"Social media metrics" is a huge buzz phrase lately -- but does anyone REALLY know what it means? Can you define it? The social media space covers a broad set of channels: widgets, blogging, social applications, micro-blogging and more. Each one of these segments, and their associated vendors, are reporting on and introducing new metrics associated with their platform, which some Web analytics tools may or may not be able to tap into. This leaves the marketer in the Web 2.0 space struggling to determine how to integrate and correlate (and reconcile) metrics being reported across all of these media. …

At a recent conference, there was renewed conversation about the clickthrough. The MRC is very far along on standardization of this metric, yet agencies feel that it is dead from a relevance standpoint. They feel the way this hallowed metric is being used harms the campaigns it is purporting to measure. How can this be true? Read on.

Last month, Hula (a joint venture between NBC and Fox) attracted nearly 2.5 million unique viewers (presumably defined by distinct cookies), who streamed content an average of more than 20 times each! That's a bigger, more engaged audience than many cable stations draw in a month's time. All this is causing pre-revolution heartburn in the media departments of major ad agencies today. They're trying to figure out which metrics best equate clicks (or streams) to GRiPs (gross rating points), so they can compare the costs of advertising online to advertising on TV. Apples-to-apples. Wrong mission.

Next month I'm on a keynote panel at the Advertising Research Foundation's third annual Audience Measurement Symposium (AM 3.0), titled "The TV/Video Audience Measurement Challenge." I've been thinking a lot about video lately, and talking about video with interactive agencies, traditional agencies, major TV companies porting their content online, and pure-play Internet companies expanding into video. I've come to believe that video is perhaps the most important development in the online metrics space, and that the rapid rise in importance of video will be -- and for many, has already been -- a game-changer.

You've worked hard to let people in your organization know that there is this great tool called Web analytics that can give them great intelligence about the workings of the Web site, great leaps forward in optimizing campaign ROI and great insight into the hearts and minds of the marketplace. They appear interested, but only a handful reach out to ask for data. And what do they want? Hits reports. You become the person that cranks out reports instead of the person who provides valuable insights.

The piece on viewthrough and how to more accurately measure it in last week's Metrics Insider was appropriate from a timing standpoint. And as Paul Harvey was fond of saying on the radio: "Now, for the rest of the story."

One of the biggest challenges the online advertising industry faces is how to account for viewthrough conversions. For people who are new to the landscape, there are two types of conversions resulting from an online ad campaign: clickthrough and viewthrough. Clickthrough conversions are those conversions that happen after a user clicks on an ad. Unlike clickthroughs, viewthrough conversions happen when a user is served an ad upon visiting the publisher site. These conversions are differentiated from clickthroughs by the fact that the individual did not click on the ad even though the conversion did occur at a later time. For …

Last week David Smith, with whom I share this space on alternate Tuesdays, wrote a piece calling Quantcast "the Next Generation of Media Research." I found myself disagreeing with this characterization -- perhaps not an entirely surprising response from the Chief Research Officer at comScore. Fortunately, I get my own column to offer a slightly different perspective, so hear me out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've heard this before, right? This time it is for real -- and I vouch for it because I was directly involved from the WAA side and personally involved in every email and phone call that took place to actually bring this effort to fruition.