The Art of Measuring the Wrong Things - Finding Balance in Metrics

“The minute we choose to measure something, we are essentially choosing to aspire to it. If we happen to measure running style, we would cultivate a nation of gazelles.” - Youngme Moon, Different

This observation from Moon’s seminal work on marketing captures the essence of our relationship with metrics. What we measure shapes not just our understanding, but our very direction.

Audience Matters

This thought is one for those in the Marketing organization—whether your title includes Evangelist, Strategist, or Community Manager. As a marketer living within the modern funnel, a significant part of your value is derived from public activity. Here are guidelines that will make all the difference in your approach to measurement.

Why Metrics Matter

If you can’t measure your business value, you have a target on your back. You’re one slight reorganization or financial belt-tightening exercise away from losing whatever champion sees value in what your soft skills bring to the business.

As John Doerr notes in “Measure What Matters,” objectives and key results (OKRs) serve as a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking.” Metrics, in the form of measurable and meaningful contributions to your business, are your savior. Without them, you’ll turn blue in the face arguing business value—and you’ll still lose. With them, you can make rational points on comparative value.

Why Metrics Can Be Misleading

Anecdotes Sell Products

Measurement does little to capture enthusiasm, affinity, or loyalty for brands. To get to these ends, we need anecdotes that are truly powerful (it’s helpful to remember people buy products because of stories, not spreadsheets). These less-countable outputs are too often completely overlooked in favor of hard metrics of success. Any business leader worth their salt respects stories, not just numbers.

The Trap of Meaningless Measurements

Beyond the squishy values, we see totally irrelevant tally marks offered up as key performance indicators. These metrics are particularly divisive as they pretend to measure success without context provided by correlation or measurements of statistical significance.

As Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, warns: “Most analytics implementations are a faith-based initiative.” In the rare case when statistical rigor is applied, the urge to see success from small numbers is too attractive to the eager.

Finding a Meaningful Middle Ground

Metrics are most important to the business when they help get beyond gut instinct calculations. It’s necessary to complement anecdote with calculation and vice versa.

It’s important to recall that trends are fundamentally a belief. The numbers can show correlations and the events surrounding them. The conclusion still (and forever will be) comes from the gut. At this pivot point, we see that this belief is no different than an anecdote.

Modern Tools for Measurement

Here are a few different angles to measurement in the Influencer Marketing world that I’ve found helpful in social media measurement, developer advocacy, and technical marketing:

  1. Total Unique Impressions: Answers the question of how many people cared about this message. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or native analytics make this straightforward across platforms.
  2. Cost Per Impression: Often measured in time but can be compared against paid efforts. Community-driven organic impressions often show remarkable ROI around product launches and major events.
  3. Time to Acquisition: The least-standardized metric I love. Chart how long it takes different approaches to achieve the same goal (e.g., recruiting beta users). The results often validate community-first approaches.

What Metrics Often Mask

Numbers aren’t the whole story. They can send you down rabbit holes or toward misguided assumptions:

  • Wrong content for the right audience
  • Right content for the wrong audience
  • The imbalance between “we’ve always done it this way” and “the next sexy thing” (most calculations show past popularity as opposed to potential growth)

One Last Note

Repeat after me: SOCIAL MEDIA ALONE DOES NOT LEAD TO REVENUE.

It connects. It inspires. It’s a catalyst.

It accelerates a process of audience acquisition that needs to happen with or without it. Choose to use it or choose to ignore it. The latter will prove challenging with time.

Find a short list of metrics that mean something to you and your business. Let other measurements come from connecting your metrics into the demand generation and public relations portions of your team. Make that effort and show impactful correlations.

No matter the goal, measure your impact, or you’re doing your skills a disservice. Just remember: what you measure becomes what you value—choose wisely.

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