• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, January 5, 2015

It is customary in most companies to perform a year-end evaluation of the people that work for them, as well as for the people they work with (like agencies and other marketing partners).

I am very much in favor of this practice, which has evolved significantly over the years. In the olden days (last century) this was a great opportunity for those in power to favor the people they liked, and bludgeon the people they didn’t. But then the 360-degree evaluation came along, as well as the anonymous peer evaluation. Darn it, those evaluations actually started to ring true (and became a lot less fun to perform).

In this age of big data -- and because I have been writing here for a full year -- I have decided to use the data that Mediapost shares for each post as my performance evaluation as delivered by you. And I am sharing them in full disclosure, as you do with a 360 performance review.

Mediapost gives us three measures: “Comments,” “Recommend” (akin to a “Like”) and “Share.” I think ultimately “Share” is a true measure of you caring. If you took the trouble to share it on a social network, it means you were either intrigued or annoyed by what I wrote, and I consider that “mission accomplished.”

What did I learn from the data?

• There is absolutely no predicting what will resonate with you or annoy you.
• Those articles that garnered the most comments are actually not the most shared.
• And vice versa, those that were shared the most only scored an average number of comments.
• My second least-shared article (“World Cup Sponsorship: Priceless”) was my most-read article when I cross-posted it on LinkedIn.
• When I invent something original, as I did with the acronyms SMFP and SERPENT, you don’t care. Truly low scores are the result.
• When I tell you your job is going to be lost, you do care. A lot. See next paragraph.

In terms of most-shared, the top three looked like this:

1. "The Unstoppable Growth Of Programmatic Is Going To Kill Jobs"

2. “Global Agency Media Deals: Trust Us Because We Are Big (And Thus Biased”

3. “TV Buying And Selling In 2020: Science Fiction Or Future Science?”

My all-time-lowest-scoring article covered media inflation for 2014. Clearly you didn’t care about the fact that all media costs in 2014 in all countries around the world actually went up anywhere between 2% and 40%+. Do you think reach and frequency for all media in all countries around the world went up by the same? Spoiler alert: They didn’t. So you should care. Very soon the World Federation of Advertisers will report on the 2015 numbers. And I think I will write about it again. That will be your chance to redeem yourself.

Because that is the beauty of this column. Mediapost editors do not suggest topics, come up with content, push us to cover sponsor PR releases or anything like that. In that respect, we are a bastion of free press, with no content marketing guidance (as opposed to most other media outlets nowadays!).

So expect more of the same from me for the coming year. I am sure I still won’t know what will hit or miss the mark with you, but rest assured that when I write about something, it is because I really care.