You Ask, I Answer: Media Value of Reddit Posts?

In today's episode, Clifton asks, Does anyone know how to calculate the media value for a post on Reddit? This question leads towards the metric that simply won't die. And that is add value equivalence or cost equivalence. Cost equivalence functions have been around for a really long time, and in the past, they kind of made sense. And so if you had to pay for a square inch of an article, uh basically as an ad, and you got that square inch for free, you would say that you saved that amount of money.

If you don't have to pay for something, you it you by default save that money. But the reason cost equivalence is a bad choice for metrics is because it makes some very broad assumptions about uh the way customers behave. Cost equivalence is based on the assumption that if a if a post like on Reddit performs organically, you put it there organically, then its performance should be benchmarked against what you would have paid for the same placement. That might have been true in an era when you only had like one newspaper, right? But it's now completely untrue for a variety of reasons.

Number one, you know from your own behavior that user behaviors are different for unpaid versus paid media. You are probably less likely to engage with a piece of uh paid media content, except under certain circumstances, right? Most of the time, most people engage with organic content, so the behaviors are different, and you will see this if you do um customer journey mapping with actual data, um, particularly digital customer journey mapping, which is something that I do a ton of, um, I will very often see the same channel, like Facebook, for example, or Reddit, um, in very different places in the customer journey, depending on whether it is paid or unpaid. Typically, not always, but typically, I will see paid be used to drive a lot of awareness, and then organic sort of help nurture and engage. Other organizations see opposite behaviors, they use organic to drive awareness and paid to retarget, but either way, the paid and the unpaid are different, right?

They occupy different parts of the customer journey, they fulfill different functions, and so you cannot do cost equivalence because the behaviors are different. The third reason why cost equivalence is bad is because cost is not a result. Yes, saving money is a result, and if you have absolutely no other metric available to you, you can still use it just to say, like we saved this amount of money, but it is not a business result. Right? It is not a this is what this campaign did for us.

It's just this is what we didn't spend on this. One of the bones I've had to pick with um public relations professionals in the past is they would say, Well, you know, PR gets you uh placement that you would otherwise would have had to pay for it. Yes, but you still had to do the PR and you still have to pay for it. And if you're paying a public relations firm, you know, ten thousand dollars a month, you are still spending money, you're just spending it differently, that's all. But cost is not a result, unless you are only measured on how much money you do or don't spend.

If that's the case, you might want to update your LinkedIn profile because that's not a particularly growth-minded organization. Uh so cost is not a result, and the corollary to that is that much better metrics exist, especially if we're talking about a digital channel like Reddit. Like Reddit, there is no other form of Reddit, right? You can't use Reddit on the on your telephone, like old school telephone, not a smartphone. You can't use Reddit in in paper form.

There is only the digital channel, which means that there is a click stream for the most part that is trackable, and that you can see what did Reddit traffic do on your website. Did it convert? Did you get a goal completion out of it? If your marketing automation and your CRM are well connected, then you should be able to trade trace and track that all the way down to Reddit gave us a customer or didn't give us a customer, or at least a sales opportunity. And so you should be using it the very least goal completions in Google Analytics as a benchmark for um how did a post on Reddit do, right?

If you get no goal completions, and maybe you run a more advanced analysis to st to measure brand strength, and you get nothing, then there is no media value of Reddit, right? Just like there is no media value if nobody clicks on your search result, or nobody engages with your social media post and goes to your site and fills out a form. So you only use cost equivalence if there is nothing else at all, right, to measure. And if there's nothing else at all to measure, you have a you have much bigger marketing problems. The only other uh situation where cost equivalence is potentially usable, is if you have a non-financial outcome to your marketing.

That means uh the the most common case is a politician, right? A vote is a non-financial outcome. You either win the election or you don't. Um, but there's no metric of uh performance in that, there's no dollar amount to that, maybe a dollar amount. If you're a corrupt politician, you can take bribes later on, but that's another story.

Um fundamentally, it's a non financial outcome. So you may have some cost equivalence there as a proxy, but at this at the end of the day, the measure there really is you either won or didn't win the election. Other than that, there is for most businesses in most situations, there are business impact metrics that you should be focusing on instead. So can you calculate a media value equivalence and add value equivalence for a Reddit post? Yes.

Should you? No. You absolutely should not. Instead, focus on the results it drives. If you have no results because there's no tracking, make that the first thing you do is figure out how to do the tracking better so that uh you can more easily determine the real value of the work that you're doing.

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