Some Experts Know Their Stuff
by Joseph Jaramillo
As a follow-up to the “experts” link I posted earlier today, I’ll draw attention to this nugget from a post by Jason Baer over at Convince and Convert:
You know where you stand in old media. Flawed though they may be, entire industries have been built around measuring and ranking traditional media like television (Nielsen), radio (Arbitron), and print (Audit Bureau and others). I can use Google to find the top 10 TV shows, top 10 daily newspapers, top 10 magazines and an almost limitless supply of other data points about who’s garnering the most eyeballs.
New media has more data, but less insight.
There are exceptions to every rule, and when it comes to my rule on social media experts, Jason is definitely top of the list.
Most so-called experts hate being judged, graded, or otherwise taken to task. The real experts in any field are those who demand metrics by which their assertions can be judged.
Tags: experts, social media
Thanks Joseph. I appreciate the kind words and the link. The amazing shortcoming, however, is that TV/radio/print metrics are 1000% flawed. There are 3.1 million people in Greater Phoenix. Last I heard, there were 450 Nielsen households deciding TV ratings (and thus ad revenue). Talk about extrapolated data. The good news is that new media has the opportunity to track usage individually. The sad news is that sites refuse to divulge data at that level of specificity, so we’re left with Compete.com and Quantcast.com and Alexa (yikes) which use the same weak methodology that Nielsen used to build an empire. We can and should do better as an industry.
Permalink: March 26th, 2009 at 3:52 pm