From a Social perspective, you are only worth something to me WHEN you post. The fact you have been reading for a year has no value, because I don’t sell advertising, because this blog is not Media, meaning I could care less about Reach. I want the right readers, not the most readers.

So the answer is website B, because all is not equal – website A failed to connect with 90% of it’s visitors! If Website A is media, it’s (maybe) successful. If Website A is Social, it’s a failure.

People say the Reach-based offline media biz is dying. So why would anyone hold up that business model as one to follow? Why would you want to Reach 100,000 people if 10% of them care enough to be Social?

Media is Quantity. Social is Quality. Jamming the two together is a Paradox, which is why the advertising performance in Social Media is so terrible; that biz model was designed to fail from the beginning.

Because “Social Media” makes no sense from a Marketing perspective!

I’d prefer to own WebsiteA, thank you! This is assuming, of course, that all other things are equal such as both websites forum users are equally active, etc.

I agree that interactivity is an important metric and love your concept… but I think you’ve gone a bit far in your post. Reach IS metric that has value. Social Media is a combination of two words for a reason… there are two components of value, interactivity as you point out, and the reach or “media” component. And just because somebody isn’t interactive today, doesn’t mean they won’t become so in the future. Although it’s not a given, it’s likely that WebsiteA has a lot better chance of soliciting future interactions than WebsiteB.

Your post seems like it uses hyperbole to make a valuable point… that the social aspect of social media is underated. But if you truly feel Reach and eyeballs have NO value… I’d suggest you go back and consider whether Youtube would have sold for what it did, if only the people that posted videos had watched them.

I’ve read your blog for over a year. I guess I was worth nothing to you prior to becoming interactive with this post… :)

That really is the point, isn’t it? The very best course most Marketers could ever take is Consumer Behavior, because you get into the guts of why people do the things they do.

And it ends up these “theories” hold true even when channels and technology change – in some cases becoming even “more true” than ever before, largely because we can measure outcomes with more precision.

It concerns me when many people in Marketing look at every new tactical execution as a brand new idea, when most of these ideas are already well known and simply using new channels or creatives. Knowledge is being lost in translation out there somewhere, perhaps due to the rise in “self-education” on the web. Or failure in the higher ed system?

In short, we forget what we learned in Consumer Behavior. There are a great number of theories that have tremendous impact on day to day operations. The theory of cognitive dissonance, for example, can be put into practical use if a company has a CRM that can generate communications based upon time-driven events. The content of those communications needs to tied directly to the timing of the sale and delivery.

What I am trying to say here is that Jim is spot on in recognizing that we can pull the theories of old out, dust them off and find new applications for them today and tomorrow.

GT

* We often use old paradigms to measure things that are new and different. Online audience measurement a la Media Metrix and NetRatings started out as attempts to duplicate what was being done on TV and in radio.
* Things that we think of as new and different aren’t really new, they’ve just been renamed/rebranded. Communities were the social media of the ’90s. Everything is viral these days but it was often called guerilla or grass-roots marketing in the past.
* There was so much hype around CRM but did most companies follow through on it? Some did, but I think most didn’t. The same may hold true for “social media”. Many will just use it as another marketing channel in the same way that they’re using email. If we can get past the hype and move beyond old measurement constructs then we’ll be able to leverage what we learn from customers. But this will only work if we’re sincere in our efforts and disciplined in following through.

And those that were had no problems measuring the impact. So why is there all this navel-gazing around SM? It’s not exotic or difficult to understand, except when you try to summon all kinds of “implications” that don’t really exist and can’t be measured because they don’t.

SM just is what it is, and not any more. Communication. And we understand how to measure the effects of communication. If you take your SM more like PR, then measure it like PR. If you take your SM like TV, then measure it like TV. If you take your SM like e-mail, then measure it like e-mail. Or do all three.

But if you’re going to define SM as something “new”, a 2-way exchange, then for crying out loud, measure it that way. We know how to do that too.

The power of a relationship is the future benefit.

Mark – I simply disagree, in the context of SM. Reach is obviously not a crap metric in TV. But if you want to measure SM like TV, then there’s nothing Social about it. There’s nothing “social” about a 1-way communication.

Something like a social CRM, (or maybe SRM?), seems definitely on everyone’s mind these days. The question of integrating an individual’s social identities (e.g. their twitter, facebook, blog, etc. identities) with their traditional CRM identity pops up. If possible it would be the connection between traditional RM and this new SRM. Already, vendors such as Radian6 have messages out that read as if this was possible to do. It seems utopian though. Except in the niche case where the interaction happens on your company’s own domain or most contacts use some widget of yours on their blog, facebook, etc.

I realize you didn’t ask this question. But without this integration it seems the future will have two contact databases running in parallel. Traditional and social RM would run separately from each other. The $ returns that came in from this new social RM effort would not be measured by matching back POS transactions to the “social RM system”. You’d probably have to do some kind of panel based measurement and estimation since control groups would be difficult.

Agreed though that the forward looking value of the relationships would be much nicer estimated with your method.

Thanks for another stimulating post.

Akin