You Can’t Measure Web 2.0 with Old School Expectations

A few months ago on another blog, I talked about the problem with measuring social media through Marketing 1.0. Most old school marketers — Marketing 1.0 pros — are used to reaching hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions. So they tend to get frustrated when their whiz-bang social media campaign is only getting hundreds or just a few thousand visits. They’re spoiled by the big numbers, and think social media should be just as robust.

The problem is, they weren’t really reaching millions in the first place. They were being lied to by ad salespeople, and it colored their perception of who they were reaching.

Here’s an example.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

According to the Golf Channel’s website, they have a “global reach of almost 110 million homes,” which makes the Marketing 1.0 pro think they’re going to reach 110 million people.

Not even close. Let’s run through the math:

1. According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country. But do 29.5 million people watch the Golf Channel? No.
2. The Golf Channel won’t even say how many people they get. But Sports Business Daily did.
3. According to Sports Business Daily, Golf Channel’s average daily viewership is 77,000. Primetime viewership runs around 131,000.
4. 77,000 viewers divided by 110 million homes is. . . .07%. Not even one-tenth of one percent the Golf Channel likes to brag about. But you can bet every Golf Channel ad salesperson is telling their customers, “We have a reach of 110 million homes.”

But it doesn’t end with the Golf Channel. Newspapers and magazines boast about print runs, but don’t talk about readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of listeners and viewers.

So how do you know who’s telling the truth? Can they even accurately measure reach, or tell how many people watched a particular program? Not really. They can come close based on statistics. But they don’t know who saw your ad, if they were flipping around during the commercials, or if your commercial caused someone to go to the store and buy your product.

The same is true for PR. If a newspaper has a print run of 500,000 copies but a real readership of 300,000, the PR person will say, “we reached as many as 500,000 readers,” but they’re only counting the print run, not the actual number of people who read that article. They don’t know if anyone saw the article about your latest book buried on page E13, if anyone sent it to others, talked about it over coffee, or even bought the book as a direct result of the article.

Social media is able to measure itself, although not completely accurately. Still 90% accuracy is better than “we have a global reach of 110 million homes.”

How can I measure my site traffic?

Thanks to products like Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and StatCounter, you can measure website and blog traffic. You can see what keywords brought people into your site, what pages they landed on, and if they purchased one of your products. This way, you can see which keywords led to the most purchases, and focus more of your attention to promoting those keywords.

With programs like Radian6, you can see if people are talking about you or your product, and which Tweets, blogs, and websites you’re on. From there, you can follow those links back to your analytics package and measure visitors’ buying behavior.

So what do hundreds of visitors do for me?

More than the millions of people the ad salespeople were telling you about.

For one thing, you can find out which of those hundreds of people truly love your product. Which ones are the raving fans. Which ones tell their friends about your product.

Jason Falls of SocialMediaExplorer tells a story about how Maker’s Mark Bourbon has an Ambassadors Club, a group of raving fans of the high-end Kentucky bourbon. They get cards saying they’re Ambassadors, they have a special website, and get special inside information to help them become evangelists of the product.

When one of the Maker’s Mark Ambassadors is in a bar, and a person next to them orders another kind of bourbon, the Ambassador says, “No, you don’t want that,” and they order their new friend a Maker’s Mark. They tell the story about the bourbon, give them a card, and encourage the person to become a new fan of Maker’s Mark. The program is such a success, because they’re constantly having to send out new cards. (They have other ways of measuring their success too, but Jason didn’t tell me that part of the story.)

Imagine you’ve got a high-end consumer product that will only be enjoyed by a small, but affluent group of people. Where are you going to put your money? How are you going to track the results? How will you determine the reach of your message and which ones are the most effective? What kind of strategy could you build with social media as compared to broadcast or print media?

Do you have any thoughts? What would you do? Leave us a comment.

Be Sociable, Share!

•