How do you decide whether it’s worth spending money on social media analysis tools for your organization? Determine whether there will be enough of a return on your investment, and be thoughtful before jumping in. Think about what you’ll gain and what kind of return you need to see to make these tools worthwhile, and whether there’s another way to achieve it. You’ll grow into the tools, so there’s no need to go for the biggest, baddest tool until you know exactly what you’ll need.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson has previously said Facebook’s “erroneous” video metrics are a symptom of a digital ecosystem in which two players dominate and measurements look increasingly meaningless. Before I make my next point, I want to state clearly and emphatically that I believe if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. In all of our programs, we gather ridiculous amounts of data that we crunch and graph and compare to come up with meaningful metrics. However, I also believe that dollars are can cats eat cashews not necessarily the currency that social media marketing programs should be measured in, especially in these early days. Tying something as ephemeral as friendship or relationship or engagement to something as complex and relatively rigid as a currency or sales target seems incredibly simplistic. It’s like saying to your friends, “Tell me how much you like me – in dollars,” rather than determining how much they like you by a more accurate measure – whether they show up when you need to paint your living room.

Appalled by the quality and approach of existing interent advertising, we only run full screen video ads that we also will only allow if it matches the quality of the content. The irony of Facebook and Google joining forces to form part of the Coalition for Better Advertising should be apparent. More than happy to demand external validation of others, the quest for transparency stops sharp when it comes to their own operations. As Sir Martin Sorrell notes, these companies should not be left to “mark their own homework”. Start with understanding the business objectives before setting PR/communications objectives.

None of the errors directly affected advertisers in the sense that they did not happen on metrics that brands are billed for. However, brands will often base decisions on where to invest their ad budgets on many of the measures that Facebook now admits have been overstated. The discovery comes after Facebook said earlier this year it had overstated how long users watch videos for on its site by up to 80%.

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