The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

An Exclusive Interview With Santa Claus: Inside Public Relations Measurement at the North Pole

by Bill Paarlberg

Last week an email arrived from claus.org, inviting me to interview their Chief Yuletide Officer about his PR measurement techniques. So I eagerly packed my notebook and earmuffs. At the appointed time, a bright red limo arrived to pick me up, and in the wink of an eye I was in a windowless Lear jet, speeding north to an undisclosed location...

Katie Paine on 2012: 6 Things That Should Be Measured and 6 That Shouldn’t.

 

by Katie Paine

Here are my 2012 New Year’s reflections, distilled into a dozen measurement recommendations: Things that should be measured and aren’t, and vice versa.

6 things that should be measured but probably aren’t:

1. The ROI of email holiday cards and calendars
2. The difference in impact between mobile and non-mobile social media
3. The relative value of CSR, IP, and relationships
4. The real cost/benefit of a viral video
5. The value of a long-term social relationship vs. a Facebook like
6. The value of a social relationship vs. direct mail, email, billboards, etc.

6 things that are measured that probably shouldn’t be:

1. The ROI of your network
2. The $ value of a Facebook fan
3. The $ value of a tweet
4. Advertising Value Equivalency
5. The accuracy of plastic rulers
6. The radioactivity of dirt on a fashion model

 ###

(And thanks to painter Paul Hutchinson for that excellent domino image.)

 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.

What's the ROI of "Merry Christmas?": Measuring the Effectiveness of Holiday Cards

by Katie "Bah! Humbug!" Paine

As I deleted my 100^th electronic Christmas card, all I felt was annoyance -- rather than merry or joyous or whatever it was supposed to make me feel. A good 50% of these mostly cold and soulless emails were from PR firms I’d never heard of. I assume they got my name from Klout or Cision or Vocus or any of the other list peddlers that bring as much joy and relevance to the season as Jacob Marley did. Which got me thinking...

Does anyone measure the effectiveness of these silly things? 

The ROI of the Corporate Holiday Card: Making Your Season Blight

I posed the question on Twitter and the answer was a definitive "no." Xmas emails are perceived as a cheap way for companies to “touch” people on their mailing list. I did discover that the ROI calculation for them is inherently flawed: Because most of these cards are created in-house, the time spent to create them is viewed as basically free, (probably because the employee(s) have nothing better to do in the month before the holidays).

A more accurate ROI calculation is probably something like this: 

Investment:

20 hours of designer time @ $50 per hour = $1000

5 hours of editing, proofing and copy review @$50 per hour = $250

Cost to email to 5000 names @ $0.03 per name = $150

Total Investment: $1400 

Return: 

Assuming a 6% click-thru rate, that's 300 clicks, for a cost-per-click-thru of $4.60. Which isn’t too bad. 

But what is the value of a click-thru? Since there is no call to action, and god knows it would be in terrible taste to say, “Merry Christmas, now click here to set up a demo!” it is difficult to calculate any real return. So the ROI is essentially $0 at best, but probably somewhere between -$1400 and the value of your reputation. 

Now let's look at a more personalized approach. 

KDPaine & Partners' Holiday Cards

For years, my company KDPaine & Partners has sent out a holiday card featuring an image of our offices. I actually have almost all of them framed in my hallway. Bill Paarlberg -- yes, the Bill Paarlberg, the editor of The Measurement Standard -- does the artwork, and we write a bit of copy that relates to both the card itself and the year we’ve had. In prior years we would also include a piece of locally-made pottery and a recipe for something that could go into the pottery. One year it was chowder for a chowder mug, the next year it was salsa in a taco dish.

Now, I don't expect the whole world to love our holiday cards. And, yes, there's a bit of self promotion in the concept. But the point here is that these cards have some thought and personality in them, and they express feelings in a unique, creative, and heartfelt fashion.

Over the years, we probably spent $35,000 on the cards and pottery. Invariably, after they go out, I hear directly back from clients and prospects who say, “Thanks for the card, and I was meaning to get in touch...” And, return-wise, I know they've yielded at least $200,000 in new business.

ROI = 471%

Value of a better relationship with customers: Priceless

Calendars, Anyone?

This year, I was contemplating the absence of calendars in my mailbox, and asked Twitter and Facebook where they’d all gone. The general response was that, with electronic calendars being ubiquitous, companies have decided that they weren’t worth it. Which in my mind leaves a huge gaping blank space just waiting for me to fill it up with my logo and message. Especially when I got this response from Jim Fetig, (one of the planet’s ultimate Measurement Mavens, and someone who has been getting my Christmas cards for at least 13 years): 

“How 'bout a KD Paine and Partners' Measurement Calendar? I'd read my daily best practice with gusto.” 

Now, I'm not sure I can come up with 365 days of measurement thoughts, but 12 month's worth certainly seems doable. Let's look at the ROI:

Cost of artwork and design: $1000

Cost to print 100 calendars: $1000

Total investment: $2000

Cost of keeping Jim Fetig happy (given that he’s been our client for 14 years) = Priceless. 

And so, my big question here is: In an age when the personalized touch is increasingly preferred -- where we shop local, eat local, and invest locally -- why is it that the majority of organizations take a mass-market approach to communicating sentiments that should be the most personal of all?

###

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. 

The Future of Public Relations Measurement: Ideas Are the New Data

There is a great article in today’s NYTimes about the business of ideas (“In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm”). It makes the point that good managers used to be the ones with the data, but now are the ones with the ideas. 

And that is becoming true of public relations measurement and social media measurement. We used to say that “Whoever has the most data wins.” With the recent deluge of data, that has morphed to “Whoever has the right data wins.” And now that it is easier to have the right data, the new mantra will be ”Whoever has the best ideas will win.”

Ideas are the new data. 

And the future of public relations measurement and social media measurement will be found in ideas. Ideas about how to get data, use data, how to make it reveal its secrets, and how to act on that knowledge.

Katie Delahaye Paine is fond of saying, “Research without insight is just trivia.” As data becomes easier and easier to come by, the insight she refers to becomes more and more important.

Public relations research is now an industry built mostly on trafficking in data collection and analysis. But as data collection becomes more and more automated and standardized (witness Google Analytics) PR measurement will more and more become a discipline based on ideas and insight.

The future of public relations measurement and social media measurement is in trafficking in ideas rather than data. Ideas are the new data.
Thank you Eugene Cho for the photo.

--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.

Rene Descartes and the Soul of Public Relations Measurement

I this morning I sat down at the computer and the Word-of-the-Day was “ontology.” Then the first blog post I came across was ”Do Analytics Need a Soul?“ by Rachel Alt-Simmons over at the sascom voices blog. So naturally I started thinking about public relations measurement and what the heck it might possibly mean for it to have a soul.

Rachel’s post includes this provocative quote:

“We need a “soul” to make analytics successful. We recognize that a culture change is needed to move decision making from an art to a science, but we need the right balance of art and science. Our business will not be run by a computer – we need people with a feel for intuitive decision making that understands the business, but we need to give them tools to better inform their decision making process. How do we evolve this decision making process?”

Which applies very nicely to public relations measurement.

Why Public Relations Measurement is Important: Experts Don't Know $#!&!

Any who doubt the importance of hard data in public relations measurement should read Nicholas D. Kristof's op-ed piece in today's NYTimes, "Learning How to Think." He writes, "...studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated." 

And that's putting it mildly. Turns out, in some cases, expert opinion and prediction is only slightly better than random guesses. (Those of us who own stock and who watch CNBC know this only too well.) 

So, next time you need to make a decision about your PR program, don't listen to someone who claims they know what's what. Look at the data. 

-- Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard 

PR, Measurement and the Truth

BILL PAARLBERG'S EDITORIAL IMPERATIVE
PR, Measurement and the Truth
"Holy epistemology, Batman! Is measurement the truth?"
PRWEEK has been advertising an upcoming debate on the subject "PR Has A Duty To Tell The Truth." (Gosh,you mean PR sometimes doesn't tell the truth? And here we've been wondering why PR has such a bad public image.) Our position here at The Measurement Standard is that measurement is either done correctly or not. We are not having -- or ever going to have -- the "Should measurement tell the truth?" debate. In the measurement niche of the PR profession, we take it as axiomatic that correct measurement is the truth.