What metric should advertisers use in social media?

Jason Preston • March 27th, 2008 •

It is an ongoing question, highlighted earlier this week by both Blogspotting and Adweek. Social technologies have always had trouble finding good advertising schemes.

One of the big issues with advertising in online social networks is, as both posts point out, a lack of reliable metrics. Adweek points out that MySpace is working hard to bring new variables to the table when talking with advertisers about value of their ad dollar:

Instead of only measuring ad exposures and clicks, MySpace is gathering data on visits to community pages, time spent there, whether visitors watched a video or embedded a piece of content in their page. What’s more, it is then tracking the pass-along rate for pieces of portable content, currently to one degree but soon beyond that. It is also tracking demographic and psychographic information for “friends” a brand has accrued.

MySpace is right to try to move beyond the limited CPM and CPC models that have dominated Web advertising for most of its existence. There are so many other factors in evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Advertisers should probably be looking at comments, wall posts, or even posts in the blogosphere to see what is being said in response to their product and their campaign. To really evaluate impact in social networks and on the internet, you have to look at reactions not only from multiple people or through multiple feedback mechanisms, but in multiple places.

If you run an ad on Facebook and someone disagrees, they just might blog it instead responding in the network.

In the end, I don’t think there exists currently a metric that accurately represents the value an advertiser is buying in social networks. But I think it’s a very important question to be asking.

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!