I was lucky to see Jeremiah’s tweet on Twitter mentioning social media measurement webinar. He was joined by Glenn Fannick of Dow Jones. I joined just about when slide was on distributed marketing. His key takeway point -

“Campaigns are happening off your servers, so you cannot easily measure”

He talked about new attributes which first need to be understood, tied-to-goals and then pushed into measurement framework. Check this list of attributes - Attention, Interaction, Velocity, Sentiment, Qualitative, and Impacts. These attributes further need to be prioritized based on industry verticals and company maturity. Early stage companies (especially in high tech/web2.0 care more about velocity and less about sentiment).

In recent weeks I have been expanding on the impact of distributed social media. Both publishing and consumption points are highly distributed now. Though most of the points are missing design features, resulting in adhoc measurement techniques. For example - our recent VentureBeat coverage was picked up by somebody in Spain and a day later it showed up on Reuters (via syndication). As an interested party I would love to see content circulation path. If I can get metrics at each points then it’s very efficient for us. Tools are evolving fast but not at the speed of social media evolution. Great opportunity for a startup to step in here and provide better insight by aggregating analytics!

Before wrap-up, Jeremiah and Glenn conducted quick survey and result was bit of an eye opener for me. Check the results-

More people think gauging media sentiment is better done using social media. I think conversational model is finally sinking in and leading people to respect need for engagement and community participation. Honestly I didn’t expect low percentages for “tracking new brand launches”. Maybe shoot-and-forget is fast changing to engage-and-listen.

Thanks Jeremiah and Glenn for sharing insights. Will wait for the next one.