This past weekend, whilst grouchy with my first cold of the British Autumn, I tapped out a draft blog post about the asinine nature of many social media outreach campaigns I currently see.

Today, feeling less perturbed, I sat at my desk wrapped in my quilt and attempted to edit it into some shape. Then econsultancy posted something almost identical -- "Are social media engagement strategies condescending and crass?" -- and in the process summed up my thoughts probably better than I could have done.

In the piece, Luke Brynley-Jones references a couple of specific campaigns that generated metrics that seemed to please the brands involved. Indeed, when I logged onto Facebook this morning, the top story was that someone with whom I'm vaguely connected happens to "like" the grocery delivery chain I criticized in a recent blog post about accessibility.

My guess is that brand manager enthusiasm comes about less because there is an ability to connect these metrics directly to revenue, but more because they can be connected to the KPIs for those who created the campaign.

Consider this example sequence of events:

1. Social Media team gets bonused on an outreach campaign based upon gathering X number retweets in a 48 hour period

2. Social Media team (being more savvy than their management) tweets out "Look at this cute kitten #squee" with an attached adorable baby cat photo -- and reach their target in about 30 minutes.

3. Social Media team goes to pub with the internet now 1% more full of kitten pictures than it had been at 9am.

If you provide success criteria, then most staff will do their best to hit those targets. In which case you better make sure that those criteria are both realistic and deliver some tangible benefits beyond bandwidth usage.

Not so long ago, I heard about a company proposing to set bonuses for their social media campaign team based upon increasing the Klout score of the corporate Twitter accounts by a set number of points.

According to Klout, I am authoritative on "parenting" & "pasties." Somehow, I suspect as a non-pasty eating non-parent, this might be somewhat wide of the mark. Additionally Klout scores are notorious for oscillating wildly as the algorithm is periodically tuned.

Fortunately, the plan above got headed off when the team pointed out how easily Klout could be gamed (much to the credit of the team, but to the detriment to the output of the corporate accounts themselves).

The uptake in our recently released research into digital marketing technology - including Social Media Monitoring - demonstrates the keen interest that enterprises are taking in measuring the success of the stakes they've made in some of these channels right now. Taking a similarly keen interest in the content that drives them should not be overlooked.

I'll be covering this amongst a range of other topics at a half-day seminar, "Social Media Monitoring: Best Practises and Avoiding Pitfalls in Selection and Implementation" this November at the JBoye Conference in Aarhus, Denmark.

Just don't expect any useful parenting advice.