Interesting piece in Ad Age arguing why we need new metrics for social  media despite the data landscape already being “complex and confusing”.

It makes the point that the current metrics we are using to measure social media are not fit for purpose as consumers do n0t behave in the same way on social platforms as they do when on the any other website.

On social platforms, unlike the rest of the web, so much of what we do is about creation: whether  it is uploading a photo, engaging with or sharing someone’s content. It makes sense to have metrics that properly reflect that.

It argues that metrics like resonance and stumbles become “crucial in better executing a paid media strategy across social.

Most of the web operates as a one-way street, meaning that a click is an action that a consumer takes when considering only himself and his wants, needs and desires. For actions like these, direct response media measures activity on unidirectional paths. But in a social network, the user’s thought process shifts to include the effects that his action will have on others who see it on the platform (liking a brand on Facebook, retweeting a post on Twitter, etc.). This “friend mindset” creates a new way of interacting with media, products, services, brands, people and culture, which leads to many multidirectional paths of consumer behavior.

Display advertising takes a mostly uniform approach to deploying media, treating all publishers more or less the same. This is the approach expressed in the IAB Ad Unit Guidelines for interactive media. With standard formats such as these, it becomes easy to group together social platforms with publishers and view them as giant standardized-ad networks.

By contrast, individual social platforms attempt to reflect a set of unique consumer behaviors. The ways that users converse with close friends, versus their interaction with the general public or even with a significant other, are considerably different. There is no value in a strategy that treats all of these environments equally from a deployment and measurement perspective. The true value lies in strategies that take advantage of the niche benefits of each social network, which requires specific metrics for each behavior, Ad Age reports.