Social Media: Metrics & Misnomers

Mark Hopkins over at Mashable adds to the worth of social media conversation started at Drama 2.0 today with this fantastic point:

The traffic isn’t really the goal of a good effort so much as the by-product. Using social media and social networks purely to gain pageviews, visitors and thus potential customers is in my view a gaming of the system. On the other hand, building up a brand, social graph, and metric of respect online is a laudable goal that will result in the type of results that many disappointed social media marketers were probably seeking in the first place.

Well said. As corporate buzzwords have moved from “social network” to “widget” to “social media, the conversation hasn’t changed all that much: companies want to be first to new places and trends where consumers already reside. The fact that digital technology allows people to create their own networks and content means that these types of venues will continue to propagate at a rapid pace.

Which leads us to the term “social media.” The emergence of this phrase is a linguistic trick that attempts to stop the buzzword parade and draw a line in the sand to encompass the entirety of this shifting terrain. More troubling is the word “media” which feels like an attempt to corral the variety of social spaces and creations into business terms, equating the rich fabric of human interactions to just another entry in a media plan, beneath TV, print, and online spends. And this will fail–-humans are tough to measure.

This brings us back to the points made by Drama 2.0 and Mashable. Their arguments protest the instinct to apply ill-suited metrics to the social space. I’m with them strongly on this point. Just this week I was discussing the problem with a coworker who handles mobile campaigns: metrics like reach and impressions originated with TV, print, and radio campaigns (and they weren’t very good metrics to begin with) before being carried over into the vastly different social, mobile, and digital spaces. The arguments that mobile or social campaigns are simply “not proven” are based on the inherent fact that these metrics cannot line up with the variables present in such campaigns.

By their nature, people are a complex bunch. The subtleties and nuances of social interactions cannot be tied down to simple standards and metrics. More than that, any attempt to do so will do more harm than good. If you want your brand to be social, you can’t be slaving over your traffic and counting your click-through. Because in the end, that’s not very social behavior.

The first step towards a successful social campaign is to take a step back, determine your strategy and problems at hand, and develop a solution based on human interaction. If that leads you to Facebook, it leads you to Facebook. If it leads you to Twitter, it leads you to Twitter. But one should never start with the declaration: “We need a widget on Social Network X.” For example: Zappos decided they wanted the best customer service in the business. This lead them to Twitter because it allows them to be more available to their users. Figure out what you want to do, then assess your opportunities in the social space.

When we start treating social interactions like simply another medium, we lose it’s nuances and our own authenticity. Social should be a human layer throughout entire campaigns, not a program in it of itself.

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