Nielsen Wants to Change the Way We Measure Facebook Success

Measuring success is one of those social media marketing sticking points that still has most people baffled. Traditional online metrics such as measuring click-throughs doesn’t really give you the full picture because a lot of social media campaigns are about awareness, not action. In other words, they function more like TV commercials than banner ads. This is why TV ratings leader Nielsen is working on bringing “Gross Ratings Points” to Facebook.

As explained in an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Gross Ratings Points are a metric that measures reach — “that is the size of an audience—by the “frequency” with which the audience sees a brand.”

comScore announced today that they’ve purchased AdXpose and will combine that with their current tools to bring “game-changing” metrics to online advertising. They’re taking the concept of GRP and going one better with what they call “Validated GRP.” They define this as “a measure of impressions that were legitimately delivered to a user, in the right context, within the right frequency range, to the desired target.”

It’s a lot to digest, but comScore has an oddly creepy video on their blog post which explains it better than I can.

The honest truth is that most of us throw whatever we can at Facebook and hope for the best. We figure every new “like” is a potential new customer and hey, you can’t not have a Facebook page, right? Maybe with this shift in metrics, we’ll finally see if posting to Facebook is time well spent, or whether we should be putting our efforts elsewhere.

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Randi Zuckerberg Leaves Facebook, Starts Own Company

Facebook Director of Marketing Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of founder Mark Zuckerberg, has decided to leave Facebook to start her own company.

Zuckerberg’s new company, RtoZ Media, will focus on helping companies become more social. “My goal is to launch my own innovative programming and work with media companies to develop their programming in new, and more social ways,” Zuckerberg said in her resignation letter.

The former Facebook marketing director will draw from her experiences developing the company’s marketing strategy and its popular live video channel, Facebook Live. She was recently nominated for an Emmy for her work with Facebook Live. (Mashable recently teamed up with Facebook Live for its SXSW coverage.)

In a phone call with Mashable, Zuckerberg said that she thinks of the move as a “natural extension” and had been considering the move “for a really long time.” With the success of Facebook Live and the Facebook-Obama town hall, she saw an opportunity to start her own company.

“I had the momentum to do it now,” she said.

The news, first reported by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, will come as a shock to the Silicon Valley establishment. Randi Zuckerberg has been a pivotal figure in Facebook’s growth, and her departure will create a void that not even her brother will be able to fill.

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