We just love measuring stuff. It gives us a sense of place, a fixed point in an uncertain world. It allows us to gauge progress, and, crucially, enables us to report success to the board, so we can tell others how clever we are. After all, for businesses, measuring what we do is how we make sure we get what we want.
The trouble is, we get what we measure. For example, care homes for the elderly used to be inspected regularly and had to meet strict criteria: the temperature of the hot tap (danger of scalding), size of rooms and availability of lifting equipment. This is important, but no one measured how happy the residents were. There were no metrics for quality of life - how 'nice' the staff were or how much fun the old folk had.
So you can be certain that no matter how miserable everyone was or how unpleasant the staff, no one ever got scalded, so the home scored well. But if you were a resident, how would you rank water temperature against enjoyment in your assessment of the place?
We see this again and again in marketing, and particularly in media. In digital, the availability of metrics for just about everything has made us junkies for the yardstick.
The introduction of page impressions as a key metric for publishers' website performance 10 years ago led to canny editors splitting stories across two or more pages - double the impressions for no more work.
Numbers can tell a great deal about how effective our efforts are, but they don't tell the whole story. Sometimes, they divert the attention from what is really happening.
Forrester recently published some research showing how social media specialists ranked their ability to measure the relative effectiveness of their activity. The experts gave themselves a score of 4.5 out of 10 - which Forrester considered ambitious. But what were they measuring?
Every day in online forums and blogs, there are people saying nasty things about brands. Truths, lies, hoaxes, misconceptions and competitor propaganda. It's all there. If care isn't taken, sometimes it ranks more highly in Google than the brand's site, because search engines value the new, rather than the true.
I was speaking at a seminar recently on reputation management - the tools and frameworks we apply to guarding brands online. At the end of my talk, I was asked just two questions.
The first hinged on a complaint that managing reputation online represented a new customer-service front - adding to costs. The second was whether the success of the activity should be measured.
The answer to the first question is simple. This customer-service front is already open - it's not a question of choice for the brand. The only question that should trouble the marketer is the same one they address whenever a customer calls the complaint line: 'should we answer the phone?'
The second question is harder, however, because measuring things is so ingrained in digital folk, and it is hard to measure the real impact of reputation management. It is a question rooted in our focus on measuring success, and ignoring the cost of failure; because the obvious (although glib) answer is 'can you measure the cost of not picking up the phone to that customer?'
So Forrester's respondents were measuring success, and their attention was directed to achieving this goal. However, they ignored the opportunity cost - the price of inaction. This can be huge, as United Airlines discovered last month, when one talented complainer wiped $180m off its market value with some well-aimed swipes on YouTube.
Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level
30 seconds on complaining in song via YouTube
- Canadian musician Dave Carroll, who claimed that United Airlines baggage handlers broke his $3500 Taylor guitar, wrote the 'complaint song' . He plans to write three songs about his experience with United.
- The video he made to accompany the first song attracted more than 3.5m YouTube hits in 10 days. The song is now on iTunes.
- In July, nine months after the initial incident, United offered Carroll $1200 in flight vouchers as compensation. It said it would be using his video for staff training.
- YouTube also hosts clips of dozens of Complaint Choirs. The phenomenon apparently started when two artists in Helsinki thought of taking literally the Finnish term 'Valituskuoro', to describe a group of people grumbling at once, as a positive way of channelling the energy people use to complain.
- Choirs from Birmingham to Singapore and Vancouver to Auckland are venting their grievances and day-to-day frustrations through song.