Wait a minute – Is Facebook a success?
Traditionally we compare social medias to traditional mass media products, like newspapers, radio, and television. The for example explains why it is that there is so much focus on how many user’s Facebook has, how man friends a person has, or how many likes a Facebook page can amass. Valuating a media has traditionally been a question about eyeballs. But that where in a time where content creation and media platform where controlled by the same people, in social media the creation of content has been outsourced to the users of the given platform, so are the same logic about value creation still relevant, or has something chanced?
I recently submitted my Master thesis about ‘Value creation in the era of social media’ (In Danish, working on an English translation), I argue that something has chanced, and that values creation in social mediums is less about the content and more about the discourse around the content. Therefore, this would mean that the successful social media would be the platform where the users create the most value. But, how do you measur that, in a reliable way?
If value creation is all about the discourse then, naturally the more conversation that can be captures and measured, the more value we capture and measure. Lets take Facebook for instance, one KPI could be:
- The number of comments user gets on a specific content.
When a user is sharing some content with his or her network, then we look at the comments that are posted around that specific content, given that the comments are of a certain length to ensure that the specific comment appends value to the discourse.
- The number of times content is being re-shared.
When someone is re-sharing a specific content, he or she is interjecting the content into a new discourse and thereby creating value, if that user is including a personal comment in connection with the re-share. This last part is important because we need to distinguish between reproducing and producing content. When someone is appending a personal perspective on the content re-shared, it is no longer a reproduction of the specific content, but the production of something new.
The above is just two suggestions for how we can measure value in social media, and I know that I am not addressing my friend’s question on which financial KPIs should be used, but I would argue that before we can masseur the financial gains from the value created in Social media, we must first understand how value is created. I believe that this is a great first step.
