For a long time now, two conundrums have been frequent visitors to the small space between my ears: 1) Why did it take the Pirates so long to relay the ball home while a lumbering Sid Bream circled third in the final game of the 1991 National League series, and 2) who even remotely thinks that Blondie or Abba is deserving of inclusion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while acts like Yes, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Blue Oyster Cult and dozens of others await their call to rock posterity in Cleveland?
That’s it. Most other quandaries somehow steered around my cranium. Until now. A third gut-
stirring dilemma has moved into heavy rotation on my mental play list. Joining Pirate pain and rock HOF bad judgment is a professional point: How has the Marketing and Public Relations profession moved to the point of measuring so much, while actually learning so little?
Not long ago the profession that feeds us was criticized for having few, widely adopted “hard” standards that show the positive impact of marcom efforts. This was further complicated by bean counters’ insistence that we directly measure ROI while trafficking in the softer business resources of communication, “image” and perception (something that is nearly impossible).
So our profession responded by measuring everything and wrongly believing that anyone was capable of taking measurement, generating data and getting “answers” to solve virtually any perceived problem. With the aid of cheap digital communications assets and platforms we came to see everyone as potential measurement professionals—it became endemic to marketing—if you were one then you were certainly the other. And we were wrong.
Too many of our measurement efforts are well intentioned, but lack the most fundamental aspects of validity, reliability and applicability to a broader audience. We too frequently produce piles of number thought to be indicative of something where upon a closer look reveals it to be nothing more than, uh…piles of data. It’s faux data—an artifact of the exercise of making measurement but not necessarily indicative of anything about the topic we desire to study.
All the while our clients and non-marketing business colleagues are increasingly asking us what all these data mean? “How, if at all, is Facebook follower growth related to my market share,” and “which metrics are most important” are but two of many common questions that largely go unanswered because we have too heavily focused our energy on gathering data and too little on developing suitable industry norms to help answer such practical questions.
This is becoming more manifest every day. Clients are now frequently clamoring for someone to help them make sense of all the data points, sets and reports. They want the world of metric and measurement to help them understand the significance of what has been learned! For the most part so far our professional answer has been weak. And of course it benefits no one.
In the second part of this blog I’ll suggest why we have made this wrong turn into measurement morass and suggest ways that it can be fixed. Stay tuned!!
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John Durante is marketing services director for WordWrite Communications.
