Our good friend David Churbuck posted today about his preparations for an upcoming column on Web metrics:
The reason that numbers matter, aside from the tyrannical rise of the “measure to manage” actuarials in the CFO’s office who worship at the altar known as “ROI”, is that marketers are still buying at the head of the long tail –where things like “mass” and “reach” seem to matter.
Indeed. The market still believes in the mass media and mass products designed for selling through those millions-of-eyeballs media. In conversational markets, successes can be built by connecting with people, growing networks of influencers who evangelize enthusiastic customers that spread the word and sales of a product. As David puts it:
The only statistic that matters for a person renting eyeballs is this: did it work for me? Did the traffic to my site, the click through on that search term, the download of that funny viral yield anything of value to me. In other words, stop pointing a radar gun at the pitchers. Worry about whether the catcher is on the ball.
The industry is still talking about reach and popularity in isolation, because it is easy to record hits on a site or downloads of a podcast. People still believe the uncountable post-impression transaction advertisers in television, radio and billboards promised were happening but could only be seen indirectly.
Ideas like engagement, raised recently by Robert Scoble of PodTech, are new aspect of the relationships formed online.
A recent argument between video podcasters at Rocketboom and Ze Frank exemplifies the lack of clarity in the new media. Rocketboom claims hundreds of thousands of downloads a day, but does not count actual viewership, while Ze Frank, who streams his podcast, can count the actual number of people who watch part or all of his show.
But what we cannot count is is how much each podcast is earning, because the actual transactions are still hidden. Ze Frank has pioneered an interesting approach to viewer support, selling duckies, which I estimate could yield as much as $370,000 in revenue this year. You can take that to the bank and measure it—Ze has his catcher's mitt on.
Another interesting posting today is this Hill & Knowlton animation of who started talking about YouTube in the mainstream media. It's a good start on the question of who shapes markets. There's a lot to see in the graphic, but it doesn't reach beyond the press, where what the press writes about is determined by events.
The question I've been interested in for many years is who told the journalists in the first place. Journalists have sources—who are they? That's where influence is most accessible for any company. It's also where a new interface for existing customer relationships can be grown, bringing customers closer to the product development process in order to make sales before manufacturing ever begins.
But you have to find those opportunities, which takes data, analysis and intuition. Above all, the ability to place bets, to predict results and measure them against expectations, turns what we believe is possible into a tested reality. We may not always be correct in our assumptions, but having the ability to test them is much more than the mass media offered.
It's time to move beyond faith in conversion rates built on mass media metrics to a marketing and advertising environment where we can see and understand the interactions with customers, measure effort and outcomes so that strategies can evolve and tactics adjusted.
Get your catcher's mitts on.
