The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

KDPaine’s How-To-Get-Good-Data Checklist

Too much data?!

So you've designed a measurement program, selected your tools, chosen a vendor, and now you can sit back and watch your clean, pure data stream into your inbox.

Wrong.

The truth of the matter is that it's usually not easy to get good data. Even after you think you've made all the hard decisions, you can't just wait as the data flows in. There are a number of confusing details to work out and pitfalls to avoid.

To help you deal with the data collection phase of your measurement project, here is...

KD Paine's How-To-Get-Good-Data Checklist:

1. _____
Sit down and review your search strings with your supplier (s) at least once a month.

• Make sure that all the terms are current.
• Eliminate any terms that are not yielding any content at all.
• If you are doing competitive monitoring, make sure that the searches are parallel.
• Be patient. It often takes time and many iterations to get search strings correct.

2. _____
Have a meeting with all your suppliers to review how impressions, audience numbers and monthly viewers are calculated.

•  Eliminate multipliers, and establish consistent and transparent rules.

3. _____
Accept that you will not get every clip, so don’t try to boil the ocean.

• Focus on what really matters: the media outlets, blogs or other channels that influence your target audiences.
• Get those Influentials to an acceptable level of accuracy.

4. _____
Check your data weekly for the first six months, then once a month on an ongoing basis. Get familiar enough with the results coming in so that you know what to expect. And so that you know when something is going wrong.

• After the first six months you’ll know on average how often you are appearing in the New York Times, the local media, and the key trades. Pick the most frequently covering media outlet and set up a system to check that number monthly. So, after the first six months you’ll learn that:
  • On an average month, the key trade journal mentions your company or the competitors X times.
  • On an average month, Y stories about your brand or one of your competitors appears in the most important business journal.
  • On an average month, you are mentioned in at least Z blog posts. 
• At the end of each quarter, look at the numbers of each individual publication. If you are way below or above average on any one of those, dig into the data and figure out why. It may be that the competition fired its PR team and they went invisible for a month or so. But a far more likely scenario is that somewhere a feed is broken and there are bunch of missing items out there.

5. _____
Do not wait until 48 hours before your results are supposed to be delivered to the CMO in a PowerPoint deck to find out that there are errors in the data. Review any qualitative data at least monthly, if not weekly. Both computers and humans make mistakes.

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Thanks for the image to Workstreamer Blog.

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.

The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.

 KDPaine & Partners' Facebook Page.

Katie Paine’s How-To-Decide-What-to-Measure Checklist

You can't measure everything, so what do you measure?

One of the hardest parts of public relations measurement or social media measurement is to determine what you should measure. Organizations often communicate with several different customer or stakeholder groups, and with several different messages or goals in mind. And sometimes office politics is as important as the data. So how do you determine what really matters to your business or organization?

This checklist will help you do that. It guides you through preliminary information gathering, meetings, and survey research to help you understand what is most important to your company or organization, and what is most important to your audience(s). What is most important to measure will be what drives your audience(s) or customers to act. So work through the following to figure out what matters, and what the best way is to measure it.

The 4 “What Matters?” Questions You Need to Answer

Remember, the point of the following research, and the experience you gain in planning and carrying it out, is to help you to answer these four questions:

1. What is most important to your company or organization?

2. What is most important to your audience(s)?

3. What drives your audience(s) or customers to act?

4. What is the best way to measure it?

____________________________________________________________

And now a word from our sponsor: Learn more about how to measure what matters with Katie Delahaye Paine’s new book Measure What Matters. 

“Fantastic primer on measuring social media from @kdpaine http://amzn.to/fFdEmj Fail to read at your own peril”

--Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR’s On The Media 

Order Measure What Matters now at Amazon.com

____________________________________________________________

 The How-to-Decide-What-to-Measure Checklist

1. Learn the Lay of the Land

__ Read up on your market, your marketplace, and really get to know the competition.

__ Check in with marketing, sales, business development, market research, and the customer intelligence group to get a clear and current list of market forces, as well as key customers and competitors.

__ Make a list of specific influencers including people, events, and issues.

__ Work through “10 Questions Every Communications Professional Must Be Able to Answer” and bring the ones you can't answer to the meeting below.

2. Get Everyone On the Same Page

__ Set up a meeting of everyone you will work with on your measurement project or that you will report to.

__ Set the agenda for the meeting, including:

1. Brainstorm influences on your customers and your marketplace, including people, issues, trends, and market forces
2. Define and prioritize all key stakeholders
3. Define measurable and tangible goals
4. Define what/who you will be benchmarking your results against
5. Define the Key Performance Indicators that you will report on

__ At the meeting, achieve consensus on the five points above.

__ Summarize the meeting in a document that includes the Key Performance Indicators that you will be reporting on and the Dashboard of charts or tables that you will need to present. 

__ Get sign off on those KPIs and the Dashboard.

3. Prepare to Do Preliminary Research
(All of the following will not necessarily pertain to your particular situation.)

__ Based on the KPIs, make a list of the data you will need to report on.

__ Select a web analytic and/or CRM tool.

__ Create one or more unique URLs and landing pages so you can directly tie web activity to results.

__ Make a list of the engagement data you will need, including some of the following: 

• Unique visitors
• Repeat visitors
• Length of time on site
• Click-throughs
• Registrations
• Conversions
• Make a list of the sales/lead data you will need 
• Number of registrations
• Number of leads
• Number of qualified leads
• Number of appointments made
• Number of proposals delivered
• Number of sales
• Market share 
• Value of sales 
• Average profit per sale 
• Cost of social media program 

__ Talk to whoever within your organization manages the website and collects web data to determine what data you already have or can collect.

__ Decide if you need any additional tools.

__ Create an RFP for web data collection and analysis. 

__ Select a survey tool.

__ Make a list of audiences you need to survey.

__ Determine if there is a list (of names) available in-house. Do you need to purchase a list?

__ Make a list of any perception data you will need, including:

• Awareness
• Perception
• Preference
• Consideration
• Trust level
• Commitment level
• Satisfaction level
• Exchange/Communal relationship level 
• Control mutuality level 

__ Draft a list of questions to which you need answers. 

__ Identify a professional expert, academic, or internal or external partner to create and test your survey questionnaire(s).

__ Provide your list of questions to the expert.

__ Review the proposed questionnaire(s).

__ Test the proposed questionnaire(s).

4. Do Preliminary Research

__ Field the survey.

__ Review the crosstabs to make sure you have the data you need.

5. Analyze & Report Results

__ Analyze the results and draw conclusions.

__ Put all relevant data into a KPI table.

__ Look for significant failures: Where did a program not deliver?

__ Look for exceptional successes.

__ Drill down into the data to determine cause and effect.

__ Pull most relevant charts and data into a PowerPoint presentation.

__ Report results and make recommendations.

Miscellaneous___________________________________________________________________________________________________________Now,

6. Decide What Matters

Use your results and the experience of this preliminary research to answer the 4 “What Matters?” questions in the introduction above.

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Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

10 Questions Every Communications Professional Must Be Able to Answer Before Beginning a Measurement Program

This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Measure What Matters, the new book by Katie Delahaye Paine from Wiley Publishers.

Read more excerpts at the Measure What Matters blog. Or just go ahead and order the book from Amazon for $15.60. That’s an amazing 45% off list price.

 

From Chapter 2 of Measure What Matters, “How to Get Started”

10 Questions Every Communications Professional Must Be Able to Answer Before Beginning a Measurement Program

Before we get into the specifics of measurement, you will need to have at hand some basic information about your organization. Work though the following 10 questions and do your best to find the answers if you don’t know them already. What’s most important about this exercise is achieving consensus among the people who will be using and/or contributing to the measurement data you will be collecting. Getting everyone on the same page is an absolute necessity before you can begin to implement a measurement program. 

Question #1: What Are Your Objectives? 

While it may seem facile and simplistic to actually put this question on the list, I am amazed at the number of people I’ve met with who cannot answer it. Or, even more frequently, they have objectives that are not measurable. You must start with a thorough understanding of your company’s or organization’s business objectives. And if they are not written down somewhere, ask your boss—you might have a very interesting conversation. 

I sometimes help my clients through the process by asking them to shut their eyes and imagine that it is the end of the year, and they are celebrating enormous success: Corks are popping, champagne is flowing, and bonus checks are being passed out to everyone. What is it that they are celebrating? Another way to define your mission is to frame it from the opposite perspective. Suppose your department was wiped out tomorrow, how would the business suffer? Later in this chapter you will find a detailed step-by-step procedure for working with a team to develop measurable objectives. 

Question # 2: Who Are Your Program’s Target Audience(s)? 

This is another question that may be pretty obvious for some companies, but it never hurts to get it in writing. The important thing is to define the audience as specifically as you can. No matter what your business or organization, the answer to this question is not “Anyone with a pulse.” There is always, within any market, a set of customers who are the most profitable, the most valuable. These are the ones you want to target. 

Question # 3: What Is Important to Your Audiences? 

Once you’ve defined your audiences, you can go about determining what issues matter most to them: What inspires them? What scares them? What are they most passionate about? Where do they go for information? The closer you get to identifying an audience’s passions, the closer you are to understanding why they are loyal to your company or brand. 

Question # 4: What Motivates Them to Buy Your Products? 

This is perhaps the most salient question for your measurement program; the answer will determine what you measure. You need to connect your actions with the ultimate purchase decision. If you sell a commodity product and what motivates purchase is price/value, then you need to measure the extent to which this concept is being communicated to your marketplace. However, if you are selling a service and what motivates purchase is the long-term relationship with the brand and/or the salesperson, then you need to be measuring relationships or brand engagement. 

Question #5: What Are Your Key Messages? 

If you haven’t articulated them yet or don’t know what they are, do research to figure out what messages will resonate most forcefully with your target audience(s). Key messages should reflect what makes people buy your product or services, or what distinguishes you from your competition. 

Question #6: Who Influences Your Audience(s)? 

Who else influences your target audience and what are the secondary influences on your business? Enumerate all the traditional media, websites, online publications, politicians, nongovernmental organizations, peers, educators, discussion groups, industry gurus, and so forth that your customers take into account when they decide to do business with your company. 

Question #7: How Do You Distribute Your Product or Service? 

Through what channels do your customers purchase your products? Which do they prefer? Which does your company find most convenient or profitable?

Question #8: What Are You Going to Do with the Information You Get from Your Research? 

Never ask a question to which you don’t want to hear the answer. Make sure you can act on all the information you get and can make changes and improve performance as a result. If your report is going to the CEO, you will have 20 seconds or less to get your message across, so your report must make an impact like that of a billboard. If it is going to marketing, the report should be short, but detailed enough to include brand data as well as corporate data. If it is for market research, you’ll need to provide cross tabs, verbatims, and other supporting data. If it’s for the VP of communications, you’ll want to make sure your results provide a big-picture corporate overview as well as the details as to why certain results are what they are. 

Question #9: What Other Departments or Areas Will Be Affected? 

Who will be involved in implementing changes as a result of your measurement program? This is one of the most important questions, because without buy-in from all departments to change their behavior or strategies, your measurement program will be a waste of effort. Whoever might have to change as a result of your measurement needs to be involved in the process of designing the measurement program. Without their buy-in, change will not happen. 

Question #10: What Other Measurement Programs Are Currently Underway? 

What data do you have access to? What metrics are already being collected? You may be able to tailor new measures to complement existing ones. For instance, sales or lead tracking data could be compared to marketing activities and measures.

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Read more excerpts at the Measure What Matters blog. Or just go ahead and order the book from Amazon for $15.60, an amazing 45% off list price.

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

KDPaine’s Monitoring Vendor Selection Checklist

Issues to consider, choices to be made, and questions to be answered before you choose a monitoring vendor for your measurement project.

Here is another in our series of KDPaine’s Measurement Checklists. This one includes 25 questions to help you set-up your daily alerts, monitoring, measurement, and reporting.

Download KDPaine’s Monitoring Vendor Selection Checklist now.

Here are the other Checklists in the series:

• KDPaine's Social Media Measurement Checklist
• KDPaine’s All-Purpose, One-Size-Fits-All Public Relations Measurement Program Checklist
• Katie Paine's Education Checklist for Public Relations Measurement
• KDPaine's Trade Show & Event Measurement Checklist
• Katie Delahaye Paine's Accuracy Checklist for Public Relations and Social Media Measurement
• Katie Delahaye Paine's New Product Launch Measurement Checklist
• Katie Delahaye Paine's Barcelona Principles Checklist