This argument was settled a long time ago. If you can’t measure it, why do it?

I don’t disagree with any of the theories here, but I do wish that agencies and metrics vendors would stop trying to tell me they can measure influence when they’re simply measuring things that they think can influence.

In my mind (and admittedly my mind is a bit wonky sometimes) you can only measure influence properly if you do it at the receiving end, not the transmitting end. But that’s proper market research that costs big money, not something you can package up and a piece of technology and flog.

That said, if someone can show me a calculation that takes all these other metrics and turns them into a measure of influence, then I’m all ears.

Talking of convergence, I believe there is going to be a convergence of advertising measurement and PR measurement; ultimately “influence measurement”, and of course following my ebook on social Web analytics you won’t be surprised to hear that I believe this nascent capability will play a key role.

Check out my post on last night’s event here:
http://bit.ly/mAc90

1.Potential to influence – I think this is what Niall is referring to. Trying to assess whether a person or publication is likely to be able to influence a particular community and to what extent. (A recent example of trying to distill this into a measure was put together by Jonny Bentwood at Edelman with regards to Twitter http://technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/jcpr-twitter-index/. At RealWire we have designed our Influence Rating to do something similar where coverage is concerned – will be posting more about this in the near future.)

2. Outcomes – a sale, improved sentiment, deeper relationship etc – and whether these were influenced by a particular activity e.g. blog post, article, Twitter conversation.

The Potential to Influence can never really be measured in isolation as it is a prediction. It also requires evidence from the Outcomes measure to truly inform and refine it. For instance if a particular person’s blog posts consistently result in a demonstrable change in the level of sales of particular types of products then it is likely to be reasonable to conclude that person has a significant level of potential to influence in that area.

In reality such evidence may be difficult to gather but it is often possible to observe indicators of influence if not outcomes themselves e.g. the extent that certain sites/people drive more traffic to your website for instance or using econometrics you can take a number of these indicators and build a model that provides a more comprehensive measure of what has driven certain outcomes http://www.metrica.net/MeasurementMatters/post/2009/05/22/Review-of-ROI-techniques-Part-6.aspx.

This might sound strange coming from an accountant, but just because you can’t measure something with certainty doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!

Even if the forms of measurement, CTRs, conversion to downloads, etc, aren’t perfect, they still go a long way towards justifying spend on marketing programmes. In my eyes, PR is much closer to advertising in that regard nowadays, with digital channels enabling standard measurement tools.

I do however ask – whose responsibility is it to undertake the measurement? I think the days of clients relying on its agencies to do all of the measurement are over and it really needs to be an inhouse activity. My clients who measure well never have issues getting their budgets signed off.