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Marketing measurement guru Katie Paine pointed to a recent blog post of mine re: Social Media Measurement ROI in her most recent newsletter article. 

I am always honored when I merit Katie’s attention — but, darn it! — I think she called me (and my ilk) a “menace” because I seemed to hem-and-haw about the ability to measure Social Media Marketing. 

Seriously, though, I have been an advocate for measurement for a long time — and even went to considerable expense to try to figure it out for clients.  So this paragraph in Katie’s newsletter caught my attention:

“Another popular reason that PR/SM ‘can't be measured’ is that, ‘You can't isolate PR from everything else the organization is doing!’ But yes, in fact, you can. It might take some coordination with advertising, or some sophisticated ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) but it can be done, and is being done every day. (Measurement is) hard … particularly for the math-phobic PR folks. It requires calculations and analytics and a bunch of things that PR people hate.”

As I noted to Katie in a follow-up email, the big challenge is not just the math-phobia of marketers.  The bigger challenges relate to the time; the expense; the lack of agreed-to approaches and relevant metrics (as in “what’s relevant?”); and, the potential need to collaborate at both a strategy and a systems-level with external agencies, as well as with other internal departments like Sales and Finance. 

Phew!  Say that 5x fast.

Measurement is GOOD but arguably too hard to countenance, especially when the anecdotal benefits of PR and Social Media (e.g., “website traffic spiked after that NYT hit!”) are often “good enough” to keep the engine running. 

I strongly believe that corporations who do spend the time/resources to “figure it out” would find that PR/SM’s benefits outstripped any other marketing program – which is why I am a big fan of Marketing Measurement.  Yet, it is hard to find companies willing and able to do the hard work (especially among startups, but even amongst our FORTUNE 500 clients).

Hope that clarifies my stance for Katie.  I am NOT anti-measurement, NOT a non-believing menace; just a rueful pragmatist (who is also, yes, admittedly, bad at math).