KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

My dream house's 15 minutes of fame

NECN has done a great Video segment on my house.
They did really good job of telling the whole story .

Could this be the end of VNRs as we know them?

Is the FCC's  FCC's fine of Comcast for airing VNRs the final blow to a dying industry that is based on the antiquated notion of bombarding eyeballs with  promotional drivel?  Only time will tell, but lets here it for John Stauber.

Universities listen up!

  This is a fabulous interview in Strumpette with Dr. Don Wright, former chair of the IPR's measurement commission and professor of PR at Boston University. It brings to light what alot of us have  been saying for awhile. What passes for PR in most universities is a joke. The text book I used last year at the Whittemore School at UNH referred to PR as "free advertising" and devoted an entire paragraph to it. There was no mention of social media at all. And these places think they're  preparing students for the future? In fact they are preparing them excellently for jobs with 1950s adverting firms. 

My very first YouTube video

Okay, i'm a dinosaur, but I did just upload my very first video to YouTube - KDPaine and Partners celebrates one year in Berlin. check it out and tell me what you think.

12 signs you might need NPR Anonymous

Forget the digital divide, the big divide I face every day is with people who don't listen to NPR and those who do. When you start so many sentences "I heard on NPR the other day..." its hard to relate to the people who aren't listening. So, when I checked into my hotel room in Chicago and eagerly ran to the radio to turn on WBEZ in Chicago, I realized that I might need to seek help for my addiction. Here are ten signs that you are irrevokably hooked on NPR.

1. You get know all the answers on Wait Wait Don't Tell me, and consider it a primary news source.
2. You have fantasies of about  Carl Kassel leaving his voice on your answering machine.
3. You tell the time by what's playing.
4. You know the name of the announcer before they tell you
5. You'd drive 100 miles to see what Silvia Paggioli looks like
6. You're more excited to meet Ira Glass after a primary debate than any of the candidates
7. You recommend NPR underwriting in more than 50% of your recommendations to clients
8. When traveling, you know where to find the NPR station in before you check into the hotel.
9. You threaten your tenants with eviction if they aren't a member of  the local NPR station
10.You know the score of the latest cricket game.
11. You plan your weekend activities around the local schedule
12. You remember last weeks Puzzler

Anyone got a support group for me?

When PR meets New Media

I've been reading New Media and Public Relations,  Sandra Duhe's compilation of the best of the academic papers on New Media and it's impact on PR. It's not for the faint of heart, given that most of the papers are theses written for the text book crowd. But there are some great gems in there -- I'll be reviewing it next month in The Measurement Standard 
but in the mean time, it did inspire me to come up with my list of 12 signs that this is the end of the world as we know it:

 

12. Gatekeepers? What’s a gate keeper? 

11. Wickipedia is nearly as accurate and just as credible as the Encyclopedia Brittannica and a lot more people use it.

10. 1 no-budget YouTube video will be seen by as many people as watch the Superbowl

9. Shel Israel calls Facebook the most productive business tool he’s ever had

8. Your efforts to “manage your message” have about as much chance as Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign

7. Deadline? What’s a deadline?

6. IBM receives more leads and more exposure from a $500 podcast than it does from an entire advertising campaign

5. Employers no longer check references, they check Facebook and MySpace

4. People are paying $5000 to join exclusive versions of Facebook and MySpace

3. Google has replaced my thesaurus, Websters, the encyclopedia, and my short term memory loss.

2. Every presidential campaign has a social media consultant

1. Measurement is easy

 

Lessons learned, how measuring the right thing can bring success

From Copywrite, Ink. : Measuring Buzz: Strategic Meets Social Media.

Great tips on how to measure internal communicatins

Really useful advice here: Employee Communication: 5 Ways To Measure The Impact On Business Outcomes - Business.

How to ensure that your results are invalid

There are certain rules for doing survey research.  MRA, AIMRI and ESOMAR all publish them, but apparently PR News and Burrelle's Luce either don't care or don't have access to a computer. Either thought is pretty scary, and either way, their current survey is doomed. By requiring respondents to provide their name, address, phone number and email address before responding, they appear to be phishing for contact information, and no doubt would be using the information to try to sell people on Burrelle's "measurement" services -- (whether they really measurement anything, I'll save for a later debate). I registered my cat, gave her a fake address and phone number and proceeded to get past the registration part, to check out the questions. They aren't bad, and if it weren't so inherently biased up front, I might be interested in the results.

why Flickr matters

I'm a word person through and through, but at one point I wanted more than anything on earth to be a photographer for Life magazine so I've always appreciated good news photos. But what really hit home was that I can describe the Berlin stacks falling down as eloquently as I know how, but nothing conveys the drama like photos. Particularly these shots of the Berlin Skyline & Last Mill Shots -.from Mark Ducharme, a totally charming, wonderful local photographer.