Answer these questions convincingly, and emerging media enters the big leagues of advertising. Writing in Ad Age last week, Steve Rubel, Senior VP at Edelman's Me2Revolution practice and a thought-leading blogger and media strategist, writes that a metric to track "influence" is the holy grail for advertisers who are monitoring the new digital media.


Audiences I have addressed recently on the subject of "new" marketing, along with MarketingProfs seminar audiences, never fail to ask the question about measures of impact for new media. After all, marketers have made a lot of progress to identify which half of their budget gets results, thus overcoming the challenge of accountability. We now have methodologies and repeatable processes to measure marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
Still, for emerging media, you may have to be satisfied with qualitative measures of impact. At least for now. After all, if you have two readers of your blog, and those two readers have the first name of Steve (Balmer and Jobs), your blog may be far more influential than another blog on technology with thousands of readers.
Rubel says that Edelman is currently testing a new measurement system, and I suspect many other media measurement companies have tests in the works as well.
How do you answer these questions, and what's convincing to the uninitiated?