Fortunately we are moving towards the generation of Standard Metrics for the Social Media Campaigns performance, which is great! but not enough.
I’m afraid that we felt once and once again in the same trick. We focus on what it is possible to measure and based on that we select our metrics.
It looks like the same process we lived during the development of Behavioral Metrics. Even today some people don’t understand why should they use some behavioral metrics and it is understandable because some of them are not useful at all. I mean, they are not useful if you use them lonely.
Social media is bringing the same problem with it. I was trying to evaluate every single metric that people, companies and organizations are proposing to measure Social Media Performance and instead of identifying metrics to real understand how are the campaigns going (related with the companies objectives) I’ve fount metrics that are just useful to compare companies to other companies without any sense. It is just about having “more” (or less depending the metric) than your competitor.
Let’s see the most often repeated:
– Posts.
– Comments.
– Avg. Comments per post.
among others…
How can you relate any of the above mentioned metrics with the level of achievement of your goal? Even if you analyze metrics related with Twitter, more tweets means what? More influencers means…what?
I mean, what all those things means in terms of business?
I’m not saying that those metrics are not useful, I’m just saying I don’t found them as metrics that you “must” use, and even if you use it, I don’t found them useful on its own.
The KEY here is that we are just focusing on “counts” and we are not linking “Operations” with “Strategy” through KPI’s and/or KSI’s (Key Strategy Indicators) and we are not considering the different dimensions that give relevance to our information.
Let me invite you to think about something. Could be a relation between the fact that that some people, even from huge companies, don’t find Analytics as a valuable activity and y the fact that normally there is not a relation between metrics and Corporative objectives?