KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Wondering about Wikipedia? You Should Be

One of the annual highlights of the IPRRC is to find out what Marcia Watson DiStaso
(Penn State) and Marcus Messner (Virginia Commonwealth University)
have been up to lately. Back in 2006 they presented the first ever study of how Wikipedia impacts reputation and your public relations program. In 2008 they brought us an update, and this year they didn't disappoint. Their 2010 results are more interesting than ever. They looked at the Wikipedia pages for 10 of America's most visible companies including: Wal-Mart, Exxon, GM, Ford, GE, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Citigroup, AIG and IBM.

DiStaso and Messner argue that PR people MUST pay attention to Wikipedia because of the influence it has over search engine results. Overall, according to their research, Wikipedia has gained search engine prominence over the years, essentially dominating Yahoo, MSN and Google searches. In one year, an average of 780,053 people viewed articles about the ten companies. The individual statistics are even more impressive. 1.6 million People viewed the GM article thus far in 2010, and another 1.4 million viewed the page for Wal-Mart

They also investigated how public opinion forms a Wikipedia article, looking at both the number of edits for an article (rigor) and diversity (total number of unique users). As it turns out, there's been a significant shift in both rigor and diversity for many companies, depending on the degree to which they have been in the headlines and how engaged they are in social media. GM and AIG for example have seen significantly higher number of edits and far more users, than they experienced in 2006. On the other hand, companies that have embraced social media and engaged in conversations in the marketplace, such as Ford and Wal-Mart have seen a decline in both the number of edits and the number of users.

Interestingly, the tone of postings to Wikipedia has also significantly shifted over time. Overall, for all companies studied, the percentage of negative articles has increased in 2010, while positive postings declined. This was the reverse of the trend they found in 2008, when positives increased and negatives declined. For individual companies, only IBM saw an increase in positives, while every saw other company saw a decline in positives between 2008 and 2010. GM and Chevron were the only companies that managed to reduce their negatives, while Wal-Mart, CitiGroup, Exxon, and IBM all saw their negatives increased.

Additionally the nature of the topics discussed has changed over time, with less and less of the postings focusing on the past and more about what is currently going on within the companies. Finally, they looked at the length of the average Wikipedia articles over time, and found that it has increased 45% between 2006 and 2010.

 

 

 

A little bit of good news from the PR News Survey on Social Media Measurement

 

To coincide with its Measurement Conference, held yesterday at the National Press Club, PR News conducted a survey of its readers to find out what they thought about social media as a PR Measurement Tool. The results delivered some good news and hardly any bad news.

First the bad news – nearly 40% said senior management does not expect measurement of social media to be included in results reporting.

It's not news at all that 60% said that management expects more metrics out of communications these days, it was the surprisingly large percentage that do NOT expect measurement of social. I'm not sure if that means that in 40% of companies senior management accepts social media as an effective tool (not likely) or that they assume that it isn't measurable. Either way, you have to wonder.

 

PR has always a bit of a paranoid profession, so there was little surprise that 32% of respondents to the survey believed that their competitors were doing a better job measuring results than they were. Nearly half 48.9% said that they were on par with the competition, while just 18% felt that they were doing a better job than their peers.

 

What is somewhat encouraging is tha 35.3% are still trying to measure impressions, but another 25% said they were measuring influence. Another 12% or so are measuring sentiment. But buried in the verbatim responses were another 5% or that are measuring measure actions, web analytics, and outcomes. A few even said "sales" and another segment said "tracking messages" all of which give me hope.

Just the fact that tonality and sentiment is being measured by roughly one in five PR practitioners is an enormous jump from just a few years ago. We no doubt owe our gratitude for this shift from the proliferation of sentiment analysis tools on the market these days.

 

We also have new technology to thank for the perception among respondents that they are doing a better job in measuring this year than last. Nearly 30% felt that they had a more robust system in place.

One in five admitted that their measurement programs were not more sophisticated and 22% said they were thinking about it. .

We have seen the future, but we’re not sure who will lead it

 

Among the more thought provoking presentations at IPRRC 2010 was a study by Dr. Tom Watson and Dr. Chindu Sreedharan from Bournemouth University. Commissioned by the IPR, the study surveyed international senior level communicators on what they felt the knowledge, skills, relationships, and managerial abilities that senior communications professionals will need in five years' time. Among other things, the study raises the issue of communications professionals working in a world without borders, without sufficient cross-cultural skills. The conclusions are a bit frightening, when you realize how few people are being trained adequately for these challenges. It also questions the very structure of public relations education.

The study asked professionals to rank different propositions in terms of importance. The conclusions: the most important skills for future communicators are an understanding business strategy. Analytics and understanding of interdisciplinary skills were next most important. Least important was coaching and mentoring skills. However, it should be noted that throughout the study there was an emphasis on reputation and relationships and cross-discipline skills and engagement with stakeholders and a de-emphasis on publicity and media relationship skills. In fact, one respondent suggested that "senior communicators should drop out of the media world"

Sadly measurement skills only ranked sixth, but I believe that the message here is that the ability to measure isn't important, but rather the ability to look at data, analyze it, and draw conclusions based on the business goals of the organization.

Also interesting was that digital communications skills ranked 7^th, but respondents were clear that the the skills needed were not pure technology, but the ability to "interpret changes and trends in technologies ".

So here's the real crux of the problem. Most communications professionals learn their skills in Journalism or Communications Schools. They know all about how to write good press releases, identify reach and frequency, and determine influence and key messages. But the strategic and analytic skills that are being demanded here are seen as something to be taught in business schools. I know that when I taught at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business, PR was relegated to a paragraph and described as "free publicity". Whatever communications skills are taught in business schools have everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with building stakeholder relationships. On the other hand, it is in the business schools that business strategy and analysis are taught. So why the split?

So my take is this. If these are the skills needed by global VP's of communications in 5 years, with very few exceptions neither the business schools nor the journalism schools are currently capable of turning out well-rounded cross-discipline-trained next generation leader that this market will demand. And judging from the truly awful pitches I get on a regular basis from PR newbies, and the continuing focus on advertising value equivalency, media relations is still alive and well. So the real question is, when all those media relations types are relegated to lower level jobs, who will be there bosses?

 

 

 

When none of the old rules apply – new theories for crisis management

Thanks to Frank Walton of RFBinder for his contributions to this post. He and I had dinner after the IPRRC wrapped up and his take was that it was the research on crisis communications was perhaps the most important of the conference. He summarized his findings for me in an email and I've taken the liberty to borrow heavily from his observations.

 

• A study by David Remund, a doctoral student at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill entitled "Crisis of Confidence: News Coverage of America's Largest Banks During the 2008 Financial Crisis, " examined the media releases and the media coverage of the major financial services companies three months before and three months after the financial crash (roughly late Sept 2008). Remund did a content analysis of the media releases for the kinds of messages typically recommended for a company in crisis. He then did content analysis of the media coverage. What he found was that the standard crisis messages and "doing the right thing" just doesn't work any more, at least when you're dealing with an industry (as opposed to a company) . The resulting new hypothesis is that there may be a different set of rules for risk mitigation and crisis management in an industry/economic crisis in distinction from a crisis affecting one company (Tylenol).
• A study by Bokyung Kim and Joonghwa Lee from the University of Missouri (graduate students from South Korea) entitled " Blogs vs. Online Newspapers: Analyzing Different Emotions and Perceptions of Crisis Responsibilty Displayed Online in the Samsung Oil Spill. Lee and Kim's study contrasted how online versions of mainstream media covered a corporate crisis (Samsung oil tanker spill) to how bloggers covered the same crisis. Results of the content analysis of the online versions of the MSM newspapers and the independent bloggers shows that the MSM focused on the economic and social impact, was less emotional, and gave at least some attention and coverage to Samsung's apologies (standard crisis communications reactions, etc.). The newspapers' attention to the crisis also diminished after a short period of time.

   

  In contrast, bloggers tended not to report at all on Samsung's apologies (standard crisis communications reactions) and even claimed Samsung denied responsibility and made excuses that, in reality, it had not. Also, the trajectory of intensity of anger and duration of coverage for the bloggers actually increased over time. All this suggests that we need to rethink "the rules" for corporate response to a crisis, given the changing news cycle, the presence of bloggers and other advocates, and proliferation of news outlets.

   

• A study by Joon Lim of Middle Tennessee University and Sung-Un Yang and Minjeong Kang of Syracuse University (graduate students from China) entitled "Mitigating Negative Publicity with Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: A Study of Self-Referencing" looked at how various corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs affect audiences' responses to media coverage of a damaging corporate event/crisis. They argue that audiences are much more likely to go easy on the corporation if its CSR program is one in which the corporation and its stakeholders have a joint stake and participation in the CSR activity. If the corporation's CSR is essentially distributing money (no matter how deserving the recipient or how large the amounts), audiences were much more critical of the corporation during a crisis. But if the corporation' s CSR has engagement / participation of the stakeholders - they do something together (think back to the Glad Bag-a-Thons; think about the new Pepsi initiative) - then the audiences are much less critical of the corporation as it faces a crisis. A corporation is potentially better if it has invested in engagement/relationships/partnerships.

   

   

There were several other crisis communications studies that I think are worth noting.

 

• Of course I was going to pay attention to Tim Coombs
  and Sherry Holladay's
  latest study, since they've never failed to intrigue me. This year they analyzed Amazon's Kindle crisis, when the company removed certain books from their catalog. People who had purchased the book were outraged and took to the blogosphere to vent their frustrations. However, Koombs and Holladay found that the apology given by Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos was exceptionally effective in diffusing customer anger. In fact, they declared Bezos' apology to be close to perfect, so I'll repeat it here: "This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle," he wrote. "Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission." While acknowledging that it should have been delivered sooner, it resulted in an amazing level of customer acceptance, according to Koombs and Holloway.

   

• The second was a study titled "Reactions to professional athletes: An empirical study by Tomasz A Fediuk, Wesley Lind, Benjamin Kotenberg and Timothy Schlosser all of Illinois State University. The surveed 203 people to determine if the impact of an apology and accepting repsonsiblity has any impact on reutation damage, support intents and puncishment expectations when the subject of the crisis is a professional athlete. As it turns out, when athletes accept responsibility and apology they suffer less reputation damage and enjoy higher support from fans than athletes who do not accept responsibility. However, the study also showed that just because an athlete apologies, doesn't mean that he or she should escape punishment. Also interesting was that the researchers separated athletes from non-athletes and found that while athletes viewed ssteroid use as less severe than non-atheletes, the two groups did not differ in other perceptions. The greatest predictor of reputation damage, support intentions and punishexpectionas was the perception of the severity of the officence. Tiger, are you liste

 

 

Translucency as a corollary to transparency

BYU's Susan Walton
and Robert Wakefield paper at #IPRRC2010 suggested a corollary to their colleague Brad Rawlins' transparency research – translucency. They recommend being "translucent" in a crisis i.e. telling your publics as much as you can and being clear about when you can tell them the rest. They postulated that transparency isn't always desirable and in many cases translucency might be a more appropriate stance for a corporation. They suggested that the type of "front door" a corporation or organization has, might vary depending on the crisis or situation at hand. For some, the door is solid oak, a barrier to the world that no one can see into. With no way to see in, these organizations are vulnerable to attack from the media and the community for their lack of transparency. On the opposite end of the spectrum are organizations that are fully transparent. Beth Israel Hospital and CEO Paul Levy's "Running a Hospital" blog is a good example of how total transparency can built trust and enhance communications. Then there are the vast majority of organizations that fall somewhere in between, with doors that are more "frosted glass." As Professor Walton put it "you can see shapes moving about, but not the details." They advocated that "translucency" as a more ethical behavior in some situations. For example, if your CFO is leaving, it's one thing to not comment, or say that he/she is leaving "to spend more time with his/her family" but you may not want or be able to go into the details of the sex scandal he/she was caught in. Their paper put some very useful definitions around the concept.

1. Translucency is a commitment to communicate to your stakeholders – not an advance commitment to what that communication will contain. I thought this was particularly useful in the age of Twitter when a rumor can go viral in minutes – long before you have time to even track down the facts.
2. Translucency occurs when credibility has already been established -- in other words, translucency only works when your stakeholder believes that the sender has their best interests at heart.
3. Translucency might be most effective when there is reason to believe an organization's arguments and data are rock solid but not persuasive.
4. Translucency is most effective when an organization already has in place a process and structure for bringing greater light thru the glass

Social Media’s Impact on PR continues to grow

Every year, I look forward to Michelle Hinson

and Don Wright's paper on the use of social media among PR professionals. For the past five years they've surveyed PR professionals - members of IPRA, PRSA, IPR and others -- on their use of social media. This year they received 560 responses from around the globe.

What they found:

• Twitter and Facebook saw the greatest increases both in usage and as the preferred source of news. In 2009, respondents saw search engine marketing as most important. This year Facebook and Twitter were seen as most important.
• In 2009, less than a third of respondents were using Twitter regularly. The percentage more than doubled in 2010 to 64%. Similar increases were seen in the use of Facebook. In 2009 just a bit more than half of respondents were using Facebook regularly. This year, nearly three in four 73% said that they regularly used SoCal networking sites to catch up on news.
• Across the board, PR practitioners feel that whether you call it new media, social media, or blogs, their influence on the practice of public relations is growing. In 2007, just over half said that they believed that social media had changed the way their organizations or their client organizations communicate. In 2010 83% felt that change – which actually made me wonder what caves the other 17% were living in? Even the Taliban would agree that social media has changed the way people communicate. 96% said they spent part of their average workday working with blogs or social media.
• Social media is winning over the skeptics. In 2008 just 66 percent of respondents said that blogs and social media have enhanced the practice of PR. By this year, 81% agreed that it had enhanced the practice.
• Another dramatic shift that Hinson and Wright found this year was in the credibility of social media. While the majority gives traditional news media higher credibility scores, this year fully half of respondents now expect blogs and social media to be honest, tell the truth and advocate for a transparent and ethical culture, up from just 40% a year ago.
• The measurement gap extends to social media: Sadly, while 84% of 2010 respondents encourage research to measure blogs and social media impact, only about a third is actually doing it. Even sadder is that while 90% agree that one SHOULD measure behavior – i.e. outcomes -- the vast majority are just measuring outputs – i.e. Hits (as in How Idiots Track Success).
• On the good news front, people seem to accept the fact that social media encourages two-way conversations. One respondent suggested that "new media enables companies to quickly learn what publics and consumer are saying about their goods and services. And that they enabled communications "without gatekeepers."
• Wondering where to put social media within the organization? More and more people are putting it under the public relations functions – 81% said that's where it belonged in 2010, compared to just 66% in the year before.
• Where the measurement of social media should saw the same shift. Up to 94% percent this year, compared to t88% last year.
• Not surprisingly younger respondents were more likely to recommend using social media in public relations.

The best of IPRRC 2010

I've now had nearly 48 hours to digest the ideas, papers and theories that flew by me at IPRRC 2010 and can at least take a stab at digesting them into some sort of conclusion. You'll find more detailed descriptions of each of these theories later this week and in The Measurement Standard. But here's my 10,000 foot view.     

1. Ethics – this was the theme of the conference. And while many of us ignored the theme and just presented our latest interesting research, many people actually paid attention to the theme this year – 21% actually discussed Ethics, or at least had ethics in the title. And, while some of the ethics papers felt like they'd been force fit into the theme, a number of them were truly inspiring, particularly BYU's Susan Walton and Robert Wakefiled translucency corollary to their colleague Brad Rawlins' (Shown here enjoying desert)
   transparency research.
   
2. The second major theme of the conference, as it is every year, is how best to manage communications in a crisis. .Lets face crisis makes for great papers, and whether it is T= Mobile, or Tiger Woods, there were fabulous papers on this topic. The major takeaway is that most of the old rules no longer apply. The blogosphere doesn't respond the same way traditional media does, the public is more skeptical and more likely to ignore your messages, and if you don't have an existing relationship with your stakeholders in the blogosphere, you can't create one overnight. What this means for CEOs – complete and total apologies are in order.
3. New/Social Media –naturally I gravitated to papers on this topic, and there were plenty of them. Michelle Hinson and Don Wright updated their longitudinal study of PR usage of social media, Marica DeStaso
   
   and Marcus Messner updated their research on Wikipedia, Tina McCorkindale didn't make it to give her Twitter paper, but there were lots of others to fill in gaps.
4. CSR – Finally, there was definitely a growth in the number of papers researching the effectiveness of CSR. In the minds of IPRRC presenters it Is clear that CSR and ethics are inseparable issues. Depending on whose research you believe, it is or is not effective.

As always, its impossible to declare any single paper to be "the best" (which is, no doubt, why there are so many different prizes and competitions) but the ones you'll see in this space and in pages of The Measurement Standard, are the ones that stood out for me. And, of course, if you want to see what we all look like click here. 

The quintessial IPRRC moment.

With a title like "Developing a Paradigm of Global Crisis Management Response Strategies" it is hardly surprising that Roxana Maiorescu's (Purdue & Virginia Tech)  (she's the one on the right, Dr. Sherry Holloday is on the left.     

presentation would draw a crowd. But she clearly didn't anticipate who would be at the table. And thus I witnessed the quintessential IPPRC moment.

A bit of background—Roxana's paper was essentially a recommendation for a global standard for crisis management response using a combination of crisis theories put forth by several thought leaders in the field of crisis communications research, including  Drs. Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay ( Eastern Illiniois University) and others.

Using the case of T-Mobile's parent company, Deutche Telekom, which was accused in 2008 hiring an investigator to spy on its board of directors (did they not learn anything from HP?) she suggested that a combination of strategies could form the basis of a standard global approach. She made many excellent points in her 15 minute presentation but the best moment came at the very beginning.

Like many presenters, she began by acknowledging the sources of her paper, and looked around the table and saw those sources sitting there. In a moment of delightful transparency she said "when I submitted this paper, I never thought that the people I would be citing would be sitting at this table!" Get used to it Roxana, that's what IPRRC is all about.

Addendum: For Roxana's full paper, click here: Download ROXANA PAPER

 

New Articles on PR Measurement and Social Media Measurement in The Measurement Standard

In case you haven't seen these yet, here are the most recent articles from The Measurement Standard, the newsletter I publish. And if you'd like a no-charge monthly subscription, just click here to sign up.

Measurement Conferences:
A Preview of the 2010 International Public Relations Research Conference, March 10-13, Miami

Measurement Tools:
Katie Delahaye Paine's New Product Launch Measurement Checklist

Research Tips and Strategy:
Make Data Your Bitch: Dominate your data in ten easy steps.

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 1:
Guidelines for Establishing a Corporate Vision

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 2:
Do Your Employees "Get" Your Corporate Vision?

Measurement Mavens of the Month:
Four Who Score: Gailanne Barth, Sue Burke, Al Orendorf, and Krista Thomas

Measurement Menaces of the Month:
Web Analytics Guys Who Fail to Account for Social or “Earned” Media

The Paine of Measurement:
How’s all that Tweetey Changey Stuff Working Out? Time to Get with the Social Media Program

Social Media Measurement
A SMUG Is Born: A social media understanding group to help everyone get up to speed on social media issues and standards.

Can This Reputation Be Saved?
SeaWorld’s Whale of a Problem

Rapid Writing, by Daphne Gray-Grant
Do Your Readers Get the Point? Five ways to connect the dots when you write.

How about the Sashies? The "Oscar" for the Rock Stars of Regressions?

 The Sashies? The Analysies? The Counties? The Corallaries? We already have a Goddess,
why not an annual Rock Star of Regressions?

It is clear that all of us data and research geeks are finally coming into our own. With entire conferences like OMMA, WAA, eMetrics and IPRRC  devoted to data analysis and metrics, you’d think we’d have our own awards ceremony by now. Sure, there’s the “Jack Felton Golden Ruler of Measurement” Award, but that’s limited to PR measurement, and with only one winner and a handful of entries, it’s hardly representative of the broad and growing spectrum of people who are coming out of the woodwork these days to “Make Data Their Bitch.”  I’m talking about the few, the proud, the data junkies and research geeks who just love digging into data and finding those nuggets that explain why that bar chart goes up or down. Or what caused that anaomaly in March.  You can tell them by the way they talk. Take this dialog from yesterday. I was reviewing a report with Erica, the KDPaine & Partners Director of Research, (otherwise known as one of the  “Paniacs”)   and when I essentially told her she needed to regenerate about 20 charts and come up with about 10 new ways of looking at the data,  she said “cool, this is the fun stuff.” That’s how data geeks talk.

So I think its time to start nominating these pioneers of performance indicators for an annual award.  I haven’t figure out what to give them as a prize.  Probably a new HP calculator – or better yet, get SAS or SPSS to sponsor us and donate their latest software. My first  inclination was to nominate my clients, who tend to be on the geeky side of the communications spectrum. But frankly, I think we need more visible heroes.

So here are my first nominees.

1.       Rachel Maddow.
@maddow is a self-proclaimed geek, who encourages her millions of viewers to "give in to your inner geek" This is what she said last night:  “So this is the only tv show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever. Best graph we've ever had. Admit it! You are excited for that and you would never hear a tease like that on any other show ever .It's okay.Just give in to your inner geek." What other television personality has ever, or would ever say such words! What she showed was a bar graph that showed the impact on the budget of various bills passed under reconciliation.  It was a very simple explanation of a very complicated subject.  She is the quintessitial data wonk.

2.       Another one that gets my vote is Abbie from NCIS.
Imagine a data geek being the hero of a TV crime series! Abbie’s love of data and use of analysis to solve impossible conundrums makes her a perfect candidate for Data Geek of the year.

3.       My third set of nominees are the guys from the NPR’s Planet Money team, Adam Davidson Chana Joffe-Walt  
Alex Blumberg    David Kestenbaum   Caitlin Kenney and Jacob Goldstein .  These guys have taken enormous amounts of data,  digested endless debates, and followed convoluted serpentine money trails to produce  their riveting broadcasts.  Whether its healthcare, the great mortgage meltdown, or the banking collapse, leave it to these guys to crunch the data into a comphrensible story.

So this is just a start, send me your nominees and I’ll start working on the prize!