Not your grandpa’s metrics and monikers

Charlie Wood tweeted yesterday about ARPU. And I asked him why he was using a telecom industry term and he responded it also applies to his subscription service. Byron Deeter who has several SaaS investments in his VC firm, Bessemer uses metrics like CMMR to monitor his portfolio. When it comes to social CRM, Paul Greenberg likes to talk about CRV

From the sustainability world, we now have new LEED ratings. Walmart has started scoring  its vast network of suppliers on a new set of  sustainability factors. Data Centers are measured on PUE. Professors at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont have been touting new country level measures like GPI – arguing that traditional metrics like GDP are not measuring natural and social capital (and their depreciation). The refocus on rare earths needed for cleantech is introducing us to sections of the periodic table our forefathers only crammed for obscure class quizzes.

In medicine, genomes are creating a new language like “marker, rs6983267 on chromosome 8q24, has been linked to both colon and prostate cancer”.

Yup, it’s a new world. A world which needs translators like Sameer Patel and Oliver Marks who I spent time with them last week at Sapphire. What I like about both is in all the happy social talk of “millions of Twitter followers” and “attention currency” they keep an old-fashioned monetary view of measuring results from social investments.

Talking about metrics, I have become fascinated as do most book authors with the Amazon Ranking metric. It is an obsession similar to that of vendors who bring out their microscope to measure how many millimeters they moved in the latest version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It is shrouded in as much mystery. So old wives’ tales abound  “Bulk sales are reported by amazon as one unit” “You can game it by consolidating many orders on one day.”  “On certain days as few as 3 book sales could move your ranking by 50,000 places”

Yup, we could use Sameers and Olivers for getting the real skinny on the amazon ranking and how reflective the index is of book success in a world of multiple channels of brick and mortar outlets, bulk book sales to corporate buyers and residuals from international locations. Actually, we could use them everywhere as we get into a confusing new world of metrics and moikers around new medicine, energy and computing.