MeasurementCamp: and so the conversations began

In amongst some heavy shit elsewhere in some of the more fundamental aspects of my life, I wanted to find the time to blog about this because I care about it.

So we had the first MeasurementCamp.

Some background for those that haven't heard of this movement:
The smart people at Chinwag (and I don't say smart cos I wanna suck up to them, I say smart because event after event they seem to nail the digital zeitgeist right in the effing jugular and I admire that proximity, insight and timing) put on an event called Measuring Social Media and I was lucky to be invited onto the panel. More background on that event here and elsewhere.

What I tangibly felt in that room that night were those mercurial and compelling twins: need and opportunity. Given that overt calling, and the incredible turnout and breadth of people in the room (in terms of background, role etc) my top-of-head suggestion was collaboration: 'an open-source set of agreed measurements for social media'.

With a bit of help from a wiki, out of that first night some twenty five (?) of us met earlier this week at the first MeasurementCamp.

The purpose of MeasurementCamp is:

...to create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.

That's shit wording - my wording so far, but it's wikified so let's hope it 'heals' - but I hope you get the idea...

The MeasurementCamp movement is about fundamentally addressing these issues of what do we measure, what do we believe in, what can we learn from measurement, what can we all agree on and work towards as an industry, what do we report back on and share and benchmark against. That kinda shizzle.

Why? Because it matters. Drucker, the guru's guru, said what get measured get's done. Because the SEO industry and Google's billions owe their existence to their ability to prove. Because we all know it's brilliant and fun and profound and the right-thing-to-do, so why can't we prove it? Because.

And the name MeasurementCamp is probably clumsy too.
Geek purists will say that a somethingCamp should run over a weekend and this that and the other. I don't give a flying flea-bitten donkeyfied horseshit. What those geek purists have done for the world is create a format of events that is profound and wonderful that it is bleeding into horrible soulless and broken worlds like that of business conferences incredibly quickly (e.g. 'Marketing Tech: Tailormade' where delegates chose the talks to go to on the fly from 4 concurrently running options, where all speakers were clearly briefed to be very very practical in their content) - so we're gonna take that goodness and apply it here, regardless of what the purists might snark. Because at the very core of the MeasurementCamp movement will be the same essence of BarCamps (and TransitCamps and - perhaps most breathtaking of all - Social Innovation Camps) and apply it: collaboration in its true form; small groups working on practial things; no hierarchy; goodness.

I don't know how many people exactly were there, and I don't know how many of the gang came to the original Chinwag event. That kinda shit *really doesn't matter now*.

What matters is what we started. And the 'we' was a really exciting group of PR folk, digital agency and independent peeps, some of the big players in the buzz monitoring/technology space, a really cool group.

From an initial open discussion we came out with the following things that'd be useful to each of our selfish needs:

• Metrics to measure - what do we measure
• Shared vocabulary - making life easier within the industry
• Benchmarking - how do our results compare with everyone else?
• Standards - ensuring apples-for-apples comparisons across industry
• Proof or evidence (of social media success) - case studies to convince colleagues or clients to participate in what we inherently know to be right
• Tools - to measure stuff with

Social Media Cafe majordomo Lloyd Davis suggested that any who felt strongly about spending the next 1.5 hrs talking about a given subject say it out loud and that people could gravitate towards the topics they felt interested by. That worked well and so the MeasurementCampers split into 3 groups of similar sizes:

• Metrics to measure
• Proxies to measure - at Lloyd's suggestion, so I think this was about finding other things that already exist (e.g. sales data) to measure social media 'marketing' performance
• Proof

Then in true caring-sharing fashion each group reported back before we all departed.
It felt to me that real progress made.
The groups are going to be updating the wiki - it looks like some of that has started already. I'll flag it up here when there's some real progress for the rest of the world to benefit from.

Next steps:

• Sign up on Upcoming for the next installment
• Contribute to the wiki

Comments

[Chris Hambly]

Will

I wrote some brief thoughts about this here:
http://www.chrishambly.com/content/social-influence-measurement

Chris

[Dan Thornton]

Darn it...though I'd avoided any of your stealth photo activity...

Must get haircut before the next one!

[Chris Reed]

Sorry to have missed it while throwing myself down mountains in pursuit of sport and fitness, but gaining only bruises for my efforts.

I'll check out the wiki and add a cheeky ha'penny worth if it would make sense to do so - though sounds like loads has been covered off already.

Chris