KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Warning, all eyeballs are not created equal

Increasingly organizations are including on-line sources in their media analysis. Whether its adding the on-line version of a newspaper like www.nytimes.com or a blog like Engadget, the practice is causing havoc with those of us trying to calculate “Opportunities to See, (OTS).

The problem comes when you try to put web-site numbers on the same chart as print media. It just doesn’t work. Here’s why: The circulation of the New York Times is 1.1 million, the OTS for www.nytimes.com is 11,405,000 – worldwide its 22 million. So, first of all the eyeballs you reach in print may or may not be the same ones you reach on line – so you may be duplicating your reach. Secondly, it is much more accurate to compare data between print publications, i.e. LA Times vs NY Times because the audiences are calculated in a similar way.

Print media is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation and the circ figures for most publications are published in a variety of directories like Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS). If you are tracking broadcast coverage, there’s Nielsen and Arbitron. However, when it comes to calculating OTS on line things get a bit murkier.

Virtually all data today comes from either Nielsen Net Ratings or Comscore. Nielsen has the power of the Nielsen brand behind it, Comscore claims greater accuracy and data on 8000 publications. They both use huge panels to track online behavior and rank the various sites.

The problem occurs if you are using multiple vendors for your on-line clippings, because chances are good that they don’t all use the same numbers. For years we’ve relied on PRTrak data. They use Comscore and we’ve generally found the data to be very good. But ironically, their parent company VMS is obviously using a different source, since their numbers don’t match the ones from PRTrak.

Frankly for the purposes of media content anlaysis, consistency is far more important than whether a circ figure is off by a few thousand. Start with one definition of OTS and stick with it. What you do NOT want to do is switch sources in mid stream. For more on this topic check out what the IAB has to say. 

Email is dead, long live conversations

If you needed proof that the age of one-way communications -- call it email, spam, or whatever --is over, just take a look at the latest report from Cheetah mail, the folks who send out a lot of that stuff. A year ago Christmas time,  on average 44% of all emails from publishers like The Measurement Standard were opened.  By Q4 2005 that number had dropped to 26%. Overall, across all industries, the drop was almost as bad:  from 36% to 21%. If that doesn't tell you that we are sick of spam and email, then take note of the fact that of all the ones we open, only 4% generate a click thru -- just about half the rate of a year ago.  The message is clear -- engage me in a conversation, don't just yell at me.  There, I've had my rant, now I'm going back to reading Naked Conversations.

I couldn't have said it better myself

Thanks to Paul Holmes for saying what needed to be said about the Lincoln Group .

More proof that communications measurement pays off

The latest Watson Wyatt study into "Effective Communications: A leading indicator of financial performance" is a fascinating piece of research. We did a write up in the Measurement Standard last fall but the data is too compelling not to pass on:

"Organizations with highly effective communications are 26 more times more likely to use measurement,  and they are 15 times more likely to benchmark their practices, " according to the study. So why does that matter? Because according to the study, these "highly effective communicators" have a  19.4 % higher market premium and shareholder returns for such organizations were  over 57% higher.  Finally, if you accept the premise that the key to profits is customer loyalty and repeat business, and that the key to customer loyalty is employee engagement pay attention to this fact: Firms that communicate effectively are 4.5 times more likely to report high levels of employee engagement and and are 20% more likely to report lower turnover rates

More and better numbers coming

In addition to the much touted "Portable People Meters" that promise far more accurate data on who is seeing your brand messages where and when, from across the pond comes news of "TouchPoints" a comprehensive new data base that relies on 5,000 respondents to tell us what kind of media they're using and where. While it's not due out until May, TouchPoints is already being touted as The Next Big Thing in media measurement. We'll wait and see, but we welcome any new system that will give us better numbers on blogs, pod casts etc, etc.

When BS enhances the credibilty of the opposition

Andrew Tucker in the paper he delivered at the IPPRC postulated that there are three varieties of trust that people feel towards organizations.

1.      Short term trust – i.e. based on measures like Fortune’s Most Admired – metrics that  look at financial performance and product quality.

2.      Medium term trust, which he calls reflexive mistrust  -- when you don't know someone well enough to trust, but I need to trust you somewhat to do my job or fill my need.

3.      And finally long-term trust based on customer loyalty and characteristics identified by Charles Fubrun et al.

I’m thinking that there’s another factor he should consider, something I’ll call reflexive trust. And that’s the situation when you so distrust another source because of their frequent obfuscation or spin that you begin to trust the opposition even though they have little credibility. I found myself listening to an interview on the BBC last night with a representative from Hamas and my usual skeptical response was flipped around. I found that I had more faith in what the Hamas representative had to say than in what was being said by the representative of the US Government. And that was because the US Government has been lying to us so consistently about events in the Middle East that it had totally lost its credibility, thus enhancing the credibility of the opposition. Organizations would be wise to heed this tale. Walmart, are you listening?: If you consistently obfuscate and lie and spin -- at some point, your very statements begin to enhance the credibility of your enemies.

It still takes human beings to measure things right

As you might imagine with the launch of our CGMDashboard we've been getting into a lot of conversations about what exactly "measuring CGM" really means. And what it means is a lot of manual analysis, despite all the assumptions about automation. Yes you can certainly go in and scrape content off blogs to see what people are writing. But what you aren't getting automatically is what's in the comments -- and that  can contain far more important information than the original blog. To monitor comments you need to go to the actual blog, open it and read and analyze the comments. It's time consuming and a PITA, but that's how we do it, and that's how we would recommend anyone else doing it. Anyone have any better ideas?

My father would be proud, my mother would be shocked

Who'd have thought that a bad Catholic girl like me would end up being anyone's role model, but Giovanni Rodriguez in the eastwikkers blog named me a "new-media role model" in his great post on jobs for the post-blogging economy. It's a piece of thinking that should be a must read for anyone who hopes to get a job in the next decade.

Doing PR for American companies could be the hardest job in the world

Another thing we learned in Miami was how corporations are viewed in various countries according to various Roper studies. John Gilfeather presented the results of two studies ( Download iprrc_2006_gilfeather.ppt)  by his firm GfK NOP. The first study was an internet-based survey in 13 countries. The second was based on a much broader study of 1000 in-person interviews in each of 30 countries.

Respondents were asked how they characterized most large corporations according to their “personality” traits included such descriptors as: Strong, trustworthy, greedy but friendly. The results do not bode well for big business. In Canada most corporations were seen as arrogant, in the US they were seen as deceitful. Only in Asia were companies given positive monitors such as fun and caring. The study also asked whether organizations were doing too much or too little or just the right amount in various areas. Half said companies were doing too little to protect the environment, jobs, giving back and disclosing. However, the result varied considerably from country to country.  Mexico was high on equal opportunity. But in the  US 71% said  US corporations were doing too little to protect jobs. In the UK 12% said they were doing too much to protect society The bottom-line:  If you’re doing corporate PR you're facing a very cynical populace. The other conclusion is that America ’s place in the world economy is shakier that it has been a long time. Trust in big business at an all time low and while globalization of brands seen as a good worldwide, Americanization of cultures is seen as bad. This is proven out by the comparison of reputation in US vs. non-US brands. The largest gains in brand power are in non-US brands, and many of the US ’s most iconic brands are declining in terms of brand power.

Familiarity breeds content

That's the conclusion that CalPoly Pomona professor Tina Carroll drew from her research into the correlation between familiarity with a corporate brand and its reputation. One of the most interesting aspects of the Miami conference is that you can present preliminary research one year and follow up in a presentation a year later. One of my favorite papers from last year was the one that Tina and John Gilfether gave on the influence of familiarity on preference, and Tina's continued investigation of the topic yielded some very interesting conclusions.

You can read the details in the next issue of The Measurement Standard but the top line conclusions are pretty compelling for PR. According to Carroll, there may, in fact, be no such thing as bad publicity.  What she found was that:

"There are indirect relationships between company familiarity and  willingness to recommend stock and willingness to recommend purchase of the product. In addition, there are relationships between perception of company personality (good, bad), perception of company citizenship (excellent, poor), perception of company reputation (favorable, unfavorable), and willingness to recommend the purchase of a product or willingness to recommend stock.

The more familiar respondents were with a company, the more positively they rated the citizenship behaviors of the organization. The industry on which familiarity had the highest impact on company citizenship was consumer packaged goods (CPG). The familiarity toward the companies within the financial industries had the smallest yet still significant impact on perception of corporate citizenship.

Compared to citizenship and personality, familiarity had the largest impact on reputation. In fact, all industries were found to be moderately affected by reputation at a statistically significant level based on the standardized regression weights. This indicates that familiarity about an organization positively impacts the reputation of the organization. Therefore, increasing a publics’ familiarity with an organization will increase the perceived reputation. In all cases, citizenship was found to have a significant and positive relationship with corporate equity. 

So, does familiarity really breed contempt? No, it doesn’t. In fact, familiarity enhances scores on positive organizational perceptions, such as citizenship, reputation, and personality.  In turn, these variables influence actual behaviors. While other factors may impact the variables investigated, this study provides great insight into how public relations characteristics impact corporate equity."