What gets measured gets done … or not?
This morning I’ve read another conception of Seth Godin, who always seem to explain things as they are, even though he’s a visionary. He wrote that most companies are afraid of making big investments in unmeasurable media. But so are their competitors, which actually means that making a big investment in unmeasurable media would be the best thing to do. History has shown us over and over again that to succeed at anything, one must either do it better than someone else, or do it in a different way. In fact, this is the core of innovation, change in general, and evolution. It’s therefore more than clear to me why social media is hard-to-measure media; it’s a medium and not a goal on its own. The same thing counts for your mobile or computer – they are only tools and how should you measure tools?
It’s all about what the tools could accomplish for you and if you’re honest and good at listening and interacting as an individual (or a lot of good-listening individuals in one building calling yourself a company), you can certainly expect a positive outcome of any of your efforts. Be aware though that this might not be in the direction you’ve planned for your end user (clients, employees, suppliers, etc), because when you’ve really listened to them you have now understood what they’d really like from you.
The world has moved on since you’ve last checked, benchmarked, and best-practiced. You might even find that with the Internet and all its available social media tools you could now set up networks and communities with any stakeholder group that you want, where you professionally interact with them and the world. You’ll see that your community of planned and unplanned target audience will not only buy what you sell, but they will teach you how to make your product or service better before buying it… for free! All you need to do is set up the tools to enable the dialogue, teach your crew to unlearn the existing way of business on a continuous basis, and manage the conversations into actions.
Doing the above will – in the beginning – be totally unmeasurable, but you’ll set loose an accelerated evolution, where you’ll earn more money in a much more sustainable way than your competition.
