Measuring Conversational Media

Rex Hammock has posted some thoughts on what he has termed Mediacasting. The basic gist is that “advertising” is the conversation with your customers. It is a conversation that is happening across a wide variety of communication channels on a wide range of devices. A key point is that the only barrier to entry is new media savviness; these new channels are not based on finite resources (spectrum) and therefore are not regulated by the FCC.

So what is an organization to do? Rex is encouraging that we all rethink our goals and get out of the typical advertising paradigms. It is not about drawing in eyeballs to your site, but rather about getting your message out to your customers via the channels they want. It is time to let the message fly free.

What interests me is the part about how to measure the success of Mediacasting:

“Unless your business model is advertising, page views are not the correct metric to measure your online strategy. Action, engagement, sales, enrollment, loyalty, retention, increased contributions, advocacy and education are business goals that require you to get content in your audience’s hands, eyes and heads — in any way they want to receive it.”

This is something I have been trying to work on with statzen (though I have to get it out the door first). In the world of Business Intelligence I work with “actionable events”. When something happens, it needs to fire off some sort of notification or process. Event based analytics are going to be big. What Rex is talking about needs event based analytics. Statzen provides analytics for individual pieces of content that you cast out (and your website is one of the channels used for casting). When tracking these events, you want to know what works. Which posts are getting people to enroll? Posts with these 5 tags have the highest sales conversion rates.

So the one of the problems I want to solve is how to create a simple system that can observe Mediacasting and the related customer events to help you know what works and what doesn’t. It is a level of accuracy that is hard to get with traditional media, and it is a big reason that I also think we will see a serious shake up of advertising prices in the next few years.