The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Paul Gillin: How to Promote an Event with Social Media

Here's how to use social media to juice up your next event, from Paul Gillin (author of Secrets of Social Media Marketing and The New Influencers):

“As a frequent speaker at events of all sizes, I’ve had a chance to observe some of the best practices conference organizers used to promote their events through social media. In most cases, these efforts cost little or nothing more than your time.

Here are some suggestions for leveraging social channels for event promotion...”

Read the whole article here: How to Promote an Event with Social Media.

--WTP (Thanks to Katie Paine for the tip.)

KDPaine's Trade Show & Event Measurement Checklist

Your framework for measuring trade shows, events and sponsorships.

Editor's note:

• To read more about how to develop KPIs and metrics from your goals, see "How to Develop KPIs and Metrics: An Olympic Case Study."
• To learn more about how to measure the ROI of a conference, see "How to Measure the ROI of a Conference," where you can download a sample spreadsheet that Katie Paine uses to measure conferences she speaks at.

While measuring trade shows, events, and sponsorships are essentially three different things, the basic checklists for doing it right are not that different.

As always it starts with establishing clear objectives:

Step #1: Get consensus on goals and objectives for the event or sponsorship

__ List the audiences and attach priority levels to each one.

__ Define the benchmarks based on the decisions you need to make. Are you comparing show-to-show or shows vs. direct mail vs. Facebook? Are you taking into account different geographies or different time frames? Are you weighing different types of sponsorship – sailing vs. tennis, or sports vs. community?

Define success:

Are you attending shows to:

• __ Get leads,
• __ Build fan bases, and/or
• __ Generate attendees?
• __ Other

Is the event designed to:

• __ Bring in new clients,
• __ Improve relationships with old ones, and/or
• __ Are you just trying to sell stuff?
• __ Other

Figure out what you don’t know. If your goal is to sell stuff you will need to know:

• __ Length of sales cycle
• __ Definition of qualified lead
• __ Total number of leads vs. total qualified leads
• __ Total number of visitors to your booth or total number of visitors, likes, and followers of your virtual event
• __ Average profit and revenue per sale

Step #2: Define the specific metrics

__ If your goal is to change people’s opinions about you, (convince them that you are in the market, or back in the market, or doing better) then your metrics will be:

• __ % change in perceptions
• __ % change in awareness
• __ % increase in preference
• __ % of attendees likely to purchase

__ If your goal is to sell stuff your metrics might be greater efficiency as measured by:

• __ Cost per contact – Divide the event budget by the number of people who had the opportunity to see your brand, whether in the booth, via other media, on Twitter or wherever.
• __ Cost per lead – Event budget divided by the number of raw leads you collect.
• __ Cost per qualified lead – Event budget divided by the number of qualified leads.
• __ Cost per customer acquisition – Event budget divided by the number of actual customers made from the event.
• __ Cost per minute spent with prospect – This is a particularly useful metric if you are comparing events to direct sales activities. What does it cost you to spend a minute with a prospect at a show vs. the cost of a sales call (typically north of $300). You’ll need to count the number of contacts or demos your booth staff make and determine an average amount of time per demo. So suppose, for example, that you do 1000 demos and each takes five minutes. If your budget is $50,000 for the show, the cost per demo would be $50. If each demo takes 10 minutes you have generated 10000 minutes of customer contact minutes at a cost of $5 per customer contact minute.

You can then compare this to an ad or a minute’s sales call as follows:

You develop and purchase the ad for $100,000 and it reaches an audience of 50,000 people. That’s $2 per person reached, but they only spend 15 seconds reading the ad, so in fact the cost is $8 per minute per person. Your event is clearly more efficient.

At $500 for a five minute sales call, each sales call works out to $100 per minute per contact, clearly not much of a bargain.

• __ Shorten the sales cycle:

If you know the average length it takes to make a sale, using your CRM system you can track the length of the sales cycle for the attendees at the event to see if the event itself has shortened the sales cycle.

If you survey your attendees afterwards to determine whether in fact they plan to purchase your products and how soon, you can compare the results show-by-show to your overall company average.

Step #3: Choose a measurement tool

__ Counting tools –

• __ A clicker: Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to just stand in the booth and count bodies. Use a regular clicker and count the average number of people in the booth at the top of the hour. Repeat at random times through out the day and take the average.
• __ Engagement categorization: It helps to categorize event attendees by the degree to which they are engaged in your event. Are they just looking at your signage, or are they actually entering the booth and having a conversation? What percentage ends up as leads?

__ Survey tools – We recommend post-show electronic surveys (Survey Monkey or Benchpoint) because they will test what people ultimately remember about the event experience, not just their onsite reactions.

__ Sales tracking tools – You will need some form of CRM system, be it SalesForce or FileMaker or a simple contact manager like the one in Outlook, but you need a database to enter leads and track them through the sales process.

__ Web analytic tools – Whether you’re an ecommerce company or just drive people to your web site for more information, you need to determine whether your activities at the show are helping engage your potential customers. Google Analytics works just fine, but if you’re already using something like Omniture or Webtrends it’s even better. Create a unique URL for your event to which traffic should be directed. You can then see how much traffic comes into that specific URL and where it goes once the person is done on the event site: Do they bail, or do they go elsewhere on your site for more information?

__ Content analysis tools – If you want to track what people said about your event, both before and afterwards, you will want to scan the media, social as well as traditional. Assuming you used a hash tag on Twitter you should be able to easily track the conversations. You can set up Google Alerts, or use your existing clipping service, but make sure you begin tracking the buzz as soon as you put your marketing materials out there.

• __ Separate out your own self-manufactured buzz – tweets, Facebook page, blogs slide share, etc., from the ones that other people have put out there.
• __ Note the medium, the data, the author and if possible the source. Was it from a speaker, an attendee or a competitor?

You’ll want to analyze all the content for the following elements:

• __ Product mentions – did the products you featured at the show up in the conversations. Did they show up more prominently or visibly than the competition??
• __ Messaging/Positioning – does the conversation position you in the marketplace the way you want to be positioned.
• __ Key messages – are they there at all? If they are there, are they fully communicated or only partially or, god forbid, inaccurately repeated. Were attendees so engaged that they amplified your messages?
• __ Quotes – did you have thought leaders speaking at the event, were they followed, were they retweeted, are they amplifying your key messages?
• __ Visibility and Prominence – Were your announcements covered in headiness or were you a minor mention? Did photos appear?

Step #4: Analyze results

Using a combination of your web analytics and CRM system you should be able to get a good profile of who was at your event and what they did as a result. If you do use a follow-up survey, try to get as much information as possible from them as to:

• __ What made them come,
• __ What was memorable, and
• __ What they plan to do with the information they gleaned.

Analyze and learn from the survey results to determine:

• __ What specific elements engaged them in your brand,
• __ What specific part of your marketing program helped them decide to attend, and
• __ What elements were most memorable.

__ Don’t just compare events, look at the big picture. Are events the most efficient way to get your message across, or to get new leads? Compare online virtual events to IRL (In Real Life) events.

__ Don’t forget to factor in the costs of attending; travel budgets are severely restricted these days and a small change in the price of a ticket can make a big difference.

How to Evaluate Events: Does Your Show Have Go?

Jim Macnamara’s ‘Measuring Up’

Evaluate events with these sample objectives, measurement metrics, and corresponding measurement methods.

When Web analytics showed that the most popular articles in The Measurement Standard are those about how to measure events, I was a little surprised for two reasons. First, even though events involve creativity and can have strategic objectives, the bulk of event management involves technical and administrative skills rather than strategic public relations expertise. In the typology of public relations roles identified by PR scholars Glen Broom and David Dozier, organising and running events mostly sits within the technician role rather than the manager role. Second, of all the challenges in public relations measurement, event measurement is relatively straight-forward compared with the intricacies of some other aspects of PR.

Still, events such as launches, conferences, seminars, exhibitions, open days, and so on are a part of many public relations programs and, as such, should be measured.

Getting the Show on the Road: Clear Strategic Objectives

At a basic level, those who run events judge their success simply by getting the show on the road and the size of the crowd that turns up. However, at a management level, the success or otherwise of events should be measured in more strategic terms. How?

Like all measurement, evaluation of events starts with objectives. Why is the event being staged? Events should have clear strategic objectives that serve the overall objectives of the organisation. For instance, events may be staged to:

• Create awareness of some new product or service;
• Generate leads of interested people for sales follow-up;
• Build relationships with key stakeholders; or
• Provide experiential contact such as demonstrations and hands-on trialling at trade shows and exhibitions to generate interest.

Without clear objectives, it is impossible to measure the success of events. With clear objectives, the metrics required are clearly mapped out.

What to Measure: Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes

It is important also to remember that measurement can be done at input, output, and outcome levels. That is, you may want to do some research before or during planning of the event to gain information about what your target audience wants and expects:

• Input level measurement helps you plan the event and increases your chances of achieving your desired outputs and outcomes.
• In terms of outputs, measurement can identify the number of attendees and the percentage who were satisfied with the event itself (e.g. was it interesting and useful).
• Finally, and ultimately, outcomes evaluation should focus on attitudinal and behavioural effects such as awareness of products or services created, leads gained, relationship improvement, and so on.

Some sample event objectives, measurement metrics, and corresponding measurement methods are suggested in the following table:

Low Cost or No Cost

What is noteworthy about the possible measurement methods in this table is that a number of them are either low cost or even no cost. Simple survey questionnaires to gain satisfaction ratings can be designed and printed in-house, or distributed by e-mail. Also, some measurement can be leveraged from existing research such as annual brand or reputation surveys simply by including a question to measure the extent to which events contributed to respondents’ awareness and perceptions.

It is necessary to note that outcomes such as relationships are the result of multiple influences beyond your event and even beyond communication. However, effective communication is one of the key ‘antecedents’ (i.e. contributions) to relationships, so quantifying that contribution is important in linking PR activities to organisational objectives.

The more difficult aspects of public relations to measure are its long-term effects; the value it provides in avoidance of criticism and crises; and its contribution to outcomes in integrated campaigns when the contribution of PR is hard to isolate. But as for events, break a leg.

Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC became Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney in 2007 after a 30-year career working in journalism, public relations and media research which culminated in selling the CARMA Asia Pacific franchise which he founded to Media Monitors in 2006. He worked as Group Research Director with Media Monitors - CARMA Asia Pacific following the sale and continues as a Consultant with the Group.

Jim Macnamara's new book, The 21st Media (R)evolution: Emergent Communication Practices is published by Peter Lang, New York. For details, reviews and orders go direct to the Peter Lang sales site, or order through www.amazon.com.