Concepts of attention, attitude and action

What do social media managers referring o when they talk about attention?  How can you tell that people are even listening and aware?  And how do you capture it to measure?  Kami Watson who writes a lot on her fantastic blog about measurement refers to attention as the “overall interest”  in your product/service.  There are tons of ways to analyze this.  Some common ones include:

·         fans

·         likes

·         page/video views

·         click through rates

·         volume of mention

·         net reach

Attitude should not be the measure of profit and loss. Whenever I hear P&L I immediately get hungry and think of pb&j sandwiches.  Attitude is the same as sentiment ratings.  Whether it’s positive or negative definitely impacts your goals.  However having positive sentiment won’t equate to fabulous ROI if your call to action falls short.

Do I have your attention?

What is your attitude towards a PB&J Sandwich?

 Attitude is not a measure of a successful social media practise. 

A good case in point would be my friends experience with her companies face book campaign.   Her family owns and operates a hugely successful snack food company that has won the hearts of Canadians and is now on the shelves of almost every national chain grocer.  They have been offering free vouchers for their product.  For years, they were leveraging the vouchers to get positive sentiment and drive sales.  Facebook was used to maximize reach of the vouchers.  They finally realized that too many FB fans were not actually buying the product but depending on the vouchers.  There were even “extreme couponers” complaining that there were not enough free vouchers! Although the attention and for the most part attitude was there, they had to shift focus to target the audience that was actually going to purchase the snack.  Since then, they have printed and focused on “buy one, get one free” vouchers.

What Blanchard is really trying to say is non-financial measurements tell the story as to why goals were or were not met?  Attention and attitude tell this story and drive action.  Action is what will ultimately increase revenue or reduce costs.  And this will save us our job.



Action is measurable and shows how your campaign influenced and moved people.   It produces the goodies we all want in PR- What did your targeted audience to in the end to help you achieve your business goals.