There is a trend in the communications industry for metrics reporting. Internet publishing allows for tracking of who reads what and how they read it. In my opinion society has not come to understand the implications of communication tracking, and industry does not know either. As a Wikipedian, I am a communications professional, and I meet other communications professionals in similar roles at lots of organizations. I live in New York, which is the the world’s capital for media and communications. The traditional heart of the advertising industry is here. The major TV studios are here. People who work in film or movies here seem to have less regard for Hollywood than the New York film industry, saying that more investment in live filming happens here and that production staff in New York are better at quality filming in a hurry whereas in California their strength is post-production and specialized studio work. Regardless of whether this statement is correct, I am more sure that these views demonstrate a perception that New Yorkers have that they move quickly and accomplish things well.
In talking with my peers from various aspects of the communication industry I see how they do their jobs. The target of mass media is to deliver information to people when they want it when they want it. For example in the advertising industry, the goal is to present an advertisement for a particular product to a person who is seeking to buy the sort of thing the ad features, and industry tries to deliver this ad as close as possible to the time when the shopper is seeking information to make a purchase decision. Nowadays with digital communication, it is possible to track who views ads and information in ways that it was never possible before.
Traditional media meant putting information in less trackable channels, like magazines, newspapers, television, radio, posters, billboards. To track media reach, social scientists would do personal surveys, individual interviews, or focus groups to come to know who watched television or listened to radio, or who walked by posters or billboards. Magazines and newspapers would report their subscriber numbers, and that count was assumed to be the reach of the ad.
At present, all of the traditional media impact calculation seems dated. Websites track people in lots of ways and produce huge metrics reports which give all kinds of information. Here are some of the more discussed metrics:
- pageviews – number of times a website is accessed
- unique visitors – like pageviews, but only counts individual viewers one time even if they visit multiple times
- subscribers – number of accounts who have opted in to receive a media feed
- Facebook likes – clicked the Facebook like button
- Retweets – passed on a twitter message
- impressions – scrolled through a message in a feed, regardless of whether message is read
- clicks – number of click responses to an ad – consider pay per click
- conversions – ambiguous term. As a communication metric, this is the number of times users perform desired actions in response to prompts. This can also be a non-communication metric meaning a more complicated process like a consumer’s move many steps from the original advertising to a purchase or action commitment.
Interest in all of these things is rooted in the revenue Google has generated from their AdSense service. Google serves ads, charging markets on a per-impression or per-click basis for the service. Perhaps most digital marketing is based on this model – I am not sure. For business managers who make purchase decisions about advertising, they may be thoughtful about investing resources to increase clicks, impressions, likes, or whatever else. The premise is that there is a relationship between increasing communication metrics and increasing the number of final desired conversions at the end of the communication process.
The reason I am describing this process is to describe the exchange rates between these metrics. With Google’s Adsense, they have a smaller price to charge for generating impressions and a higher price to charge for clicks. Other communication services might offer to increase any of these metrics. What is strange about the contemporary communications industry is that there are all these communication products and it is difficult to put monetary values on them. They all seem to be useful, and despite the flood of metrics it is often difficult for organizations to determine which communication channels are resulting in which final conversions. Established organizations with enough data to consider might be able to look at what they do in multiple channels, and differentiate that a certain percentage of final conversions have come from one channel like Facebook, and another percentage seems to have originated in another channel like Twitter, and so on until it is possible to make reasonably useful guesses about which investments in which channels generated the desired outcomes. All of that is sensible, and how communications is supposed to work with digital media. It is nice to be able to predict final conversions before an investment in an ad campaign has even been made, and new media makes this possible when traditional media much less often made such predictions possible. When the impact of past communications investment can be tracked, and when the insights from analyzing that tracking allow prediction of the outcomes of future investment, then that means that business managers can determine the relative value of investing to get one kind of user engagement versus another.
When these metrics get funny is when they are used outside of the context of having enough data to determine number of final conversions. I work in public health communication, and I spend my time thinking about how to deliver relevant health information to people who would find what I have to share to be useful. I continue to be happy sharing information on Wikipedia – it seems to me that if someone goes to a Wikipedia article, then it is because they wish to be informed on that topic, and I feel that by developing Wikipedia articles I am justified in assuming that traffic to those Wikipedia articles is a valid indication of delivering the information to people who would use it. Wikipedia pageviews is the communication metric which I seek to provide in my communications service.
Elsewhere in health, and elsewhere in lots of contexts, I see that most communications projects are insufficiently funded to analyze and understand the metrics which they generate. More could be said on the matter, and in this field there are people with more expertise than me. If I described my particular niche, it would be in general communication to advance a nonprofit mission in education, and for me, I contribute to Wikipedia, and I watch my peers in the field who also do similar things. If I were to describe my most obvious weakness, it would be to say that I know little or nothing about doing communication that is likely to result in a conversion to lead to a customer paying money for a product. It is a bit of a contemporary culture change as compared with the past that marketing for products and for public service education share the same channels and outreach tools.
I am saying all this to lead to one observation – I wish to talk about the exchange rates for the communication industry. Suppose that someone has limited resources and wants to invest in communication strategies. Suppose that this is in the field of nonprofit education, and that someone has messages of general interest and they want to reach the largest audience which is interested in the message, either to deepen their understanding or to guide thought. Suppose now that it is plausible to hire communications staff which will do communications activity, and who will report communication metrics back to the company as a proxy for impact of communication. Those communications staff may do activities which result in higher metrics for any of these activities, and I am ordering those activities here in order of preference when cost is not a factor:
- Developing an organization’s own website, including driving traffic back to that website
- Arranging for the message to be featured in traditional journalism, like TV shows or magazines
- Engaging any social media platform, like Facebook or Twitter
- Doing blogging on the websites of others, or otherwise, being featured in amateur third-party journalism
- Email newsletters
- Producing specialized permanent media for distribution in new media platforms, like image sharing sites, online forums, or YouTube
- Arranging for the message to be distributed in more timeless scholarly channels, like journal articles or books
- Posting the content to Wikipedia, assuming that it is the sort of content which Wikipedia would welcome
The odd part about contemporary communication is priority. I think seeking traditional journalism is justified, but not for its reach to large audiences in general circumstances. I feel that traditional journalism is extremely valuable for confirming credibility and establishing neutral perspectives. Traditional journalism is an excellent strategy for raising the value of content, but I think its market share for reach is diminishing. With regard to all of the other options on this list, I feel like very often, these different strategies are judged by the metrics they generate, with the exception of Wikipedia. Here is the oddest part of all – at present, it is my perception that many people working in communications directly equate the value of metrics in one channel to another. So for example, if someone is doing communication by driving traffic to an organization’s website, and collecting twitter or Facebook impressions, and talking about views on YouTube, and sending emails to a subscription list, then in the end they make a sum of all the numbers generated from all of those sources and call the combined number “communication impact” or some such thing. I work at Consumer Reports, and as a large organization, we enjoy the luxury of being able to do some more nuanced analysis, but around New York I have met communications staff at better funded organizations who have this “just all all the numbers” strategy of estimating the impact of communications. For smaller organizations adding all the numbers together is much more common. Adding all the numbers together assumes a communication metrics exchange rate of 1:1 for all classes of product, which while simple to do makes no sense. Sometimes numbers are wildly skewed, and many information consumers may be using one channel but not others, yet all channels are lumped together.
I think the 1:1 communications metrics exchange rate exists because there has to be some reporting of communication beyond communications professionals, and in the end, sometimes people just want to know one number. Another explanation could be that many websites have marketed metrics tracking as a feature, and instituted the idea that without a metrics count any communication plan is dubious. The gamification of collecting metrics is compelling and brings excitement into the workplace. There really ought to be some way to calculate an end result, and without anyone else proposing an exchange rate, then by default, 1:1 is the easiest starting point for even thinking about the topic.
For topics which are covered in Wikipedia, and for information that could be shared in Wikipedia, the Wikipedia pageviews are often greater than the metrics counts for other channels. Despite this, there are hardly any organizations which care about Wikipedia pageviews. I feel that since Wikipedia articles plausibly are being read by people who just searched for them, they ought to be considered to have reached an audience which is demanding information on a topic, and therefore, are reading a more relevant audience than, for example, someone who subscribed to a Twitter feed perhaps months in the past and scrolls past messages in their feed.