KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

#1 lesson in Finacial PR Measurement from Nasdaq OMX - measure daily

Jonas Rodny is givng a great case study of measuring financial PR around the acquisition of OMX by NASDAQ.
The key element was that the goal was to preserve shareholder value, so all media decisions were made, and measured around share price and value.
They monitored media every day, plus had a monthly analysis trying to find out what topics and messages were coming across. Also studied reach, but a monthly analysis wasn't sufficient, so we started off every morning with a comms manager meeting, and head of investor relations, to find out what the current topic of the day was. So they used the daily analysis of clips and other business intelligence to decide what to do. That made us more able to act on what was happening on a daily piece, Enabled us to find out what was really happening
Had to deal with SOX regulations and the fact that media loves conflicts and would chose to write about conflict rather than facts and understanding.
Bourse Dubai had the potential of turning it into personal conflict but managed to avoid it.

Great example of going from theory to reality

Dr. Ron G Wolfe, Assistant Dean and Professor, Zayed University was doing college PR for Eastern Kentucky University,  publishing quarterly magazines and doing traditional comms stuff.  Wolfe was challenged to make the effort pay for itself. Alums had been paying $10 a year for "subscriptions" to the magazines. They started with a database and took a random sample to determine likelihood of giving. Discovered 32% likely to give. Convinced the boss to roll out to full 5000, and 32.1% gave more than $25 the first year, The effort is now raising $500 - $1 mill annually from alums. who had been setting for $10 dues each year. So far the effort has  raised $20 million.

Wolfe says the biggest learning was that you can predict outcomes with a random sample.
When asked if there was anything special about EKU that contributed to the success, Wolfe said that he had benchmarks against other institutions of similar side and found that they were the last to do annual campaigns. Boss was one of those people who operated on gut feeling, what's your gut feeling? and I would say "what does my gut feeling have to do with anything?"

If anything, Wolfe said that EKUs Alums were incredibly loyal. A lot of graduates are 1st generation graduates. When they left, they realized the value of the education that was available to them. Interestingly, most graduates were teachers not well off by any means. But now even younger alums are now giving, setting up institutional bank accounts.

Case studies reveal reality of Middle Eastern PR Measurement

Tim Walmsley started off the discussion with a case study of Oral-B and Crest for P&G. The good news is that they measured success in terms of outcomes -- actually dental check ups, the bad news is that he concluded by echoing David Rockland's endorsement of AVE's !

Mazen asks a question that i wish I'd asked, which is how does the influence of one person -- and the quality of the people managing a brand -- can be measured.

Sana Bagersh, coming from both the corporate comms side and now on the PR side, says that it is critical that the data filter down to from the highest levels to the people who are actually working on the brand. Too often you get high level, high caliber of person at initial meeting and then it declines. Critical to know how to ask the right questions.

Interesting that a lot of the conversation is discussing the need for segmentation of audiences, which we're seeing more and more of. We recently segmented media by density of military presence. Increasingly it will be important to measure ONLY the media that the stakeholders are actually reading.

One takeaway -- according to San Begersh it was the spectacular (not in a positive way) impact of social media. Can't control things, you can only can mitigate and guide.

Nader Elmir's takeaway was that we need to ask agencies to think different. We have a tendency is to go with the flow. This is NOT what we need. Tell us what we can do differently. We've been doing things because that's the way things have always been done. We need agencies to challenge us to do things differently.

Tim Walmsley says the one takeaway was: lets do it together, do things faster, get better data, pull it together in new ways.

Man bites dog story on the campaign trail

What is interesting about this story about  Cash-strapped Clinton fails to pay bills
isn't the fact that Clinton can't manage her money, that's harldy surprising. Getting cash up front has for years been part of the rules for working for political campaigns.  What is much more interesting is how well Obama is managing his, paying people on time and earning trust as he goes.

Report from Dubai: the 2nd Annual PR Measurement Summit

Just listened to David Rockland Present at Second Annual PR Measurement Summit
and I have to say I was surprised to hear him call AVEs a form of ROI. A form of justification, yes, but ROI, I find that a stretch.
Nonetheless the conference is great. Lots more people than last year, full of interested students almost all of whom are on Facebook. Also got some kudos for talking about Second Life .  For the most part it is very clear that a year has brought a tremendous amount of sophistication to the Dubai PR community. Not only are the questions significantly more sophisticated but there seems to be much greater acceptance. Session on case studies of measuring global brands about to start. Photos to follow. The only thing  missing is Twitter. It, along with Flickr, are blocked by the UAE government.

Social Media Measurement discussion heads to Virginia

I'm really looking forward to  BlogPotomac, seems like all the Twitter buds I've never met will be there, and of course lots of old friends that I mostly see only see electronically.

Return to Dubai

I'm looking forward to the Second PR Summit Measurement 2008
next week in Dubai. Last year was an incredible experience, lots of great discussion about measurement, monitoring and Middle Eastern media. Hope to see you there.

Answer some questions, help the industry

The Society for New Comms research is doing a very interesting study of social networking use. Help them out by filling out this survey.

More signs that its the end of the world as we know it

Jeremiah Owyang perfectly captures the power of Twitter and group participation. in his piece on SXSW: How The Audience Revolted and Asserted Control.

CNN finally catches up to THE Measurement Standard

Its nice to know that CNN has twigged on to the rolie of Facebook in this election cycle.

also nice to know that our own newsletter scooped them on the story
and here as well