social software measurement as asymmetric warfare

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Sydney Social Media Club where there was much discussion of measurement by Paull, Jye & Matt.

After the event, I was pondering this well-known story:

Two campers are walking through the forest when they suddenly encounter a grizzly bear. The bear rears up on his hind legs and lets out a terrifying roar. Both campers are frozen in their tracks. The first camper whispers, "I'm sure glad I wore my running shoes today." "It doesn't matter what kind of shoes you're wearing, you're not gonna outrun that bear," replies the second. "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU," he answers.

When you are asked to demonstrate the ROI of social software, all you have to do is prove that SM delivers the benefits of traditional media at a lower cost - because it seems that most marketing is a cost of doing business rather than a generator of sustainable growth.

There's a problem here however: What if it doesn't? If you compare Twitter to TV using TV's metrics then TV is probably going to win. TV's metrics have coevolved with the medium over decades. It's a fixed match. TV is wearing the running shoes and you're looking like a tasty snack for a Mr Grizzly. Julian does some very interesting crunching of Twitter reach numbers and concludes: Knowing this is great for planning but who is going to take back a reduced number when traditional media agencies are still talking inflated reach into the 100,000s?

In making this move, I would suggest that the SM crowd risk doing a Mullah Nasrudin:

Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill. He had never seen a bird like this before. "You poor thing", he said, "how ever were you allowed to get into this state?" He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers. "Now you look more like a bird", said Nasrudin.*

Even by calling it "social media", we clip its talons. As this article by Malcolm Gladwell explains, if you are a David and you play by Goliath's rules then you then he will squash you. If you are engaged in an asymmetric struggle then you need to choose your turf and your weapons - not let them be chosen for you.

Some hypotheses (which may well be wrong because I don't work in marketing):

• Social software is that it allows you to do multiple things at once - customer service AND promotion AND sales AND research. Organisation with a combined approach to selling, marketing & service would be more open to social software plays that offer an integrated approach to the customer (not that are necessarily many of those about).
  
• Social software is speed. Measures around "time-to-market" and "response time" become critical here (which are more associated with new product development & customer service than advertising).
• Social software is cheap (unless someone is greedy) - "cost per message" anyone? This means that you can run multiple experiments in a short period of time at low cost. Iterating TV spots is not cheap.
• Social software is interactive - you'd expect that cross-selling/up-selling metrics might be relevant here.
  

Of course, these measures don't help you persuade people that Twitter is better at TV's job than TV is - but should you be trying to do that in the first place?

There are two other riffs in my head:

• Marketing & media as ecology (with prey, predators, parasites, symbionts).
• Measurement as social proof.

But those will be other blog posts.

*Thanks to Dave for introducing me to this story.