News, views and insights around communications measurement.

Better Measurement

Bigger Impact

Newsletter N^o 2

A very warm welcome to our second newsletter. Our theme for this issue is social media. However, as you might expect from TMP, we're not ones simply to add to the great mass of uncritical stories about the promise and power of social media. Instead, we've selected a few stories that we believe raise important challenges for communicators. They reflect serious issues that need to be considered when building and managing social media campaigns.

TMP focuses on helping clients extract the greatest business value from their measurement. So we're all too aware that many social media measurement tools (but not all) continue to confuse the the mere availability of data (especially as there's so much of it) with meaningful insight derived from relevant metrics and data. Insight is needed to drive strategy and enhance the effective use of scare marketing and communications budgets. Social media analytics providers need to get a grip on some of the issues we highlight in this newsletter - if they don't, they're in danger of becoming devalued as a means to demonstrate effectiveness and be an input to decision making.

The stories we've selected in this newsletter we hope will help you get a better grip on how to create, manage and measure social media programmes. We'd be delighted to hear your thoughts on any of the topics raised, or to be pointed to content you've come across that you think deserves a wider audience. Pleasd do drop us a line!

Mike, Colin, Guy, Liam and Pat
The Measurement Practice Team

t: +44 7774 235 767
e: info@measurementpractice.com

Social media trends

Jeff Bulla's useful and concise top 10 trends piece covers technology, personalised content and delivery. His measurement comments focus on the need for "machines with big powerful processors" We'd argue that the most powerful processor to make sense of all that data remains the human brain. Still, this is a good road-map to help develop and guide your strategy. The original article

Locking down social media security

Huffington Post published this very useful 4-point primer about a little-discussed issue in social media management. As brand stewards, how do you pro-actively prevent reputational damage from external threats? The four points discussed: security; message protocols; pre-posting checks; and post-posting monitoring are a really good starting point for conversations with your internal teams, as well as your social media agency.

Why you should be sceptical about social media RoI

Online advertising has been struggling with click fraud for many years. eMarketer claims it's costing advertisers est. $7.2 billion. Theres been much less discussion of this around social media, but TechDirt recently published rather shocking data about the misinformation and inaccurate analytics plaguing social media marketing. Useful ammunition for conversations with content marketing and social media agencies - especially those promising, frankly, illusiory engagement and RoI results!

What we've been up to lately

Mike Daniels is preparing his FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress keynote panel speech, which will focus on how the measurement community is at risk of allowing measurement to become the responsibility of marketing, rather than communications.

Colin Wheeler recently published a challenging blog in PR Moment, arguing that good measurement supports communicators' professional and personal development, whilst bad measurement, or even worse, no measurement at all could serve to make them irrelevant.