Good piece.

I would say the old adage holds. What you cannot measure, you cannot manage. So where there is the need to manage (or ‘control’ which is what you prefer here), measurement and metrics are essential.

That said I agree with your criticism that brands mustn’t discard social media as a channel off-hand just because the metrics have not evolved.

But that is the problem definition. Where are the alternatives, the possible solutions?

Perhaps you want to look back in the history of mainstream media and identify how long it took for brands to adopt radio advertising and then how long it took for widely accepted metrics to evolve.

The problem has not changed. But with the web in the picture, two other things happen: one is that the internets people believe their own hype rather a lot so this could be a case of their own intellectual incapacity to sell the concept well to brand managers. Secondly, the echo chamber of the web amplifies the noise such that the hype looks bigger than it is. The web does disable quiet reflection quite summarily. This issue needs the social media people to sit down and reflect on what needs to be measured and how. But then again if that were the case, some or the other social media company would have found a monetisation model by now, no? 😉