KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

How Shell, Procter & Gamble and Rockwell measure their success

One of the best parts of The Measurement Summit was learning how the big boys are measuring results.  Of course most of the case studies were pretty useless to the average non-profit, but its nice to see what you can aspire to if you had all all the budget for measurement you wanted.

Mostly what we learned was that the really excellent companies are using a wide variety of measurement techniquest. 

Bert Regeer, Head of Global Communications Planning and Operations with Shell International BV uses everything from traditional media analysis to detailed reputation mapping to assess his reputation. About the only thing they DON'T track (yet) is blogs, but they're working on it. Shell uses. They anlayze their reputation with a wide variety of stakeholders individually and map out communications plans accordingly.

Matt Gonring at Rockwell gave us an update on his use of Padilla Spear Beardley and GfK NOP to assess, change and improve Rockwell's repuation. They make extensive use of GfK's reputation measures to assess what is important to Rockwell's stakeholders. They then took that data and refocused the company's communications efforts around "shareholder intimacy" and away from the tradtional features and benefits communications that B to B has been boring customers with for years.

We learned from Jim Allman at Devries and Mark Weiner at Bacons how Procter & Gamble used marketing mix modeling to deterimine that PR is much better value than tradtiional advertising.

And finally, we learned how United Technolgies uses Predictiv's model to show the  impact of PR on the corporate bottom line.

Metricsexuals Rule

Team Metricsexuals aka the Cool Team, aka Team Evaluation, (the ones with the dark glasses) won the first round in the great measurement debate successfully arguing against the notion that blame for lack of measurement lies with the corporate communicator. Our point was that measurment is actually on the rise, and in fact, the biggest obstacles are the agencies that are too afraid of measurment to advocate it.

Sadly, we lost the next round to Team Measurement, so the great Measurement Summit debate ended as a tie.

The powers that be felt that our name was too racy for public consumption.. but in fact the definition of Metricsexual is as follows:

Metricsexuality is the trait of an urban or rural male/female of any sexual orientation who has a strong aesthetic sense and spends a great amount of time and money on measurement and evaluation. KDPaine coined the term in 2004 at an IPRRC meeting in Miami after witnessing too many conversations about measurement, metrics, dashboards and communications evaluation. Paine described the effect of metricsexuality as preferring PR research to other forms of human intercourse.

 

Measuring blogs in Poland

Through the good graces of  Katerina Tsetsura at the University of Oklahoma, I've been invited to teach a workshop in Warsaw Poland on how to measure CGM, Blogs and other new media. It may not be Shel Israel's idea of a tour of the world, but I'm pretty excited.  Over the next few months I'll be speaking in Warsaw, Singapore, Salt Lake, Wichita, Milwaukee, Dallas, D.C. and Hartford. I'll also be in (but not presenting in) New York, LA, Dubai, Islamabad  and Chicago.

Key messaging in PR tied to prescription sales

The Jack Felton Golden Ruler of Measurement Award was won today by Porter Novelli on behalf of their client Watson Pharmaceuticals. It's an interesting case study that you can read here . The cliff notes version is that Porter Novelli did a detailed content analysis of four years worth of media coverage of Oxytrol and what they found was that communication of key message was a key driver of both patient visits and prescription sale. They also found that articles that contained key messages were six times more likely to be positive. What was neat was they tested individual messages against purchase behavior and found, not surprisingly that some messages, although they got the most visibility, had, in fact, very little impact on sales.

Breaking News! PR is not three times more effective than advertising, at best it's one to one.

For years, there’s been a myth out there that there is some sort of multiplier for PR that assumes that PR is x times more effective than advertising. The most frequent number used was three, but for years organizations and their agencies have been multiplying their PR “impressions”  by  whatever number they chose to indicate how much more effective PR is than Advertising. The only problem is that there has never been or will never be any statistical evidence to support this assumption.

Dr. Don Stacks of the University of Miami and David Michaelson proved this initially in 2004 and this morning presented the results of phase 2 of their study at the 4th Annual Summit on Measurement.

So just to set the record straight: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN IMPACT BETWEEN PR AND ADVERTIISNG.  But this is not necessarily bad news.

The study was conducted in shopping malls in five suburban locations around the US. A total of 351 people participated.  I won't go into the research methodology but it was unbelievabley rigorous, and the confidence level is 95%.  To eliminate existing bias, participants were presented information about a totally fictious new product – ZipChips.  – a new potato chip that contains no fat, no salt and no calories.

 One group was exposed to messages exclusively thru an ad, another group saw only editorial and the control group saw no messages at all. Interestingly the "editorial"  was from the New York Times, included an endorsement from the head of the FDA and was in essence a best-case scenario of a story that exceeded all our wildest hopes and dreams. 

For those of us who have been dissing the multiplier factor for decades, the results were hardly surprising, but for a ton of PR practitioners who have been foisting this myth on their clients for years, this is the PR equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. The landscape will never be the same.

 In reality, the implications are actually quite fun. First of all, we can now say with out any doubt that PR is just as effective as Advertising at least for product launches. And given the fact that PR is generally cheaper, if I were an accountable communicator, I’d pay a lot of attention to this data the next time I was developing an integrated communications plan.

 Interestingly enough, the only differences were in the “don’t know” category. There were fewer “don’t knows” among those exposed editorial, leading to the obvious conclusion that if you are trying to explain something to someone, PR is more effective.

 The bigger question is how does PR fit within the broader context of marketing communications? Clearly this shows that when there’s news, PR is a more cost effective way to get the message out. But if you don’t have nothing to say that is newsworthy, and/or you have a product that is potentially controversial, advertising may be the way to go.

  Needless to say, the presentation sparked a lively debate among attendees at the Summit, one that will presumably continue long into the lobster bake and I hope, into the blogosphere, your thoughts???

 

 

Blogging the Public Relations Measurement Summit

So the fourth annual Measurement Summit started today. Organized by the Institute for Public Relations, it brings the top PR Measurement Wonks and Wonk Wannabees to New Hampshire for three days of measurement discussions and fun and frolic. Like we learned in Miami, just because these guys are researchers doesn't mean they don' t know how to have fun. Tonight is a sunset cruise around Portsmouth Harbor, tomorrow night everyone comes to my house for lobsters and steamed clams.  Friday night, IABC's Yankee Chapter hosts the remaining speakers and attendees in Rye. In between we'll be hearing from the leading researchers, academics and practitioners in the pubic relations field.
This is not for the casual dabbler in PR research. The Summit kicks off with the half-day session called Measurement 101. Dr. Don Stacks and Dr. Brad Rawlins   are currently giving  a  broad overview of the concepts of measureing the outputs, outtakes and outcomes of public relations. The terms they use sound scarier than they really are. They really do a really great job of defining the measurement framework and are truly challenging the attendees to practice what they're preaching. Its interesting to see a program that forces people to leave smarter than they arrived. Its a tough act to follow, but I'm up next doing my "Six Steps to the Perfect Dashboard." routine. Hope I can keep everyone awake. Its tough knowing you're the only thing between them and the booze cruise.
What I love most about this conference is the high level of discussion that takes place. Yesterday in our user group meetings I left with an enormous amount of new material for both the blog and the book. The best new idea was a matrix chart which we're going to put on the dashboard that compares different projects and programs based upon cost and impact. More on that later.  In the mean time, got to go rehearse that speeech.

Congratulations to New Comms Forum and Jennifer

I think the announcement this week that Ragan and Jennifer McClure are teaming up to put on the New Communications Forum next year in Las Vegas is great news. I hate Las Vegas and would much prefer Napa or Silicon Valley, but its such a great conference that I'll have to be there. The only problem is that its the same weekend as the IPRRC Miami Conference, and you know how much I love to blog that!

Live from Chicago, its public relationships

I've been out here at Ragan's Strategic Communications Conference this week (Jeremiah has already done a fabulous job of blogging the content) Check out the photos. It reminded me why I love this job. First of all, kudos to the folks at Ragan and all my fellow presenters, they clearly understand their audience. There were lots of excellent presentations on new media and blogging that opened lots of eyes.  A high percentage of the attendees were from non-profits, a trend I've seen alot of. Rather than confusing people with corporate examples and expect non-profit PR people to draw their own conclusions, they had a well attended track specifically for non-profits. So rather than jumping back and forth between examples in my presentation, I could focus on what I knew the entire audience wanted to hear. And judging from the questions, measurement, or as I'm calling it now "data-driven PR"   is high on everyone's priority list.
So many great moments, hard to know where to start. Up at the top of the list has to be Jeremiah's 20-minute history and intro to the blogosphere over dinner at the end of which Fraser Seitel "finally got it." Or was it the closing session, let by the newly elucidated Seitel, in which Jennifer McClure,
Ragan's Jim Yisela and Chris Kent, Charles Pizzo (one of the funniest men and most entertaining speakers on the planet) and Gerard Braud (okay, he's also really funny and entertaining, but Charles tops my list because he must have mentioned the need for measurement half a dozen times in his various presentations) engaged in a highly amusing debate about what is killing PR. Jim says its bad writing and corporate speak (Jim,  mea culpa over "data driven PR" which I realize is corporate speak, but it's my opinion that lack of data driven decision making in PR is exactly what is killing PR. So I'll just have to figure out something else to call it.  I probably agreed most strongly with Jennifer's contention that PR has been dead for a long time -- killed off in the 90s by bad PR practices and uninformed PR newbies allowed access to telephones and editors list. Her feeling is that PR has been replaced with social media and I'm inclined to agree. Gerard isn't quite so sure its dead, and Charles is furious with PRSA and IABC for not enforcing ethics and standards. All in all it was a really interesting discussion, and I'd love to hear what everyone else out there thinks.
I also had a great time at Pat Cleary's session on blogging for non-profits. Cleary works for NAM which is an organization with which I violently disagree on every issue. But his talk was so interesting and enlightening, and his points were so well made I couldn't really get upset about the fact that his blog advocates against efforts to curb global warning, and in favor of really bad energy policy. grrr But I digress.
His point was that if you stick to your  message and mission, and ignore all the blather, blogging is an incredibly effective tool to advance an agenda. I couldn't agree more.
All this great content on top of several incredibly interesting meetings with measurement mavens, an all in all, it was several days well spent in one of my favorite cities in the world. 

The power of word of mouth

Once again a grassroots, word of mouth campaign for a better candidate has beaten back a well-funded campaign backed by the DCCC. The Washington consultants running the democrats inside the beltway decided that  Jim Craig, a local  state rep, should go up against incumbent Jeb Bradley in November. They  obviously had never heard him speak.  And even more insulting, they announced this before the primary, before the voters in New Hampshire got a chance to chose who they thought would be the better candidate. AND they ignored Carol Shea Porter a woman who knows Bradley's record by heart and who is a convincing and dynamic speaker. Having heard both of them, the best way I can describe Craig's  campaigning style is that Carol Shea Porter is to Jim Craig what my mother's best Givenchy scarf is to wet toilet paper around the neck.

But the real lesson to corporations and the DCCC is the power of word of mouth and grass roots efforts. Shea Porter had no money, couldn't afford to advertise, couldn't pay anyone to make phone calls and won by 20 percentage points by getting the word out via email and talking to real people in real living rooms (including mine.)

Craig had ten times more money -- enough to make at least 6 robo calls to everyone I know, fielded dozens of campaign ads on television, radio and in newspapers, and had enormous signs made (but remarkably few of them were actually put up.)  Talk about measuring effectiveness. What does that say about ROI on the traditional forms of communications? 

The bigger question is when will the DCCC realize that all the money in the world won't sway people who really listen to candidates, ask tough questions and vote their conscience. This isn't the first time the DCCC have come in and tried to tell Democrats how to vote and failed. The question is, when will contributors hold them accountable and start measuring the effectiveness of their efforts.

Convergence of measurement and CGM

We've been suggesting for years that our clients analyze CGM chat as an indicator of message pull thru from PR campaigns. Now I know I'm not alone. Pete Blackshaw has an interesting post on measuring ad campaigns based on chat. His premise: increasingly, advertisers and their agencies will look to CGM-based conversations as a measure of success. The plus side in my mind is that it measures the extent to which people are actually engaged by a campaign. The downside is that chat can be influenced by so much more than just an ad, including paid word of mouth campaigns. Will we really be tracking ad effectiveness or overall brand promotion? Either way, consumer feedback is a heck of a better way to measure than guesstimating eyeballs.