• by Bill Wise , July 6, 2011

In case you needed further evidence that TV metrics need an update, look no further than Tweet Week.

The event, which took place this April, was an occasion for CBS stars to chat directly with fans over the social network. eMarketer recently ran a post-game analysis with George Schweitzer, president of CBS Marketing Group. The numbers seemed positive, but bad news on the metrics front loomed below the surface.

First, the good news. The week ended with the network's top stars gaining a collective 50,000 new Twitter followers. In a Twitterverse where @Shaq has 4 million followers, 50,000 isn't an earth-shattering number; but considering social media ripple effects, 50,000 additional fans inside of a week is definitely a nice achievement.

But things get complicated on the ratings front. In a rare moment of media industry honesty, Schweitzer offered this: "In terms of ratings [impact], we'll never know." Which is to say: there was no concrete way for CBS to connect the new Twitter followers to its bottom line.

Schweitzer didn't elaborate on the precise CBS's precise Twitter measurement problem. But what is clear is that if one of the most powerful media organizations on earth has trouble measuring social media-to-offline connections, then we all have a problem. So it's worth taking a moment here to consider why CBS-and other forward-thinking media organizations-can't close the Twitter/TV measurement gap.

One obvious place to look is technology. Since CBS can't cookie a TV viewer, there's no real way for CBS to know how its Twitter following engages with its offline content. Now, we're definitely heading toward better technological connections between offline and digital channels, particularly via mobile devices (consider subway billboards that serve as mobile grocery stores). But until all the connections are seamlessly integrated, there will always be holes in understanding how the connections fit.

Another culprit to consider is organizational: many media businesses have siloed the digital and traditional sides of the house -- and it's hard to coordinate efforts across siloed businesses. Media companies are keenly aware of this; and we're seeing restructuring of media companies from "new media" and "old  media" into media, plain and simple. The recent consolidation of three entities at IPG's Initiative is great example of that new, smarter approach.

The Initiative consolidation and mobile connections both point to ways the organizational and technological problems are surmountable. What concerns me more is a matter of how metrics evolve. Put simply: while media channels emerge quickly, TV metrics evolve slowly.

Consider the dozens of very new media outlets -- from Twitter to Foursquare -- that hit their tipping points over the past five years. The industry is trying hard to understand how to sync these new channels with traditional ones -- which means, for instance, translating "follows" and social graph data into ratings points. It could also mean allowing TV measurement to evolve past ratings points altogether, into a more digital / social-friendly metric.

Is the traditional media world ready to adapt metrics to sync with the new digital challenges? I'm skeptical. As anyone who's familiar with, say, the immense hurdles the industry has faced in time-shifted ratings can tell you, traditional media metrics have had real challenges keeping pace with changes in their own small universe, let alone with changes beyond the TV space.

That's a real problem. It might mean we're headed toward a future where one half of the media world just doesn't know what the other half is doing. In an era of ever-increasing connections between the touchpoints, that's untenable.

I'd like to revisit just what the social media-enabled TV metrics might look like in a later post. But for now, I'll end with a challenge for everyone in this community to work through ways of bringing TV and other traditional measurement up to speed with the newest media outlets.  If that isn't possible, we'll be looking at metrics stories that are horribly outdated-maybe as outdated as yesterday's tweet.

Next week: why I'm still highly bullish on TV as a medium for brands and for ad monetization, despite the metrics challenges.