Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience

Chapter 17. Be Measurable

We talk in this book about how media is virtually anything that we create, consume, and share in our daily lives. It is the information, experiences, and stuff that define our daily interaction with brands, causes, organizations, and each other.

By now, we hope you are convinced that adopting and communicating through a mediacentric strategy must be a key part of what your organization does and how you engage your audience. Gone are the days of broadcast-style communications where an organization used a single message or venue to reach its broad audience, and walked away with the assurance that their efforts met the intended target audience in the intended way. Instead, we now live within a communication ecosystem where many different channels exist and virtually anyone—organization or individual—can deliver information, experiences, and stuff on terms that they dictate.

As members of the audience, we all have opportunities to create, consume, or share information like never before. As organizational leaders, we all have an obligation to adapt and change with the times.

We understand that for some, the thought of abandoning even changing ever so slightly the well-established methods of operating and communicating requires more than just a solid theory and compelling stories. Some companies need to see a demonstrated ROI before putting resources into new things. Even if our arguments over the last two-hundred pages resonate for those people, something more ...