Sounds ridiculous does it not? But if we measure online news sources by pageviews, # of unique visitors and time spent on site, why is length of hair a bad measure of a person’s influence?

Still being stuck in the last century magazines and news outlets still prefer to measure their value to their “real” customer – the advertisers NOT readers by awareness created.

The classifieds portion of their advertising is the closest they get to measured lead generation. If you have a full page ad what do they state – how many people read their newspaper daily. Not satisfied with that, the measure of “subscribers” is valued more than the “off the rack purchase” readers. Even though I “subscribed” to the WSJ for years and diligently put it directly from the porch into the recycle bin for 2 months, I am more valued than someone that borrowed my copy on the train to actually read the Marketplace section.

Bloggers and Twitter users are also getting stuck in the same treadmill. Subscribe to our blog on your RSS feed readers, follow me on twitter, is the standard call to action.

How about a more meaningful call to action for both newspapers and other media like actual action? An article gets written, readers act on the article. The more I think about it, B L Ochman got it right. The most important question to ask a reporter BEFORE you do an interview:

“Will you include the name of my company and a link to it in your article?”