If you want to know where to spend your money so that you’ve got the best and most useful analytics tool for social media on the market today, I’m about to cut through all of that clutter and help you out.

Buy yourself a brand new (or slightly used), shiny current version of a Human 1.0, and the brain they bring with them. (Find a good one, of course, there are some lemons out there).

Measurement has become almost as bad of a battle cry as “influence” or “awareness” or “Community”. We have millions of pieces of information out there, and if we can come up with any way of distilling them into something that feels simple, we cry eureka! and slather it all over our reports like it tells us everything we want to know.

But software and tools and automated rankings and everything of the stripe leaves one feature off the list, the feature that only that Human 1.0 can bring to you:

Critical Thinking.

The ability to look at a number and ask hmmm, where did that come from? Is that accurate? Complete? Relevant? Does it matter? Why does it matter, and what other information do I need to pair it with in order to make it matter? What’s is this number actually telling me, and can I improve upon it by changing how we gather it somehow?

Only the human brain is capable of accurately and consistently critiquing and evaluating some of the most important qualitative things around data: context, nuance, sarcasm, unspoken implication, the dynamics of the ecosystem that sprouted the numbers, the impact that the gathering mechanism has on the numbers, understanding what other numbers and data should be related to one in order to make it potentially meaningful.

Data is a bunch of numbers. Alone, they mean jack, because they tell you nothing but a snapshot of something devoid of any context whatsoever. Even clustered together in “statistics”, without context or caveat, many of those numbers mean less than nothing themselves. Information is data more ordered, where you have some organization, enough so that some meaning can be interpreted from it . But what most companies are striving for is insight, the highest rung on the measurement ladder, the process of collecting and analyzing information that, when interpreted, actually yields something of value upon which you can make a decision.

You don’t get a cookie for running a report. You don’t even get a cookie for highlighting something on that report and saying ‘hmm, that’s really interesting.” Measurement itself is not the goal. Measurement is a tool and a process for finding insights, which are in turn information used to make better decisions. What to start doing, what to keep doing, what to stop doing. You don’t win until you say you can do that through your measurement efforts.

We accept far too much information, scores and rankings, even “research”, at face value. There’s so much of it, that we take the short cut of always presuming that the conclusions put in front of us are true, that the work has been done to make them useful and relevant and even correct. It’s the new generation of “if you read it in the newspaper, it must be true.”

The most valuable asset we have is our own minds, capable of incisive thought and critical thinking to help us find meaning amongst all that information, meaning that matters to us and not someone else. Tom Webster calls it “doing your own work”. Otherwise, the result is simply noise.

If all we’re doing is reporting on noise and putting in pretty graphics, we’re doing ourselves – and the painstaking work we’ve undertaken – a terrible disservice. We need people, human brains who can interrogate that data relentlessly, question its use and validity and contextual relevance, and transform it into information that enlightens us, that guides us, that’s completely relevant for our work and our achievements and our goals…and even lead us to another layer of questions we should be asking.

Anything other is just shortcuts. No one ever said this wasn’t going to take work, or investment for that matter. Find yourself someone with sleeves that need rolling, a head for asking really smart questions, and set them loose. It’s the best money you’ll spend not just on social media, but on your business.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Most Powerful Social Media Measurement Tool Money Can Buy

Counting something gives you a singular, rather meaningless number. Like your waist size. If you’re a 34 waist, that’s a single piece of information that tells you absolutely nothing without additional context. Same goes if you have 400 coins in a jar. Or 9,000 subscribers to your blog.

Context is everything.

If you’re that 34 waist and an average male, that’s probably pretty standard and unexciting information. But if you’re that 34 waist after two years of changing your lifestyle after having been a 52 waist and losing a life-altering amount of weight, that’s a bit different piece of information, and it carries drastically different relevance, both to you and to the others observing that number.

If you have 400 coins in a jar, you could have about $4.00 in pennies, or a mint in rare antiquities (though perhaps you’d pick a different vessel in which to store them).

If you have 9,000 subscribers to your blog and nary a one has been back more than once, that original click on the little orange box isn’t nearly as sexy as if that person revisits your site, refers people to your stuff, and buys other things you have to offer.

Your Measurement Deserves More

Please stop shorting your “measurement” practices by assembling some quantitative data point, throwing it on paper, formatting it in a pie chart, and calling it accountability. And no, I don’t particularly care if that number is more or less than the other guy according to your observations. Unless you understand enough about the context for their number, you’re simply speculating about its importance to you both.

If you’re investing money and time in something – including the collection of that information itself – you owe it to your business and your efforts to work a little harder at finding meaning behind the numbers.

Rarely if ever is a single point of data useful in itself. You need to know what it impacts, or what in turn impacts it. You need to understand what changes or stays the same when the number moves. And most of those bits of information are going to come from different places in your business or the universe, and through the processing and knowledge of one or more human brains. You’re not likely to strike gold in a single graph culled from The Great Information Pumpkin.

If you’re just counting things, you’re shortchanging your own understanding, and you’re demonstrating surface indicators at best and meaningless aggregation at worst. Which means the decisions you’ll make based on that information aren’t nearly as good as they could be.

When you’ve collected a number, start by asking yourself the most important question of all: “Why?”

Why does it matter? Why did it get there? Why isn’t it smaller, or larger, and what might impact either direction? Why is this important for us to know? Why is it going to drive a decision we might make (or why isn’t it)? Why this number over another one? Why does this number have a bearing on the results we want to be able to see?

Then see how you crave more points of information. You start digging for context or relevance. You become eager for a way to make that number mean something. Then and only then can that counting become the very first step in a much more exciting and interesting journey.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Counting Isn’t Measuring

Our abhorrence for calculation enables us to mutually agree on statistically dubious metrics with nary a shrug or arched eyebrow. Consider Nielsen ratings, which are used to determine the popularity of all TV shows and, consequently, how the dozens of billions of dollars in TV advertising is apportioned.

Nielsen ratings have a direct impact on hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. In 2009, there were 1,147,910 households with a TV in metropolitan Charlotte, North Carolina. Of those more than 1 million households, the behavior of just 619 was tracked by Nielsen to determine ratings. A total of 619 families became the unelected representative tastemakers for 1,147,291 other families. That’s not math; that’s folly.

But yet, we welcome numerical vagary and imprecision into our businesses like a box of free Krispy Kremes. We accept as truth Arbitron (and Nielsen) radio rankings, the number of cars that drive by a billboard, and the notion that somehow people read every page of a newspaper or magazine (and pass it along to 2.5 friends). Do you really know the financial impact of your TV, radio, outdoor print, public relations, and customer services initiatives? Probably not.

Social Media is Inherently Measurable

Social media almost always offers the advantage of complete—rather than extrapolated—data. The same is true of all online marketing. Whereas we have mutually agreed that 619 families are an appropriate stand-in for 1 million others, online marketing offers the compelling alternative of measuring each and every individual.

That’s the good news. One equals one.

What Should You Measure? It Depends

The bad news is that there isn’t an easy-to-convey, standardized, one-size-fits-all metric, like Nielsen ratings, for social media. And there isn’t going to be. What is measurable differs from company to company. If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company that has a long sales cycle with many conversations with prospects before they become customers, you can determine with relative ease whether that customer was influenced in some way by your social media efforts. Alternatively, if you’re Pringles, it’s a lot tougher to make that connection.

Your type of company and how your business is structured has tremendous influence on what you can credibly and reliably measure within the social media realm. Measurement of all things—not just social media—is a discipline, not a task, and it needs to be a cultural imperative. If you’re going to ask about the value or impact of social media and how to measure it, you need to know how you determine those things for other areas of your business and translate or adapt some of those practices.

The Common Excuses

“Social media isn’t measurable” is an excuse. Here’s what companies really mean when they say that:

1. We don’t have the right tools in place to collect the data we need.
2. When we have all the data, we don’t know where to start.
3. We don’t know which data might relate to other data to analyze it well.
4. We don’t have or won’t deploy enough data collection and analysis resources to figure this out.
5. We’re afraid of what measuring will actually tell us about our effectiveness.

You need to understand whether you’re equipped with the right tools and data, whether you’re willing to spend the time evaluating that data, and whether you’re functionally and culturally prepared for what it might show you.

Once you’re past that hurdle, you can get to the numbers – and if you’re going to do social media right, you need to get past your loathing for math. Nobody promised social media would be easy, only that it would be awesome.

___________

This is the final post in a 7-week series covering themes included in The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social - my new book with Jay Baer, now available on Amazon in hard cover and Kindle.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Discipline of Social Media Measurement