Crowdsourcing social media measurement definitions

Crowd Looking UpRecently the Web Analytics Association announced it published social media measurement definitions on which it wanted the public to comment. I bet y’all realized I’d be excited about this since I’ve been so adamant about crowdsourcing (and not!) in the past.

I am eager to see how this works out and whether many in the social media community contribute thoughts to this. We all claim to be experts and have opinions on just about everything we possibly can, and this is an amazing opportunity to come up with definitions that are not forced upon us but that we create ourselves.

This could be an incredible test of crowdsourcing and whether it’s actually valuable. Can we all rally around an important cause (defining social media measurement and metrics) and agree on broad concepts? Is this a futile effort?

I think that if WAA gets the word out there and can emphasize its importance, we could really accomplish something great. And those are both big “if’s” but definitely can be overcome. WAA has done a lot of the work for us already and proposed basic definitions, which will greatly help our efforts. It’s one thing to want to crowdsource definitions from scratch, but a whole different animal when a general framework is already in place.

Perhaps I have seemed wishy-washy by changing my mind about crowdsourcing in the past. But one thing has become clear to me recently. Crowdsourcing is only as valuable as the starting question. If you ask a simple question or a complex question with no sense of where you’re going, your crowdsourcing efforts will probably fall flat. But if you have a very specific idea in mind, and offer up suggestions or a broad framework to work in, then you’re likely to see amazing feedback.

So let’s do this, folks! Let’s all put in our two cents and figure out a way to come up with concrete and broadly applicable definitions and rules for social media measurement.

Who’s with me?

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