KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

The best of IPRRC 2010

I've now had nearly 48 hours to digest the ideas, papers and theories that flew by me at IPRRC 2010 and can at least take a stab at digesting them into some sort of conclusion. You'll find more detailed descriptions of each of these theories later this week and in The Measurement Standard. But here's my 10,000 foot view.     

1. Ethics – this was the theme of the conference. And while many of us ignored the theme and just presented our latest interesting research, many people actually paid attention to the theme this year – 21% actually discussed Ethics, or at least had ethics in the title. And, while some of the ethics papers felt like they'd been force fit into the theme, a number of them were truly inspiring, particularly BYU's Susan Walton and Robert Wakefiled translucency corollary to their colleague Brad Rawlins' (Shown here enjoying desert)
   transparency research.
   
2. The second major theme of the conference, as it is every year, is how best to manage communications in a crisis. .Lets face crisis makes for great papers, and whether it is T= Mobile, or Tiger Woods, there were fabulous papers on this topic. The major takeaway is that most of the old rules no longer apply. The blogosphere doesn't respond the same way traditional media does, the public is more skeptical and more likely to ignore your messages, and if you don't have an existing relationship with your stakeholders in the blogosphere, you can't create one overnight. What this means for CEOs – complete and total apologies are in order.
3. New/Social Media –naturally I gravitated to papers on this topic, and there were plenty of them. Michelle Hinson and Don Wright updated their longitudinal study of PR usage of social media, Marica DeStaso
   
   and Marcus Messner updated their research on Wikipedia, Tina McCorkindale didn't make it to give her Twitter paper, but there were lots of others to fill in gaps.
4. CSR – Finally, there was definitely a growth in the number of papers researching the effectiveness of CSR. In the minds of IPRRC presenters it Is clear that CSR and ethics are inseparable issues. Depending on whose research you believe, it is or is not effective.

As always, its impossible to declare any single paper to be "the best" (which is, no doubt, why there are so many different prizes and competitions) but the ones you'll see in this space and in pages of The Measurement Standard, are the ones that stood out for me. And, of course, if you want to see what we all look like click here. 

The quintessial IPRRC moment.

With a title like "Developing a Paradigm of Global Crisis Management Response Strategies" it is hardly surprising that Roxana Maiorescu's (Purdue & Virginia Tech)  (she's the one on the right, Dr. Sherry Holloday is on the left.     

presentation would draw a crowd. But she clearly didn't anticipate who would be at the table. And thus I witnessed the quintessential IPPRC moment.

A bit of background—Roxana's paper was essentially a recommendation for a global standard for crisis management response using a combination of crisis theories put forth by several thought leaders in the field of crisis communications research, including  Drs. Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay ( Eastern Illiniois University) and others.

Using the case of T-Mobile's parent company, Deutche Telekom, which was accused in 2008 hiring an investigator to spy on its board of directors (did they not learn anything from HP?) she suggested that a combination of strategies could form the basis of a standard global approach. She made many excellent points in her 15 minute presentation but the best moment came at the very beginning.

Like many presenters, she began by acknowledging the sources of her paper, and looked around the table and saw those sources sitting there. In a moment of delightful transparency she said "when I submitted this paper, I never thought that the people I would be citing would be sitting at this table!" Get used to it Roxana, that's what IPRRC is all about.

Addendum: For Roxana's full paper, click here: Download ROXANA PAPER

 

New Articles on PR Measurement and Social Media Measurement in The Measurement Standard

In case you haven't seen these yet, here are the most recent articles from The Measurement Standard, the newsletter I publish. And if you'd like a no-charge monthly subscription, just click here to sign up.

Measurement Conferences:
A Preview of the 2010 International Public Relations Research Conference, March 10-13, Miami

Measurement Tools:
Katie Delahaye Paine's New Product Launch Measurement Checklist

Research Tips and Strategy:
Make Data Your Bitch: Dominate your data in ten easy steps.

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 1:
Guidelines for Establishing a Corporate Vision

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 2:
Do Your Employees "Get" Your Corporate Vision?

Measurement Mavens of the Month:
Four Who Score: Gailanne Barth, Sue Burke, Al Orendorf, and Krista Thomas

Measurement Menaces of the Month:
Web Analytics Guys Who Fail to Account for Social or “Earned” Media

The Paine of Measurement:
How’s all that Tweetey Changey Stuff Working Out? Time to Get with the Social Media Program

Social Media Measurement
A SMUG Is Born: A social media understanding group to help everyone get up to speed on social media issues and standards.

Can This Reputation Be Saved?
SeaWorld’s Whale of a Problem

Rapid Writing, by Daphne Gray-Grant
Do Your Readers Get the Point? Five ways to connect the dots when you write.

How about the Sashies? The "Oscar" for the Rock Stars of Regressions?

 The Sashies? The Analysies? The Counties? The Corallaries? We already have a Goddess,
why not an annual Rock Star of Regressions?

It is clear that all of us data and research geeks are finally coming into our own. With entire conferences like OMMA, WAA, eMetrics and IPRRC  devoted to data analysis and metrics, you’d think we’d have our own awards ceremony by now. Sure, there’s the “Jack Felton Golden Ruler of Measurement” Award, but that’s limited to PR measurement, and with only one winner and a handful of entries, it’s hardly representative of the broad and growing spectrum of people who are coming out of the woodwork these days to “Make Data Their Bitch.”  I’m talking about the few, the proud, the data junkies and research geeks who just love digging into data and finding those nuggets that explain why that bar chart goes up or down. Or what caused that anaomaly in March.  You can tell them by the way they talk. Take this dialog from yesterday. I was reviewing a report with Erica, the KDPaine & Partners Director of Research, (otherwise known as one of the  “Paniacs”)   and when I essentially told her she needed to regenerate about 20 charts and come up with about 10 new ways of looking at the data,  she said “cool, this is the fun stuff.” That’s how data geeks talk.

So I think its time to start nominating these pioneers of performance indicators for an annual award.  I haven’t figure out what to give them as a prize.  Probably a new HP calculator – or better yet, get SAS or SPSS to sponsor us and donate their latest software. My first  inclination was to nominate my clients, who tend to be on the geeky side of the communications spectrum. But frankly, I think we need more visible heroes.

So here are my first nominees.

1.       Rachel Maddow.
@maddow is a self-proclaimed geek, who encourages her millions of viewers to "give in to your inner geek" This is what she said last night:  “So this is the only tv show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever. Best graph we've ever had. Admit it! You are excited for that and you would never hear a tease like that on any other show ever .It's okay.Just give in to your inner geek." What other television personality has ever, or would ever say such words! What she showed was a bar graph that showed the impact on the budget of various bills passed under reconciliation.  It was a very simple explanation of a very complicated subject.  She is the quintessitial data wonk.

2.       Another one that gets my vote is Abbie from NCIS.
Imagine a data geek being the hero of a TV crime series! Abbie’s love of data and use of analysis to solve impossible conundrums makes her a perfect candidate for Data Geek of the year.

3.       My third set of nominees are the guys from the NPR’s Planet Money team, Adam Davidson Chana Joffe-Walt  
Alex Blumberg    David Kestenbaum   Caitlin Kenney and Jacob Goldstein .  These guys have taken enormous amounts of data,  digested endless debates, and followed convoluted serpentine money trails to produce  their riveting broadcasts.  Whether its healthcare, the great mortgage meltdown, or the banking collapse, leave it to these guys to crunch the data into a comphrensible story.

So this is just a start, send me your nominees and I’ll start working on the prize!

 

Will this lead to true integration or flawed conclusions?

This announcement that Omniture will work with Facebook to incorporate their ad results data into Omniture's system is certainly a big step forward in integrating the results of ones marketing efforts in today's environment. However, it is only half a solution. Until Omniture, and more importantly the people who use Omniture's data also incorporate data about the conversations that are taking place on Facebook pages, Fan sites etc. the data will be incomplete and the conclusions they will draw will be flawed. 

News from New Hampshire

First to all of you who are wondering, we're fine. Just cranky.

It's not that being without power for five days is the end of the world. You have wonderful spontaneous dinners with friends around the wood stove. You can even work in the greenhouse while the sun is out (not very often.)You gain enormous sympathy and understanding of your forefathers (how did they do it? they had more time and different priorities.)And there's the never ending wonder at the power of nature.

And for more photos, go here.

But lets face it, when you're 56 years old you have your routines.  I'm used to hair dryers, and washing machines and  having NPR on throughout the house pretty much 24/7. So when these things go away, its not the end of the world, its just disruptive.
Going to bed looks like this: 

1. Go to basement, find coleman lantern.

2. Replace broken mantle.

3. Realize the globe is also broken, light it anyway. Take to bedroom.

4. Realize you left the flashlight downstairs.

5.Take lantern downstairs and find the flashlight.

6.Take lantern back to bedroom, go back downstairs for glass of water and cell phone.

7.(Keep cell phone charged at all times because its the only portable phone and alarm clock in the house.) 

8.Set alarm clock.

9. Read till you fall asleep or you run out of propane ,whichever comes first. 

Then there's getting up in the morning.

1. Find flashlight.

2. Light lantern.

3. Put lantern in bathroom.

4. Go downstairs and find coffee pot.

5. Move coffee pot to only working plug.

6. Start coffee.

7. Go back up stairs to shower and realize that the propane has run out of the lantern.

8. Go to the basement and get more propane.

9. Replace propane, burn fingers on lantern.

10. Pick up lantern and watch it fall to the floor

11. Pick it up, burn fingers again.

12. Pick up broken glass from what is left of the globe.

13. Realize you cant vacuum the glass up because there isn't any power.

14. Put on shoes

15. Take shower.

16. Realize there isn't enough light to put on makeup.

17. Run fingers thru hair pretending they're a blow dryer.

18. Get dressed, where what you took off the night before because at least you know it all matches.

19. Grab your laundry, get in the car and get drive as fast as you can to the office in Berlin, where they never lost power.  

So to everyone who has asked. Really, I'm fine. But you might not want to get in my way.

Why Facebook fan pages don't matter

Glenn Beck Vs. The Poodle, And Other Facebook Faceoffs - All Tech Considered - Technology News And Culture Blog : NPR - StumbleUpon

A slightly different perspective on why fans and followers matter, or don't as the case may be :)
Why isn't anyone asking if all this nonsense sells more (or fewer) records, or garners more (or fewer) votes or viewers or better (or worse) poll numbers?

Which channel is best? It depends

I get asked a lot about which social media channel is "the best" and of course my answer is always "it depends," and you should ask your customers But this week provided a fascinating contrast in the types of conversations that go on in each space.

On Tuesday, I hosted a Social Media Chat (#sm47) on the topic of measurement. TodayI spoke to the Portsmouth, NH Social Media Breakfast(#smbnh) on the topic of tracking success. Both events generated a remarkable amount of chatter on Twitter. Most of it was what KDPaine & Partners would categorize as "expressing support" (one of our 27 types of conversations). Most of the tweets would be rated by almost any system as positive in sentiment, except of course the tweets that called me "Wicked awesome" and "Sick" -- unless someone has figured out an algorithm to detect local slang. But in general the discussion was essentially agreeing with my premise that social media CAN be measured, and can be tied to measurable outcomes.

At the same time, I was also engaged in a variety of conversations on Facebook. Mostly having to do with either politics or music and people I adored in the 70s. It was fun, and silly and made me laugh a lot.

And then there was Linked In, where I've been fighting a battle over AVEs and counting hits should be a valid metric for PR. The gist of that conversation is that the measuring clips and mentions is all that needs to be measured.

I've also noted that I can say the exact same thing in my blog and get almost no response, but put the same post on My Ragan and get a dozen comments violently disagreeing with me.

Obviously the responses and the level of dialog are determined by the knowledge level and background of the audiences. And I haven't decided yet what this means for my social networking activities or what to do with this information, but it's pretty clear that we need to set different levels of expectations, and thus different measures of success for different channels.

Why some PR people deserve and get a seat at the table and others do not

 

This all started with a Linked In discussion http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=13905943&gid=1877517&commentID=12015063&trk=view_disc about the appropriate metric for online and social media. In essence the initial query was a request to know what the new version of AVE and GRP was? Naturally, I argued the point that in an age where companies can measure engagement, interaction, sales leads and outcomes, there was no point in even asking that question.

Someone else answered that:

"A number of the UK monitoring providers use a fixed rate to calculate an AVE for offline and online/blogs" .

After I breathed into a paper bag for a while and got rid of my apoplexy over the use of completely made up numbers, I responded that I spend most of my days talking about "the new metric for social media" and NOT ONCE have AVEs or "impressions" or any other form of eyeball counting come up. In fact, when I ask people if they consider it, most people laugh. I added that today, measuring how many people saw your brand, matters less when you can measure what they did after they saw it. If P&G no long cares about how many eyeballs they reach, but what people DO -- i..e. the outcome -- after they've seen it, we have to rethink our definitions of measurement.

I then received this response:

For many PR agencies and PR representatives, the desired goals are not sale figures or new clients or something like it, but they are potential contacts with readers, share of voice, attention in the media and room they took "for free" with their communication actions (e.g. press release, event, ...). … do not forget PR, where the goal are the articles…

And that's when the lightbulb went off. The PR people who have the proverbial "seat at the table" are the ones who understand and can explain and demonstrate how their program impacts the organizational goals. The ones that sit around whining about why they don't get a seat at the table are the ones who think that getting "a hit" or an article or a blog post IS the goal. Until they bother to answer the question "why is an article important? and what bottom-line benefit does the effort have on the organization" they won't get, and do not deserve a seat at that proverbial table.