What's Important About Social Media Is What Happens Because Of It

THE MEASUREMENT STANDARD — If you're from New England, you know the expression, "Light dawns over Marblehead." Marblehead being a quaint little New England seacoast village, and "marble head" being a reference to someone's incredibly thick skull. It roughly translates into "Duh!" Which is what happened to me while sitting through the umpteenth discussion about measuring social media at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in DC last week. Don't get me wrong, it was a great conference. There were dozens of stories and case studies on how the use of social media is changing government -- making it more open and transparent, facilitating brainstorming and collaboration, speeding up response time, and generally making it easier to deal with bureaucracy. And that's when light really did dawn over this marble head: As long as we call it social media, we want to measure it the way we do all other media -- with hits, or impressions, or column inches, or AVEs, or eyeballs, or GRP, or some kind of old-fashioned metric...