KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Be afraid, be very afraid, and do NOT trust your list.

This may not be the Worst Pitch in the World, but for me its an all time record for bad pitches. An agency emailed me this morning to include them in a story in The One Minute Benchmarking Bulletin.  First of all, that publication ceased to exist 5 years ago. Secondly the whole concept of the publication was that it could be read in a minute and had minimum content, none of which came from outside sources.
So I suggested to the poor flack who was assigned to this unenviable task that who ever supplied her media list was clearly incompetent. She immediately apologized and explained she was just using what Cision's MediaSource provided her! Yikes, that's scary. How many thousands of PR people are relying on a source that is so clearly out of date. No wonder Kevin Dugan has no shortage of material!

Getting ready for SXSW

Aaraon Strout is putting together  45 Interviews in 45 Days as a lead  up to South By Southwest. here are my answers to his interview questions:

• In one sentence, please describe what you do and why you’re good at it.

I measure communications-- specifically I measure all forms of professional communications, internal, external, investor, community, events, you name it. What makes me good at it is that I love the math and the analysis but as a former reporter and professional communicator I also understand what the data means and what you need to do with it and about it. 

• How did you get into the world of online community, social media or social marketing?

I was assigned to write a paper on "how to measure blogs" by the Institute for PR's measurement commission. In order to measure something, you need to know how it works, so I started a blog. Then Shel Israel told me to get onto Twitter, and we got Facebook as a client and the rest, as they say,  is history. And, since I measure our own communications, I can honestly say its been great for business. 

• If you had $10 million to invest in one company and one company only based on their use of “social,” which company would it be and why?

If there were such a thing, I'd say Obama, Inc. His campaign did social better than anything else in history. But if it had to be a real company it would be Comcast, I think any public utility that can make me love them by fixing my broken TV at 10 pm on a Friday night is doing things right.

• Which business leader, politician or public figure do you most respect?

Michell Obama

• Would you join a toothpaste community? Why? [for background on this question, see the "Would you Join a Toothpaste Community"]

No, I'd rather spend time with real people, or my Twitter community, rather than develop a whole new one.

• Freeform – here’s where you can riff on anyone or anything – good or bad. Or just share a pearl of wisdom.

I think social media can really change the world. We saw a little bit of its power with the Obama campaign, we should see lots more of it as social media brings sunshine and transparency to government.

Who cares why it was censored. more people need to see this.

There's a big kerfuffle flying around the blogosphere
about who and why NH's own Rev. Gene Robinson's prayer was omitted from yesterday's We Are One concert. Rather than engage in the guessing game of why, I'm printing it here in its entirety because it's important, its beautiful and more people need to hear it.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire Opening Inaugural Event Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president. O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…
Bless us with tears-- for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an educat
ion, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS. Bless us with anger-- at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience-- and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility-- open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance-- replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity-- remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable i
n the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States. Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.
Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims
Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.
 And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand-- that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace. AMEN.

Another tool to figure out who's influence is growing or waning

This is the best tool I've seen so far to analyze an individual's influence on Twitter. It's certainly takes into the broadest range of datapoints.

What PR people can learn from the Bush Presidency

This morning's On The Media segment about Bush and the Media is an excellent lesson for PR people everywhere. The segment lists dozens of standard PR tactics (used by most PR folks for decades) that the Bush Administration used to in the name of "communicating messages" and shaping opinion. Standard command and control tactics that may have worked in the earlier centuries, and before the advent of social media, but ultimately failed.
Sure, if measured by "opportunities to see the message"  they succeeded. No doubt the media analysts in the White House could show that messages were in fact communicated, and that coverage of their particular issues and battles no doubt did increase steadily during the past 8 years. So by the metrics that most PR people (and particular PR agencies) use today, you could say that it worked.
But measured by the ultimate metric -- did it accomplish the organizations goals  and objectives -- those strategies and tactics were a complete and utter failure. Not only did they not fail to accomplish much for the country, but given the state of the Republican party today, they had, in fact the opposite effect, removing power and credibility from most of the people how have wielded it for the past 8 years.
So what happened? In short, social media happened. The power of Twitter, Blogs and all the other media outlets -- in short, the power of people and conversations  that enabled truth to win out over lies, transparency to win over obfuscation,  hope to win over fear, and unity to win over divisiveness. . its a lesson that should not be lost on the rest of us.
A number of years ago Shel Israel and I had dinner in Chicago and talked about the extent to which social media could change the world. Shel, it already has.
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Present at the conception

It was at last year's eMetrics conference that I first hooked up with the guys at Tealium. I'd been complaining about the lack of measurement tools that showed the actual impact of social media and PR efforts on actual business results. After talking to them for a minute or two, it becamem apparent that these guys had the answer. That was also when Avinash and the wizards at Google Analytics first debuted all the cool new features of that fabulous program. Well, one thing led to another, and obviously there was some intercourse between Google and Tealium because shortly thereafter they announcced that they were a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC)
That connection has now produced an offspring that is the answer to many of our prayers. It's an incredibly simple, affordable ($250/mo) analytic tool that hooks into Google Analytics and goes way beyond the basic data that Google provides -- like telling you which media is driving visits, click-thrus, conversions and sales. It looks just like Google Analytics, but offers an extra line under the stats that tells you which media your visitors went to before clicking thru on your site.
Okay, all the PR people out there focused on your relationships and reputations, this is not the metric solution for you. But for everyone else who works for an organization that sees PR as part of marketing, this is the answer.

Twitter is getting SOOO mainstream

You know its mainstream when the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services is on Twitter

Do you love the life you've made?

I have a philosophy about music. You hear the lyrics you need to hear when you need to hear them. I listen to alot of music and most of the time, the lyrics are background to whatever I happen to doing. But every once in awhile.. the lyrics break thru the busy-ness. My friend Cosy Sheridan's new CD Eros
is the latest new addition to the "Running Tunes" play list on my cool Sansa Fuze . (thanks again Ryan Donovan) and on Saturday morning I started to really listen to the lyrics for the first time. I'd been intrigued with the title of one of her tunes "Do you love the life you made?"  but it wasn't until Saturday morning, when I was contemplating that very question, that I realized how powerful a song it is: 

It's a risk and a leap and then a hole in the net
its a miracle you haven't given up yet
and seems to reward arrogant fools
it blows up in your face doesn't follow the rules

Everything unravels
Everything will fade
Do you love the life you've made?

Do you need a moment of rest?

Tension holds you upright
Tension drives us all
For all you do right
its all you do wring l

All the ways you could die
All the ways you could live
One wrong move, its alot to forgive

So it's a great question because by the time you make it into your 50s, you damn well  better love the life you made because it's very hard to change. And, as a cancer survivor, I've learned to savor the moment, not save stuff for later.. because frankly you don't know how many "laters" you're going to have. So making sure that you love your life, strikes me as a pretty important thing to get right.

I literally stopped in the middle of my run to ponder it. And what I realized is that an awful lot of whether you love or hate your life boils down to where you wake up in the morning. When I'm waking up in Berlin, I can see all the way down the valley to the presidential range. This is the view from my bedroom window.

Then I go for a run and this is what I see:   

Then I stop in at Dunkin Donuts where they ask me if I want my usual, and then make it just right. I walk to work and am greeted by some of the smartest, most hardworking people I've ever had the privilege of working with. I talk to clients who are wicked smart as well, and they inspire me to think harder and smarter.

When I'm not in Berlin, I wake up to this at the family farm in Durham:

In short, what's not to love? Sure there are times when I'm heading to the airport on a 3 am bus when I declare quite loudly that life sucks and I hate my life, but truly deep down inside,I don't mean it. I've got unbelievably great friends,the ability to make a difference in my industry and in my community, and I'm blessed in where I live and how I live. So Cosy, for me the answer would have to be yes.

IPRA, do you really not care at all about measurement?

So I was all excited to get the announcement of the IPRA - Golden World awards. I mean IPRA is the biggest international organization for PR, and its conferences are pretty important affairs. Besides, we've been doing some pretty interesting break-thru stuff these days, setting social media benchmarks, measuring investor relations, correlating relationship and trust to intent to purchase and media exposure.. any one of which would be a good candidate for an award, or at least  PRWeek and the IPR seem to think so.

Imagine my surprise when I read down the list of categories and saw not one mention of research or evaluation. Can it be that IPRA doesn't feel that research is an important aspect of PR? What bugs me most is that all the categories focus on pushing information out, and nothing in this award program focuses on the basic reserach that might well show that a campaign is unlikely to succeed. Isn't there value to that? 

Why I love My Life

A repost from my Coos Conversations blog: Why I love My Life.