Every week, Copywrite Inc.’s Rich Becker and I discuss a blogging best practice on BlogStraightTalk, in our new location on BlogCatalog (our new home). This week we followed up from my post Does Blog Rank Mean Anything with a discussion on The Power 150 and Social Media Measures.
There are many ways to measure success in social media. But do most social media measures really mean anything to businesses? To answer the question, we consider the popular Ad Age Power 150 and other measures. Here are some highlights:
Take One: Becker
- …if we’re talking truth, social media measures just don’t mean anything to the businesses we serve or hope to serve. What does? Meeting their strategic objectives. That’s it.
- I never joined Todd Andrlik’s, now Ad Age’s, Power 150… It’s the total measure of nothing; although you might think otherwise given the way a few people gloat about their position.
- …most social media measures lead people to erroneous conclusions when they live and work too much inside the bubble.
Plus, Rich said….
Sudance catalog (http://www.sundancecatalog.com/) had opened a store in a premium retail location in Las Vegas called Boca Park… Had Sundance used social media measures, it would have been a goldmine. It had tremendous traffic, great brand awareness, high visibility as a flagship store, was written about often, and seemed to have everything going for it. Except one thing. For whatever reason, nobody bought any products, at least not enough to justify the rent.
Take Two: Livingston
- …no business or organization will engage in social media for a cute badge on their blog that proclaims them to be the 78th out of 500 companies on a questionable index.
- Unless you can attain a top ten ranking on such a large list, who cares? There’s no PR value. There’s only one number that really matters, that’s #1 with your customers.
- I think the social media marketing crew really needs to look beyond rankings and the era of conversation discussion, and focus on delivering tangible results.
BlogStraightTalk publishes every Monday. Next week should be particularly testy as we debate whether journalists and bloggers are the same. Join us.