The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Take a Bite of the Tastiest Infographic of the Season: Gorkana's "Who Won the Egg Hunt?"

Here's a sweet little Easter egg that came our way via Measurement Matters, Gorkana's weekly "PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet" (it's fabulous: go subscribe to it right now): "Who won the egg hunt on Twitter?" I'm sure there is a sizable fraction of the world who would agree that an ideal use of Twitter is to rank the popularity of tempting-yet-nutritionally-challenged junk food.

As for myself, Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate will forever and always be the only real chocolate. The rich and distinctive flavor has ruled my entire candy universe ever since I was a mere prep school lad, and Cadbury chocolate was one of the few escapes from a constrained and tasteless tedium. --Bill Paarlberg, Editor

Political Print & Social Media Analysis in the Coolest Interactive Infographic Ever

Brandwatch provides a political share-of-media infographic that you'll love playing with. You can compare the amount of Twitter and print discussion on 30 policy topics between media and candidates by state and time period. Pretty colors!

Brandwatch claims this technique reveals "the true thoughts of voters," better than surveys. But what can you really conclude by knowing, for instance, that Romney had more NH press and tweets than Obama about Israel and Palestine? There's a lot of information here, but to make sense of it requires a bit of extra thought. --Bill Paarlberg, editor

How the Rest of the World Sees U.S. Politics: A Global Perspective on the Presidential Elections

(Click here to download the report Global Perspectives on the US Election now. This post is reprinted from Katie Paine's PR Measurement blog.)

I've been spending quite a bit of time in the Middle East of late, in my role as Chief Marketing Officer for News Group International.  One of the first things I realized is the wealth of information and resources we have under one roof. 

Automated Social Media Analytics: Is "As Good as Human" a Valid Objective?

by Diane Lennox

Seth Grimes’ recent post, “Never Trust Sentiment Accuracy Claims,” was probably designed to set off a lively exchange about social media analytics. It worked. His challenge to the validity of benchmarking accuracy against human analysts, or accuracy as a goal altogether, raises some of my favorite points.

(Full disclosure: I work for SAS, where we use both human and automated analysis. Our SAS® Social Media Analytics employs automated sentiment analysis.)

I love Seth’s core question: Is “as good as human” a valid objective? Yes, and no, I think.

After all, are we looking for “better” than humans, or more consistent? Is positive defined as containing positive keywords associated with a brand, or is it, rather, something we like? If it’s the latter, you need humans – but they’d better be well trained. If it’s the former, consistency wins.

We see these issues pop up all the time. Let’s start with who is good at what.

Humans, compared to computer chips, are better at extrapolating. For example, SAS offers a category of solutions we call “customer intelligence.” (Problem is, few others call it that.) I can teach human coders and computers alike to look for terms, e.g. CRM, marketing automation, marketing optimization, customer segmentation, loyalty program, and on. But real people often talk around marketing terms, without using the actual terms. So we teach our human coders the concepts behind these terms, and then they can spot other ways of describing marketing activities managed via technology. Computers can’t do that. While they can make some assumptions based on similarity, they still need the terms.

Computers, on the other hand, don’t make mistakes (assuming you’ve programmed them correctly). They don’t get distracted or change their minds. More importantly, they have no opinions. Example:  When Bank Systems & Technology picks up our press release about SAS’ new security analytics platform, I’m thrilled. But is it positive? Not according to the computer, which looks for sentiment indicators. Simply repeating the availability of the product is neutral, a statement of fact. Computers can resist the urge to take intent into account when scoring. So, points for consistency over comprehension, right?

Well, it depends.

It’s the question that will never die: What do you want to measure? In this case, is it expressions of 3^rd-party opinion or successful efforts to plant key messages?

And what happens when you encounter a word that screams “negative” for some but not for others? Most standard sentiment taxonomies rightfully consider “fraud” to be a negative term. But SAS offers a product aimed at detecting and preventing fraud. So for us, it’s neutral. As are terms like “killer” (as in “killer app.”). For one of our customers, “f***ing amazing” is what they strive for. No plug-and-play vendor can customize sentiment to accommodate individual needs.

So a lot comes down to defining your terms – “positive” in this case or, maybe “influence” in another (that’s for another column). But even more comes down to transparency and flexibility. Be skeptical. If your vendors can’t explain to you how they derive sentiment, step cautiously. If they say “natural language processing” but talk only keywords, send up a flare. And if they make lofty claims of accuracy and expertise before they understand your needs and the context, change the locks.

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Diane Lennox is PR Services Manager for SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services. A 30-year veteran in marketing communications and writing for all media, she has spent the past six years supporting SAS' internal PR agency by managing the Global PR Resource Center (internal), acting as international liaison with dozens of country PR managers, guiding PR measurement and monitoring, overseeing communications and media training, supporting the blogging and social media program and providing SEO guidance. She does not do windows.

(Thanks to Across the Litoverse for the image.)

Why Is Social Media Content Analysis So Difficult? Linguistic Detectives Provide a Clue.

Media content analysis has its CSI counterpart in forensic linguistics.

Media content analysis is one of the most common and valuable tools in social media measurement and public relations measurement. It's the process of reading and quantifying what is being said in the media about a company or organization or person. You typically want to learn what key messages are getting out, and whether or not people are reading or saying favorable things.

Those of you in the media analysis business will enjoy an article about forensic linguistics in the July 23^rd issue of The New Yorker by Jack Hitt entitled "Words On Trial." It's about the work of language experts who try to Sherlock the hidden meanings out of ransom notes, crime scene graffiti, and other language-based crime clues. Call it "CSI Language."

Analyzing social media is a little trickier than print media, because people often use social media in a less formal fashion, with slang, sarcasm, and abbreviations. Here's a passage from the article in which you social media analysts will recognize the difficulty of your work:

"..words serve as catalysts, setting off sparks of potential meaning that the listener organizes into more specific meaning by observing facial expression, body language, and other redundant clues... [including] prior experience... To every exchange we bring unconscious scripts; as any given sentence unspools, we readjust the schema to make better sense of what we are hearing.

Social media is notoriously difficult for automated (computer) analysis to make sense of (estimates are as low as 60% accuracy) and usually requires time-intensive human coding to parse. Forensic linguists are trying to use computer analysis, too, with mixed results:

" 'One thing we have learned about language is that is is a very human form of communication. You have to have human intelligence, human powers of inference, and human encyclopedic knowledge of the world" to make sense of it... Computers can crunch reams of words, but only people can decide what the words mean."

Go read the whole article now. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor

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  --Bill Paarlberg is editor of  The Measurement Standard blog and newsletter, and of Katie Paine's book “Measure What Matters.” He is also editor of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” by Beth Kanter and Katie Paine, which will be published this year by Wiley.
  Follow Bill Paarlberg on Twitter.

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.

What's the Value of a Media Monitoring Service?

Here's a calculation from Media Vantage of what it would cost to hire staff to do media monitoring. (Click on the image to see it bigger.)

Does it seem realistic to you?

Here is what Katie Paine (CEO of KDPaine & Partners, and publisher of The Measurement Standard) has to say:

I know from 20 years' experience that it takes an average human about an hour to read 10 clips, and that a trained analyst can work twice that fast. So, in an 8-hour day staff could probably read between 80 and 150 clips.

The major point I would raise is that an internal person almost always has other priorities, and won’t get fired if they don't the clips on time. Whereas an outside firm has only one priority: getting the clips done correctly and on time.

The other problem with doing monitoring in-house is that there is no objectivity. An in-house reader will spot a key message a mile away. And that is not representative of how your audience is reacts.

Also, you should be reading the competition's clips as well as your own (so you know how well you stack up against them), and in-house analysts can’t be unbiased about the competition.

Our recommendation is that if you get more than 50-100 clips a month you should be thinking about using an outside firm.

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The Plague of the Pass-through Press Release: To Count or Not to Count?

 Ask the Queen of Measurement

Dear Katie: 

If a press release gets printed verbatim, is it really coverage? I mean, since it is obviously the words of the company, rather than the media outlet, why should it be counted?

--Perplexed in Peoria

Dear Perplexed:

Good question.  We’ve all seen them; the article we know is a press release. Every reporter and editor has probably done it at least once. Deadline looming, there’s a 5-inch hole that needs filling and you take the most interesting release, change a few words, and problem solved.

One of the first things I was taught about public relations was that the less work it takes to turn your press release into a story, the more likely it is to get printed. So, it never surprised me to see my press releases end up verbatim in the local paper. The headline may be different, but essentially it’s got all the same words we actually wrote and got approval to distribute.

The problem is that now, given the proliferation of subject-specific blogs, content farms, and other online media outlets, combined with the reductions in budget and staff and a widespread shift of reporters to the corporate PR world, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the verbatim use of press releases by media outlets.

Your question has also been voiced by some of my clients: Why should they pay to collect, analyze, and report on something that is generated by the competitions’ PR departments?

While I see their point, their customers, prospects, and constituents probably don’t. The average reader barely knows what a press release is, never mind being able to identify one in their favorite news outlet. I’ll accept that, if something appears that is very clearly a company placement, (i.e., contains a dateline, registered trademark symbols ®, media contact information, or standard disclaimer or boiler plate), then the reader may question the independence of the source. But I doubt that the majority of readers are that sophisticated. My guess is that most readers will simply accept it as a news story.

Therefore, we believe it should be included in any competitive analysis.

(Thanks to Beth Kanter for the photo!)

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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.

Politics and Pornography Consumption, by Way of Public Relations Measurement

Can research get any more exciting? Read on, as public relations measurement tools are used to demonstrate a relationship between the outcome of political campaigns and voter’s consumption of pornography.

Last fall, The Economist ran an article (“Rising to the occasion: Electoral victory brings a surprising consequence: the winners look at smut”) on recent research demonstrating that American men tend to look at more pornography after they’ve voted for a winning political candidate. The research extended the challenge hypothesis (testosterone goes up in males after successful competitions) by way of using Wordtracker and Google Trends to track the number of searches for pornographic keywords.

And just today I read David Brooks’ post The Thrill of Victory, which reports on a soon to be released update of the previous study:

In a forthcoming study for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey compared Internet searches in red and blue states after the 2006 and 2010 elections. They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010.

Fascinating.

--Bill Paarlberg, editor of Measure What Matters and 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.

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

 

first direct Live & Unedited: How to Recruit New Banking Customers in an Atmosphere of Distrust

  

first direct, a telephone and internet-based retail bank in the United Kingdom, has always been proud to be a different kind of bank. Recently, however, the bank discovered that its brand differentiation had declined and it wanted a new strategy.

Assembling a team from Kantar Media Precis, Millward Brown, Mindshare, JWT London, JWT Cheethambell, and MadeByPi, first direct’s brief was to recruit new customers at a time when consumers had little trust in financial institutions.

Show, Not Tell: Be Truly Transparent by Broadcasting Unedited Comments

Fortunately the team knew that first direct really was different: customers really did love the bank. It was the most recommended bank in the UK. So the new strategy would be to show, not tell. To do this in a credible way first direct had to let its customers share their experiences, both positive and negative. It was decided that comments would be broadcast unedited to the world to create a totally transparent message, one that no other bank would dare to consider...

5 More PR-Related Things We Need to Get Rid Of

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Last month's article “Five PR-related Things We Need to Get Rid Of” sparked many excellent comments, both here and when it was reprinted in ragan.com. So we thought we’d follow up on the feedback. Plus I’ve got five more things to get rid of.

First, it was amazing to learn how many people are still convinced of the efficacy of some old fashioned techniques...

Still In Love with the Press Release?

I was stunned to find how many people are still in love with the press release...

How to Determine Which Influencers Matter to Your Business

KDPaine's 2-step search-and-verify process for determining the top 100 most important news sources for your business.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

The sheer size of the social web makes it very difficult to figure out just who is talking about you and what they are saying. It’s not just about which media matter, it’s which blogs, channels, people, thought leaders, and analysts. So below I describe my 2-step process you can use to determine the most important sites and influencers for your business. First, let's talk about the bigger picture.

90% of what you find is noise.

It may seem to be a very cool thing to be able to tap into the entire social media universe to hear what people are saying about you. But I can tell you that after listening for anything more than a day or two you will either have decided that the vast majority of what you are hearing is irrelevant to your business, or there’s so much that you are overwhelmed. Having listened to customer conversations for our clients for over 14 years (yes, my company, now called KDPaine & Partners, started monitoring newsgroups back in 1996) I can pretty much guarantee that 90% of what you find is noise.

So how do you sort out the noise from what is meaningful? There are two paths you can take.

• Option 1, Use a computer. Collect everything and use a computer to sort out what is meaningful and figure out what the most important sources are. And then only read those.
• Option 2, Use human beings. Determine what media really matter yourself, and then read those.

Most people take Door Number 1 as the easy way out. But I’ll be a contrarian and explain why we almost always use and recommend Door Number 2.

The problem with using computers is that they’re not inherently very bright. They are like toddlers that are very excited to discover lots of new things and have to be taught what is important and what isn’t. And, unless you are very patient, and have pretty deep pockets, someone has to spend a good amount of time teaching whatever program you’re using to get it right. That typically takes anywhere from six months to a year.

In the mean time, the computer will routinely bring in mentions of completely unrelated topics. Type in “SAS,” for example when looking for the analytical firm, and you’ll get anything from the Scandinavian Airline to San Antonio Shoes. When were analyzing all of HP’s social media, half the mentions were of horse power. Just Imagine trying to collect all the mentions of “Sun” or “Oracle.”

So yes, over time, computers can be taught to identify your brand correctly. But then you still have the problem of sorting stories into what is relevant for PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Accounting, etc. And then there’s the question of tonality – most systems get the positive, negative or neutral thing right only about 50% of the time.

Which is why, if you are getting anything less than 2500 mentions a month, I strongly urge you to use human beings. And, if that’s too many, only read and analyze posts on those sites that really matter.

Which, of course, requires you to have a system in place to determine “what sites really matter.”

So what sites do really matter?

The first point you need to understand is that “what matters” is very specific to your target audiences. NPR’s Planet Money Blog may be hugely influential to business, but if you’re selling video games to teenagers the teendiariesblog would be far more important. If you are a consumer goods company selling toilet paper, product management may need to focus on mommy bloggers, while corporate communications might be far more concerned with environmentalaction.org. And, while we’re all used to having handy dandy lists fed to us by the likes of Cision and Burrelles, those lists are so frequently off target that you’re more apt to get blocked and damned for spamming than placing a good story.

So here’s what we recommend:

KDPaine's 2-step search-and-verify process for determining what sites and influencers really matter.

Step 1: Search for those blogs that mention you or your marketplace most frequently.

If you are already using a listening tool like SM2, Sysomos or Radian 6, it very probably has an algorithm built in that purports to determine “key influencers.” In reality, it’s just counting up the number of times people write about your brand or your marketplace, but, still, it’s not a bad place to start. If you’re using Google Alerts, you can just feed the most relevant articles into an Excel spreadsheet.

The important thing is to look for more than just your brand. Make sure you are searching for the competition, and the entire market space that you are in or want to be in.

You’ll need three to six months of data to start. Capture the source of a mention and the number of times that source has written about your brand and/or the competition or the market space you are in.

If you’re using Google News or some other free source you’ll need to do searches on a regular basis. Once a day, you can use Google Feed Fetcher or just manually collect everything that Google finds about you and put it into an Excel spreadsheet:

• Delete the duplicates and anything that is irrelevant.
• Put the date in the first column, the source in the next, the author in the third, and note the subject in the fourth column.
• Then note number of comments for each one.

Keep tracking your mentions this way for at least three and ideally six months.

Step #2: Verify that the blogs and bloggers are actually important.

At the end of six months you’ll have a list of those blogs that mention you or your marketplace most frequently. Take the top 100 who have mentioned you most frequently and run each through Blog Grader and Twitalyzer and rank them in order of their scores. This is an indicator of the reach of the individual blogger.

Now calculate the Conversation Index for each one, that’s the ratio of comments to posts. Rank them from highest (the most comments per post) to lowest (the least comments per post).

Now add the three ranks together and sort them from high to low. Get online and check the top 50 to verify that they really are relevant to your brand and your market or your client.

Now you’ve got a list that is truly yours -- and truly valuable. Keep it that way by repeating this process on a quarterly basis. 

"Torture At Times" Shows What a Powerful Tool Media Analysis Can Be

A recent study by Harvard University students ("Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media") reveals that major U.S. newspapers altered their longstanding classification of waterboarding as torture after it became clear that the Bush administration was engaged in waterboarding terrorist suspects. These results imply that the newspapers changed their definition of torture in tandem with the administration's efforts to rename waterboarding as something other than torture.

Coverage has focused on the lack of skepticism in the press (Raymond Bonner in The Daily Beast: "How the Press Covers Torture", and Glenn Greenwald in Salon: "New study documents media's servitude to government") and the justifications provided by The New York Times (Yahoo News). 

Here at The Measurement Standard, we simply note, with pleasure, that this research demonstrates the power of media analysis. Media analysis is a common and very valuable tool in public relations measurement, yet is typically used to investigate far more trivial matters. It is nice to see it used to explore truly weighty and profound questions about how society records and represents itself. -- Bill Paarlberg, Editor 

Thought Leader Measurement: Four Easy, No-Budget Techniques

Including: Using “ideal” vs. “nightmare” to develop your own thought leadership index.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

There’s nary an organization out there these days that wouldn’t like its internal gurus and experts to be considered thought leaders in their industry or marketplace. CEOs, CTOs, Chief Scientists, Professors, economists -- all are being media-trained, groomed, and speaker-trained to write/speak/blog about key issues that affect the business. As a result, these busy executives are increasingly wondering (as they stand in yet another airport security line) whether it’s worth all the travel and the effort. But developing effectiveness measures for thought leadership programs is anything but simple.

Ideally, an organization would have a sophisticated enough CRM system to track any leads generated from the speech or blog, all the way through to purchase. Lacking such a system, corporate communications types are increasingly looking for easier (or cheaper alternatives). In my book Measuring Public Relationships, I suggest a variety of metrics including cost per minute spent with prospect, cost per lead acquisition, and share of conversation about key issues.

But if you want some quick and dirty techniques that won't break your budget, here are four of them. First, develop your own Thought Leadership Index to track and compare print, broadcast and blog coverage. Then track print, blogs and Twitter to see what influence your experts are having. Ideally, you should use all of them together to give an overall picture. Using these four techniques over time will help you to determine if your thought leader program is having an increasing or decreasing impact on the issues that critical to your business.

Technique #1:
Ideal vs. Nightmare Coverage: Your Very Own Thought Leadership Index

In chatting with numerous corporate communications pros over the past few months, I’ve learned that when launching a “thought leadership” program, the immediate goal is media pick up of the organization's point of view. So I asked a few of them what success would look like.

The answers frequently included “positive coverage,” “pick up of our approach to a solution to xyz problem,” and “leadership positioning on xyz issues.”

So it occurred to me that most of these programs have an ideal story or blog posting in mind. And, they probably have a worst nightmare scenario as well. So why not develop a Thought Leadership Index (similar to KDPaine & Partners' Optimal Content Score) that allows you to compare your results in print, broadcast and blogs? So, here is the way to rate your coverage as to how close to ideal it is. The closer to ideal your coverage is, the more effective your thought leaders are.

Start by making a list of all the things you’d like to see in the media coverage:

• Positive or neutral tone of article
• Mention of a key battle or issue
• Mention of one or more key messages
• Mention in a headline
• Inclusion of a video or photograph.

Now make a list of what your worst nightmare of media coverage is:

• Prominent or dominant mention of the competition or the competition's thought leaders
• Positioning of the competition as a leader and/or positioning of your company as a laggard or follower

Neither of those scenarios is likely to show up very often; most of your mentions will fall somewhere in between. So put together a spreadsheet that weights each of those elements. See the sample below. Now when you review the stories that include your thought leaders you can score each one as to how close it comes to the perfect fantasy article or the worst nightmare scenario.

In adapting the sample below to your needs, the client weights the various elements according to what matters to them. The final score for an article goes into the ultimate monthly OCS index number. You add up the individual scores for all the items analyzed and divide by the total number of items. That’s your index score for the month.

Technique #2:
How much brand engagement are your thought leaders generating on blogs and websites?
Use Google Analytics or whatever web analytics system you are using and track the following engagement statistics on the blogs or web sites that your thought leaders are contributing to:

• Unique visits
• Repeat visits
• Rss feeds
• Subscribers
• Comments
• Track backs

Technique #3:
How much are the bloggers paying attention?
Check to see if the influential bloggers are mentioning your thought leaders. Collect the following data points:

• Authority rank of linkers (via Google, Technorati, Twitalyzer or TweetLevel)
• Number of Linkbacks to your pages
• Number of Subscribers to your pages
• Number of Appearances on blog rolls

Technique #4:
How much are they paying attention on Twitter?
Finally you need to see if any other industry influencers are paying attention to your thought leaders. Set up a column in TweetDeck with a search on the topic or issues your thought leader is an expert on. See who is writing or talking about that topic and then use Twitalzyer to determine his/her authority. Set up a Google or SocialMention search for the topic to see who the influencers are on that issue.

The Geography of Buzz: Mapping Cultural Excitement

 

There's an intriguing story with some sexy density maps in today's NYTimes, "Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool Is That?" The article presents research that locates cultural hot spots based on the frequency and draw of events like concerts, fashion shows and theater openings. The authors of the research used photographs of parties and events over the course of a year to qualify the events as "buzzworthy," then mapped the location of the events in Manhattan and Los Angeles. The results are maps of the density of different types of cultural events in those cities.

And this got me to thinking that we do much the same sort of thing when we do media analysis in public relations research. We map the density of mentions of companies or products in the media. Then, instead of comparing fashion shows to concerts, we compare products or companies. Would be nice to have some cool density maps, though. 

-- Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard

Coverage Decline in '09?

The Paine of Measurement

 

 

As media move online, PR and public relations measurement must adapt.

I'm working on a number of year-end wrap up reports for our public relations measurement clients, and I'm starting to notice the impact of the changing face of media on their results. Almost across the board, traditional media coverage (unless you are Obama, a bank in crisis, or a car company) is down. More and more of our clients' coverage is coming from online sources and blogs.

Not entirely surprising, of course. We've been talking about this for months, but it's interesting when you see it begin to play out in your own charts and graphs.

For decades, we've written about the shrinking news hole that impacts results when major events dominate the headlines -- economic meltdown, political elections, 9/11. But in an online digital world, the concept of a news hole is irrelevant. Online, it doesn't cost any more, essentially, to run a 1000-word story than it does to run a 500-word story, and publications can triple the number of stories they write on any one topic with no impact to the bottom line.

Many of my clients -- and yours, as well -- may see a decline in their coverage in 2008 and on into 2009. My hunch is that it's a result of the downsizing of the media organizations themselves. With fewer reporters on staff, media outlets just can't produce the volume of coverage we're used to.

I'm not for an instant implying that there's overall less coverage out there, just that the sources of coverage are changing. Non-traditional media like The Huffington Post are still adding staff and increasing coverage. A new blogger is born every minute. Former print journalists, now unemployed, don't suddenly stop being journalists. They just do it on their personal blogs instead.

All of which has interesting implications for public relations. We're already seeing the more sophisticated organizations rethinking their top tier media lists. We predict that this will become a regular monthly exercise in 2009.

But, in today's rapidly changing environment, even the notion of having a top tier list might be an anachronism. Things may be shifting too quickly to make it doable, and the big opportunities may come from places you least expect them. Read this story ("Twitter Comes Through in the Real World") from my friend Chris Nahil and you'll see what I mean.

It may just be time to rethink the entire PR process. Now there's a fitting resolution for the new year.

Wishing you every measure of success,

Counting Words (Hey, isn't that what PR measurement does?)

In today's NYTimes there is an article about word counting ("He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns)"), and what the frequency of use of different types of words can imply about their author.

Maybe this analysis could be applied to PR measurement. If increased use of causal words indicates health improvements in individual people, then perhaps companies could tailor the subtle subtext of their press releases by using more or less of them.

The article includes a word use analysis of the political candidates that has some counterintuitive results, to my thinking: The Democrats’ use is “concrete and restrained,” whereas the Republicans’ is “cheerfully unrestrained, future-focused.” Very interesting. --Bill Paarlberg

Measuring the Transparency of Environmental Sustainability Reporting

Here is a link to the pdf of Measuring the Transparency of Environmental Sustainability Reporting by:

Brad Rawlins, Brigham Young University
Katie Paine, KDPaine & Partners, and
Peter Kowalski, KDPaine & Partners

Summary:

The websites of Fortune 50 companies were evaluated to determine the depth and detail of information presented on environmental sustainability efforts of the company. A summary measure, called the Environmental Reporting Transparency Scorecard, was used to rank the companies. Findings:

· Environmental sustainability reporting is still being used as a public relations tool to position companies favorably on environmental issues, rather than to hold companies accountable to stakeholders for environmental performance.

· The majority of the Fortune 50 are providing some kind of environmental information online, but there is room for improvement in the adoption of the interactive and integrated technology that is available for reporting and stakeholder participation within the Web medium. These technologies would enhance the transparency of the reporting process.

· There is little evidence of stakeholder involvement in the environmental sustainability reporting process. If companies are involving stakeholders in this process, the disclosure of such participation would improve the appearance of transparency.

· Involving third party groups that provide reporting standards helped organizations to be more transparent in their reporting process, as determined by the ERTS scorecard.

Measuring Reach on Radio

by Peter Kowalski

-- Editor's Note: The following was provided in response to a client's query, and it makes a good blog post, too.

Radio broadcast content remains among the most difficult to record, archive and retrieve, and of the traditional news media, is the least frequently (and accurately) monitored. Radio content is tracked using speech to text systems, which rely on voice recognition software that is often error prone. The sounds involved in the key phrase "Red Cross" are fairly unambiguous, and I would anticipate that your organization would have less trouble than something initial-based like the ASPCA, or something based on a proper name like Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As opposed to print or Internet monitoring, though, we would put very few restrictions on a radio broadcast search, instead relying on human readers to filter through segments for information that may or may not be pertinent to a particular investigation.

There are four major providers for radio broadcast content:

-- Cision tracks major markets and national news shows, but in my experience with using Cision in a limited capacity for a higher education client of ours, I would not recommend using their services for radio monitoring. Their accuracy is extremely low.

-- VMS tracks national networks (e.g. NPR, PRI, ABC Radio, Dow Jones Radio) and stations with news, talk, business and financial formats in the top 20 metros. They admit to the challenges inherent in radio monitoring, but an independent study found them to be 40% more accurate than Cision in retrieval.

-- National Aircheck is a niche company, and has monitoring specialists who record and monitor news, talk, business & financial radio across 2,500 stations (all major FM + almost all AM in the top 50 metros). As they specialize in radio, they have a large client roster that includes many of the largest public relations firms.

-- TVEyes is one of the newer entrants into this space, and tracks a handful of the national networks (Bloomberg, NPR, AP Radio, CBS News Radio).

Arbitron data is most commonly used to provide estimates for reach. In an integrated study, I tend to prefer Cume Persons, which is the average number of different people who listened to a station for a minimum of five minutes in a quarter hour. These persons are counted only once, no matter for how long they listen (so say, they listen for 45 minutes). This differs slightly from Average Quarter-Hour Persons, which is more useful for estimating reach in a rotating ad spots in a specific daypart or timeframe. Since we know when the news item aired, we would use Cume Persons, as it is comparable to other metrics like Unique Monthly Visitors (Web) or Impressions (Print). If you are new to Arbitron data, a handy reference guide can be found here. This data is often segmented within demographic groups, but the extent to which each provider can provide this level of detail would have to be more closely determined.

As with print and online data, radio reach data would be enriched with information about position within a particular show, dominance within a segment and other measures of prominence and dominance that are specific to radio and relate to how individuals remember aurally-received news.

Data providers are slowly getting to the point where segments can be listened to online, which is always preferable in analysis as tone of voice, pacing and similar factors can alter perceptions of information. It took TV and cable monitoring services some time to get to the streaming video point, and as streaming audio becomes more widely available, I consider it an asset to analysis.

Peter Kowalski is Director of Research Strategy at KDPaine & Partners. His research interests include international inter-media influence, agenda setting and network analysis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations from the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

How Public Relations Measurement Can Win the War on Terror

It's not a new thing to talk about the war on terror as a war in the media for mindshare. But I've never seen it stated as explicitly as in the article "Marketing Osama" which appeared in a recent issue of The Week, and which was reprinted from a story by John Cook originally published in Radar. The point there is that Brand USA and Brand Osama are fighting it out in the media, and this marketing/PR battle is the important front in the war.

Public relations measurement evaluates exactly the sort of metrics that define the strategy that al Qaida has been using to enlarge its support: media impressions, media content, key messages, contributions and new members. Public relations should be not only measuring the war on terror, but, by virtue of tracking the most important metrics, should be defining the war on terror too. (See "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?")

One of the more interesting aspects of the war on terror is that there is, (so far, that I know of) no way to know if we are winning or losing, or how we will ever know if we do win or lose. And that's where public relations measurement comes in: If we can use public relations metrics to define progress in the war, we can use them to define success and failure. Public relations measurement can win the war on terror by defining when the war will be over.

And here's how we do it: Let's say that al Qaida's media and marketing efforts now generate X impressions of their key messages each year, which in turn result in Y dollars of contributions and Z new members. We gather and track this data for the last ten or twenty years, and correlate it against terrorist activity of all sorts. (Yeah, it's a big job.) We then will understand what level of exposure to key messages (or Osama bin Laden videos) is required to generate what levels of recruits. Or to generate one new suicide bomber.

Then we define success in terms of the metrics. So, we could define "winning the war on terror" as when al-Qaida's impressions, contributions and recruits are dropping. And then we define victory as the point at which these metric fall low enough so that al Qaida can no longer function effectively. If Osama bin Laden doesn't get his message out, or if no one believes it enough to do anything, then we've won. --Bill Paarlberg