Measurement as Recession Insurance for Social Applications

Josh Bernoff over at Forrestor writes that if social applications can prove their effectiveness they can maintain profitability even if a recession leads to a drop in advertising expenditures:

If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession.

These same arguments apply to some other forms of online marketing, including search ads and email marketing. Those are going to be good investments in a recession. If you're smart, you'll position yourself now with proof your apps are working. Then when the ad dollars get tight, you'll be in good shape.

It boils down to ROI justification (like it should).  How do you "prove your app is working" though?  If your goal is to generate buzz then the overall traffic you receive may be less important then the quality of the influencers who interact with your app.   You want the people who are going to carry the marketing conversation beyond your social application to their other social networks.  While there is no way to really measure whether or not a user is telling their friends, classmates, co-workers, etc about your product, I do believe we will soon be able to measure the online influence of individual users in the near future. 

Social application developers need to start considering how to leverage the trends in consolidated identity, data portability and API's that expose the social graph to measure the impact of EACH user of their social application.  Once this happens social applications will quickly climb the value chain above almost all traditional online marketing initiatives.