This post was originally published on April 11, 2009, at my DeckersMarketing.com blog, now defunct.

My friend and fellow social media guy Kyle Lacy asked a question on Smaller Indiana about whether we should measure Web 2.0 with Web 1.0 tools.

You can't measure social media marketing the same way you measure traditional marketing.

The problem, Kyle says, is that Marketing 1.0 folks are expecting old school results with 2.0 tools. They still expect to measure thousands and thousands of views, like they used to see with TV and radio commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads.

Even as recently as five years ago here in Central Indiana, TV and billboards reached hundreds of thousands, radio and newspapers reached tens of thousands. Across the country, Web 2.0 is only reaching hundreds and thousands – tens of thousands if you’re lucky, hundreds of thousands if you’re Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

These “low numbers” are having a chilling effect on some marketers, especially the Marketing 1.0 folks, because they’re used to seeing the BI-I-I-I-G numbers. They have these too-high expectations because they have been lied to by traditional advertising and PR.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

On the Golf Channel’s website, they tell us “the Golf Channel has a global reach of almost 110 million homes.”

Ooh, squeals the marketer in capitalistic delight, if I advertise on the Golf Channel, my ad will be beamed into 110 million homes.

Not so. Who typically watches the Golf Channel? Golfers. And how many of them are there? According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country.

In other words, the Golf Channel wants us to think they’re reaching 110 million homes. That may be, but that’s not how many people might watch it — 29.5 million. And of those, how many are actually watching it? It sure ain’t 29.5 million.

The Golf Channel won’t even say. But Sports Business Daily did. They said — probably to the chagrin of The Golf Channel — the average daily viewership is 77,000, while their primetime viewership runs around 131,000.

Let’s see, 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 the Golf Channel isn’t alone in these misleading figures. Newspapers and magazines like to boast about print runs, but don’t mention actual readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of viewers. (And don’t get me started on cable companies that lump in dozens of stations no one watches and then count them to pad their advertising rate cards. Like I really want 12 different home shopping channels or an HD version of the International Military History Channel.)

Therein lies the problem. There isn’t a completely accurate way to measure the number of viewers on a TV channel, but marketers have been conditioned to think they’re reaching 110 million.

The same is true for PR. Let’s say 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 can’t tell how many people read an article, clipped it out, sent it to others, or stuck it at the bottom of the bird cage.

Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media

PR, traditional marketing, and media people like to say they can measure their efforts by measuring sales, web views, numbers called, etc. They run a few commercials, or get some airtime and column inches, and look for a spike in sales.

“Look, sales went up right after we ran our commercial,” they say. “We made it all better.”

But that’s not completely accurate. They can’t prove the cause-and-effect of their efforts. Was it their latest ads? Or the previous set of ads? An unknown newspaper article? Coupons? A full moon?

I agree, the PR/ advertising most likely led to the increased sales. But which commercials at what time? Which story on what TV news program? And how many of those particular commercials led to a particular percentage of sales?

There is no piece of software on earth that will tell me that 10% of Friday’s sales increase happened because of Thursday’s 6:00 TV news segment, and not the article in the newspaper. And I’ve got nothing but surveys and estimates to tell me that I need to focus more attention on the NBC news, not ABC.

We Can Measure Social Media Though

Now that we’ve got some great tools to measure social media, people aren’t seeing numbers of millions or even hundreds of thousands, they’re seeing thousands, and sometimes even hundreds. (And sadly, these are the numbers they were probably getting all along.)

And marketing people, used to that 110 million figure, are writing off Web 2.0, because it doesn’t have the same numbers as big media. Of course, they write it off, not knowing important figures like commercial viewership, or how many people are fast-forwarding through their commercials on the DVR.

Sports marketer Pat Coyle often writes about the problems he’s facing with marketers who are very interested in in-stadium sponsorships and reaching 60,000 people per week for 8 – 10 home games, but balk at sponsoring a social network with 20,000 raving fans because they don’t have “high click-rates.”

What these marketers are missing is the passion of the raving fan that social media harnesses. A raving fan who finds the latest song, article, or video online will tell their friends about it through Twitter, post it on their blog, or even post it on a discussion forum. Their friends pick it up, and forward it on through the same channels. This ultimately drives traffic to the website, thanks to the exponential growth of they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. This leads to increased sales or viewership, which leads to more raving fans, which leads to increased sales, and so on, and so on.

The benefit of social media is that we can measure the passion of Web 2.0 users, and how much they love the company or brand. We can use services like Radian6 to measure the real reach of our marketing and PR 2.0 efforts.

Programs like Radian6 tell us who the raving fans of our brands are. One raving fan is worth more to a company than 200 people who glanced at the TV ad or raced past a billboard at 70 miles per hour. The raving fan tells their friends, who in turn become fans and tell their friends. The cool thing is, social media measuring tools can follow that train. It shows where the raving fans are talking, and how often they’re doing it. It will show us who that first raving fan was, and how much of the actual number of sales they created.

Social media is still new enough that there isn’t a standard method of measurement, but that’s because there are too many methods. We’re spoiled for choices, and because this is such a new way of doing things, the people who find out the best way and can standardize it will own social media measurement.

Meanwhile, marketers need to learn that if they want to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their online campaign, they need to begin understanding the emotion and passion of many of their customers. If you can harness that, then you’ll finally begin creating the traffic –– and sales –– you’ve been looking for.

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