From best practices will come consensus–and ultimately tools to be measured against.

From my perspective, the wild west that we live in now is great-because I can make the numbers tell any story I want. It would be great though to be able to do a side by side comparison-figure out what works and why–and then replicate it.

My response to your comment, below:

Well said. Key point here is that - unlike our predecessors in broadcast 50 years ago - ours is a crisis of abundance. You are spot on there. Building the mountain of data was step one. Gleaning *information* from it turns out to be the tricky bit, followed closely by enabling productive action on that information.

I think the only way to achieve a consensus is to quantifiably demonstrate the link between some set of metrics and the tangible business results that brands really care about. In the end all marketing boils down to changing what a target group of real people think, feel, or do in the “real” world.

The team that can find a way to look through what’s observable on-network and establish a statistical correlation between social indicators and off-network sales will have the high ground in the inevitable battle over standards. You have as good a shot at that as anyone, I’d be happy to help if I can.