info-design

Has it been already two years since Best Buy posted an "Emerging Media Marketing" position? In a historical moment of what has come to be called "social media," the original posting was sufficiently awkward that Best Buy pulled back and did a nice save by pulling the crowdsourcing card for the position. I voted for the description by new at the time Tweep @zamees who, of course, blogged the episode.

This came to mind as I was reading "A Framework for Social Analytics" by Susan Etlinger at Altimeter Group (copy below). It's a nice piece for helping you to form a mental model around social media. Certainly, a good launching point, along with practical steps. At the time of the Best Buy posting, if you'd asked me what things would look like today, I'd have thought that we'd be further along than we are. You know, the Internet Time thing. But even Etlinger references social media as still emerging. Others also see it as still early. Fast Company's Farhad Manjoo, in "Does Social Media Have A Return On Investment? " echoes the theme that we're not even yet at a point where we can measure well.

I guess this shouldn't be a surprise given that even a more mature area such as SEO is still in ascendancy. A recent Search Engine Land report cites the finding that 31% of responding practitioners are new to SEO as of the last 12 months. That is, they were not practicing SEO with clients 12 months ago.

Don't get me wrong. I've always loved this frontier stuff. I get excited when the authors talk about coaxing out the data and being willing to integrate multiple data sources. I was just surprised that two years had gone by and we are where we are.

Labels: social media