ReveNews
Math Teachers Are Laughing At Us Right Now
Being buried in post-campaign analysis made me slack in giving you a blog entry about that very same topic. Life can seem cruel. And my pledge to focus on actionable advice continues, so I’ll stay away from science and art for one more entry (although my heart longs to jump into narratology with Dan & Henry.) I wish I could make the same promise about math, though. There’s an awful lot of math in measurement, especially when you’re trying to measure something as ephemerial as a ripple.
I’ve mentioned before that I think there are three essential core tools for measurement, plus the need to develop something qualitative for each unique circumstance. Two of those three core tools are familiar disciplines: some kind of reporting of advertisng (reach) and some kind of analysis of webserver logs (response & experience). The third core tool is about measuring those ripples, measuring what is happening on sites that you didn’t necessarily buy access on (which would be in the reach reporting) and yet aren’t on your webserver (response & experience reporting.)
Enter the strange new world of buzz tracking and analysis. In the past, this was an aspect of campaign measurement that relied upon gut instinct and good information gathering: reading everything that you could find that people were saying or writing about what you were doing. Webserver referral logs, good blog-specific search engines, a few alert keywords in the search engines and you’ve got a good start at keeping track of what people are saying. You’re relying, though, upon good keyword mining or them making a hyperlink as part of the discussions to identify them. I want to know what people are saying without them having to create a hyperlink or use my brand name exactly right!
Wait, I’m starting to sound like a public relations person, or a marketing consultant to some K Street lobbying group, aren’t I? I was going to torture you with math! I want to get a feel for not just the volume of the conversations, but also their quality, the trends among them and their impact on the other metrics we’re measuring. In fact, you can think about buzz tracking as PR/polling, just in a new environment where you can measure a much larger sample size than the Nielsons do, and where the difference between a “media outlet” and an “individual respondant” grows thinner and thinner.
So it is no surprise that the company that helps me scale this kind of tracking is in Washington DC instead of New York City (although there’s still an NYC connection in their background.) CEO Pete Snyder is also one of the smartest people I know, but how can I not love someone who gives quotes to the press like, “Given my background, I see the Internet as the world’s largest focus group.”
If Pete cares to, he can know more about the success of your marketing efforts than you do, at least if brand awareness or buzz are part of what you’re trying to generate. Why? Because Pete understands the power of item #39 of the Cluetrain Manifesto: “The community of discourse is the market.” He specializes in understanding the community of discourse, which means he specializes in your market (all of your markets and all of my markets.)
Pete’s crew doesn’t just turn that into a collective narrative of the marketplace (which would be valuable enough as an extention of that intuitive effect I’ve relied on), they underpin that with both quantitative and qualitative values about the nature of that dialog. I suspect many of Pete’s clients do rely upon it as a kind of “focus group report on steroids” but if you have a handle on the other core metrics tools, the numbers underneath provide you part of the missing data that describes the ripples that an idea or brand or media property make in general.
The key to combining those three data sources is that elusive customized qualitative measurement(s), which might be both “curiosity” and “buying indicators” — a brand impact effectiveness test and a business objective test. For another project, that might be a very different test (such as, for a CPM-based publisher, “evangelism” and “stick time”.)
And you’ll need a lot of math. Don’t ask Clippy for help in Excel, he’ll assume you remember what your math teachers taught you and give you a help screen like the one above. Which was much more useful than David telling me, “You can’t do that with Excel,” or Beth exclaiming, “OMG! Excel so isn’t meant for that!”
That’s why geeks invented PERL and psychologists and pollsters share statistics as a discipline. The actionable advice is that your referrer logs are a hidden goldmine if you have a bit more data (quantitative and qualitative) about the outside sites you find there, and any of you who’ve obsessed over a linkage report probably understand that intuitively.
Our math teachers were trying to tell us that statistics were practical all along and we were just weren’t listening to them. Boy, did they (and Clippy) get the last laugh on us.
>>The actionable advice is that your referrer logs are a hidden goldmine