Attention Index and Monetization Effectiveness
Steve Rubel writes about something we’ve been thinking about for a long time. He’s calling it Social Media Effectiveness:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/07/a-new-system-fo.html
This is a great first step on a road towards real quantification of the value of all marketing activities, and to a model for monetizing the propagation economy.
Or, in English, it’s a good step towards determining what attention is worth.
Today, marketers in conventional media live and die by CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. Now, these impressions may not be worth much, because in ad-speak, impressions are simply the number of times an ad has been delivered. That doesn’t mean those ads were seen. They may have been ignored, skipped, or Tivo’d into the Land of Dead Ads.
Similarly, today, marketers are having a difficult time understanding the value of emerging media, because it doesn’t conform to this CPM model. "Mentioned on a blog," isn’t worth much when it’s Bob’s Fishing Fun, but it’s worth some millions of equivalent impressions if the blog is BoingBoing. Is that mention worth more than advertising on popular blogs? Probably. Are the impressions themselves worth more? Maybe. There are no hard and fast answers. And it gets weirder. What is the value of being seen on justin.tv? What’s the marketing value of a conversation on Twitter?
Anyhow, Social Media Effectiveness, as blogged by Steve Rubel, is a step towards defining that value. But I don’t think it goes far enough. Why exclude conventional media? Those are surely still effective. Why not work at defining an all-encompassing metric known as Attention Index?
Attention Index would be tied to people, not media properties. We all know it’s much more important to be noticed by people such as Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, or Cory Doctorow than just-another-guy-with-a-blog. So, the question is, can we quantify that? Can we say, "Robert Scoble has an Attention Index of 1.5MM, because that is how many people are paying attention to him on average?"
Note to Robert, if he happens to read this: 1.5MM is just a number pulled out of the air.
Now, we don’t have the capability to deploy such an all-encompassing metric, but someone like Google SHOULD be able to do something like this. Imagine being able to see the Attention Index of anyone and everyone. Imagine Attention Indexes weighted by industry. Suddenly, not only do you know all the key influencers in your area of interest, you know the actual value of being noticed by them. The propagational economy now has a metric!
Now, when you can track through to how many people purchased something based on Attention Index (AI), then things become really interesting. This metric, Monetization Effectiveness (ME), creates an equation for total value of a person’s attention:
AI x ME = Your Total Value
Again, this is a grandiose metric that would require something on the order of Google Adwords tracking across the entire internet, but this metric is not impossible to define or deploy. And this metric would be a goldmine of data for marketers. If someone has a low AI but high ME, is this your new product evangelist? If your new product overperformed their historic ME, what does this mean about your product? What tools can you provide to increase both AI and ME?
Imagine a world where AI and ME are common marketing metrics. And imagine how your own marketing might fare.
