AVE for social media? No thanks

The idea of using AVE (advertising value equivalent) calculations for measuring the benefits of social media gets a general thumbs down over on the PR Week website where there’s a feature looking at this question.

My comment on it was:

Social media doesn’t perform one task; it performs many – marketing, customer service, PR and more. You can’t collapse all of those different impacts into one measure.

You can read some background on AVEs in the piece I did for Reputation Online.