In our monthly e-newsletter last week, I commented on the pleas we hear for new standardized performance measures in the Destination Marketing field. And, I've been one of the ones that has been suggesting we need to get serious about tracking more than just "heads in beds."
After talking to a number of DMO CEOs whom I think are some of the smartest out there, I'm beginning to change my tune. I'm beginning to believe, as several of them do, that the most important performance measures to a community are what's uniquely important to that community. And, in many cases, those measures won't be portable to other communities.
Roughly at the same time I was having that ephiphany, an article in the New York Times (as shared by Reveries) seemed to chime in all at once.
"Good enough is vastly more rigorous than any metric," says Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "As a scientist, I can say that very little is measurable," says the author of The Black Swan, adding that "even those things that are measurable, you cannot trust the measurement beyond a certain point."
Duncan Watts of Microsoft, author of Everything Is Obvious, actually believes that having more information is good, but that "coming up with the correct meaning…is hard."
Data gives an appearance of control, but Novelist Anne Lamott, says that "everything that is truly human is the opposite of that. And, Albert Einstein, a numbers guy if ever there was one, likely would concur, given his famous advice: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
In the end, I'll repeat my new mantra, offered recently in Inc. by Chip Conley, Founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality:
“What counts that we are not counting?”
THAT is the holy grail of productivity measures.
I tend to agree with those CEO's who espoused, "the most important performance measures to a community are what's uniquely important to that community". Each Bureau does unique things that match the product in their respective communities. The kicker is to establish those measureables (occasionally asking about those things we don't measure), document them and let all who need to know them hear them regularly.
Posted by: LT | June 09, 2014 at 15:20
Always have to be calibrated but 95% are measurable across comp sets. Real issue is that DMOs need to lead communities to sense of place, not just follow or accomodate
Posted by: Reyn Bowman | June 09, 2014 at 19:12