Posts Tagged ‘metrics’

What Constitutes Value in Social Media Measurement?

February 7th, 2010

This weekend, I read a few articles on public relations research that got me thinking (I think that’s what my professors were going for ;) ) The general consensus is that public relations research is often limited to the evaluation of the products of short-term communication programs when what it should be doing is evaluating the products, processes, and the outcomes of both short- and long-term programs (Grunig & Grunig, 2001; Michaelson & Macleod; 2007). Of course, this statement assumes that organizations are conducting research in the first place…

Social media ROI has been an ongoing debate ever since those who were dabbling in the space realized that they needed to come up with something measurable in order to convince reluctant executives that social media was a worthwhile investment of their organizations’ time and resources. Unfortunately, number of page views, clicks, conversions, tweets, mentions, fans, blog posts, etc. are all examples of products, not processes, not outcomes, and not necessarily long-term.