Impressions are totally worthless! Why would I measure total or unique pageviews? I care more about behaviors! Followers, likes, Twitter lists are completely meaningless. Stop me if you've heard any of these comments (or variations therein) in your career....I'm guessing you have, right? In the words of Lee Corso, "not so fast my friend!"

So many conversations about measurement get bogged down in the weeds. Even if we are starting at the proper place -- the planning phase -- the natural instinct is for us to focus on the metrics themselves. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't play one on television so I'm not going to guess as to why that happens. It just does. Where should the focus lie if it doesn't focus on the metrics?

This is a conversation MUCH older than I am so you've probably heard this before, but you start with the business objective. What's a common business objective? Growing your business or improving financial performance, right? As soon as you've landed on that you can focus on the business metric. What's a common business metric? Growing sales of a particular product right? In addition to growing sales, a common business metric is raising awareness of a particular product. When you've landed on those two elements, you can then focus on specific social media metrics. Awareness and sales are two items that are quite often business and social media metrics.

At this point, you've all likely seen, heard or read the article from McKinsey a couple of years ago about how customers are starting to move outside of the traditional purchasing funnel. If you've ever done any digital consumer research (listening, surveys, consumer segmentation analysis, etc...) you'll know that McKinsey is right. How people search for and find information about your product is changing (it might've already changed for whatever that's worth). However the funnel is changing, product awareness is still a component of the funnel.

Now, before I go any further please know that I'd never advocate using JUST awareness-related business metrics or social media metrics. That's where the wheels do fall off of the tracks. Awareness, like any other business metric is just one component of the measurement process. You'll probably also want to track interactions, brand loyalty/affinity and, gasp, sales. Again, though, you'll want to make sure these metrics are aligned to overall business objectives before you start putting anything in stone.

So, if you agree with me and are going to start looking at awareness-related social media metrics more closely what should you be looking at? Impressions, pageviews, likes, followers and Twitter lists are all great places to start. But what about things that aren't served up to you on a Facebook Insights platter? What about aided and unaided awareness questions from a survey? It's certainly possible and in fact it probably should be done more often than it is now. Have you thought about creating a standard survey instrument that you can post on your social media communities? If not, start TODAY.

Awareness metrics aren't the devil. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Awareness is an important part of the sales funnel today, and in the sales funnel that McKinsey represents in the article linked to above. If awareness is part of your overall business goals then awareness should appear in your measurement scorecard. Period.

Go forth and be aware!