Ryan MacMillan

I joined up with MeasurementCamp again on Wednesday, this time hudddled in a sweating mass in the upstairs of a cafe in Soho. Alright, so the social media industry may not be run from leather armchairs in smoke-filled club rooms but the croissants were first rate.

It seemed that most people wanted to talk about more or less the same thing, designing frameworks for measurement. We split into three groups to keep conversation manageable and presented our thoughts at the end. With one group approaching the issue from the client’s perspective, by looking at what outcomes (eg. increased revenue) could be achieved from social media campaigns, our group decided to play devil’s advocate and come at the beast from the opposite direction: by attempting to categorise all possible social media activities into measurable channels. The third group sat somewhere in the middle, designing a model for the level of variation between volume and engagement. Harmony.

The three groups’ thoughts seemed to complement each other well, covering a lot of ground and just about linking up with each other, but we are a long way from applying any hardcore science to our findings. That’s not the point though, for now, I feel these meetings are a bit of a “Marketers Anonymous”, where the new guy can say, “Hi, I’m Ben, I work in Social Media and I want to help make more sense of what I do”.

(”Thank you Ben, round of applause for Ben everyone. You’ve made the biggest step already.”)

Of course, by the time enough case studies, metrics and tools are available to measure every social media campaign with great accuracy, the industry may well be mature and measurement will be a different concern. It will always be important to measure the results of one’s campaigns but the medium will by then have proved its case already. Right now, we are attempting to chart relatively virginal ground so I think any intelligent effort at doing so is worthwhile. I look forward to the next meeting.