Measurement is a word that I have been hearing a lot lately in media and broadcast circles. Specifically, in terms of the measurement of social media activity.

Can it be assessed in the same way as marketing ROI? How indeed is it assessed? And what kind of budgets should be put aside for social media activity?

The ability to meaningfully index and chart the seas of communities growing across social media is more than a possibility today, but it is still happening with varying degrees of success.

In my view this appears to be because the marketing companies that have seen opportunities in social media have not had the technological experience needed to hone their tools to best effect. Marketing has long relied comfortably on basic sampling because responses were difficult and costly to obtain.

Perversely, it is now easier than ever to discover “responses”, as everywhere you turn there are tools aggregating page views and website hits. However, as a wise colleague put it the other day, if the numbers are easy to find they are probably not the numbers you need.

As traditional discovery and distribution of music takes a back seat to digital content channels and networks, identifying how and where to spend marketing budgets is the subject of increasingly anxious conversations.

The democratisation of the music industry means that it is harder to predict what might actually break through and become a hit. And I say break through, because if you look at the word wide top 10’s, you see predominantly artists with the backing of an unrelenting marketing machine powered by a seemingly endless budget.

Still, many traditional or new media sites, such as the BBC and Pitchfork, are as influential and popular as ever, so it isn’t simply a case of being able to put all the budgetary eggs in to one social media basket. Social media activity is really an extension of traditional marketing activities. It should enable deeper and more meaningful relationships with consumers and fans. Knowing this, of course, is the easy part. More difficult is the question of how to measure such activities, how to identify when it’s actually working and when it might be either falling on deaf ears, or worse, alienating the very people you hoped to reach.

I believe that measurement of social media matters most within two core metrics, influence and engagement. If you can clearly define the influencers within communities, and target them in ways that engage their interests as well as their followers, you have a way of concentrating time and money in marketing activity. The kind of complex analysis and influence weighting needed to cut across the whole of a micro-blogging site such as Twitter, for example, is no mean feat. And it is something the team I work with feel very passionately about getting right.

Mainly because the unique strength of identifying real influencers within artist communities or genre specific niches is that any work you do to fully engage with them will be paying off in the years to come, burning on when this year’s budget is well and truly burnt through.

Obviously looking at where your marketing efforts have been most successful is the best way to keep the impact high when budgets are low. This also means that instead of relying on spending money across different areas and teams in order to be sure of a success, you will be able to reduce the spending in the areas you find are not working.

The entertainment industry is no longer gambling on a digital future, but if they do not invest in the right kind of metrics, they will be gambling away marketing budgets trying to cover all bases, and more than likely spreading themselves far too thin in the process. They say rivers run deep, and in a newly democratised digital industry, so should the relationships your marketing efforts build you.

Marie-Alicia Chang is a Co-founder of start-up anayltics company MusicMetric and a regular columnist here at TMV

Other Users Also Read:
Apple Moves Toward Music As Service
What’s In It For Me?
Variable Pricing – What It Should Really Mean