There’s quite a bit of grumblng and back-and-forth-ing about memory these days. Columbia assistant professor Betsey Sparrow’s study that Google is significantly altering human memory kicked off a rancorous debate about what the cognitive consequences of all this digit-ality.
 
So, is Google ruining your memory? No more or less so than your GPS is ruining your ability to find your way around using a map. In other words - communication and information technologies are always changing, tweaking and morphing existing skills into new forms. Sometimes, they’re morphing them totally out of existence. The availability of Google changes our need to remember facts. Little facts - like the address and phone number of the local pizza joint. Big facts - like what year the Civil War ended.
 
Sparrow’s other findings are a bit ho-hum as well. For example, I learned from the NYT best-seller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer (a good read, by the way), that our memories are designed to work visually and spatially. Think about it…you’re struggling to recall the name of a song and all you can do is stammer through a description of where you were and who you were with when you last heard it. In Sparrow’s study, people could recall where they placed a fact (which computer folder it’s in) better than they remembered the fact itself. All that shows is that when we know we can retrieve a bit of data, our minds tend to let that info go and apply the free cycles to something more pressing, like trying to find our way around without a damned GPS.

By now, I think there are very few people who still question the value of social media, though there are no universal methods of measurement in place to determine the exact value added by a social media activation.

In the digital space, measurement is essentially (stay with me on this one…) the “golden ticket” everyone is searching for.  However, there are a few analytic tools that can give one an overview of his/her social media influence; my favorites hasve recently been released by Edelman’s Digital team – Tweetlevel and Bloglevel. Such tools give us – the users and consumers of social media – a way to calculate our influence.

Although I’m not, say, Justin Beiber, I am still interested in my clout in the social media space. I have no need to measure my digital activity as if I were a brand investing in a social media campaign, but I do enjoy that there are metrics for even the lowliest of users (like myself).

As these tools keep being developed, I think we will be much closer to establishing a universal way to measure social value. And this will encourage brands to expand their social presence into a more engaging, meaningful way to connect with their core consumers.