In general, the leaders in social media have done a good job of trying to work though this. There are good articles here, here and here. But ulimately, I think it’s a lot simpler than all of this.

There is only one way to measure the efforts put into any department in a company: the ultimate impact on sales. Anything that doesn’t allow the company to do a better job of delivering its value to the marketplace, which can only be measured by sales volumn, should be discontinued. That includes marketing and public relations efforts.

There are those who, like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, will shift metrics when the numbers don’t work out in their favor, but ulimately they will fail if they pretend that their inability to be productive is acceptable to any degree. Any agency that offers a complicated forumula to help you gauge the results of their efforts should be shown to the door. If they cannot show you how what they do will increase your sales, you are better off not spending the money.

When you love your clients and you genuinely admire the efforts they put into their product development and marketing, you naturally want to help them spread the word. But stories that are all spin, that are written based on conclusions worked out in advance without consideration for the facts will not serve the long-term best interests of the client.

To their credit, our customers don’t complain when we ask them why. Why did you develop your products this way? Why does it meet the market’s need? Why are you selling it this way? Why are you better than your competition? These are the same questions we ask experts from companies that are not our clients when we write about them for industry publications. We need the answers to create meaningful stories that will ring true with readers, because they are true.

These thoughts come to mind as I read a story in the New York Times about “hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.”

According to NYT:

“Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.”

How sad. In college, I worked side-by-side with physicists working on what was then the largest cloud chamber in the world. They faced many challenges as they worked to control the temperature and humidity of every square centimeter of a 3-foot diameter aluminum column that rose up three stories from the basement of the Physics Building. They hoped to create clouds in a very controlled environment, mostly so we could pollute them and see what happened.

Many of the things they tried didn’t work. There were plenty of skeptics saying they would never get it done. Even so, they continued their work steadfastly, competing against themselves and using the data to tell them how close they were coming to their goal. They never attempted to trick the data they were getting into defeating their skeptics. What real scientist would do this?

Global Warming is a politically charged issue that could have a very real impact on our future survival. We need to find out what’s going on and what part we play, if any, in the changes we’re observing in our environment. It’s not a contest to be won by a particular political party or scientific camp. It requires scientific objectivity, not allegiance to a foregone conclusion that may have nothing to do with the truth.

Being objective can be one of the hardest things a business manager–especially a marketing manager–is asked to do. We ask our clients to do it every day and we make sure we don’t let them down by drinking the Kool-Aide before we know what the facts are. That’s how we ensure that our advice always adds value.

Would we be able to do this if we didn’t work with the industry’s best companies? Probably not. Like I said, we’re fortunate.

At least that’s the message we got from this recent post on Agent Genius. Brandie Young writes:

The organizers brought together C-Level (COB, CEO, COO, etc), high-level executives from across the servicing value chain (and around the globe), economists, GSEs and others for a series of peer-to-peer, brutally candid conversations lasting two days.  The concept was to foster open, candid sharing and panelists were asked (and answered) challenging questions.

We’re very happy to hear that the show was a big success. We’re starting to get used to the fact that everything Paul Jackson is involved with turns to gold.

To be fair, DS2009 wasn’t the first conference industry built around a critical issue that attempted to really open up a dialog among all interested parties and add value to the conversation. We were involved in the Veros Predictive Methods Conference for a number of years and were very impressed at how the company overcame barriers between competitors to get analysts, risk managers and executives into sessions where they could work through real industry problems together.

In the end, Brandie at Agent Genius is right, it comes back to the content you deliver. But I don’t see how that has anything to do with whether you make a profit or not. Being cheap doesn’t necessarily guarantee a higher value.

That said, I do feel that trade organizations have a responsibility to offer more in the way of training and thought leadership to their members. Offering killer events, whether live or virtual, is one great way to do that.