Measure What Matters

Over the course of these last few weeks winding down the semester, we have been reading a book titled “Measure What Matters.” This book, as you can guess, is all about measuring the important stuff on your social media profiles. This book proved itself useful to the business professional all the way to an amateur social media user like myself. This book covers everything from what you can measure, how you can measure it, cost of measurement and the importance of measurement. Looking back on this book there have been more “aha” moments than “duh” moments which has been good to learn a new skill to transfer to my professional career. That’s what school is all about right?

One of my biggest “aha” moments was the idea of measurement being free. Using social media as much as I do, I would’ve guessed the most successful companies are using high dollar tracking systems to make sure their twitter profile is thriving and getting across the point it needs to get across which is not the case. You and I can use the same programs to track our stats on twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. just as easily. Would I really want to look and see the stats from my three tweets in the last month and two Instagram posts? Not necessarily, but if I started working with companies and promoting products and started to get more popular and post regularly, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

One thing that stood out to me about the book is the focus it had on every day, common topics needing attention because they can get lost very easily. What I mean is topics like reputation and caring about what your employees think. These aspects can make or break your business yet can often be forgotten so taking these into account can help tremendously. I like what the book has to say about employees because it talks about the importance of not only gaining the trust of your customers to have a successful business but also your employees. It is hard to keep a successful business when employees don’t like or respect their boss, and this can lead to the downfall of a business nine times out of 10.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. As I stated earlier, it taught me a lot and I was impressed with the thoroughness Katie Paine brought into “Measure What Matters.” It covered so many topics in so many ways and was very easy to comprehend and understand. I would recommend this to any business professional, PR professional, anyone learning social media measurement or even anyone who is just interested in learning more about social media.