While I applaud the Twittering of The Walrus, and know the person doing it, I disagree that volume of followers is much of a measure, of anything.

There are people who seek out followers (I'm not saying that is what The Walrus does) and collect them like baseball cards. It's not hard to do. (My blog, Canadian Magazines (canadianmags.blogspot.com), has more than 1,000 followers though I have done absolutely nothing to cultivate or seek them out, including not following them in return.)

There are Twitter extensions that harvest followers on a tweeter's behalf. When nothing more is required of the follower than clicking the "follow" button, of course, you'll get all sorts of people doing it. No downside.

In fact, recently I've found myself more and more blocking people who are clearly not following me, but trying to amass huge Twitter lists as a marketing strategy for goods and services that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of my blog.

I like Twitter and twittering, but I am under no illusions about it. My feeling is that the more people use it, the more commercialized and spam-ridden it will become, and the less "real people" will use it and it will likely flag and die, as many other social media tools have done before it.

Hey there D. B.,

Many thanks for your comments. I appreciate hearing from folks that have given the question some consideration.

“I disagree that volume of followers is much of a measure, of anything.”

I guess, the thought that I’m left with when thinking about what to measure is: How is this measurement any different than the others that are commonly used online, e.g.: number of RSS subscribers, number of e-mail list subscribers, number of “Friends,” number of page views, and so on?

Each of these metrics also require very little commitment, other than clicking a button, providing an e-mail address, or typing in a URL.

If that’s the case, then traditional publishers are swimming in a sea of meaningless metrics when it comes to looking at their online “reach,” “engagement,” and so on.

In the interest of fleshing out what is a really interesting topic, let me ask this question: What do you, as an online-only publisher, use as metrics to measure audience and engagement? And what advice would you offer to traditional publications who are struggling with the same question around their online operations?

Many thanks in advance for pushing these questions forward. :-)

Phillip.

Philip: "If that’s the case, then traditional publishers are swimming in a sea of meaningless metrics when it comes to looking at their online “reach,” “engagement,” and so on."

Me: Yes, exactly! We are being beguiled by numerosity without significance. And unfortunately, the latest generation of social media tools seem to be leading us to an ever-shallower stats obsession.

Personally, when I look at content-centric site stats, I'm interested in page views + visits, RSS subscribers (if there is a full-text feed, otherwise, engagement (reading) only shows up in page views), email clickthroughs, comment volume, inbound links.

I think that inbound referrals from facebook, twitter, etc are interesting to track.

HTH.

Phillip,
I am something of a sceptic about all sorts of metrics, including the traditional ones. We need to measure, that's for sure, and our customers (advertisers) demand it. Larger print magazines live or die by the Print Measurement Bureau readership stats. But nobody truly believes that every copy Outdoor Canada has 18 readers; it's only useful as a comparator with all the other measured magazines and an indicator of trends, up or down. The methodology puts magazines on the same plane as other media like radio and TV.

Online, whenever anyone asks me for data, I can give them things that seem to satisfy them, such as how many times someone has clicked on their ad and presumably read their message. They also seem satisfied with visitors and page views, which seem a reasonable indicator in about the same, inflated way that PMB numbers do. And, over time, tracking those things gives you a trend line. In the case of my blog, since March 2005, traffic has grown steadily from an average of 0 visitors and 0 page views to where, in the month of June it had 19,000 visits and 24,000 page views.

In the scheme of things, those are tiny numbers; I would argue that anyone should take them with a grain of salt (though, I can prove where many -- not all -- of them come from). But given the very specialized nature and small potential audience of a blog like mine, the numbers are pretty good. I don't dote on them, but I pay attention to them from time to time.

Frankly, if we had the kind of metrics that were truly meaningful, such information would probably require such an intrusion into readers' lives that they would be turned off. So we live with the methodologies we have.

How about revenue as a metric?

Apart from the many other reasons that many individuals and organizations may pursue "readers"/"followers"/"visitors" (personal glory, educational aims etc.) ... for most businesses the investment in stafftime or hard costs can only be justified if the revenue derived therefrom exceeds the associated costs.

In short, "followers" is nice, but to my mind the most important thing is to establish correlations between the number of followers and some revenue source.

If in a month when you have 1,000 followers you can demonstrate that 125 people followed your tweets back to your own site and those people in turn were responsible for 328 pageviews which represent $X in online ad revenue, and that 3 of them purchased something from you (e.g. a subscription or whatever), totalling $Y in sales revenue, then you've got something to work with.

And when you increase your followers to 5,000 and you find that resulting revenues in a typical month increase commensurately, then bingo, you can start making business decisions.

Anything short of that is like 1999-2000 dot-com bubble thinking.

Doing Twitter "right" means knowing those metrics. Are you spending your time and money cost-effectively or not? It's pretty simple, innit?

@Jon Stahl: Re:

We are being beguiled by numerosity without significance. And unfortunately, the latest generation of social media tools seem to be leading us to an ever-shallower stats obsession.

So what is the answer to “stats obsession?” I see a lot of organizations obsessing over stats here and there, but not making a commitment to understanding where the stats fit into their goals, or strategy. Is there an easy answer to thing one? Go on a stats diet? Focus on what you’re good at and ignore the stats?

@D. B. Scott I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here:

And, over time, tracking those things gives you a trend line.

For me, this is the key. Looking at the trends not the stats. Someone a lot smarter than me said something like: “if you measure the same thing, in the same way, every time and over time, then that information become actionable.”

That stuck with me, and I try to invite the organizations I’m working with to think about their statistics like that, e.g.: What are the five-to-ten statistics that can actually help you make decisions on a day-to-day, or week-to-week basis.

Let me ask: What would those be for your publication, blog, or organization? Or for those that you’re connected to?

In the scheme of things, those are tiny numbers; I would argue that anyone should take them with a grain of salt (though, I can prove where many — not all — of them come from).

This makes a lot of sense to me for a publisher that is very focused on specific topics, or a tightly-defined niche. However, many of the larger publishers I work with have such broad collections of online content, that it’s not easy to identify “traffic that matters” vs. “accidental traffic.” In many cases, looking closely at search traffic identifies large numbers of visiters searching solely for things unrelated to the property, like pornography, or gambling, etc.

So how do the big publishers achieve the same sense of confidence in their numbers? Trends are one answer, clearly. But perhaps there are other measurements that they should be considering?

Jon Spencer Always focused on the mythical “buck,” eh John? ;-) Though you’ve summarized the task-at-hand for publishers in this regard really nicely here:

If in a month when you have 1,000 followers you can demonstrate that 125 people followed your tweets back to your own site and those people in turn were responsible for 328 pageviews which represent $X in online ad revenue, and that 3 of them purchased something from you (e.g. a subscription or whatever), totalling $Y in sales revenue, then you’ve got something to work with.

And when you increase your followers to 5,000 and you find that resulting revenues in a typical month increase commensurately, then bingo, you can start making business decisions.

Thankfully, this is all a possibility now — with a bit of planning and a decent analytics tool — thanks to the magical InterWeb. And there’s the catch: I think this is a bit of a double-standard when it comes to the InterWeb vs. traditional marketing.

Doing Twitter “right” means knowing those metrics. Are you spending your time and money cost-effectively or not? It’s pretty simple, innit?

Not so simple, I think. For example, why aren’t these same metrics applied to the traditional (aka print) marketing world? I mean, we know they should be applied, but — realistically — which publications are equipped to say that “Print marketing promo A, resulted in B visits to our Web site, that turned into C subscriptions, D product buyers and resulted in E online ad revenue?” Not many, I would guess.

But those print ads are run anyway, and often just on the basis of resulting subscriptions and some sense of “brand awareness.” Let’s face it, its hard to track everything we’d like to consistently and effectively. People don’t always follow the links you want, enter the codes you want, or buy at the time you want them to.

Lead me to ask: What priority should publishers put on tracking these activities to revenue? How many publications are able to resource their analytics activities to any meaningful degree? My guess would be that traditional (aka print first) publishers are struggling here. Thoughts? Experiences?

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

"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."

What I dislike about these discussions is that they almost always revolve around money and numbers as if that's what this industry is all about. As a writer/editor I got into this line of work to communicate ideas and effect social change not to to churn out copy to pad out the advertising pages. Sure, of course the media I write for need to keep afloat, but they certainly don't need to make 'profit'. If they could break even, shouldn't that be enough? Why do they have to make profit?

You're right, the Walrus is not a good example of a for-profit business - and that's precisely the point. It's not. It's a non-profit publication with a mission: "to be a national general interest magazine about Canada and its place in the world. We are committed to publishing the best work by the best writers from Canada and elsewhere on a wide range of topics for readers who are curious about the world."

They don't set out to: "make heaps of dough and buy yachts for our staff".

So, in that context, if they manage to develop a successful Twitter campaign and attract new readers and build community in a novel online space, even if that doesn't bring in hard cash in spades, it's still a good thingTM for all sorts of reasons not relating to revenue.

Maybe it's time we stop thinking about information as an industry and start seeing it more as a human endeavour worthy of our collective support. If we did, maybe our conversations about 'metrics' would be more focused on other more important considerations than profit.

Hi Adam!

I totally agree that profit isn't the only motive, nor should it be. But I think "profitability" is a vitally important metric of success.

By that, I mean, knowing whether each aspect of what you're doing as a business venture is a net source of profit, or a net loss.

It's often a great idea for businesses to participate in activities that lose money, but they should know what those money-losing areas are, and be able to determine whether they're bringing in enough revenue from profitable aspects of their business to offset those losses.

All I'm suggesting is that business managers should always understand how their businesses work -- what's driving their success.

For instance, in magazine publishing, I know that (usually) editorial, production and admin departments are usually cost centres. Advertising is usually a profit centre. And circulation may or may not make money (depending on other factors).

I think if we spend a dollar, we should know whether it's generated revenues of $0, $0.50, $1.00 or $1.50. If we don't, we're not really managing the business aspects of our operation. We're just having fun.

(I do like having fun, by the way. [grin] Even if I don't sound like a particularly fun guy in these comments!)

-- Jon

Phillip:"... realistically — which publications are equipped to say that “Print marketing promo A, resulted in B visits to our Web site, that turned into C subscriptions, D product buyers and resulted in E online ad revenue?”"

From the advertiser's perspective though, if they are smart in their marketing efforts, they should be able to proxy the effectiveness of their ad channels. I had an interesting conversation with a retail veteran once about effectiveness of mass channels (like newspaper ad) & direct channels (like email blast). He said he does not really care about any metrics related to the channels specifically; he just divide the sales he got after the marketing effort by the cost he spent on those channels, and he can conclude that mass is more effective for him.

I like both POV from Adam & Jon. Profitability is how most for-profit define success, so any efforts / costs spent in any marketing channel should directly or indirectly lead to incremental revenue that hopefully at least cover the costs. However, if there are some other definition of success like spreading information to people, measures like followers or friends can be at least a leading indicator if not the absolute measure.

More importantly, new channels sometimes redefine what success can be. In Walrus' case, should being a "magazine" even be part of their mission? Or is it really just publishing quality general interest materials to their target audience through any channel, any format? These all shape what metrics are relevant to their success measures.