Out of the Page View Ashes will rise a Social Media Measurement Index

Categories: Social MediaPosted on December 1st, 2006

Steve Rubel indicates that the Page View ranking as a primary index is dying. Ajax, RSS, don’t indicate exactly how the content is being consumed, let alone what users do with the content and their sentiment.

The solution is a new type of index will come in to play. Social Media will influence it. Just ‘visiting’ a site doesn’t indicate what users have the capabilities to do now. Users can now do the following

Users can interact with the page
Rate the page
Tag the page with Delicious
Comment about it
Blog about it
Link to it
Page rank doesn’t indicate duration of stay either, or if they even read the content!

I’m on a serious knowledge question to understand what do Marketers want to measure when it comes to Social Media. Web users can actually perform actions other than pure clicks to page views on web pages.

This coming Tuesday, I’m helping Factiva run a Roundtable Workshop to answer those very questions. I’ve also listed out a bunch of companies that measure social media, and contributed to a partial list of things (Steve Rubel did too) that could be measured. (I could easily double this list)

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[...] The new Marketer must learn to listen (social media monitoring is important to me) to what people are saying before even crafting a message. The new Marketer must realize it’s a two-way conversation, and sometimes that means they need to connect the technology knowledge holder in a company with customers using web tools. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Web Theory: Japanese Culture and Community Marketing on December 2nd, 2006 at 5:33 am

I know “Page View” is dying when I start to understand the impact of AJAX. Among the AJAX components, DOM may be further to be developed for tracking.

I’ll need to brainstorm about it.

Posted by Bess on December 3rd, 2006 at 8:14 pm

I think you’re on the right track here. At the end of the day, “interaction” is more important than simply “touch”.

The funny thing is, marketers should LOVE having a new metric that takes these things into account since the numbers would significantly increase, certainly.

The reality is that pageview is easy, and we’re all mostly lazy at the end of the day. Every Web server automatically tracks page views with little additional work. But to start to track the things you mention, there’s likely going to be additional upfront work to be done as projects are created.

So my questions about the “new metric” is this:

How can we take into account a range of interactions (whatever is deemed important) in a way that’s as easy, or only slightly more complex as tracking page views?

Posted by Jake on December 5th, 2006 at 4:29 pm

[...] Metrics of last era to don’t apply to Social Media, I believe that a new way of measuring will come about. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Factiva Social Media Roundtable helps to answer “What should we measure” on December 6th, 2006 at 9:18 am

I just saw this post and was intrigued by their discussion, related to this thread:

http://www.clicktracks.com/insidetrack/articles/lucky_oliver_case_study.php?source=nws102006

Posted by Jake on December 6th, 2006 at 11:11 am

[...] Interesting listing of the important metrics in the blogging / social media space (text and comments entirely Jeremiah's):"1) Participation and Engagement (Voted 14 times) Corporate folks voted for this as the most important They wanted to know how are marketers interacting with them, is this quality? 2) Influential Ideas: Memes, and their intensity over time (Voted 11 times) Consultants voted this as the most important to them This could make sense as PR is traditionally hired because of ability to spread message, is this mass? 3) Relevance (Voted 8 times) Does this mean the long tail matters? 4) Sentiment/Tone/Opinion/Favorability/Emotion (Voted 8 times) Factiva product team this the most important to them 5) Content (Voted 6 times) 6) Relationships and Connections (Voted 5 times) 7) Analytics and Activity (Voted 4 times) Whoa, this is way down on the list, thereby showing old measurements are not relevant to Social Media Community Activation or Call to Action (Voted 3 times) 9) Reach (Voted 2 times) Does this mean a-listers are less relevant? 10) Tied: Conversation Index/Engagement (Voted 1 times) 10) Tied: Demographic/Who (Voted 1 times) Some were surprised the “Who” was not voted as high. Does this mean that if anyone is engaged in the conversation then they are influential and part of the market? Cluetrain supports this as anyone conversing is in your market. Thereby, those that participate matter. " Tags: Analytics , Marketer , Metrics , ROI [...]

Posted by Kalivo.com - From Web Strategy by Jeremiah on December 7th, 2006 at 9:26 am

[...] Steve Rubel wonders what the next form of measurement attributes will be. I’ve echo’d that the out of the ashes of Page Views will emerge another measurement. Eric’s already started to measure Engagement Two days ago, I talked with Eric who writes the amazing Web Analystics Demystified (as well as a few books). We talked about how the term Engagement is being used by different industries — Web Analytics, Advertising and by people like me in Social Media. Compete is working on Attention I spent some time with the guys from Compete.com, they’re gathering ‘Attention’ data (how long users stay on websites) as one form of measurement. I video interviewed them, I’ll get that put up soon. (PodTech has quite a big of video footage that’s being put through the editorial process, Robert is amazing in the amount of content he creates) Dow Jones, Factiva and the community have already crafted out requirements A few months ago, Dow Jones’s Factiva (They also stopped by at PodTech yesterday as well) and a dozen Social Media, PR experts, and Corporate clients got together in Palo Alto to discuss what are the requirements for new measurement, I encourage you to read the whole post, as well as look at the trackbacks to find out what else was said. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Growing up and Replacing the Antiquated Page View Metric on February 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am

[...] Anyway, I’m going to have beers with the good Mr. Ivy next week and I didn’t want that whole “social media” thing hanging over my head. And while I recognize that this metric (which I still have yet to share the calculation) doesn’t capture fully the elaborate needs of the really smart folks working to pound out Social Media Measurement, I heartily agree with Clint’s friend Jeremiah Owyang when he says that “Social Media is about people. People connecting to other people to build better relationships, fostering communities and increasing collective knowledge” and “Measurement and Metrics are one way to help to tell the story of Social Media.” [...]

Posted by Web Analytics Demystified » Blog Archive » Calculating engagement, part III … social engagement and relative content grouping on February 19th, 2007 at 10:26 am

[...] under heftig og konstant beskydning (se eksempelvis KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog eller Jerrmiah Owyang). Derudover er det praktisk (som Punditokraterne selv påpeger) ganske besværligt at skulle finde [...]

Posted by Kunsten at skære til « Blogs og effekter on October 15th, 2007 at 1:21 am