Through my work with Compete, I've been paying more attention to "attention". For example, I noticed that Facebook recently announced that it is going to rank new applications written for FB by engagement. Although I know some may argue that engagement and attention are different or that any measurement like this is imprecise, etc., this is still one of those cases where I'd say, "folks, let's just be happy that we've moved that far up the evolutionary tree." Regardless of what you call it, I love this kind of enlightened thinking, especially since I come from the world of PR where clients have been asking the wrong questions for years. How much coverage did we get or where did it appear is always more interesting to a client than what the hit accomplished. Likewise, how can any client today really prefer a hit in Investor's Business Daily (let's say a one-line quote in the eighth paragraph) to a blog posting about their company that generates 18 comments. But they do. True, we can't measure the value of those comments using attention metrics, but I know that social media measurement companies are starting to compute the value of engagement/dialogue/etc., and that's a good thing, even if the methodology has a long way to go.
There's certainly more work to do around the issue of attention, engagement, etc., but at least we're getting closer (see Jeremiah's post for more insight into Facebook's recent announcement). The idea here is that our industry - the full boat of marketing services - is changing, but is it happening from the ground up or bottom down? If you consider gurus and really smart people like Jeremiah the "top" then I supposed it's top down. But I'd say that, as always, the top is the people with the purse strings - the senior marketing execs, and these are not the people driving change. So, here's my plea to the top: take every way that you measure the impact of what you do today, plug those terms into Google and see whether new approaches are starting to take hold. If they are, get out there and start asking questions (it's likely that's how you'll meet the gurus on their way up, by the way). Trust me, you'll find that a few tweaks in how you measure - and the new programs that result - will make your marketing programs more targeted and effective and each dollar you spend will be better for it.
Go on, what are you waiting for.
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