This post will surely elicit some controversy as it dives into the social media hornets nest known as statistics.

I started thinking about stats again after seeing that the FeedBurner stats for TechCrunch indicated that blog eclipsing 100K readers. Interestingly enough that number has dipped to around 87K as I write this post.

First off, I want to congratulate Michael Arrington on a very successful venture. He has built that blog into social media juggernaught in just about 15 months, bypassing all the antiquated requirements of the old media world to create a valuable internet based information resource. I recommend that anyone looking to make a business out of blogging keep an eye on what they’re doing over there.

Now here’s the other side of the coin. I don’t think that TechCrunch has anywhere near 100K unique readers via their RSS feed. In fact, the number is probably lower than 50K. Those assertions have absolutely nothing to do with TechCrunch because they can’t control what FeedBurner reports as their stats. But they do exemplify the confusion caused by accepting the numbers of any given resource that publishes statistics on social media.

Lest I be chewed to pieces by the blogging wolf pack I feel that it’s important to make the following statement. I don’t think that individuals and businesses should ignore blogging, podcasting and other social media technologies due to a lack of defined stats on actual consumption. I’m a firm believer that these tools should be used in spite of the ambiguities present in statistics for these tools.

In fact, I’ll state that the worth of any social media property is best defined by the core audience of avid consumers who not only follow but also take part in the conversation. This is in contrast to the people who are subscribed but really don’t read every post. How can you tell the difference between the two? You can’t.

No matter how hard firms like FeedBurner try to deliver accurate stats, at the end of the day they are still counting only page hits and IP addresses. What do those stats tell you about the people consuming social media? Very little in my opinion. Josh Hallett may disagree. He wrote a post in 2005 about finding gems in your stats.

It is true that you can gather countries and even specific domains of large corporations from your statistics. But then what? Can a domain tell you the title of a person consuming your media? Can an IP address or country of origin tell you if the person viewing the media is someone in a position to respond intelligently? No and no.

My point here is that the majority of what people gather from stats is based on wild assumptions. So why sweat the details of stats? I say don’t sweat the small stuff in stats. And instead of focusing on IP addresses and page hits, focus on contributions and loyalty. Because the subscribers that really matter are those who contribute and are loyal to what you’re doing. Those are the subscribers who will fill your venture with interesting content and opinions. Those are the subscribers who will tell others about what you’re doing and link back to you from their sites. Those are the people who help you grow. Can you tell who those people are just from hits and IP addresses? I say no.

If you stop and think for a second it’s very easy to see how the numbers that FeedBurner reports can be inflated. Many people like me are quite mobile and as mobile people we are likely to be subscribed in more than one place, via more than one subscription tool. In fact, many of the feeds that I am subscribed to in my offline reader (which happens to be Onfolio) I’m also subscribed to in online readers such as Google Reader and Netvibes.

Speaking of Netvibes. Have you noticed that TechCrunch is a default subscription on the Netvibes start page? Does FeedBurner consider everyone who has a Netvibes account and doesn’t remove TechCrunch to be a reader? Given the popularity of Netvibes I would say that feature has the potential to skew the numbers of readers far upward. None of this is FeedBurner’s fault by the way. It’s just a fact of the slippery nature of statistics with regard to social media.

Here’s the bottom line. The old models of statistics like page hits, unique IP addresses, even subscribers simply don’t apply anymore. In a world where individuals and businesses are likely to have a web presence across multiple sites, pure numbers really don’t mean much. It’s the intangible value put forth by a resource that determines its worth.

So don’t stress stats. Instead focus on quality and community. And then you’ll have a decent shot at building the kind of value that TechCrunch has built over the past 15 months.

[tags]Social Media, TechCrunch, Stats, Statistics, FeedBurner, Analysis[/tags]