Facebook likes are the new AVE

By , May 20 2011, 10:51 am 1 Comment

I spent a fair bit of my blogging time elsewhere this week thinking about Facebook’s like button and it’s relative uselessness as a measure of engagement. Fresh Networks has taken a different take on likes by thinking about engagement signal decay over time here. I am really concerned that Facebook likes are turning into the social media equivalent of AVE. A relatively easy to conjure metric with little management or performance value. 

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  • http://prbreakfastclub.com/ Keith Trivitt

    I think you are quite right in your concern over the Facebook ‘Like’ being the new AVE for PR and comms pros. The functionality is simply too easy to pass off as a broad metric to please management (Well, that video we posted on Facebook had 6,000 Likes, which means it got X number of views for X number of minutes viewed … a total win for our brand!).

    Unfortunately, I don’t see any easy answer to stopping this madness beyond educating clients and management that Facebook Likes are but one of many measurement tools we now have in our arsenal. And much like the derided AVE, Facebook Likes only serve as a panacea to long-term issues for PRs and marketers seeking to properly measure the value of their work. Like most things in life and business, doing that measurement properly isn’t easy, it takes considerable time and it surely is not as easy as equating Likes to brand value.

    Keith Trivitt
    Associate Director of PR
    Public Relations Society of America