Hi David - thanks for the comment.

You are right - everything can be measured. The problem is that if you measure something on a level that is too granular, you may be meeting your goals while your company goes down the tubes.

Take customer support for example. A set of metrics could be length of time that a customer is on hold (as an indication for customer satisfaction) and length of support call (as a measurement for cost containment). The service department could do real well on both those metrics and still deliver bad customer support - leaving the customer to buy from someone else the next time around.

The same could be said in marketing. Events people are routinely responsible for # leads coming from an event, and email marketers are measured on email open rates. The real important measurement is how all these programs build upon one another to create better results than they would by themselves. That gets lost when you break them apart like that. And the results that people get often give them a false sense of success.

And then of course there are the innovative new programs. If they are new, then by definition you really do not know how to measure them. And in most companies, if you cannot justify something on measurements, you will not get it budgeted. So in effect you are killing innovation and the learning that goes with it.

In terms of reaching the influentials and building a social network system that can help with everything you do - I am not sure how you can measure that. How many people do you need in the network in order to make a difference? How do you know you actually reached a real “connector” and not a self-promoter? A lot of companies are struggling with this and even in very large innovative companies that I have recently worked with you will find the influential marketing person budget-less - left to beg borrow and steal from other marketing sub-departments.

Got any good examples of high-value activities where these estimates would really be meaningless?