Hi Phillip!

Money isn't everything, of course. But in the case of a for-profit business, it pretty much IS everything.

The individuals who work for those companies may have other personal objectives (altruistic or aesthetic or whatever), such as the Walrus's Twittermeister who enjoys communicating with the magazine's readers.

But that person's "job" is not to maximize personal enjoyment, that's just a fringe benefit. We all like it when we enjoy certain aspects of our jobs. The businesses themselves have no morals or ethics or desires. It's the essential nature of capitalism -- corporations exist to make profits. If they don't do so, they cease to exist. If that happens, the people who work(ed) for them continue to live. But the business doesn't.

But that's not my main point. My main point is that if you hold up the Walrus* as a paragon of good Twitteration, then I feel you should do it based on metrics that demonstrate they are converting followers to revenue in some way. It's "nice" to know that people are engaging with the magazine in a number of ways, but that's just because I personally think the magazine is a good one and I like the idea that it's being read by as many people as possible.

If they get a whole bunch more people to read it for free, with no revenue associated with that increased readership, then that's OK as long as costs don't increase. But spending limited resources on getting more people to read the magazine for free isn't the path to making a magazine a viable business in the long term. And if the Walrus was to shrivel up because it could never become self-supporting, then that wouldn't even be a qualified success. It's what we call "failure", corporately. Time and money that had been spent on accelerating its demise would be seen as wasted resources.

I want the Walrus to thrive. And I work for other magazines who also deserve to thrive. I want to know how to make wise business decisions in their best (financial) interests. To do otherwise is short-sighted -- those publishing ventures might get some valuable ideas into the public's eye, but then quickly die, rather than being able to continue doing so? Not good.

If the Walrus is Tweeting its way toward a more profitable bottom-line, then share with us how it's doing so.

Back to your other point -- I know that if I do even a direct marketing campaign with carefully tallied and analysed results, I may only be capturing a (large) portion of the actual revenue impact, but not all of it. [We circ geeks call the unmeasurable impact "white mail".]

But in most cases I can assume that the unmeasurable impact is roughly consistent between the different control/test groups that I AM able to measure reasonably reliably. So if Offer A generates a measurable response rate 50% higher than that from Offer B, I can make a fairly simple business decision.

I may know that a portion of the respondents to either offer chose to respond in some way that prevented my being able to track those responses, but who cares? Unless I have reason to believe that Offer A was more likely to generate unattributable responses than Offer B, I can still assume that Offer A was comparatively more successful.

Tracking, monitoring and metrics are great. Knowing whether I did something that generated profits or losses is fundamental to this silly world of ours. I don't have a choice but to act accordingly.

Metrics aren't 100% accurate, and any yardstick of directly attributable revenue isn't the complete picture either, but that should not be an excuse to ignore/avoid the single MOST important factor in running a business wisely.

Knowing someone's got a thousand, million or a billion Twitter followers is like knowing that they have really nice potted plants in their office. Whatevs. It's not a measurement of "success".

Profitability is.

Like it or not.

* The Walrus is, actually, not a very good example to use of a for-profit business, since that enterprise has a defined educational mandate, as well as a need to maintain its long-term viability. But I think my point is still valid.

-- Jon