The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Can the Reputation of Target Be Saved?

The short answer: Maybe, but only if they do something fast.

I’ve been watching the growing Boycott Target movement with a great deal of personal interest. I heard a fabulous presentation by someone from Target at PRSA a while back and have ever since been impressed by their philosophy of doing good, rather than just talking good. And, after Goodwill, it’s my favorite place to shop.

So when many of my friends sent me the Boycott Target video and asked me to “like” their Boycott Target Facebook page, I felt a true pang. Generally I’d be the first to go along with boycotting companies that do evil to society, their employees, or their communities. (I haven’t bought Exxon gasoline since the Valdez spill of 1989.) In today’s terms I’d call myself a highly engaged consumer who perceives a strong and healthy relationship with the Target brand.

But when I heard about their $150,000 donation to an arch-conservative anti-gay Republican gubernatorial candidate, all I felt was dismay. It was as if the “don’t be evil” guys were found to be doing evil all along. (Okay, well maybe I’m just naïve.) Somehow, it made it seem that all Target’s prior support of the LGBT community was nothing but window dressing. That when push comes to shove all they really care about is the bottom line.

Now I will freely admit that a big part of my dismay comes with the fear and loathing I feel towards the Supreme Court ruling that declared corporations to have the same freedom of speech rights (and ability to buy an election rights) as individuals. The ability to freely spend money to ensure that elections and the enforcement of laws goes your way is the biggest threat to democracy I can imagine. That having been said, I don’t hold it against Target for funding whom they please.

Their fault in all of this was to simply say I’m sorry, and do nothing to rectify the problem. They took no action to indicate that they were doing anything other than paying halfhearted lip service to an outraged public.

So, when the video began to circulate, and the pleas to boycott became louder, I have to admit I listened. And if I listened, there are probably a whole lot of other people who heard it as well.

If Target wants to avoid more damage—and long term reputation damage—they've got to make a serious effort, and fast. --KDP

* (Thanks for the illustration, HitDanBack.)

 

 

 

The Problem with PR Today is They Don't Teach You How to Do It

The Paine of Measurement

 

Today's PR demands business skills that don't get taught in PR school.

Since this is our official “back to school” issue of The Measurement Standard, we thought we’d all take a turn in the classroom. So that’s why there’s a piece on “What we’ve learned from our mistakes,” and a checklist of what you need to know before you start your measurement program.

But mostly, this issue is aimed at all measurement maven wannabe’s that want to do metrics right but may not have the necessary skills. Take heart, because you can learn those skills.

I know because I did it.

Nowadays I am very much a numbers person, but I didn't start off that way. I went to school and got a liberal arts degree, a BA Cum Laude with a major in Asian Studies. My dream was to be the New Delhi correspondent to the New York Times. But that dream got deferred somewhere along the line, and I became the New Hampshire correspondent to the Boston Herald. Not exactly the same, but a fun assignment nonetheless.

Then, like many good 20-somethings, I followed my heart to the Golden State. There I discovered that there were about 20 wannabe reporters for every opening, so I jumped to “the dark side” and got a job in corporate marketing. Ten years, five jobs, and a bunch of measurement and justification later, I started The Delahaye Group and what is now my 23-year career in measurement.

The point is that nowhere in any of my pre-measurement schooling or work experience did anyone ask me to understand a basic P&L, a statistical correlation, or any other form of math, accounting, or business principles. I was never taught, or expected to learn, the skills that modern PR requires.

And that’s the problem for PR in today’s environment: Today's PR demands business skills that don't get taught in school.

It used to be that if you could count to 100 (or the number of clips you got in a month, whichever was greater) you could measure PR. Then, when things got a bit more sophisticated, you needed to know how to use a calculator to add up the number of impressions. (Or, worse, calculate AVEs.)

But while our counterparts in the business schools were learning what makes businesses grow and prosper, us PR folks were learning how to spin, obfuscate, and justify. More recently, communications classes have added an emphasis on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and, in the best of the best, statistical analysis. But the fundamentals of business success still seem to be the exclusive purview of business and accounting majors.

Which means that most communications majors have a completely warped definition of success. Somehow they think that if they just get enough of something – Facebook fans, twitter followers, clips, column inches, or impressions – their existence will be justified.

What they don’t understand is that unless they can tie those ”somethings“ to the mission and bottom line of the business, their measurement program is one enormous exercise in futility. Ultimately, someone someplace up the food chain will call into question their right to exist. And they will have every reason to do so.

As long as PR and social media are seen as just a better way to spin a story, we’ll always be vulnerable. PR people will always seem second-rate and expendable until we aggressively demonstrate that we have vital role in helping the organization achieve business success, be in greater efficiency, shorter sales cycles, or lower legal and retention costs.

Which means that if you want to be a success marketer or communicator today, you probably need to go back to school and take a few of those business courses you hoped to avoid.

Happy Measuring,

 

Puzzling comScore Video Data: Bad Numbers, P0rn, or What?

Recent data from comScore shows that 178 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of almost 15 hours of online video last month.

Something seems very strange with these numbers, though. Take a look in comScore's chart below at the Minutes per Viewer column, and notice that the total audience average is 882 minutes per viewer. That's 14.7 hours. But now notice that Google Sites is the property with the most unique viewers, and the most minutes per viewer, at 283 minutes. That's only 4.7 hours. And minutes per viewer for all the other properties listed are much lower than that.

So where are all the other viewers that account for so many hours of viewing that the overall average is boosted to almost 15 hours per viewer? There must be a huge number of people not accounted for in this data watching a huge amount of video on sites that are not listed.

Maybe there are an awful lot of people out there watching an awful lot of Internet p0rn. Wait a minute, of course there are. But enough to alter the averages so dramatically?

Or maybe the numbers are off somehow. If I had to guess, I'd say that someone added the average minutes per viewer instead of averaging them.

-- Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Content Views Ranked by Unique Video Viewers July 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property	Total Unique Viewers (000)	Viewing Sessions (000)	Minutes per Viewer
Total Internet : Total Audience	178,148	5,234,655	882.0
Google Sites	143,226	1,884,498	282.7
Yahoo! Sites	55,107	238,322	28.6
Facebook.com	46,571	166,186	18.3
Microsoft Sites	45,558	219,149	40.2
VEVO	43,911	202,091	68.5
Fox Interactive Media	38,136	164,760	27.2
Turner Network	33,442	107,793	25.3
Viacom Digital	30,715	70,617	44.8
Disney Online	28,475	64,104	6.0
Hulu	28,455	153,845	158.0

 

Business Insider: Almost A Third Of U.S. Households Have Cut The Landline Cord

You telephone marketers may want to take note. Read more...

eMarketer: What Makes Social Media Trustworthy?

From the eMarketer blog:

"A study of frequent social media users by market research firm Invoke Solutions found that the most trusted information was posted by people respondents knew. But blog posts were more likely to be trusted “completely” than posts on Facebook, and trust dropped off sharply when it came to Twitter, even among friends.

Postings by brands or companies were trusted less, but levels were similar whether companies posted to Facebook or blogs. Online community sites did not hold the same trustworthiness as Facebook or blogs... and respondents had an even more skeptical eye for independent bloggers. And across all categories of content creator, Twitter streams were trusted less than other media."

 

-- Bill Paarlberg, Editor

KDPaine & Partners delivers custom research that measures brand image, public relationships, and engagement to help you measure your success.