Measure What Matters

Chapter 5

How to Measure Marketing, Public Relations, and Advertising in a Social Media World

“The difference between PR and social media is that PR is about positioning, and social media is about becoming, being, and improving.”

—Chris Brogan

Thanks to advances in online technology that have made it incredibly easy and virtually free to publish, social media is turning the business world upside down. To paraphrase Ken Kesey, in today’s media environment the inmates are now in charge of the asylum. A new blog is created every minute, and at one point during the June 2005 Iran election controversy, 200,000 tweets an hour were being posted to social micro-blogging site Twitter.

People—your customers, your employees, your stakeholders—are now the media, the editors, and the reviewers. They are in control and they’re going to let you know what they think by voicing their opinions and changing their behavior.

From a measurement perspective, this social media revolution requires an entirely new way of thinking about what we do and how we define marketing success. We need to look at these changes as we would an earthquake. The tectonic plates of marketing and communications have shifted. As a result, some institutions will collapse and others will rise from the ruins. The degree to which you can get your mind around these shifts will be the degree to which your business will survive.

The Three-Part Social Media Revolution

Social media require us to shift our thought processes in three ...