KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

An anthem for the times

As I went running around the sleepy little town of Berlin, NH
this morning, as usual enjoying the natural beauty and amazing views, the news coming into my earbuds via NHPR was more than disturbing. Thousands of miles away protesters and children were being tear gassed and shot by Bahraini police. I'd been glued to Andy Carvin's Twitter stream for weeks, and today's news was just too much.Those of you who have followed my muses while I run, will know that I have an inner faith that you hear what you need to hear at the time.

As it happens. I switched to music from my favorite local musicians and this song  Download 05 Track 5 came on. It's called The Kings Who Make the Rules and it was written a few years ago by friend Rick Watson and It's on his new CD

It was relevant then and quickly became a favorite of mine, but it seems even more appropriate now than then. Here are just some of the lyrics:

Revolution by disillusion, men pushed to the brink

Outrages and uprisings by those who dare to think

The ruling class will fix the game to harness us like mules

We must battle the injusticies of the kings who make the rules

To all the brave freedom fighters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and anywhere else. This one is for you.

 

Don't blame Google, look in the mirror

This insightful piece from Evan LaPointe on JCPenny's SEO debacle raises a very relevant and pertinent idea: It's not Google's fault that it was gamed, nor is it really the fault of the content farms.  It's the fault of organizations who just aren't listening. 

...what we have here is a situation where JCP as well as many other brands / retailers, have a complete void of assistive and rich content to accompany their site experiences, and that lack of content is what requires search engines to look off the site for signals that this site and these pages are even worth considering.

 

The sad part is that in the physical stores, you can interact with salespeople. These people will talk to you about what bedding will look good in your home. They will help you dress for your first day at the new job. They will tell you what the bulleted list of product features on a steaming iron actually does for you and your clothes.

 

What these salespeople don’t do (in most cases) is just blab out some marketing language about each product and have a call to action on their foreheads.

 

The even more unfortunate part of all of this is that there were tremendous resources (in people and money) poured into link development and gaming Google (which continues to happen at thousands of companies who are seeking “the easy way”).

 

All of those resources could have been put into researching what users were looking for in search, what users were doing on the site (and not doing), and creating a brilliant site experience with relevant content to satisfy all of those external search and on-site hopes and dreams.

 

Doing this would have naturally separated JCP from its competitors who were not willing to invest in creating a genuinely great site experience or developing the same content on their site.

Let me selfish here. The content farms and search engine gaming are the bane of my existance. It fills our feeds and our servers with junk, wastes my coders time who spend their days sorting thru the stuff trying to figure out what is real and what is fake. Worse, it confuses the marketplace who think they're getting lots of "hits" when in fact 80% of their mentiosn may be irrelevant. 

So you have corporate commmunications and public relations departments trying to improve their organizations reputation online and off, by promoting listening and diaglog, while simultaneously,  you have the digital marketing folks systematically making their colleagues jobs more difficult by using these annoying, if not illegal, tactics.  What a waste.  As LePointe suggests, perhaps if they spent the money listening instead of spamming and gaming, they'd be far more effective.

A helpful guide to social media advertising measurement

 

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released its "guide to social media measurement."   That's actually a misnomer. It is not a guide to overall social media measurement.  As might be expected from any organization that has Advertising as its middle name, It blithely assumes that all social media interaction is desirable, and I can think of any number of organizations, from Groupon to Hosni Mubarak that might beg to differ. So, to be clear,  if you are trying to measure the effectiveness of your advertising spend in social media, this is a good place to start. And the really good news is that it pretty much lines up with what we in the Social Media Measurement Group of the CIPR and the Validated Metrics Framework that came out of the Barcelona Principles.

Perhaps the best parts of the Guide is in the appendix. There are some good case studies and implementation scenarios that can help you get your mind around the problem.

Egypt's wasn't the only revolution this week

Andy Carvin, (@acarvin) National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities, is already being talked about for a Pulitzer Prize.
First of all, let me confess, I'm a complete, total, 16-hour a day NPR addict, so it wasn't entirely surprising that when NPR's social media guy showed up on Twitter, I'd start following him. To the best of my recollection  it was sometime in the midst of the 2008 political campaign that we traded some tweets about the NH primary and social media. So I  was thrilled and delighted when he came up and introduced himself to me at SWSX a few months later.

Back to the Pulitzer. The reason Andy is being mentioned in the same sentence with journalism's most coverted award is his amazing curation of tweets from Tunisia and Egypt in the last month. As a result of this activity, Andy may be to journalism, what those folks in Tahir square are to the Middle East. In a word, he may have changed our very vision of the landscape. In short, he has forced alot of people to redefine  "covering a story" and the nature of "journalism" itself.   We always new that social media could change the world, and especially the world of journalism, but now we are seeing it in action.

When I first saw Carvin's tweets from Egypt, I immediately set up an @acarvin column in Tweetdeck to keep myself up to date. At first, his tweets were so immediate, I thought he was actually in the thick of things, and worried about his safety. Then I realized that he was actually in his office, which actually gave him a much better vantage point to collect, filter and retweet news from Tahir square.

At one point he was posting about 400 tweets a day, giving his readers an incredible perspective, with pictures, video and translations coming in real time. Being the news junkie that I am, I found him to be many minutes, and occasionally an hour or so ahead of the major news outlets like CNN and the New York Times. Anderson Cooper's punch to the face notwithstanding, only Al Jazeera English had anything close to Andy's level of coverage.

Lets think about this. One guy, from a radio network who's funding is constantly under threat, has better coverage than most major news conglomerates. 

This is not entirely new news. We've seen over and over in this new social media age, that one twitterer (@OxfordGirl in Iran, @sandmonkey in Egypt) can quickly become the goto source for a story. But Andy's curation approach is what is really new. The idea that one smart individual with wicked fast fingers and a whole bunch of connections, can "cover" one of the biggest stories of the year using hundreds of feet that are actually on the street, in the square and at the front. He didn't  need cameras and microphones and a crew. He has dozens of trusted sources with cell phones and their own sources.I don't know what Andy gets paid, but even if NPR paid him triple-time hazard pay, it's still alot cheaper than the half a million or so Rupert Murdoch spends to put out The Daily each week.

Even more amazing, he may have ended up finding his own new financial model for journalism. By the time Mubarak was gone, Andy had amassed close to 21,000 followers on Twitter and then he tweeted this:
His gentle plea generated several thousand dollars from his faithful followers, includig some from me, showing that incresaing engagement does in fact have direct revenue implications. 

 

Guess they didn't achieve the objective..

Groupon announced on Thursday that it is pulling its controversial Super Bowl commercials from the air.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

This is a social media litmus test

I love this brilliant video from Bob Garfield, co-host of On the Media
and author of The Chaos Scenario.  Okay, I'd admit it, Bob is one of my favorite people on the planet. I was lucky enough to spend a delightful hour or so signing books with him at PRSA International in San Diego and have followed his wit and wisdom religiously ever since. But this particular video isn't just a brilliant characterization of the reality of the social media scene but also provides an excellent litmus test for social media measurement. 

Every day there's a new kerfuffle going on somewhere on some blog about whether you can or can't measure social media; whether there is or is not an ROI impact, whether impressions matter etc etc. The most recent has been taking place over at my friend Shel Holtz's blog about Groupon.

The reality is there are two types of people: the people like "rainbow birthmark" in the video that see the world today as filled with wonderful new tools to scream louder and in a different way to the world at large. They aren't interested in a two-way dialog, could care less about listening and think that "buildng brand engagement" means getting more followers on Twitter.  They call me up on a daily basis and ask me for "the social media equivalent of AVE" or "the value of a Facebook friend" or worse still "how many guaranteed impressions will I get from doing this iPhone app? "

I want to scream at them, "DON"T YOU GET IT?  We don't want to be your friend, you deaf rainbow-birthmarked moron. "  

Then there are the few, the humble, the listeners. The folks at Dell are the poster children of this group. They listen like crazy, and see more value in listening than screaming. They measure success in happy, repeat customers and the added value that brand loyalty brings to the company. Home Depot, Comcast and Southwest fall into this category as well.
This group measures results by the impact on the business, the shortened sales cycle, more qualified leads, improved business processes, more loyalty. With them I have long conversations about measurable goals and actionable metrics. 

So if you are still reading this, it's time for your quiz:

Are you the listening type that measures business value of listening to your stakeholders? Then call me, I'd love to debate the issues, review your metrics and share my thoughts.

Or are you the rainbow birthmark type that care more about hits (how idiots track success), eyeballs, and faux followers and just want people to "be your friend" and "watch you dance."

To quote the advice my cousin the middle school teacher gives his about to be naughty pupils:  Make good choices.

Sometimes, metrics that ignore relationships are worse than no metrics at all

Take the case of Home  Depot. Now, I've been a customer at Home Depot
since i met its founder Bernie Marcus at a board meeting in Long Island. Can't remebmer the name of the bank we were on the board of, but I remembered Mr. Marcus and his values-based philosophy of running a business. 
Based on that relationship, when Home Depot opened its first store on the Seacoast of New Hampshire, I went in and applied for a credit card, which arrived in the mail a few weeks later. Since then, I've probably at least close to $100k there,  having built two houses and rennovated a third in that time -  mostly with supplies purchased at Home Depot. About a year ago, Lowe's opened up not far from Home Depot, but, critically for me, next to Target and Starbucks, so I checked it out, and found that in some areas, particularly the gardening and shelving areas, Lowe's had a better selection. But the pricing didn't vary much, and neither did my shopping habits. Until this week. 

Somewhere in the bowls of Home Depot (or more likley an outsourced service company) is a giant computer grinding away at "the numbers" and somewhere my name and number got cruched and they figured out that according to their "algorithm" I  posed a credit risk. Never mind that I have been paying my bills on time for a decade. Never mind that i remained loyal, despite the arrival of the competition, never mind that I even stood up for them in conversations because I like their sustainability programs. My number came up and it said "cancel her account."   

Fine, doesnt' matter to me at all. I have no problem at all switching all of my hardware purchasing to my local hardware store and Lowes. But it does point up the weakness of having a measurement program that only crunches numbers, and fails to look at the people and the relationships behind those numbers.

UPDATE: @homedepot saw my post and responded. Today I got a notice that my credit was reinstated and increased!  Once more brand loyalty reinstated thanks to a good listener!