The title of this post comes from Paul Graham’s recent post “Startups In 13 Sentences” – his advice to starting a new business.
We come across this question all the time – “What’s the ROI of ____?”. Insert social media, internet marketing, web strategy, etc, etc – everything that we teach. The first thing I tell all my clients and have tried to relay to you on this blog is: Define goals so you have something to measure.
If you can’t chart your progress from the beginning to your current milestone than you cannot measure ROI. And if you don’t have goals the data can be meaningless. Here’s what Paul says…
“Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.” via Paul Graham
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