howard’s spot

Had a great conversation with 2 buddies who are in the online ad biz – on measurement. Not just measurement of social media, but holistic measurement of all marketing activity for a given entity. The theory being that all media measurement can be boiled down to some GRP-like metric.

We went on to discuss if there was some type of equation to convert online measurement to GRPs. Seems like banner measurement should be possible to convert to GRPs since there are already standard metrics similar to frequency and reach, but how about social media?

The argument in the case of social media is that frequency & reach are nearly impossible to define and/or measure. How can you measure the viral reach of a widget, or Facebook application? I’d also argue that these simple metrics ignore some most significant attributes of social media such as word of mouth (trust) and attention/exposure (duration). For instance, a Facebook application may only attract a fraction of the “impressions” or even “clicks” as an online banner, however the length of time that a person spends on that application is measured in minutes (not seconds). You can’t translate that into GRPs (I don’t think).
So my conclusion is a tiered approach…

Tier 1 – Provide a hi-level measurement strategy in order to come up with general allocation of media dollars.

Tier 2 – Provide more granular measurement strategy within each media category to further breakdown the media spend at a more tactical level.

Eventually, what we currently label “social media” will be synonymous with “the internet” and we’ll have our silver-bullet metric… According to Randall Rothenberg, president-CEO of the IAB – “We are further than nowhere, less than somewhere (on measurement).”