Monday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the current workarounds that advertising agencies are using to give them better metrics than just click-throughs. It seems that finally, companies are demanding from marketers better metrics to provide results.

Today, there exists no true standard for measurement online, even for just measuring click-through — Omniture will give you different data than your own data, or data you might get from another vendor. This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of ad blindness — where more and more people are tuning out ads online and offline.

Social media adds to the mix of things requiring measurement, and in some ways the conversational nature of it could offer more meaningful metrics than ad responses.

How does your monitoring firm measure social media engagement? We are right in the thick of this effort to map data to results.

The problem is that most monitoring firms are only giving you data after the fact, and are doing all of the measurement for you. I was speaking with one of our customers yesterday who had serious issues with this, because these are the same people who are making suggestions as to whether or not to engage with social media participants. Her problem? Why should I believe the monitoring firm that something is heating up and is worthy of engagement when they are also being paid to do the engagement? Isn’t it in their best interest to find ways to increase their income by creating work for themselves?

The better way (from my customer’s perspective) is to look at the posts yourself, in real time, to know whether a conversation is worth engaging in. So, this is a real-time measurement — something that is very subjective to the person viewing it, and probably won’t ever have anything but a company-specific standard.

Tags: Social Media Monitoring //