[...] to quantify the theatre field’s use of social media. What am I missing? Link to more. Also, Chris Ashworth responds. Share [...]

Cool stuff. I definitely am just armchair speculating here; I don’t know what tools are available.

I’m really interested to watch you continue to hash this out. (And reporting it to us all on Twitter, natch.) :-)

I’ll try a point/counterpoint:

Followers: I’d LOVE to capture 2nd/3rd degree social network. Have you by chance found a tool out there that will size up a user’s total network?

Frequency: So if the concern is about theatres being too prolific and users dropping them because of it, maybe I should think of ‘negative’ points if that number goes too high. For now, if a theatre manages to tweet once/day on average, I consider that successful.

Total Tweets: this is where the full data table would be helpful for you to see as proof of concept…I’ll be posting the entire spreadsheet online soon. Until then, I’m trying to see what kind of statistical impact # of tweets has on @mentions…in other words, it’s multi-variate regression time!

Time in Existence: a few months from now, perhaps even now, I agree this will become meaningless. I just wanted to give a little boost to people who jumped into the fray early. I could instead give these 5 points over to number of lists a theatre appears on. Thoughts?

Client: definitely something I’m still struggling with. I’m baffled by how some very effective twits are still using web as their interface. My interest is actually in “punishing” people posting to Twitter via Facebook. These are different platforms, and thus should have different uses/messages. My own habits unfortunately are a terrible example. But in truth, I definitely am mixing ‘encouraging best practices’ and ‘rewarding for good results.’

ROI: I’m trying to turn my attention to this now. It’s a little complex because everyone’s using it a little differently, and I don’t feel qualified to prescribe a single best-solution. Thinking hard about how to best adapt the brilliant ideas in http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-one-year-later.

ERS/ING: I had at one point an “Authority” category that was this same measure. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out in a predictable way. Some theatres follow 1:1, others as high as 10:1, but that number turned out not to be a good predictor of anything. It was also difficult to scale, so a theatre that might have 20 followers, and only follow 2 people was being rewarded.

More tools: I’m barely keeping up with you on this one. Check out the latest post: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfv2gkvv_10g2ntr8ch

I think you’re right: The trick here is finding metrics that measure traction. And most of those are not transparent enough until we can break in to the box office, cross check patron contact information with twitter usernames, and physically measure how many people were not only talking about a show before seeing it: but how many people IN THOSE PEOPLE’S network also went to see the show WITHOUT seeing it. That’s a lot of work for a marketing department to do.

It’s what NOT doing that and not improving these metrics means that scares me. This is a time when we should be pulling apart the traditional metrics of theatre ‘sales’ and recalibrating our efforts to the metrics that actually matter. Measuring tweet frequency doesn’t measure quality of tweets — but measuring quality, depth, and breadth of communication across the surface area of the organization does indicate whether we are doing our job as theater artists: Telling stories that change the world.