by Kirsty Pitkin How to Measure And what does that even mean? A
fter an event is over, we take stock. We measure the number of tweets, the number of people who could have possibly seen those tweets, the number of blog posts, the
number of discussion threads in the LinkedIn group, etc., etc., etc… We take these numbers to indicate the level of engagement sur- rounding an event. But is this what they are actually telling us? A recent post by Ann Priestley challenged me to think about the ways we measure the online engagement with a conference. She presented a graph from Socious, who use the high peak of ac- tivity during an event and sharp tapering of this activity after the event as part of their argument to sell their product. Their implica- tion is that unless your event has a long tail of post-event activity, it is not as successful at long-term engagement. My concern here is that it is easy to confuse “activity” and “en- gagement.” I admit that I have been as guilty of this as anyone else. The number of tweets generated during an event can sound impressive and help event organizers to see the value of supporting the use of Twitter by the audience. However, the number of tweets on a hashtag only represents the level of current activity, not nec- essarily the level of ongoing engagement. At the end of the day, all event-related activity tapers off sharply after the event itself, moving aside for more natural discourse and engagement with the topics, without the constraints of the event identity and structure.
how actively engaged the audience is with the topic at that point in time, when there is a collected audience sharing that experi- ence with them in real time. However, after the event, the ideas discussed and the connections made may not be associated with the conference hashtag, making them difficult to trace. We can’t currently record new follows that result from use of a conference hashtag (to my knowledge!) and we can’t automatically determine if a conversation a month afterwards is an extension of ideas raised by the conference, unless the participants have tagged it. Once the flush of public activity around the event is over, this might not be appropriate for either party, so the traceable link diminishes, but the engagement between the participants about related issues remains. Equally, a reflective blog post after the event demonstrates that one individual was deeply engaged with the issues raised at that point in time. If it is tagged, we can find it. However, unless we measure the number of people who read that post over time, com- mented on it or linked to it (both literally and thematically), then we have no idea whether it has led to further engagement beyond this point.
Engagement is very much a soft issue and difficult, if not im-
possible, to measure accurately. Activity is easy. You can see out- puts of activity very clearly. They can be tagged and identified and measured and visualized. Engagement is much more subjective and dispersed, along with the audience. Tweeting prolifically during a conference may demonstrate
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Conference producers may be interested in connecting every- thing back to the original event, but the delegates themselves are usually more interested in the topics than the event identity. This makes it especially difficult to attribute the results of engagement to the event the farther away from it that you get. With an amplified event, the person engaging may only have a very general awareness of the original event that triggered the content or conversation in the first place, significantly reducing the likelihood that they would tag their response to make it traceable.
MIDWEST MEETINGS WINTER 2011
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