The ROI of Social Actions
This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012
I am no great fan of Damien Hirst’s diamond skull… But the British artist said something interesting in an interview the other day.
Asked about his definition of success, Hirst replied that if you were to put a painting at the entrance of a pub only to find it gone the next day, that would mean that you had produced a successful piece of art.
I am wondering… what is the equivalent for successful communication?
These days, we spend a lot of time talking about the ROI of our work. In particular, nobody seems to agree on how to measure the success of social media.
I am tired of hearing people say that it’s all about the number of re-tweets you get. I believe there is another way to do it. And people like John Battelle are showing us the way.
In an interview with McKinsey, the executive chairman of Federated Media Publishing said that we have to go beyond KPIs like “We have 2,500 likes on Facebook and we want 25,000”. We have to understand how content is being amplified by social media: “Did people comment on it a lot? Did people link to it from other blogs and so on?”
Now that the technology for collecting this kind of data is available, Battelle believes that what we have to do is cross-hatch the “information on social actions with audience data: these kinds of people like to talk about those kinds of topics, and they like to share about these kinds of topics”.
He calls the measurement of social media “an evolving and currently inexact science, but a very promising one”.
Is the act of sharing content online the equivalent of stealing Hirst’s painting from the door of that pub?
