You Cant Just Have Peanut Butter

October 29, 2008 · Comments

Peanut Butter and Jelly Say it with me. Peanut butter and… Right. You can’t just have peanut butter. It’s wrong. It’s a freak of nature. It’s an amputation of our sensibilities. It’s like cookies and … It’s like Day and … It’s like Batman and… Oh, I guess you can have just Batman these days. But you can’t have just peanut butter. It doesn’t work.

Ditto social media for business. You can’t have just social media: the blogging and podcasting and tweeting and social newtork use. It’s great that you’re doing all that stuff, but you need your jelly, too. And in this case, the jelly to social media’s peanut butter is measurement.

Measurement

If you’re blogging, is it improving your search ranking? Is is helping you move prospects from thinking about a project towards taking a meeting to start a project? How are you judging your success? Simply by watching your RSS subscribers or page views go up?

If you’re trying to improve awareness, how many comments are you getting on various sites? Are you tracking sentiment? Can you get as granular as specific product elements versus just the product itself? What counts as a win for that awareness? Are you counting digital ink? Press clippings? What’s the measure of it all?

Are your web pages converting? Do you have some kind of call to action to provoke a certain action? How many visits versus how many conversions have there been?

Cue the Dead Horse

Why beat this particular horse, you wonder? Because there are more and more people feeling pressure from the economic downturn who are turning their web design shops, their writing consultancies, and their extra agency cycles into a social media practice, where it seems that they’ve got the “join the conversation” part of the dogma just right, but not the “must do something to help a business” part.

Hold me to measurements if you hire me. Hold me to tying this all into your primary business. This is no longer the shiny object. If you’re in this for business, let’s work it that way. It can (and should!) be lots of fun, but let’s make sure we are all disciples of K.D. Paine and that we measure.

True story: there’s no jelly in my house. It’s a very sad day.

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  • My mom eats peanut butter right out of the Jar ... i always thought it was just wrong :) ...

    It goes to show you that there's never one way to do things and people will always push the envelope and break out of the box!


    What I'm taking away from this post is that we need to measure what we are doing to know if we are being successful, but those measurement are not the same for all of us or for all businesses.


    Question that i have ...

    Does anyone out there measure your impact in social media in terms of developing thought leadership & professional development for employees/staff?

    I'd LOVE to hear from Chris and/or some of the community here?!


    --
    http://twitter.com/franswaa
  • Peanut butter hmmm, come to think about it I'm hungry =D, nice blog will be reading more for sure!
  • How about some nice slices of strategic decision making & tactical adoption support with that?

    Well, you can always throw peanutbutter and jelly around the office and see where it sticks, I guess. Good luck with that method. :)

    Susan
  • Great post Chris. I can have and do have just peanut butter on a regular basis. I know, that makes me a freak of nature!
  • Okay, so a few things:

    @Craig - I didn't say measure=quantity. There are great qualitative and sentiment tools. Those are a great measure. Christopher S. Penn measures on dollars, and that's a nice measure. Easy, at least. I don't think the masses are my target. Nope. I just want the right 1000. (Was that Kevin Kelly's line?)

    @Laura- I don't entirely agree. I think a site is part of it, but I have a post about outposts in your media strategy that conflicts with that thinking a bit. In my mind, media has atomized, and it's all over the place. Yes, there should be a home base, but the outposts are now just as important because that's where the fish are. (such as it were).

    And for all of you "stuck" on the food analogy: I can eat peanut butter plain, and have many times, so there. Have you tried bananas?
  • I know I'm weird, but I kind of like plain peanut butter sandwiches (no jelly). I also wanted to relay a conversation I had with mike seidle the other day.

    He argued that sometimes measurement isn't necessarily as important as some people think. He said that sometimes it's cheaper, for example, to just try many different approaches as opposed to trying one or two and measuring the crap out of them. (at least I think that was his point)

    I'm torn between the two. I do think that there is no substitute for metrics, but it is also good to have as much out there in as many different arenas as possible.
  • Carter
    Hey Chris,

    Great post and interesting timing. I was just discussing this yesterday with a friend; she's into SEO, Digg, Stumbleupon and I've been using (primarily) social media to build relationships and all but ignoring SEO.

    Thanks for the kick in the butt and great advice-I'm now on the sites mentioned above and plan on learning more.

    It's great to point out and remind people that there's no one right way and to touch the most people you need to use multiple (and measurable) avenues. Even if it takes extra time...
  • I agree with Chris. In the rush to harness the power of social media, the business owner does need to treat the new medium as they had the old which is to measure and adjust.

    There are no magic bullets in business we all know that (Don't we?).

    Take the time to read his article and make certain you pay attention to the traffic coming in as well as the content that is going out.

    I posted this message and linked to Chris' post on www.quired.com/blog.

    Chris certainly seems to have the pulse on Social Media.
  • @Laura Roeder totally agree. Your website or your blog should be your main concern. It's like your home and when the guests arrive you don't want to be found with the dirt in the middle of the room.
  • When I read the beginning I thought you were going to say the "jelly" is your website. I agree with metrics, but I think anther overlooked "jelly" is what all that social media is driving people to - your site. Sometimes you will see people who are very active, popular tweeters with ugly, confusing, or poorly-organized sites. I always tell people to focus on the site first, because that’s what all your online marketing is leading to. I dod recognize that this can be a budget issue though, as social media is generally free and websites are generally expensive.
  • Chris,

    Great meal here! I love (as it appears does everyone else) the PB&J metaphor.

    Now I shall go ruminate on my metaphors.. I mean measurements..

    Energetically,

    Amy

    @allaboutenergy

    http://allabout-energy.com
  • Great post, even though I don't like peanut butter :) This is something that I really need to start focusing on. I think I've given myself enough time to get into the flow of the conversation, and now I need to thnk about how to measure what I'm doing. I'm learning that this is the really hard part! Thanks for this reminder.
  • When Social Media and Peanut Butter Collide.

    I'm loving the comments on this post because not only is there an engaging dialogue regarding the meat and potatos of the post, (Why not continue the food metaphor?) but the peanut butter lovers have converged, and "I'm not eating your damn jelly!"

    I met someone at Blogworld '08 and had long conversation nwith them, because I overheard her discussing her peanut butter love, and taking tablespoon to the peanut butter jar sometimes constitutes breakfast. I knew I had met a kindred spirit.

    The underground peanut butter community has spoken loudly and carried a big spoon in through your comment section. Clearly we need our own social network. What's this say about the jelly folks? Where are they?
  • Great post Chris! The questions about measurement come up more and more in relation to social media. Yes it is interesting, yes it is fun, yes it is engaging, but how does that persuade companies that their marketing dollars should be spent on social media plans? Great tools are coming out to help us listen, with numbers. I think it is important both to the future of social media and marketing practices that we find a way in order to show how conversations through social media lead to greater brand awareness and therefore profitable.

    I did always only like peanut butter sandwiches as a kid though...
  • Good post but I'm not quite sure if I agree with the metaphor. I don't know if the :jelly" to social media is the measurement. So many times you hear social media a-listers speak about how they hate to judge media in a quantity measured form and how engagements and conversations are better. I understand the metaphor, just think the jelly is off. The measurement is more like the fluffanutter that you put on every now and then, wouldn't consider it the jelly.

    Craig
    www.budgetpulse.com
  • Chris - great post and metaphor!

    I tend to lean in the direction of paying attention to metrics that relate to your own objectives. The key in that is admitting that you have objectives on social media and then figuring out what they actually are.

    Social media is tool that makes interactions much more effective in terms of speeding up the normal 'social' process, but at the end of the day, how does the number of clicks or SE visibility or press clippings relate to your over all goal? We can track just about everything, but does everything matter?

    I see so many people in my own networks get wrapped up (or dare I say addicted) to the technology and the interactions on social media, that they often forget about their 'jelly' all together.

    Why are you participating in the first place? Who are your trying to meet? If you're just interested in meeting as many random people as possible, why? How will that benefit you?

    Sure, people like to meet people and make new friends, but what's your professional agenda in those relationships? (And I think it's OK to have one, as long as your legit and passionate about your interests, and it comes secondary to your contribution to the community...) And when do those relationships transition offline and become real hand shakes or collaboration? (Social media will never replace eye contact and handshakes - it was never intended too)

    I love this post Chris, because you hit the bulls eye - the luster of the technology is starting to wear off, and now it's time for people to dig deeper into how all this cool media and access to all these new relationships will enhance their personal AND professional lives...

    (But I still like to eat peanut butter straight out of the jar... :)
  • I like things simple - Peanut Butter on spoon, measuring overall traffic to specific posts, comments, registrations for my newsletter.

    The one thing I have learned recently is I am not offering enough conversion opportunities - things for people to do when they get to my site

    This is a circle, the more effective your social media becomes at driving traffic to your website, the more effective your website has to become to make the visit worthwhile.
  • Funny - I just blogged about this very thing.

    The current data and methods are bad, and misleading. We all seek something more reliable, which will inevitably emerge.

    For the moment, we can each only trust our own indicators, not the ones others say are important.

    john
  • Chris, Thanks for the post - I love metaphors.

    Social Media and....
    ...product awareness
    ...branding
    ...engagement
    ...context sensitive conversations
    ...humanizing a company

    I guess that the second part of the duo is wrapped up into the ROI as a package deal - measurement depending on varying definitions.

    Billboard and magazine advertising is not measurable, yet still widely used - social media doesn't need to be any different.

    So, what's the justification to use social media tools as part of the marketing equation? Simple, it's where the people are - just like billboards on the highway, or people sitting around in waiting rooms reading magazines.

    CPC, and PPC will (hopefully) fall to the wayside as new ROI measurement metrics are brought online.

    btw, Peanut butter and....crackers.
  • Ed
    I hope I hear a
    How do you measure SM ROI for business:
    "Late In'08 Edition" Blog post hatching.

    Peanut butter goes best on a fresh Macoun apple
    from New England every October
  • I totally agree with the need for measurement as many of our clients who have now realised the power and potential of digital are used to a high levels of accountability and detail in what they are getting for their budget.

    We are currently trying to develop an ROI model for social media and digital pr that attributes values to certain actions but as these values are arbitrary, the ROI result is more about how much value has been created rather than return on investment.

    But I totally agree with Toma in the previous post its really about what you want to achieve from what you are doing.
  • Hi,

    You hit the spot with this post. I think that the measurements you need, depend on what your goals are and what is your strategy for the long term. I think it's like a new website : first you build general content and in time you start creating more focused articles and you start addressing more specific keyword phrases. And you do this by watching the bounce rates and the number of visitors coming from the searches done for specific keywords and other factors.

    It's all about what you want to achieve and what steps you think you need to take in order to get there.

    Thank you

    PS : good twitts also :)
  • Okay, I know this wasn't the point of the post, but on a side note, why can't you just have peanut butter? I like the occasional peanut butter sandwich. And for the cookies, what can't you have those without? I'm curious to know.
  • I emailed you several days ago about hiring you for a great project...You can't get ROI if you don't call back.
  • I am beginning to think misery loves company--you have posted so much for me to think about the last few days...I am now an "insomniac" I would post a longer comment and ask the dozen of questions i have but I am off to update my Linked In Profile....as always THANK YOU.
  • im confused,

    you said you're in such violent agreement with kd paine regarding measurement but kd paine according to her blog is in "violent agreement" with Jason Falls regarding a post called "what is the roi in social media" in which jason makes it clear that you cannot measure social media in THAT way,

    just trying to give you a hard time chris :)

    http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2008/10/28/w...

    i dont think we are going to be track the business return of social media 100%, we can track metrics like comments, page views etc, but you cannot quantify conversations, what if you only get ONE comment, but that one comment ends up changing the way your business functions, or the way you're product is built. if you use the amount of comments to judge success you make be cutting yourself short.

    just my 2 cents
  • pam
    Oh you mean this stuff on the top of my mouth was suppose to digest? Oh...I get it now; this isn't all about add workaholics nano second attention spans it's about results...hmm. The vision drives the business model the model informs the Go To Market Strategy...the social media is a way to ....oh ya communicate and realize the vision. How are we doing also on benchmarks of success - I love this article I'm taking it to everyone of my fox, add, peanut butter eating clients and I might even add a little jelly!
    Pam
  • I am still trying to figure this out. I do know that my blog is growing and I am enjoying it more and more each day. That enjoyment is *not* based on pageviews or subscribers, though I am happy to have positive information in that regard. After speaking at a conference a few weeks ago, I learned something new that could very well be part of my jelly because I found a vast network of people in an industry who are genuinely interested in what I can teach them. That feels good. Now I'm working hard to figure out how and what I want to deliver but I don't think I've scratched the surface. Now that I'm writing this, I think I need a mentor. LOL! Sometimes I think I have too many ideas and they are all over the place. So, if I focus little more, perhaps the jelly will come? I hope that didn't turn into an incomprehensible blurb....
  • Hi, Chris. I really like the PPJ metaphor that's the nugget of this post. Besides being a big fan of metaphors (I think metaphors, like pictures, help people break down and digest ideas), I think you are spot on with the "go together" theme. A campaign or a program or some disjointed activities is pointless if it isn't paired with carefully designed intent and defined goals. I understand that companies may want to figure out how to 'get started' and not get eaten alive by Company B should it get their first. But without purpose statements and clear destinations, how can they truly expect to do anything but flounder?
  • I guess I'm considered a freak then because I actually eat spoonfuls of peanut butter as a snack. I definitely don't think it's an amputation of my senses. Yes, I know, I'm different :)

    Yes, yes, I know the point you were trying to make and as always, you provided a great thought-provoking post. Measurement is definitely a key to success.

    I think sometimes we pay too much time on the wrong measurements and use those to judge success or failure. Of course, I always want to see my subscriber counts and views to increase. But, does it really matter how many subscribers I have? What if I only have 5 subscribers but all 5 of them are from key organizations in my field(s) that I was trying to attract to my blog? What if they are writers for a major newspaper, tv show or a major publisher and that translates in something positive for me? In that case I would argue that subscriber and view counts don't matter as much.

    Additionally, it's not as simple as a numbers game to me but measurement is important...just in other ways. Some of my measurements include the number of real friendships I have and continue to develop; the impact and/or change I can have my online communities; the transfer and increase of knowledge that occurs daily for me and direct or indirect business opportunities.

    It is important to measure your involvement in social media, blogging, podcasts, etc. but we always need to be as diversified as possible in our types of measurements.
  • Great post, Chris. My question is what measurements do we use? And how do we track them effectively and know what they really mean? Every Saturday morning I dutifully record my site stats in a spreadsheet. Over time, the right ones are going up while others are going down. But, to be honest, I have no clue if I'm tracking the right numbers.

    PS Add jelly to that shopping list before the family comes home!
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