Ad Week Experience: Measuring Social Media’s Basic Particles

This past week I took a brief tour of the Advertising Week Experience held at The Times Center. That was place to be to learn how Adobe–yes, as in PhotoShop–and other ad metrics vendors measure the buzz and possible revenue potential of tweets and likes. Walking into their event space on 41st, I was confronted by large flat-screen displays packed with tables of numbers. It felt more like central operations for the Department of Homeland Security rather than Don, Peggy, and Pete’s office digs.

Chatting with the Adobe crew, I was able to get a sense of the overall problem space. This territory encompasses serious study of social media’s fundamental elements–Twitter’s tweets, LinkedIn’s job links, Pinterest’s pics, etc. Adobe, by the way, officially got into the business only a few months back but that was after a strategic acquisition spree.

Anyway, the Adobe Social Media Suite shows marketing types the reach of their social media activities using various dashboards and graphs. And ultimately, the theory goes, Adobe Social Media will calculate the revenue stream attributable to a social media quantum event. Did I mention this is not an exact science?

Adobe was not demoing their social measuring wares. However, a quick review of their marketing leads me to believe their approach relies heavily on trend charts. You eyeball them to guesstimate whether a blip in the social meter cardiogram relates to an improvement in the ROI vital sign. Adobe’s service, by the way,is geared for large enterprises–read expensive.

While wandering around, I discovered Unmetric whose focus is on gauging overall buzziness. They’ll measure how a brand, product, or campaign is doing social media-wise, compared to the competitors. It’s part of a benchmarking genre, which takes a different philosophical view than the tweets-to-dollars analyzers. If we can’t truly trace the final impact of your social media activities to the bottom line or some key metric, than at least we can say whether you’re better at getting attention versus the other fellow.

Google, of course, has its own flavor of social media metering. They released a free tool about the same time as Adobe–its part of their core Analytics service. More heavily web-site focused–no surprise–Google will tell you whether a site visitor had a relevant social interaction before arriving at the front door. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s significant.

My own big picture view of all this is heavily influenced by the work of geo-physicist-turned-marketing-guru Didier Sornette. Many of the social media vendors are concerned with finding mavens or influencers–paging Malcolm Gladwell–who you’ll need to target. Sornette takes a completely different tact: social network are too huge and complex for the mavens to have much power.

Instead he believes that significant events–spikes in interest of books, videos, or blog posts –have more to do with network structure and average connectivity. His goals are more modest than the tweet tracers. By analyzing web site hits over time, Sornette can tell if a blip in clicks is a result of a nicely connected social network that amplifies word-of-mouth effects.

Or whether a single “exogenous” event–Oprah recommending your product–forced copy-cat or herding behavior in a not so nicely linked network. You can learn more about his work here.

Still useful information, but nearly as sexy as screens filled with dashboards and meters.