What are you measuring?

Recently, legendary blogger, author, and marketer, Seth Godin, published his 10,000th blog post. His publisher wrote a tribute about his strategy that felt pertinent to the social media era we’re living in. 

“He's measured success not by viral reach, or fleeting attention, or even by the sales of a given product, but instead by the degree to which he has been able to earn trust and add real value to his readers' lives, day after day.” 

I’ve written about how trust is the main thing we should be optimizing for, instead of views, profit, or followers. Every relationship (business or otherwise) is built on trust. “Do they show up consistently in the way I’ve come to expect? Do they make me feel seen and heard?” That’s trust. 

Social media platforms make analytics easy. You can see the views, comments likes, shares, saves, profile visits, and follows that each piece of content earned. But just because these numbers are focal doesn’t meant mean they’re the numbers we should be focusing on. Quantifying trust is harder. Quantifying real, meaningful, life-improving experiences for your audience is harder. But that’s what we need to optimize for, because that metric takes care of all the rest, or renders them irrelevant. 

How do you measure success?