Out of the Page View Ashes will rise a Social Media Measurement Index

Steve Rubel indicates that the Page View ranking as a primary index is dying. Ajax, RSS, don’t indicate exactly how the content is being consumed, let alone what users do with the content and their sentiment.

The solution is a new type of index will come in to play. Social Media will influence it. Just ‘visiting’ a site doesn’t indicate what users have the capabilities to do now. Users can now do the following

• Users can interact with the page
• Rate the page
• Tag the page with Delicious
• Comment about it
• Blog about it
• Link to it
• Page rank doesn’t indicate duration of stay either, or if they even read the content!

I’m on a serious knowledge question to understand what do Marketers want to measure when it comes to Social Media. Web users can actually perform actions other than pure clicks to page views on web pages.

This coming Tuesday, I’m helping Factiva run a Roundtable Workshop to answer those very questions. I’ve also listed out a bunch of companies that measure social media, and contributed to a partial list of things (Steve Rubel did too) that could be measured. (I could easily double this list)

This article was written by Jeremiah Owyang, a Web Strategist from the SF Bay Area. Check out his blog at http://www.web-strategist.com/