socialmediocrity

The IAB UK, and more importantly the IAB Social Media Council (IAB SMC) have proudly announced their opinion on how all social media should be measured, ingeniously missing the point entirely, and demonstrating (to this author at least) their ever decreasing relevance to the wider industry.

In a show of complete lack of original thought, the framework adopts the acronym I.A.B. – Intent, Action/Awareness/Advocacy/Appreciation, Benchmark. So actually that’s IAAAAB, but then would have been somehow more ridiculous, right?

As an aside, imagine if everything an industry body issued borrowed it’s mnemonic from the organisation’s own acronym – the mnemonic itself becomes oxymoronic as a concept very quickly in this case.

So anyway, the announcement goes on to completely fail to deliver against it’s own declared mission to help advertisers and agencies better digest the complexities of social media measurement. Instead, the notion that anyone in an advertising or marketing capacity needs to be told how to do their job is patronising in the extreme. Their framework essentially reads thus:

• INTENT: it’s a good idea to know what you want to do before you start doing it. Set some KPI’s, kids!
• AAAA: It would be good if you think about what you expect to happen as a result, and how you might measure whether or not that has happened. For this foresight, IAB, we are eternally grateful.
• BENCHMARKING: Once you’ve observed the impact, try and find a direct competitor that didn’t do so well, so that you can show how much better than them you all did. (groundbreaking, huh?)

This framework is entirely bereft of any real value in it’s current form, and the IAB (and especially their social media council), must be somewhat embarrassed I would think. It is with no small degree of mirth I noted their expectation that they might receive feedback from the wider industry.

Richard Pentin, IAB SMC member and Group Planning Director at Tullow Marshall Warren: “The days of whimsical experimentation are over….to be taken seriously it’s imperative we start making it much more accountable, and the IAB social media measurement framework is designed to do just that”. I can assure you, Richard, it goes nowhere near doing that.

The IAB’s call for more case studies to be shared amongst the industry rings as a hollow cry of “we don’t know what to make of it either – has anyone else worked it out yet?”. Far from the days of experimentation being over, they have only just begun for social media, and it is a terrifying prospect to think that we stop innovating and creating from here on in – the way the IAB UK SMC evidently have.

I am personally troubled by the way in which the push to find the holy grail, the golden measurement by which all campaigns will be judged, gets in the way of the actual objective (the “i” in the framework, if you remember). And as Richard himself acknowledges here, social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms - no wonder we’ve struggled to find a common methodology which works across everything.

What the industry actually lacks is any opinion-leaders of any great value. Firstly, perhaps the IAB SMC should define social media. It sounds obvious, but conceptually “social media” transcends so many other traditional activities, that it might actually need defining  so that we know what it is your referring to exactly. Is it viral? Is it word of mouth? Is it customer service? It is all of these things, and so much more.

Secondly, it needs to be acknowledged that social media is not a discreet, silo’d activity, and to treat it as such is any advertisers’ or agency’s first mistake – we’ve learnt this before with digital, let’s not repeat it, purrrlease. A strong industry body should be taking the lead on this. Integration is no longer confined to the marketing team and referring to the media mix but instead affects every aspect of a business. The very nature of social platforms needs to be understood from the lower echelons of the boardroom up to the decision makers in the post room. Your customer will tell you if you are getting right – by buying more things, or using your service more.

By definition, then, social media is much much more than advertising alone. It is more than “interactive”, and it is for these reasons we must all reject the myopic framework published by the SMC sub committee of the IAB UK, and it’s contributors.