KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Any advice for small businesses on social media?

I'm giving a workshop on social media to the Women's Rural Entrepreneur Network (WREN) on Wednesday and have spent the past weekend gathering my thoughts on the subject, well parts of the past weekend. My best source so far as been David Meerman Scott's "The New Rules of Marketing & PR"   which is a great source of good "how to" tips. The real story is that so many small businesses are just discovering how important their web sites are that going to that next level is about as daunting as climbing Mt. Washington.
So does anyone have any advice as to how to bridge that social media gap for really tiny businesses?

Vote for me I'm not running for president!

But I did get listed on Melcum's top 30 marketing blogs..so if you're so inclined you can vote here..  hmmm I wonder whether buying votes on line is legal?

HP update -- it just gets worse

Having now been without my HP laptop for ten days, they just informed me that they will "release" it to Fed Ex a week from today and with luck I will receive it on August 6th -- nearly 3 weeks from when I sent it in. What is extraorodinary is that they ask you what you do with your computer and I say "business" -- so they expect professional business people who run their business from their computers  to just put their business on hold for three weeks??? Time for a new vendor.

I give up on HP

For a year I've been saying that my HP iPAQ 6515 does everything that the new Apple iPhone does, so why would I need to switch? Today I officially gave up on the HP. For two years it's been giving me problems with the sound card. It fails the sound test, and the only way you can use it is with headphones and they only work on one side. It's been back three times for the same problem. So when it failed again, this time I was told to download a ROM upgrade, which I did. And then Activesync stopped working. Finally after two more phone calls and three more downloads and another hour of fussing with it, it is now willing to share information with my lap top. The sound card still doesn't work but there's no way I'm spending $250 + to get this piece of junk fixed. I now totally understand why the iPOD and Apple dominate the marketplace. They make things that work, they make things that do what they say they do, and they really do make things SOO much easier. I'm saving my pennies for an iPhone starting today..

To make matters worse, the wireless died on my HP laptop and their response as always is "send it in" -- a week later and I can't even get thru to the right support person to find out the status.  30 minutes of being transferred around to people who I can't understand, and 20 minutes of phone trees is not a good use of my time.

Eating local, very local

This is raspberry and blueberry season here in New Hampshire and I have several dozen bushes of each about 50 feet from my desk. The trick is to pick them before the japanese beetles get to them, or they rot on the vine. So for the next few weeks, if you don' t hear a lot from  me, it's because I'm in the garden picking madly.

A good explanation of what the implications are of page views vs time spent

The marketing world and the blogosphere have been churning of late over the news that Nielsen is no longer counting page views and is now counting time spent on web sites in their overall rankings. There's a great analysis piece here.
In some ways, Nielsen is affirming a metric I've been touting for years -- cost per minute spent with prospect. (also cost per minute spent with eyeball)  --  as a way to judge the value of long content-rich exposure like speeches, customer events, and sponsorships vs the 30 second ad.
The problem comes when you try to compare the impact of on-line media, CGM and traditional media. If MSM is still counting eyeballs, and on-line is counting time, and CGM is counting influence, what's a measurement maven to do?  Since its not likely that there will be one metric anytime soon, the answer is, keep them all separate and measure against your competition instead.

As the measurement world turns..

Lots of great rumors floating around this weekend about personnel changes in the measurement world. Word has it that Jill Ury --  whom I hired as an intern at Delahaye in 1989 and who had to be the longest surviving Delahaye (now Cision) employee will be joining Report International to help boost its US presence. Jill has been working in the world of measurement for almost as long as I have, so she should bring alot of background to RI's fledgling US operation.
And Lisa Binzell, another of my all time favorite Delahaysians, will be joining her friend Barbara Coons -- another of my favorite people, at Edelman's Strategy One.
Then I heard from the legendary Measurement Maven from Down Under, Jim McNamara, that as of August, he will be taking up the post of Professor of Public Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, a newly created Chair in the Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences to lead research and degree programs in public relations and advertising and also head the Australian Centre for Public Communication. Sounds like a perfect fit. McNamamar is one of our most popular contributors The Measurement Standard (as well as a great camel rider.)






And several future bloggers and Painiacs have also entered the world. Kami Watson Huyse gave birth to future baby blogher Chloe, and Jessica Paradis brought the latest addition to KDPaine & Partners, Dyson Ramsey, into the world just a week earlier. That brings to six the number of babies born this past week or so. So, inquiring minds want to know,  what the heck was going on in the universe last November? 

The worst of the worst

Bad pitches to bloggers are bad enough, and I routinely treat as spam any press release that comes to me that doesn't have anything to do with measurement. But when the spam release is promoting Pay-per-Post -- the most insidious invention to hit the blogosphere yet -- arrivedin my inbox, I was honestly at a loss as to how to sufficiently punish the sender. Any thoughts???  The idiots contact information is as follows:
Jason Ovitt [JOvitt@sspr.com]  847-415-9326 in case you want to pass along your thougts about Pay-per-Post.

Warning all you survey research people out there..

The most recent brief for the Center for Media Research gives this warning:

Phone Surveys Skewed by Cell-Only Homeowners

According to the most recent PEW research study, 12.8% of U.S. households cannot now be reached by the typical telephone survey because they have only a cell phone and no landline telephone.

The study goes on to point out:

If people who can only be reached by cell phone were just like those with landlines, their absence from surveys would not create a problem for polling. But cell-only adults are very different.

The National Health Interview Survey found them to be much younger, more likely to be African American or Hispanic, less likely to be married, and less likely to be a homeowner than adults with landline telephones. These demographic characteristics are correlated with a wide range of social and political behaviors.

In early 2003, just 3.2% of households were cell-only. By the fall of 2004, pollsters and journalists were openly worrying about the potential bias that cell-only households might create for political surveys. The National Election Pool's exit poll found that 7.1% of those who voted on Election Day had only a cell phone, and these cell-only voters were somewhat more Democratic and liberal than those who said they had a landline telephone.

Given the speed with which the number of cell-only households has increased, there is growing concern within the polling business about how long the landline telephone survey will remain a viable data collection tool, at least by itself. At the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, a government researcher told the audience that the size of the cell-only group could approach 25% by the end of 2008 if the current rate of increase is sustained.

The Pew Research Center conducted four studies that included samples of cell phone numbe! rs as we ll as landline numbers. The surveys covered a very wide range of topics, including use of technology, media consumption, political and social attitudes, and electoral engagement. Comparing the cell-only respondents with those reached on landlines allowed an assessment of the degree to which our traditional surveys are biased by the absence of the cell-only respondents.

Comparisons Between Landline Samples and Cell-Only Samples
Number of survey questions compared	46
Average (mean) difference between landline and cell-only samples across all 46 questions	7.8%
Range of differences (absolute value)	0% - 29%
Maximum change in final survey estimate when cell-only sample is blended in	2%
Average (mean) change in final survey estimate when cell-only sample is blended in	0.7%
Source: PEW Research Center, June 2007

The good news, says the report, is that none of the measures would change by more than 2 percentage points when the cell-only respondents were blended into the landline sample and weighted according to U.S. Census parameters on basic demographic characteristic! s.

However, while the cell-only problem is currently not biasing polls based on the entire population, it may very well be damaging estimates for certain subgroups in which the use of only a cell phone is more common. According to the most recent government estimate, more than 25% of those under age 30 use only a cell phone. An analysis of young people ages 18-25 in one of the Pew polls found that the exclusion of the cell-only respondents resulted in significantly lower estimates of this age group's approval of alcohol consumption and marijuana use.

Perhaps, opines the report, excluding the cell-only respondents also yields lower estimates of technological sophistication. For example, the overall estimate for the proportion of 18-25 year olds using social networking sites is 57% when the cell-only sample is blended with the landline sample, while the estimate based only on the landline sample is 50%.

Including a cell-only sample with a traditional landline-based poll is feasible, but cell-only surveys are considerably more difficult and expensive to conduct than landline surveys.

• Federal law prohibits the use of automated dialing devices when calling cell phones, so each number in the cell phone sample must be dialed manually.
• It also is common practice to provide respondents with a small monetary incentive to offset the cost of the airtime used during the interview.
• The screening necessary to reach cell-only respondents among all of those reached on a cell phone greatly increases the effort needed to complete a given number of interviews.
• Pew estimates that interviewing a cell-only respondent costs approximately four to five times as much as a landline respondent.

Pollsters recognize that some type of accommodation for the cell-only population will have to be made eventually.

KDP1, Durham 1, Berlin 2

We lost the appeal for our zoning violation last night. In essence the town of Durham ruled that because I wasn't  actually living in my office (spending sleepless nights there doesn't count, apparently) I was in violation of the zoning ordinance. Apparently you have to brush your teeth, wash your face, pee, get dressed and make breakfast within a certain distance of your business to qualify as a "home occupation."   Which raises some very interesting questions. If my "home occupation" is horse farm, do I have to sleep in the stall? The long story made short is that they encouraged me to come back and ask for a variance to allow my business to continue in the cabin. I informed then that I would do that when hell froze over.
Once again, the stark difference between the two towns in which I'm involved was made clear. Senator Gallus, the Senate representative of Coos County, came up to my office in Berlin yesterday morning and asked if he could give me a hug and personally thank me for bringing my business to Berlin.  So for anyone else frustrated with zoning on the Seacoast -- I've got some really lovely office space in Berlin for you...