Each year in the middle of the lazy, hazy summer we provide you, dear readers, with measurement reading material for when that latest paperback thriller loses its luster. Our purpose here is partly to parade The Measurement Advisor’s most popular articles, both during the past year and over all fifteen years of our publication. (That’s over 500 posts, by the way.) But we also want to point you toward truly useful resources and interesting reads.
So this isn’t just a download of Google Analytic’s pageview all-stars. Here at The Measurement Advisor we are proud to be the least boring newsletter of communications measurement. So we’ve built our proprietary R.E.A.D. (Reading Excitement Algorithmic Decider) system to filter out posts of limited interest. The result is skewed towards practical advice and away from flash-in-the-pan posts. Like those that dealt with specific conferences, or old-news scandalous events. (Or even, as luridly delightful as it was, last year’s Bodice-Ripping Summer Reading Special. Click on that image to the right; Fabio awaits.)
James Patterson has been the world’s best-selling author since 2001, with over 300 million books in print. But he has yet to write a thriller about measurement. (Hey, come to think of it, “Measurement Murder at Midnight” has a nice ring to it.) Here is your summertime measurement reading (some articles may require a subscription):
Show Your Value, or, How to Win the Measurement Argument with Your Boss
Katie Paine says that the most frequently asked questions at conferences are about how to show your value. Our readers have shown the same high level of interest:
- How To Show Your Contribution to the Bottom Line
- How to Break Up With Impressions: 4 Steps to Start Measuring What’s Really Valuable
- How to Write a Fabulous Media Measurement Report in 4 Hours or Less
- Industry Benchmarks: How Do Your Numbers Compare?
- Measuring the Effectiveness of News Releases — A Case Study by Greg Jarboe
How To Measure
The purpose of The Measurement Advisor is to help our readers do better communications measurement. So it’s no surprise that How To Measure is the most common category clicked on. If you go there right now, you will discover step-by-step guides, checklists, and advice for measuring most every aspect of communications.
The most popular how-to posts of the past year:
- Your Guide to Trust: How to Get It, Keep It, Measure It, and Regain It
- 7 Measurement Skills That Cause Stress—and How to End the Anxiety
- The 6 Worst Communications Measurement Things of 2017 — and How to Fix Them
…and your perennial favorites, our most popular how-to posts of all time:
- How To Develop Your Own Social Media Engagement Index
- Data Points You Absolutely, Positively Need in Your Communications Dashboard
- How to Evaluate Speaker Opportunities and Measure Thought Leadership Programs
- The Essential Toolkit for Internal Communications Measurement
- Nine Common Measurement Needs and the Best Vendors to Solve Them
The Future of Measurement
Our publisher Katie Paine has been doing measurement, inventing new techniques for measurement, and writing about measurement since the 1980s. She’s always been ahead of her time, and certainly not afraid to write about what she sees there:
- A New Organizational Chart: Reinventing Communications for the Digital Age
- Murder by Bad Metrics: PR Agencies Must Adapt or Die
- Welcome to 2018: What Will and Won’t Happen In Communications Measurement
- Katie Paine’s Communications Measurement Predictions for 2018
OK, enough measurement for a summer day. Time to return to your beach reading. What?! You don’t have a stack of potboilers to take to the beach? Here are Elle magazine’s recommendations. Don’t forget your sunscreen. ∞
