KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Hoping to clarify the Blog ROI discussion

Okay, I'm open to suggestions, but it seems from the number of comments on my recent rant about the ROI of blogs, we need to get some common language about the different types of blogs and why people have them. For the purposes of discussion, and to guide our CGMDashboard clients to the right measurement solutions we're dividing the type of blog projects as follows:

1. MY Blog Measurement

This approach might use the calculation Kami Huyse is referring to.  So for example it cost KDPaine & Partners about $100 a year to maintain this blog and according to Dane Carlson's calculation its worth $25,404.30 yielding an annual ROI of $25,304.30. Not bad. But then I factor in the sales that have come from it, and the relationships that have formed many of which will lead to future sales and the ROI obviously grows. The problem is calculating just how much. And frankly if you Dane tells me my blog is worth $1 million but I haven't created any new relationships out of it, it's a waste of my time. Since the reason I created it was to create dialog and relationships, I'm much more interested in increasing my Conversation Index than my value as an ad site. I have other advertising vehicles that I'd rather have people buy into. And Kami, unless you give me access to your blog analytics, I have no way of knowing the Conversation Index.  I could of course look up ever post and count each comment and TrackBacks, but you'd have to do that continuously and the return on all that effort would be very hard to find. (And FYI, our CGM Dashboard is software that organizations use to track their own blogs, not necessarily a service like Nielsen.)

And if I'm John Edwards and I start a blog to help me get my ideas across, change the world and win the 2008 Presidential Primary, I probably don't care much what the Dale Carlson number is. I care how many people donate money to my campaign, or email their congressperson, or do whatever else I ask them to do.  As always, it depends on your definition of "Return."

#2 -- Measure my reputation

These are the types of measures that our CGM Dashboard, Cymfony, Intelliseek, Market Sentinel's are doing the most of. People are concerned that a potential disaster (ala DellHell) can erupt and spook customers and/or Wall Street. So they make sure that every mention of their brand is tracked and any hint of  a problem is reported. They also use this kind of measurement to listen to customers and find out what's on their minds. There are no hard numbers yet in terms of "eyeballs reached"   but there are relative numbers like share of positive comments or share of negative comments relative to the competition.

#3 -- Measure my blog pitching efforts  or -- What's it worth to me when Steve Rubel mentions my brand in his blog?

This is where a lot of the controversy seems to be focused these days. There are no "equivalent" numbers like "audited circulation" so into the breach comes "authority measures," measures of linkage and influence and other ways to assess the impact. All great ideas and all important and all a HUGE improvement over AVEs. But as always, there is no magic bullet. It still depends on the audience you are trying to reach. As cool as it might be to get mentioned in Gawker, I'm going to get much more impact and better results from a link to Shel Holtz' blog. 

We'll be discussing all these issues on Friday at the New Communications Forum, so stay tuned, I'm sure we'll have new thoughts by Friday afternoon.

What's the ROI of a blog?

We had an interesting conversation with a prospect for our new CGM Dashboard software. As usual we explained that it was specifically geared for consumer generated media parameters such as comments, trackbacks, nature of comment, type of comment etc. there was a lot of head nodding and hmmming and then at the end the PR guys said "but what’s the bottom line? When I go into my boss he expects to see a dollar sign like an ad value equivalency or something. Don’t you have that formula? "

After counting to ten, biting my thumb, walking around the building twice and taking about a dozen deep breaths, I politely explained that this was NEW media, not OLD media. That if he was looking at blogs like just another medium to pitch to and collect clips from, that he wouldn’t have any bottom line at all. Then I suggested he go back and reread the Cluetrain Manifesto.

It's always amazing to me when people try to justify their existance in the 21st century using tools with the mental equivalent of an oil lamp to guid them. The reality it that if your boss wants “ROI” from blogs, he/she better start by defining what kind of “return” they thing they’re going to get. Sure, there are stories about folks that start blogs and all of a sudden sales increase – that’s a pretty measure of success. But it doesn’t happen very often, and it you better have a really enticing blog if that’s your expected return.  Using Howe’s Conversation Index is a great way to measure the success of your own blog, but it’s not going to tell you if your overall blog strategy is working.

If you’re pitching other people’s blogs hoping for a “mention” you’ll be very lucky indeed to see any return at all. Bloggers are interested in ideas, concepts and controversy, not pitches, new products or hype. Not that there aren’t a lot of organizations that would be helped by having a blogging strategy that engages customers and influential’s but then the return is the level of engagement, the number of comments and track backs and perm links to and from your information, not the number of “hits” -- And no, there aren’t standard “multipliers” or “reach numbers” for blogs. I’m sure that now that Nielsen owns intelliseek and buzzmetrics we’ll see something soon, but at the moment, other than a very few blogs that publish their own “circulation figures” (and unless and until they’re audited I wouldn’t believe those figures) .

And if you’re wondering what the “ROI” is for blog monitoring – instituting a program to make sure your reputation isn’t suffering at the hands of the Blogerati, just ask Michael Dell what he lost the week his stock dropped 20 points as a result of an unhappy customer ranting in cyberspace that exposed to Wall Street Dell’s Achilles heel – lousy customer service. Most people would agree that it’s worth many thousands of dollars to know that your billion dollar reputation isn’t at risk.

If you're looking for ways to persuade your boss to fund your measurement project.. .

You might want to check out my column on the Talent Zoo website.

More signs that PR is on the rise

I was thrilled to read that Glaxo is joining the ranks of the PR converted. Apparently they have decided to turn their employees into PR ambassadors. I take exception to Ad Age's verbiage that calls the move "unprecedented" since its a strategy Anita Roddock used decades ago with the Body Shop. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth noting.  According to Ad Age.. " the $35.4 billion pharmaceutical giant has quietly anointed its 8,000 U.S. sales representatives as “public relations ambassadors” to lift its image and that of the beleaguered industry with grassroots PR. The initiative, dubbed the ”Value of Medicine” was created by Michael Pucci, GSK’s VP-external advocacy, to respond to overwhelming criticism and negative perception of the pharmaceutical industry. "

Best new idea of the week

Stowe Boyd, author of the /Message blog, has come up with something he calls the Conversation Index. It's a simple calculation of the ratio between the number of posts on a blog vs the number of comments. If your ratio is less than one, that means that you have a real dialog going on. More people are listening to you and engaging in your conversation than you are posting. Of course most of us newbies would be hopelessly over 1 but I think it brings up a very good point. If our objectives in creating blogs are to create dialog, you need to measure the dialog. We've been encouraging our clients to measure comments and TrackBacks, not just the tone of postings, and Boyd's concept totally reinforces this argument and provides a neat way to package it. As always, you become what you measure. So if you measure your CI, presumably you will see what works and doesn't work to engage your readers, then modify your postings accordingly and demonstrate improvement over time.

So how do you spell success Mr. Cheney?

You have to wonder how Dick Cheney measures success? Clearly he doesn't give a fig for what the media or the late-night talk show hosts have to say. But you'd think that when your former boss's press guy says he's appalled, it might give you pause.  Marlin Fitzwater, the highly respected White House Press Secretary for George Bush Senior, said he "couldn't believe" that Cheney's office didn't have a better plan for dealing with his shooting incident.  As he said, when Bush I collapsed at Camp David they had a statement on the wires before the helicopter left the ground. Where is C.J. Craig when you need her?  In reality, we have to accept that Cheney, and probably his boss as well, only measure success in terms of campaign contributions and votes. And who knows whether shooting your friend in the face will turn off alot of NRA contributors, probably not. But Republican contributors also watch late night television and even Fox is questioning why the VP's office sat on the information for too long, and Scott McClellan can't seem to get back on message, maybe they'll change their definitions of success and failure.

Is it just me or is this kind of scary?

First there was pay for placement, now there's pay for buzz. According to AdAge, word of mouth is becoming a saleable medium, just like television. Apparently ad agencies will be able to "buy good buzz" the same way you can buy and ad, or a congressman. I guess with enough money you can buy anything, but to me, the beauty of word of mouth was that it was based on reputation and reality, not how much money someone was paying for the service.

What's got me really scared is that the advertising community it all over this, and PR, that first invented word of mouth, is nowhere to be found.

According to Ad Age: "Turning WOM into a medium -- as opposed to just a marketing discipline or tactic -- could do wonders for its stature, allowing agencies to buy buzz alongside traditional media buys. There’s even a rate card forthcoming this week. ....BzzAgent campaigns work like this: Volunteer agents choose a campaign to work on and receive information about the product. After forming an opinion, the agents spread it to people they know and then produce a report on the activity. The reports are then analyzed for the client. Agents receive points in exchange for reports that they can redeem for rewards."

To me it all ads up to more fakery and less "truthiness" in marketing. I for one, will begin to suspect anyone's opinion, and personally would want to know how much they are getting paid to promote it. Kind of how I feel about Congress these days.

Your tax payer dollars at work, we think..

Thanks to my buddy Mike Daily at Cubic for this one.. Apparently, according to the GAO, the federal government has spent some $1.6 billion of your taxpayer dollars on advertising and PR in the last three years. Not surprisingly, the lions share has gone to advertising, but still the GAO reports that $197 million went to PR. My question as a tax payer is: How do we know if those taxpayer dollars are being spent effectively? Where are the measures of success?  Even if you take the industry average of 5% spent on measurement,  that's still some $9.3 million that they should be spending on measuring the effectiveness of the other 95% .  I'd be very willing to wager a ticket to this  year's Measurement Summit that this government hasn't spent anywhere NEAR that on measurement. In fact, the sad thing is, they'll probably spend more trying to "spin" this piece of bad news than they will on measuring the effectiveness of the $65 million they'll probably spend this year.

And I thought Granite Staters were cheap!

For some reason we've been flooded with feedback these days about how expensive PR Measurement is. For nearly two decades now we’ve been hearing communications professionals whine about how important it is to measure results, but they don’ t have the budget for it, or it got slashed from their budget. Enough already. Budgeting is a matter of setting priorities. A former client of mine put it this way – “when it came to measurement, you were my right arm. I could always slash off a pinkie, but I was never going to cut off my right arm.” And we stayed in his budget year after year. That’s because he used data to make better decisions. Like the year we showed him that a major song and dance show they were doing at a trade show was yielding very little in terms of qualified sales leads. Sure, the research cost him $20K or so to do, but he saved $50K out of his trade show budget at every show.

Another PR manager at a major consumer bank called me to say that her boss wanted her to fire the PR department because they didn’t  think the results were “good enough.” She wanted data on which to make a decision. I conducted a competitive benchmark analysis to see how the media was covering the industry as a whole. As it turned out, when you looked at the numbers, the PR agency was doing a great job, especially compared to the leading competitor. As MasterCard might say: Cost to collect and analyze the clips: $5000. Cost to demonstrate results: $2500. Cost of not having to waste time conducting a major agency search: Priceless. The point is that in each of these cases, the account manager or PR manager saw measurement as his or her right arm. Not as a way to justify his/her existence, but as a necessary tool for making better decisions and advancing the client or the organization’s best interest. So even though the budgets were small, they worked within those parameters and made the choice to keep those funds for research.

All too often, PR managers put measurement in their initial budgets, only to whittle those funds away when an event goes over budget, or when the VP thinks up a new wrinkle at the last minute. Such budget cutting leaves you with  either poorly conducted research or no research at all. But worst of all, it leaves you with no way of knowing whether all the resources and efforts that you spent all the money on were effective.

In the last few years, the cost of media content analysis has dropped from an average of about $30 a clip to as low as $6 a clip. Software that allows you to automate the measurement process starts at $1500 a year. We've got a program that allows you to analzye up to 1000 clips a year for $10,000. So shut up about the money and come up with another excuse. 

Truthiness and CSR in Superbowl Ads

As usual, I watched last night’s Superbowl, not for the game itself, or even for the annual debate about who had the coolest uniforms. I watched the ads with an eye to what they say about our culture, and what it means for marketers and public relations practitioners.

My overall impression was that the national obsession with Truthiness vs. James Frey-ness has found its way past media hype and into our culture. There was the “Honest” ad about Jimmy Kimmell”  and the inevitable update on the “godaddy” saga that poked fun at the hypocrisy of network sensors and the FCC.

More interesting was the enormous amount of skepticism voiced by the people around me, particularly the teens and 20-somethings. It started with the Gillette Fusion ads. It was bad enough that the ads were uninspiring, but you should have heard what the men in the room had to say about the blades themselves. The general consensus – don’t buy them.

And Pepsi—whatever you were trying to do with Brown and  Bubbly – didn’t work. Our group voted your ads the worst of the night, and the loudest dissing came from the youngest in the crowd, so I’m not sure whom you were targeting, but if it was the younger set, try again.

The best line of the night came from someone who saw the ad for Ford and said “No wonder they had to lay off so many workers, their ads suck, they’ve always sucked and they haven’t changed in decades.”

And then there’s the true marketing effectiveness test – does anyone remember what the ad was for or what the company does? As much as I loved the Godaddy ads, most of the people in the room with me thought they were selling faulty tank tops.

The most surprising twist to the Superbowl ads and the best news from our perspective was the CSR factor. The Dove ads as well as the Veterans ad were both heavy on social message and the notion that because related marketing has come to the Superbowl is great news

But I have to admit my favorite was MasterCard’s MacGyver ad. And yes, it makes me go out and buy things with my MasterCard.