Steve Rubel
made a great comment today about the need for standardization of blog
measurement. He describes two recent studies,
one by Gallup and one by Pew, which show dramatically different blog readership rates. He rightly asserts that as the blogosphere
continues to grow, the need for consistent measurement will intensify. While I agree with him, I would offer two
counterpoints to his argument.
First,
“traditional” or “mainstream” media doesn’t exactly have the measurement
standardization thing down. Look at the
browbeating Nielsen has taken over audience measurement of late. While they’ve been at it a little longer, and
we’ve become accustomed to working within their flawed systems, the reality is
that mass marketers have limited understanding of audiences for major media
outlets and even less ability to actually reach their desired market
segments. So it’s not surprising that
something as nascent as the blogosphere would be in the early stages of figuring
this out.
Second, and
more importantly, the discipline of marketing analytics needs to engage in this
conversation. Marketers around the world
are eager to find better ways to improve marketing accountability. When marketing analytics began to emerge it
was quickly relegated to geek status as one of the tools of direct
marketing. It wasn’t sexy and it
required time and discipline to implement. But it does something standard market research doesn’t: track transactions and calculate ROI.
Given the
cacophony of conversations in the blogosphere, and the data it generates,
marketing analytics is worth a second look. Data mining tools have begun to emerge which yield analysis of context
and sentiment, and produce real insights about large volumes of unstructured
data. Many of these tools emanate from
work of the Intelligence Community, or Informatics, while others derive from
search-related products. Today these are
the purview of people who got a lot further in calculus than I did. As CGM continues to mature and mainstream,
marketers will demand more than trend-spotting and brand impressions from their
measurement and research companies. And
they’ll want to take matters into their own hands. They’ll become dissatisfied with use of a
third party, and want to interact with the information directly.
Marketing
analytics tools need to catch up with the market and find ways to help address
Mr. Rubel’s question about standards. After
all, in a long tail world, what’s the point of depending on intermediaries to
tell you what’s going on?
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