I want you to imagine back in the early days of newspapers and magazines how the effect of coupons could be measured. A store owner put a coupon in a local newspaper, and then counted up the coupons that came back into the store – immediately that store owner had an understanding of the impact the advertising budget had on sales. Now flash-forward to today, and overlay that expectation of an observable metric being applied to social media – Nathan Gilliatt, a.k.a., the Net Savvy Executive, has analyzed some of the methodologies marketing agencies are struggling to wrap around the existing data, and comes to the conclusion that “the golden metric that will answer every question does not exist.” In part, this concern is a post-modern one – our world lacks a coherent narrative, and social media rests upon a sea of ever more modularized and granular expressions of culture.

On the one hand, attempting to measure precisely the impact of any given trans-media event is an exercise in futility – rather we must apprehend trends, and think in terms of clouds and presence rather than sites and indexing traffic. On the other hand, a small business owner who knows precisely where they’re putting advertising and marketing energy can make a pretty good assessment of any given strategy. Jacob Morgan has posted two examples of the specific impact social media marketing has had for smaller corporations, and there are plenty more social media marketing success stories out there if you ask around on twitter.

Tracking marketing effectiveness is only a fraction of the data that we can expect to bubble up out of the social networking space. Another example was highlighted by Matt Rhodes on the FreshNetworks Blog in his post ‘Facebook, Gross National Happiness and the power of buzz tracking.’ “Buzz tracking offers a really valuable source of insight for brands and organisations, especially when it compares what people say (the buzz and sentiment) with other profiling data we have about them.”

via Quaint Media and Today’s Memetic Ecology / Wes’ Desk.