Stop Measuring Social Media

Think about your most important relationships. They might be your spouse, your kids, your parents and your friends. Maybe it’s that teacher from high school who inspired you, or the co-worker who took you under his or her wing.

Now try to put a numerical value on those relationships. Seriously, see if you can. Then take that value and calculate the relationship ROI.

I know, it sounds ridiculous. Yet that’s exactly what companies expect from their social media engagement efforts.

Social media needs to be quantified, so the argument goes, or else it has little value. Everything needs a number.

This is, after all, how it was always done online. A company built a web site, people went to the web site. A brand put up banner ads, and people clicked on the banner ads. Action and reaction in near perfect symbiosis, with results easily exported into an Excel spreadsheet. Moreover, each action began with the company’s goal in mind, and with the expectation (even determination) that the customer would change his or her behavior to fit the company’s needs.

Today, these same companies are trying to do the same thing in a social web context – but an ROI rooted in conversations rather than clicks does not export well into Excel. Actions and reactions are chaotic, not symbiotic. And today, each action begins with the consumers’ goals, their desires and behaviors. Companies need to change their behaviors to befit the modern consumer or be damned.

Of course (contrary to popular belief) companies still have a large amount of control – it’s just that their influence is tempered by the rise of consumer involvement and greater share of voice. Marketing 2.0 is a team sport.

Overall, the web is a now a far more qualitative environment – yes, there are still plenty of numbers to compile, from page views to time spent interacting with content, widget downloads, video views and blog posts, and on and on. But this is only a small part of the value equation. The real value lies in the depth of these interactions and conversations, in the connections that are made between customer and brand. A customer isn’t just someone who clicks on a web site and orders a product, but someone who can tell others about the product and start a fan page, or come to a brand’s defense.

Social media is only “social” if people participate – otherwise it’s just technology with no soul. People are the real “killer app” of Web 2.0, and people don’t have numbers, they have names and voices. And now they can be heard.

So do yourself a favor – don’t measure social media, at least in the traditional sense of measurement. Put away the spreadsheets, the projections, the metrics and the cost-benefit analyses. Don’t count how many friends you have, but rather take a hard look at the value and extent of those friendships.

Just listen. Just participate. And just for once, don’t measure anything except how the experience makes you feel. That’s the first step – and the most important metric of all.