I got a call from a company that I am advising that was looking for advice on certification. They were the first to put onto my radar that the ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) had announced its Digital Technology Accreditation program, with the first accreditation going to Clearspring, the "world's leading widget syndication and tracking service." A similar accreditation has recently been granted by IMServices for Massive. This interested and bothered me at the same time.

It's gratifying to see the increasing popularity of marketing measurement. You can barely get through an article on marketing these days without seeing "ROI" or "metrics" in the copy. Google search on "Marketing ROI" and you'll get 16.5 million hits. Unfortunately, in a world where anyone can publish anything electronically and everything looks good at first glance, marketing measurement solutions are being tossed about rather casually. "ROI" has become shorthand to describe any ambiguous effort to associate spend with economic value. "Metrics" are anything you can build a bar or pie chart on. And don't even get me started on …

So this guy I know told me that he heard from a very influential friend of his that all the buzz on the M15 bus last week was about Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. Some people call it conversational marketing; others call it "listening to the consumer." (And from there it's just a hop, skip and jump to social media, CGM, and "Web 2.0.") So today I came to an Advertising Research Foundation workshop on WOM marketing, because I'm easily influenced. So why all the buzz about buzz?

My job is to help companies understand and strategize around the use of Web metrics to optimize their marketing. After explaining the massive multitude of measurements one *could* tabulate, it's time to decide what the organization, department, group or project *should* measure. With so many measurement options, the question is seldom about standards or technologies, but always about goals. What are you trying to accomplish?

One school of thought suggests that it is short-form video that will continue to rule online video. I'm not convinced; the Internet is not just a medium (per se); it is also a distribution platform. In other words, it can be compared to TV, but it can also be compared to broadcast or cable or satellite (the technology that distributes TV.) I tend to believe that we'll continue to see Internet streaming eat into the distribution share of other video distribution technologies (broadcast, cable) as a means for consumers accessing long-form professional content.

Reach and frequency and the core concepts of traditional media planning and advertising: These data, of course, available in free or for-pay tools, are certainly helpful for planning campaigns. But reach measures can be dirty (cookies, unduplicated unique users, estimates from panels, coverage error). Frequency measures can be just as dirty (problems recording time in single page visits or visits on the last page, do page views really matter with AJAX and rich media, cookies again, and so on). We all are aware of the challenges.

The Google Ad Planner announcement last week, timed to the annual ARF conference, got a tremendous amount of interest in the press. In fact, as an "industry quotable," I do not remember a story this year that has gotten as many calls. So the question is, what's all of the hullabaloo about?

This week I moderated a panel at OMMA Social that focused on social media metrics. In preparing for the panel, I started my research with trying to define what social media measurement really is. I had a preconceived notion that everything can be measured, right? Well, to quote someone from the conference (who was quoting Einstein), "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

If you are not a reader of Erwin Ephron's Ephron On Media , you should be. Ephron is credited with having "invented" media planning. Where that is true or not (probably is), Ephron has certainly been around since the start of media planning in the '60s. And he remains one of the lucid voices in the media opinion world. In his most recent piece, he talks about the new Nielsen fusion initiative which marries the NTI TV ratings service with measures on streaming video and consumer purchase behavior. He explains in greater detail than I will go into here, fusion …

A client shared with me a copy of a solicitation email they got from an otherwise reputable marketing measurement company with a proprietary methodology for linking the value of marketing communications to shareholder value.