I was alerted to an article this morning by Slashdot which piqued my curiosity - something that gets piqued (what a great word) every now and then. This article appeared in the Australian edition of Computerworld and, much to my right-brained surprise, was onmeasuring web metrics and how the terms of measurement are changing. It goes like this....
With the rise of AJAX and streaming media, content can be refreshed without "turning the web page" e.g creating a new page view. That means that measuring the number of page views becomes secondary to the amount of time spent on a site is a more accurate gauge of the "value" and "ranking" of the site. Page views will become secondary.
Most affected by this of course is going to be search-driven sites like Google, since Google is something that you spend only a little time on as you craft your search and then go to the results. The sites that will be benefited are social networking sites like Facebook or YouTube which gets an extra boost because all the streaming media sites have things you watch over a longer time which means more time spent as you watch it.
Of course, this move raises a significant question for how you measure ANYTHING in the Web 2.0 world. If you create a social network for your business and you have a small number of registrants that spend a lot of time on the site, is that a success? Well, it could be a piece of measurement for customer advocacy I suppose. But what does the small number mean?
I don't know. That may be a stupid example, but what I find utterly fascinating is that the left-brained side of CRM and anything customer/consumer related that has to be measured to find some sort of value in it is being questioned or transformed.
What I'd like to know from anyone reading this, are there companies that are developing metrics that will measure the "value" of customers in a Web 2.0 driven customer-ecosystem?
This isn't a rhetorical question.
I don't know too many that are. You may.
Companies like Satmetrix are doing what seems to be a good job, though I haven't really delved deeply yet, into measuring the customer experience which is one area that has have its benchmarks constantly changed. But I need to know more than that. I'm taking suggestions that will be attributed for the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light here.
Plus, if someone wants to write a short blog entry on it, I'll put it up here.
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