You say that the Vitrue product is ‘total snake oil’ and ‘linkbait’ with ‘not a shred of value’ that ‘makes no sense’ and is ‘nonsense’. You certainly get points for colorful writing, but unfortunately you miss the fact that the tool does actually make quite a bit of sense, and provides real value to marketers. Once you strip away the colorful language the facts do not support your outrage.

It seems that you have two core concerns:

1. Earned Media and a CPM-like calculation is overly simplistic and not an accurate representation of the value of social media to brands.
2. Vitrue’s business interests make anything we say automatically suspect.

On the first concern, we agree that social media offers far greater potential than simply ‘impressions’. But the fact is that most marketers need to start with what can be quantified most easily, and build from there. The principles behind our tool rely on very reasonable and arithmetically logical assumptions about impressions. You criticize the $5 CPM assumption, but if you spend some time with the product you can see that it’s actually configurable–*you* can decide what you think a thousand impressions are worth.

On the second concern, I could make the same argument about your business interests. Your position could be summarized as ‘Social media is a complex topic and you need expert advice from people with digital marketing chops.’ Does the fact that you have a business interest in that being true automatically invalidate what you say? We at Vitrue are quite open with our business interests (as are you on your blog), and people are free to evaluate what we say in that context. Questioning our motives seems to be a simple (and frankly, unfair) way to criticize without having to bother to stick to the facts.

I should make one final point: you say that our CEO’s ‘talking points are written to inflate the value of Facebook and are not grounded in reality.’ Facebook seems to be doing quite well in creating real value with nearly 500 million users. The thought that Vitrue and our Social Page Evaluator are somehow going to ‘inflate’ that value does not seem particularly plausible.

I will leave it at that; any interested readers can see earlier dialogue with Adam on his previous article at http://thefuturebuzz.com/2010/04/14/the-value-of-a-fan/ (my comment is the fourth one on that post). I also invite you to try out the Evaluator yourself at http://evaluator.vitrue.com. After using it, you can form your own opinions.

As always Adam, I appreciate the interest in what we have to say even if I disagree (strongly, in many cases) with your conclusions.

Regards,

Jim Anderson
Chief Operating Officer
Vitrue, Inc.

I think that Foursquare has a great idea that can be measured. Get 50 people to show up at one place and get a badge. This is something you can see. Either 50 people are at the sports bar or they are not. This is type of factual data that social media will have to find to ensure that they are a legitimate factor for ROI – that can be accurately measured.

Ed
http://www.mcintoshmarketing.com/blog