I will be speaking on a panel at this years Podcast and New Media Expo on Friday September 28th in Ontario, CA. The panel is dubbed “Metrics in New Media: Showing Results and Judging Success ” and as of today’s date I will be participating with Paul Vogelzang of Porter Novelli / Mommycast, and Matt Snodgrass of Porter Novelli and the Open Metrics initiative.

There is a lot of talk about metrics these days, simply because metrics are what matter to marketers. They are our guiding light in the online world, we simply need to know our ROI. Podcasting, in its ripe old age of 2 years + a few months already has a movement towards establishing an open set of metric standards that the industry can adhere to.

Metrics can be a tough thing to nail down. Even in the email business, we still (after ALL of these years) continue to flush out metrics due to a continuously shifting landscape around deliverability and bounced emails. A recent study by the Email Experience Council highlighted the lack of standardization around email definitions and metrics, making it difficult to for some marketers to optimize the medium. The IAB’s email committee is also working on new documentation, and David Daniels of Jupiter Research is spearheading the Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition. There is a lot of activity around continuously developing and refining a standardized set of metrics for which even a mature industry can continue to accurately measure its performance from.

This brings back recent memories of Podcamp NYC, where John Havens, Lee Gibbons, Kris Smith, Dave Kawalec, Matt Snodgrass, and Chris MacDonald and I, sat on a panel and preached the importance of the Podcast Open Metrics Initiative. Podcasting as an evolving medium for advertising and marketing, is now at a point where there needs to be some kind of base industry standardized metrics that will allow marketers the ability to effectively measure reach and ROI to the greatest degree possible. Developing standardization around a defined set of metrics now, will have a huge affect on the speed in which advertisers and sponsors adopt the medium.

For podcasting, this is only the beginning and an ever important point in time. Many companies are looking to participate and may still be on the fence due to a lack of industry metrics. For email, its an evolving issue and one that our industry is on top of, aggressively. We know that email delivers one of the highest ROI’s of any online channel, and as an industry we stay on top of the changes in our space to ensure continued success.

Metrics are always a hot item in the world of online marketing, but there is one medium that’s of particular interest in our industry these days, its the new kid on the block, podcasting. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Podcasting, Media, Marketing, Business, Blogging, Trends, Technology, Travels, Friends, People, Entrepreneurship, Ideas, Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: openmetrics, podcastexpo, roi, marketing, metrics, eec, strongmail, emailmarketing,