This is the only content metric you need in 2026

I get asked a lot about how I measure content and the metrics I use to gauge success.

I usually divide it into three buckets:

Today, I’m going to focus on the “reception” piece, specifically creating dialogue around your content.

And it’s really the only metric you need to determine the success of your content.

Here’s why.

Traditional content marketing measures things like impressions, website traffic, and click-through rate as metrics of success. It might have worked for content in 2016, but not in 2026.

In 2026, content is a tool for brands to create cultural moments. We’ve seen this with the “killing” of the Duolingo owl, to Ramp’s brand activation with Kevin from The Office, and even the annual dissection of the Super Bowl commercials.

As Dan Humphrey famously says in Gossip Girl, you aren’t anyone until you’re talked about.

That’s where dialogue comes in.

We use the term “parasocial” to describe the relationships brands and creators have with their audiences. However, by definition, “parasocial” is one-sided and unreciprocated.

And that playbook doesn’t work for brands in 2026. It’s why we’re seeing more of an emphasis on “founder-led” media and employee-generated content. The goal is less about seeing the brand as an unapproachable entity and more about humanizing it. Because of this, we’re seeing brands shift to being more conversational to build a two-way relationship with audiences.

Brands today are creating moments for more conversation in their content, whether it’s more actively participating in the comments section on social media posts, moderating live-streamed events, creating communities on Slack or Discord, or hosting IRL activations.

There are so many benefits to having conversations with your audience:

And it starts with measuring dialogue as a metric.

Measuring dialogue serves three purposes:

Reception measures how content is received, understood, and interpreted by an audience. Not whether it performed, but whether it landed with the intended meaning, tension, or question. It acts as a barometer of what your audience cares about and shows whether people are extending ideas rather than passively consuming them.

This is about interpretation, not reaction.

In this case, dialogue reveals:

Reception answers: Did this content say what it needed to say, in the way it needed to be heard?

Brands today aren’t just businesses, but cultural engines. The ideas that brands create through their content shape taste, culture, and identity. They’re pioneering concepts and perspectives in their industries, and in some cases, writing entirely new playbooks.

Culture-building measures whether content creates shared language, inside references, norms, and repeated participation over time. Thoughtful responses, follow-up questions, and peer-to-peer exchange signal cognitive investment and shared ownership.

This is about continuity and collective meaning.

In this case, dialogue reveals:

Culture-building answers: Is this content shaping how people think together over time?

Direction measures whether the dialogue moves thinking in a new direction.

This isn’t about understanding or belonging, but forward motion. Dialogue reveals who synthesizes ideas, connects threads, and moves conversations forward before formal roles exist.

Where Reception asks where it landed and Culture-building asks whether it stuck, Direction asks whether it shifted anything.

In this instance, dialogue reveals:

Direction is what prevents dialogue from becoming circular.

So to recap:

So then, how do you create content that gets talked about?

Spoiler: It’s not by doing what everyone else is doing or talking about things everyone else is talking about.

There’s a common misconception that if you just talk about something more or louder, it’s how you’ll break through the noise.

But that’s not the case. The content that people talk about needs to be memorable, unconventional, and thought-provoking.

In other words, it needs to be different than anything else on your feed. The closer you get to that, the more conversations it will generate.

Some examples include:

Measuring dialogue isn’t about output, performance, or virality. It’s about shaping how people understand, relate, and move. Success becomes what a conversation unlocks, not how loudly it performs.