I had lunch with a colleague I greatly respect yesterday and we were discussing how a lot of measurement and metrics in the digital/social/blog space are really smoke and mirrors. People will take one or two choice measurements and make grand sweeping proclamations about how they applies to other things when they really don’t, but they are believed.

As an industry, the digital marketing space is concerned about whether or not we’re “in another tech bubble” — that’s a topic for another post, but I truly believe we are NOT in another bubble like the dot-com boom.

However, it is entirely possible we could end up in another bubble. One of the causes of the dot-com bust was that large brands no longer felt threatened by the startups, so they stopped spending to compete against them. The initial perception of threat came from overstated expectations, claims, and predictions of the value those startups were providing to their audience.

Today we see the same thing in the social space: metrics that sound like they’re getting something accomplished, but if you dig deep enough it is easy to question what the true effect is. Something like “Reach” comes to mind, especially when applied to Twitter and Re-tweets. There are a lot of other examples out there.

We as an industry need to educate our clients on the true value of social media platform metrics (as a diagnostic), and work with them to focus on driving to and measuring real bottom-line business metrics.

If we can’t succeed at that quickly enough, we just might find ourselves in another tech bubble, where promises of being able to interact with the consumer as never before turn out to be a lot of talking to ourselves and trying to engage an audience that really isn’t listening, even if we think they are.