To echo Wendy’s point it was disappointing the panel was broadly dominated by number crunchers with no dedicated representation from PR which has been in the understanding ‘human communication’ business for a fair few decades now.

Yes we need metrics, but they shouldn’t be seen as the desired end point for all the fantastic initiatives and debates that were triggered by Monday’s event.

To give just one example, in the PR space there has been a lot of debate and hard work done recently to understand the nature of ‘online influence’. As a sector we haven’t spent our time trying to develop a single-figure metric to replace the Technorati Authority score.

We know that life is more complicated than that, and if we are going to try to develop common methodologies for Social Media evaluation, we do need to involve as many disciplines as possible.

Having reflected on the event, there seems to be a dichotomy between a common set of measurement standards and which metrics are important to a specific organisation.

It’s telling that the person who suggested focusing on outcomes is a psychologist. Perhaps this indicates that the process of measuring social media needs more insight from that discipline as well as the number-crunchers?

Thanks for the comment, I agree the more time that’s spent listening to the conversations generated by Social Media the greater the upside for the client.

My worry is that for the standards to be ‘universal’ they will end up being quite vague and woolly and there was a lot of that last night. I think that truly robust evaluation can only come by looking at the specific client and their objectives and the campaign you have put together for them.

That said, it’s always good to have a starting point and framework that you can build on if needed so I would say go for it because the journey may end up being more worthwhile than the destination.

I will throw my two-penneth into the mix!