Today’s post was inspired by discussions with Ryan Calhoun

Think of every sports tournament, game or other form of competition that currently exists in the world. There’s one thing you’ll find they have in common: Over the years, they have all developed their own set of rules and guidelines. While there may be variations in these rules based on categories such as age or location, they still follow similar patterns that helps to keep everyone on the same playing field. This makes it possible for teams across the world to play each other in comparable games. Standardization for our industry would create a similar situation. It would develop the possibility to start comparing our results to others and begin benchmarking industry standards.

In order to get to the point of industry standards, we need to start with ourselves and make sure that we are being consistent with the information our internal teams prepare week over week, month over month. We spoke to Ryan Calhoun, Sr. Operations Analyst at Radian6. He helps our internal teams collaborate with customers to build their own social media successes. With Ryan’s help, we built out the top 5 practices toward metrics standardization.

Get the Fuzz Out!
Even when you are working with qualitative metrics, you can still make sure that you have a process in place. This way, there’s no guess work when it comes to exactly what you are showing through your analysis.

Don’t Buy in to the Fairy tale
We would all love for a knight in shining ROI armor to come bounding up to us with all the answers, however, we need to fight the urge to buy in to stories that aren’t 100% based on fact. That doesn’t mean we lose our creativity in how we deliver information. We should make sure that the stories we are telling are non-fiction.

Build a Transparent Method
Keep your methodology in line. Document your exact process for finding keywords, changing keywords, how you move decimal places, and even when you run reports. This will also create transparency in your efforts which means your analytics and reporting teams will all be on the same page.

Correlation versus Causation
Make sure that you are finding the actual causes in your metrics and not just events that could be correlated. Unless you can prove results, outstanding circumstances – such as a massive social media event on Tuesday – doesn’t alter your results.

Consistency!
“You play the way you practice” is an age-old saying that rings true to your metrics as well. If you always fudge some numbers to make dummy reports, you’ll probably do the same and not even realize when it comes to real report time. Be consistent, not just in what you show, but in how you go about showing it.

These are some ways we keep our rules of the game in line. What approaches do you take toward standardization?