Digital marketing technology has two main pillars: delivering a message and measuring the effectiveness of that message.
One of the reasons why digital is such an interesting area to work is because both of these pillars are in constant flux. Obviously, delivery mechanisms are becoming more and more refined and targeted - companies are finding ever more ingenious ways to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right people. However, as the media landscape changes, what's also changing are the metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness. I won't go as far as stating that sales or bottom line ROI is going to be anything more than paramount - these will always be important- but it's clear that the measurement architecture that exists with current technology is probably not developing as fast as the media landscape. Novelty is great, but it comes at the cost of expertise.
I recently attended the rather good "Measurement Camp" where the core topic of discussion is how to go about evaluating social media. What was clear is there is a pretty wide consensus of opinion.
From speaking to various agencies, I can see that there are big differences in the way social media effectiveness is measured and reported. It also seems a bit worrying that different tools give different values for the same metric. Very often the problem is the availability of data. Tools working form incomplete, and different datasets can’t seriously be relied upon.
The logical solution is to access the data at a single source, where it can be easily tapped and consistently reliable. By the source, I mean the social networking platforms. It would be great to see the agencies and social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace et al) get together and agree a standardised model. The platforms could report the metrics (number of brand mentions, visits to pages mentioning brands, sentiment of those pages, unique visitors...etc.) or aggregated metrics into one "score". The data would be reliable, more insightful and in everyone’s interest.
It took a long time to agree on the offline Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) metric, but its success shows that it can be done.
