Just coming back from SES Toronto. It’s always nice to have the chance to talk in person with people that I rarely see! There were lots of interesting sessions but the one that I was most curious about was measuring success in (careful, buzzword coming…) a 2.0 world.

It was turning out to be a roundtable with lots of ideas and concepts being thrown around when all of a sudden, someone from the audience came up with an interesting comment to the panel: “so, it’s already been 40 minutes and we have yet to learn how to measure success of 2.0 initiatives; could you please give concrete examples?”.

The panel didn’t seem to know how to react because really, there are no standards in the industry yet and each website is different, a one-size-fits-all answer is out of the question. You have to measure your initiative according to what matters to your business. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to get users to register? To post comments? To upload content? Stick with the basics, there are lots of ways to measure your initiatives, but stick to what really matters in your decision making. Agreed, easier said than done, it is easy to throw floods of data on a spreadsheet that your boss will see, not really pay attention to and have the impression that you really know what’s going on. But choosing just two or three KPIs will most likely help you get everyone in the chain of command clear on what’s being measured, how it is being measured and how it is going to be actionable. This is even better! You’ll see that your boss and your colleagues will start to become more educated, more informed and more interested in the actionable data you can feed them with.

In the end, 2.0 or not, it remains about being able to provide actionable data.