Why Internet Mediated PR will win - it's measureable

Where the Internet is really making TV look creaky, though, is in the most important area of all, the one that determines where the money goes: audience measurement.

So claims Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune

Readers know, by and large, what it means when they hear that a TV show has 3.2 million viewers: The Nielsen Media Research monopoly has extrapolated from its sample of the U.S. population's viewing habits to arrive at that number, and if that show is on a network, it will be, in all likelihood, canceled very soon.

But people outside of the business often stumble over the meaning of Internet-specific measurement terms such as "hits," "page views" and "unique visitors," to name some of the most common ones. They don't grasp how site rankings are arrived at. And, bigger picture, they fail to understand, perhaps, how very fragmented the Internet audience is: Social networking site MySpace made news recently when it climbed to the top of the Internet heap - by tallying just 4.5 percent of all U.S. Internet visits.

So consider this a primer, necessary in so new and dynamic a medium, on Internet audience measurement.........

We its quite good and worth reading.

We do need to harness some of this stuff. But there are caveats. This is not a 'mass audience medium' and so the numbers can and do conceal a lot of information and comparisons are very hard to make. But if we use it wisely it will offerpower to Social Media PR such that now one has seen before.