Yesterday I’ve been reading Samir Balwani’s great blog post about social media measurement. Reading the post and the comments, I’ve been directed to Jeff Hammonds blog post about social media metrics. And the combination of both posts opened my eyes.

Bandwith indicators are unsuitable for measurement of social media ROI. Bandwith is the indicator of the generation push. Social medias nature is pull. People only listen to thinks they care about. Your bandwith maybe high, your marketing KPI may be great – but your company crashed because nobody cares about your products.

Back to start. The bandwith indicator was made by a few guys. Thier effort was to measure the bandwith of marketing and advertising. They used bandwith as a benchmark and while more and more people used it, bandwith itself became a rule. But that’s a long time ago. It’s time to create new indicators. Free your mind and use a different term. I’ll call them “proxies” or “a proxy”. Proxies because it’s a known word from webtech and it describes what it is: A placeholder.

It’s time to develop social media proxies. These proxies measure “weak values”. This values are not direct bound to your work, the work of your deparment, the work of your company. But used wisely a “weak value” tells a story about the customers conception outside of the circle of control. And it’s nothing else than a placeholder, like bandwith is too. A proxy.

Here’s a wikimap showing social media proxies. Measurement placeholders capturing the social media circles of culture, conversation and commerce. Feel free to edit and update this map. May the bandwith rest in peace!

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