most likely they don't have a good grasp on the platform.  Flip the switch to a recent ad campaign that I worked on, and things are quite a bit different. One of the fan pages that we created only generated 53 followers over a 12-week period.  However, those followers generated roughly 539 clicks through Facebook. That's more clicks than we had on a banner ad that ran on a high-traffic site targeted at the audience we were aiming for.  There, I would argue that the number of followers becomes meaningless in regards to the measurable results.

Where I agree with Don the most is in regards to his stance on impact, measurement, and attribution of media in the social space.  First, he offers insight that ROI comes in two forms: financial- a percentage of dollars returned for a given cost, and impact- awareness, engagement, and influence that will eventually create value between a consumer and a brand.  For instance, the ROI of a coupon is pretty simple.  You determine how much it costs to print/produce/distribute the coupon,  the amount of money you spend actually lowering the cost of your item and ultimately compare it to sales numbers after the coupon period expires.  It's a short financial gain/loss that is easily measurable.  For something like social media, things could often take a while.  A tweet about toothpaste could spark a dinner table conversation that leads to a purchase decision two weeks down the road.

Don also goes on to talk about the PESO model his firm uses.  In the age of digital, social, and traditional, it's important that agencies remain wide in scope and integrated across all platforms.  Earning media alone often isn't enough.  Paying for it isn't always enough either.  By expanding through as many consumer touch points as possible through paid advertising, earned media, shared content (often created by consumers) and owned online properties (Web sites, microsites, blogs, social media profiles) you truly can increase the liklihood for consumer conversions. 

Now onto the only piece of the editorial that I don't neccesarily agree with: the hypothetical ROI model.  Don states that through logic, we can come up with data that could essentially determine the value of social media engagement.  For instance, if you push out a tweet to "x" amount of people, "x%" will see it, "x%" will share it, and "x" percent will change thier behavior when they come across it.  I believe you can use these metrics and make them sound believable, but if a company is so on-the-fence that they have to resort to determining the price point of a single tweet, the outreach is probably plagued to begin with.

You don't have to be a math major to get this social media stuff.  But it does help if you have a foundation to measure your media outreach.  The metricsman is on to something, it will just take time to see if his predictions continue to come to life.

In case you missed the link above, check out my 8 Trends for 2011 post from way back when.  I'm still confident that I'm on to something.