The rise of social media, and more specifically social media advertising revenue, has nudged a rather interesting question: How should we measure success? In the olden days, “hits” were the thing (but turned out to be a rather generic thing), then it was “unique page views” (slightly better, but still a bit bulk), then it was the “like” or “fan”. Now, the metric of choice for social media seems to be comment-worthiness.
Facebook is adding a new set of metrics around comment-worthiness, the most obvious being “People Taking About” (here’s another article on the subject from ClickZ, thanks to Beth Kanter via Mari Smith). The idea is that your potential reach is important (how many people have ‘liked’ you enough to click a button, and how many friends those people have), but your ability to activate that pool is even more important. Comments, links, mentions, photo tags, all combine to suggest how many people are talking about your page or your brand.
It makes sense, if your goal is to sell ads, to care deeply about how much of your base is talking about you. That implies they care about you (or deeply dislike you), or they consider you conversation-worthy. It also makes sense that positive or negative comments count the same. But what if your goal isn’t ad sales but impact? What if you’re an arts organization seeking to connect your community with theater, or music, or handicraft, or history?
Then, also, you want to measure your success by the conversations you start (or at least the ones you are a part of). And that’s where “People Talking About” and related metrics could help you find your way.
