Marketing in the Participation Age: A Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share, Take Part, Connect, and Engage

Chapter 12

Measuring Participation Performance

It is becoming more critical to measure marketing performance in this environment of shrinking marketing teams and budgets, a fragmented media landscape, competitive pressures, and an economic downturn. We’ve already discussed the staggering amount of data available today. The most recent numbers indicate that more than 15 petabytes of new data are generated from both machines and people. (A petabyte is a unit of information equal to 1 quadrillion [short-scale] bytes, or 1,000 terabytes.) And the more we instruments we introduce to the world, the more data will be created.

At the same time, a number of company surveys indicate that senior company executives want their businesses to run on data-driven decisions today but that this is not occurring as often as they’d like given our data accessibility. However, accessibility is not the issue; there are a number of barriers preventing organizations from making decisions and taking actions based on data and insight. And generally speaking, organizational and behavioral barriers, not data obstacles, are holding back widespread adoption.

The first barrier has to do with measurement results appearing in a format that is familiar to the organization. The data and decisions must be linked to business strategy; this is what business leaders know and what they focus on every day. It is also how they are measured on both an individual and organizational basis. The bottom line is that marketing ...