"Measure What Matters" Chapter 2

I said after reading the first chapter of "Measure What Matters" that it didn't make any particularly new points for me, but I did expect the rest of the book to be more informative when it focused on how to measure rather than why. This chapter did seem to validate that view, as it was definitely more informative for me personally than the last.

This chapter focused mostly on the actual questions that need to be asked to get good data. A company has to know exactly what it's looking for before it measures and why it's looking for that. The chapter lists 10 questions that focus on objectives, audience, messages and so on. Admittedly, none of this seemed particularly surprising or revolutionary to me, but the book did lay it out pretty neatly to its credit.

The chapter also lists 4 ways in which bad data can be gathered: "Incomplete Assessment of Variables," "Relevancy of Content" (or irrelevancy more accurately), the fact that commercial services omit results, and "The (In)accuracy of Content Analysis." (from pp. 26-28) This does seem like a good approach to me--that is, to list the ways not to do something as well as the ways to do it. Overall, the chapter did seem to introduce some important and noteworthy ideas.