The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

The Dark Side of PR

Phony protests go hand-in-hand with
phony measures of success.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Every night for a week, I've watched MSNBC's Rachel Maddow expose yet another astroturfing or "spin-a-palooza" incident:

• Health insurance giant United Health fills up ersatz grass roots protests with its employees.
• Oil companies promote their anti-climate change legislation by stealing the letterhead of local non-profits and conducting letter writing campaigns.
• The American Petroleum Institute asks member companies to provide employees for "Energy Citizen" rallies to protest climate change legislation.
• The anti—everything organization Freedom Works protests anything and everything that big business deems potentially damaging to its profits.

At the end of each segment Maddow points out that while there's nothing illegal about any of these activities, they are nothing more than corporate-funded PR and should be labeled as such.

She's right. These phony protests are PR -- reprehensible PR. Fortunately, in this day and age, it is very easy to identify and expose the people and the motives behind any such "campaigns." All it takes is a click or two to figure out where the money is coming from and who is pulling the strings. Maddow even shows you how and where to get the facts.

Once the true nature of these events is exposed, any thinking person will immediately become skeptical, question the motives, and lose confidence in the effort. And lose confidence in public relations in general.

At the end of the day we have to ask ourselves: If this is what our profession is becoming known for, then why would anyone believe the rest of us? These manipulated campaigns are making it harder and harder for normal everyday -- principled, that is -- PR professionals to do their jobs.

If the essential image of PR is that we're the people behind astroturfing and fake rallies and counterfeit letter writing campaigns, anything we do will be looked at with suspicion. Worse still, any young person with morals, ethics, or integrity will no doubt chose a different career.

Wherever there is a 24-hour cable station hungry for content, corporate-sponsored protests will make news. The real problem is that, as long as success is measured in how many eyeballs are reached by the effort, the PR firms behind the pretend protests will earn their fees and put the campaign in their brag books.

Whether or not the companies ultimately achieve their business objectives -- and are helped or hurt by the inevitable backlash -- is a vital but seldom-considered measure of success. Chances are good that the firms are using good old AVEs to prove to the clients that they have achieved enormous success.

Fortunately there is a new breed of PR people emerging from the ranks. People like Brian Solis, who has co-written Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, the guidebook for how to do PR right in an age of spin (read the book review also in this month's issue). And like Kathleen Buczko of NMC Partners, who, for as long as I've known her, has told prospective clients to take a hike if they don't have a product or service worthy of attention. And a host of other people, wise in the ways of social media, who understand that being real and transparent is the best road to trust and commitment.

So, to all you idealists out there who think that PR has to do with building relationships and solving problems: Hang in there. Read Solis and Breakenridge's book, and believe that your time is coming. Learn how to measure real impact and outcomes, and wait for those eyeball-counting, AVE-advocating media manipulators to go out with the buggy whip, the rotary phone, the phony protest, and the other failed symbols of the 20th Century.

What's Important About Social Media Is What Happens Because Of It

 

It's time to take the "media" out of social media.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

If you're from New England, you know the expression, "Light dawns over Marblehead." Marblehead being a quaint little New England seacoast village, and "marble head" being a reference to someone's incredibly thick skull. It roughly translates into "Duh!"

Which is what happened to me while sitting through the umpteenth discussion about measuring social media at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in DC last week. Don't get me wrong, it was a great conference. There were dozens of stories and case studies on how the use of social media is changing government -- making it more open and transparent, facilitating brainstorming and collaboration, speeding up response time, and generally making it easier to deal with bureaucracy.

And that's when light really did dawn over this marble head: As long as we call it social media, we want to measure it the way we do all other media -- with hits, or impressions, or column inches, or AVEs, or eyeballs, or GRP, or some kind of old-fashioned metric.

Why do we think an old-fashioned metric is the right way to measure a very newfangled thing?

Here's the rub: Social media isn't really a medium. OK, yeah, it's a communication medium. But, for measurement purposes, what's really important about it is what happens because of it. It's a way of doing business. It's crowd sourcing, it's opening up the kimono and getting everyone to throw ideas around.

So... it's time to take the "media" out of social media.

75 years ago there were probably people trying to measure the effectiveness of the telephone by counting how many people were on your party line. At some point, the telephone had proven its ROI often enough that CEOs stopped questioning its value. It became a workgroup tool, a process improvement tool, a must-have-to-do-business tool. And the telephone measurement industry went the way of the buggy whip and corset stay companies.

That's what I predict will happen for at least part of social media. Sooner or later, monitoring and listening to what your customers have to say will be as obviously valuable as picking up the telephone or asking customers what they think. No one has to justify listening to customers any more. So if we just call it "listening" and not "measurement," chances are everyone will adopt it.

But more to the point, the metrics that we need to use to measure the effectiveness of social media are totally different from anything that PR or marketing folks are familiar with.

We need to be working closely with the data geeks and the market research folks and measure the things that happen faster and better because of social networking:

• process improvement,
• time to market,
• the number of new product ideas,
• the number of suggestions,
• the length of time it takes to find a solution to a problem,
• the efficiency with which a product is launched,
• the level of social capital,
• the churn rates amongst your customers and/or employees,
• the cost of recruitment,
• the turnover rate among top management...

...you get the idea. It's the change to our business habits and efficiency that we really should be measuring. Not how idiots track success.

The Trust Issue

The Paine of Measurement

 

 

Professor Brad Rawlins is my friend and one of the world's most knowledgeable people on measuring trust and transparency. A month or so ago he gave me Stephen M. R. Covey's book The Speed of Trust (see my review here). Little did he know how much of an impact he was about to have on my life and my business.

I've always been what Jane Austen might have called "a trusting soul," far more inclined to trust than mistrust. My friends wouldn't be as kind. They are constantly looking out for me, fearing that I am trusting people I shouldn't be. They're probably right about 40% of the time.

But, for that other 60% of the time, I'm inclined to agree with Covey: If you give trust, you get trustworthy behavior in return. If your behavior is trustworthy, people will reward you with their trust. It's a closed loop, and, in my experience, only occasionally violated. After 56 years on the planet, my ratio of delight to disappointment in my fellow man is pretty damn strong.

The rewards for trusting are just as true for organizational relationships as they are for personal relationships. Organizations that trust their employees and that demonstrate that trust are more likely to be rewarded with trust on the part of their employees. Which means that when their employer talks, they listen and they believe. They don't immediately go online and try to find out what "the real story" is.

Now consider all those organizations that are telling employees not to blog and not to participate in social networks. Organizations that are essentially "pulling an ostrich" and avoiding the revolution taking place in media and communications. By doing so they are telling their employees that they don't trust them. Which means they don't have faith in their employees. And it also implies that they don't have faith in their own ability to hire and train employees. Which may be the bigger problem.

The core of Covey's philosophy is that trust begins with "Self-Trust," i.e., the degree to which you are true to yourself and the promises that you make to yourself. And an organization that doesn't have faith in itself will need layers of systems and processes to check up on employees and to micromanage their behavior. As a consumer, when I am faced with such a company, I have to ask: If you don't have faith in your own systems and processes and operations, how can you ask me to have faith in them? -- KDP 

The Future of Public Relations Measurement is at Brigham Young University

The Paine of Measurement 

You better learn how to measure your public relations,
or these guys are going to eat your lunch!

I spent most of last week with my head in the clouds, literally, on the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Nestled high in the Wasatch Range, BYU is truly one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. While there, I was privileged to be invited to explore the peaks and valleys of measurement with undergraduates at BYU's School of Communications.

We just hired a BYU grad here at KDPaine & Partners (his name is Chris Near, and he is our new Director of Research), and now I've seen how they teach PR on campus. So I can tell you that BYU is training the next generation of PR and communications professionals by providing a solid grounding in research and statistics. These students understand that communications today is a combination of science and art. While they may have entered college with a vague notion that good "people persons" make good PR people, they quickly learn that it takes a lot more math and research than people skills to make it in today's communications environment.

The best part of the visit, however, was not the views, nor even the hospitality. (These guys are nicer than Canadians: I paused for a second outside the campus bookstore with a quizzical expression on my face. Before I could even reach my map, three people immediately asked if they could help me!) No, the best part of the trip was hearing students say that now they understand how they can put the theory into practice.

They now understand that doing research before and after a program can actually lead to better results. They got it when I talked about tying social media results to real tangible bottom line benefits. To them, surveys and correlations aren't just some vague theory. They are hands-on tools to figure out how and why people respond the way they do. And to determine what works or doesn't work in their strategy.

The new generation already speaks the language of management.

So beware, all you PR people who shun research, or who use it only to justify your existence. (Or worse, take the easy way out and use AVEs.) There's a new savvy generation coming along that will roll right over you. It's not just that they get social media, and are as fluent on Twitter and Facebook as my generation was with a Bacon's director and SRDS. This generation already speaks the language of management. It embraces statistics and will make decisions based on data, not on how things have always been done.

Like all generations, these millennials will challenge the status quo and yes, they will question authority just like we did. But they won't do it with placards and peace signs. They'll do it armed with KPI's and Dashboards, Google Analytics and SPSS.

Wishing you large measures of success,

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,

An Open Letter to President-Elect Barack Obama

The Paine of Measurement

Use social media, not polls.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

There's a lot of talk these days about what you should do with all those millions of contact names you've captured in the last two years -- those volunteers, donors and voters that helped you earn your place in history.

As a researcher, I have a novel thought: Listen to them. Hear their ideas and use them to help solve the nation's problems. If Dell can do it with their Ideastorm, why can't you create a national Ideastorm? You used social media to excellent effect in your campaign, so why not use social media to connect people to solve society's problems?

Put all those folks that voted for health care as their number one priority on a giant, virtual brainstorming committee to come up with the answers. Connect all the folks like me that are most concerned with global warming, and get us to commit to reducing our carbon footprint by 25%. I'm guessing there are more than a few economists on your list somewhere, so use them to solve the bailout issues.

I love it that you are limiting the roles lobbyists play in your new administration, and I laugh at those who complain that you are locking out their expertise. Who needs influence peddlers and lobbyists? You've got millions of smart people with good ideas that you can tap into for free.

The power of this idea came home to me yesterday as I was having breakfast with David Moore, author of The Opinion Makers.

(In the interests of transparency, David is one of my all-time favorite people. He's single-handedly taken on the political polling industry, and just might be winning. Remember all those stories about how polls may be flawed because they don't include cell-phone only households and don't determine the extent to which people haven't made up their minds? That's David's influence.)

So we're talking about the future of polling and it hit me: The millions of volunteers and donors that you have brought into the political process could be a giant focus group on what people are thinking.

Sure, there is bias in the sample, but it's no more biased than the leading introductory statements that pollsters are asking these days. And yes, you could debate that a self-selected sample of 10 million isn't as accurate as a poll. But if your polls aren't reaching cell-phone only households, and your response rate is down around 2%, how reliable is your data anyway?

The point is that the polling system, which is supposed to inform politicians about the will of the people, is broken. It's continuously abused by corporations, lobbying organizations, and agenda-setting NGOs, who have warped the process badly with their biased questions, unreliable sampling, and conflicting results. Polls are now no more a reflection of the nation's opinion than Sarah Palin is a reflection of a the typical American working mom.

So my humble suggestion is that you replace them with something more 21st century. Tap into the collective expertise of 10 million people, the wisdom of the crowd.

Sincerely,

The Jetsons vs. the Flintstones

vs.

Some companies embrace the future, while others are stuck in the past.

My recent summer reading (see the article this month, "5 Measurement-Related Books Reviewed") has got me thinking about certain characteristics of companies, and the future prospects of those companies.

Meet the Flintstones. Some companies are stuck in the old command-and-control era, thinking they can manage their messages, buy their way into conversations and control their communities. These companies I call The Flintstones, because they are stuck in the past. If they try their hand at social media they are likely to fail.

Meet the Jetsons. Then there are other companies, those who embrace the brave new world of accountability, openness and conversations. These companies I call The Jetsons, and they will ride the waves of consumer media and sentiment to a new era of success.

There are some good examples on both sides.

The Flintstones	The Jetsons
Old line ad agencies that think they can still buy eyeballs to achieve success. Agencies that still see their role as "controlling the message."	Agencies that see that all media is social and that you can achieve far more by listening than by yelling ever louder.
Organizations that put employees in communications straight jackets.	Organizations that create employee networks and can then benefit from the collective wisdom across departments and rankings.
Organizations that erect walls to keep out dissenters and other points of view, and make sure that "contact us" is a task for only the most determined.	Company spokespeople that answer their own email and respond to customer and employee comments personally.
Organizations that look only at short term ROI from social media and PR.	Organizations that measure success in terms of long term relationships and reputation.
Organizations that see the next shiny new social medium as a way to garner "more eyeballs."	Organizations that follow and listen to their constituencies and embrace the tools used by those constituencies.
Organizations that see measurement as counting eyeballs and AVEs.	Organizations that measure relationships, and use metrics for planning and strategy.

Wishing you large measures of success (Yabadabadoo!),

Ten Surefire Ways to Wrestle Insight from that Pile of Data on Your Desk

The Paine of Measurement

 

Because research without insight is just trivia.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Okay, I recycled that subtitle from an ad campaign we ran back in the '90s, but it's even more true now than it was back then. Between the automated monitoring systems, the Web analytics, Google analytics and a hundred other data points, today's communications managers are awash in data, but starved for insight. The market is hungry for standards, but truly malnourished when it comes to insight and figuring out what to do with all this data.

So, I thought I'd provide a fast lesson in what to do with a pile of data when it's staring you in the face. Here are ten straightahead ways to gain insight from your data:

1. Look for failures first
The most valuable lessons come from discovering what is not working. For instance, when the podcast you put up on YouTube has only been downloaded once. By your mother. Perhaps you need to look at the content that is being downloaded to see what's missing.

2. Tie the data back to what is most meaningful to you
If you're working at a non-profit, correlate it to online contributions, or to new volunteer signups, or to the percent increase in donors per mailing. If you're working in high tech, tie it to qualified leads, or requests for more information. If you're in the education marketplace, tie to application requests, or alumni participation.

3. Make sure your metrics accurately compare programs
It's great if you're measuring two different product launches by the degree to which the conversations about the new products are positive and position the product accurately. However, if you spent $10,000 on one and $500,000 on the other, you should definitely be looking at a cost per message figure to compare the two. Otherwise you're comparing apples to Beef Wellington and no one will believe you.

4. Don't show any data you can't make decisions with
Data not only has to be accurate, it needs to be relevant as well. So, for example, if you're comparing your spokespeople and thought leaders and the degree to which they are quoted compared to the competition, make sure that the VP who quit last week isn't on the chart. She's not going to be figuring into any of your future plans, so don't waste your presentation on her. (Unless, perhaps, she turns out to have been three times as effective as any of your other spokespeople. Then you have a valuable benchmark to work with, and maybe your spokespeople have some lessons to learn.)

Similarly, if you are tracking specific reporters or bloggers, make sure they are actually assigned to your beat. Many times bloggers will cover one story intensely, but then will never write about your industry again. So be careful who you call "The most influential blogger this quarter!"

5. Understand the "So What?"
What is the data trying to tell you? What opportunities is it trying to present to you? So what if you've classified all your conversations into the 27 different categories we recommend, now what? Now you figure out what types of conversations you need to pay attention to. (Read more in this article: "5 Reasons to Love 27 Types of Conversation and 19 Types of Video.")

6. Use data to make your point
Your data can be the clincher for your argument. If you are having trouble getting your senior management to show up at meetings with prominent bloggers, study what the competition is doing. Are they out there more prominently in key blogs? Are they on Twitter? Nothing like a little "His is bigger than yours" to get the juices flowing.

7. Give it context
Is my 20% negative horrible? (Not if you're Dell and you used to be at 80%.) How do you compare to others in the industry? If you're in the defense industry, 20% negatives isn't too bad. But in packaged goods or higher education, you'd be out of business.

KDPaine & Partners has recently studied social media use (social bookmarking sites, Facebook, external blogs, institutional blogs, and YouTube) in academic institutions. Below is a chart with some benchmarks you can refer to for general context. (We gathered the data over a 30-day period, September-November 2007, and included all references to five major universities. To ensure comparability and a manageable data set, content related to athletics was not included.)

8. Look for seasonal trends
We always present data on a 13-month rolling calendar so we know whether the slump in coverage is due to reporters being busy with political campaigns, or maybe to the fact that the agency or PR team has taken the summer off.

9. It's all about the conclusions
If you are telling me what the data means, tell me something useful. Don't tell me that I achieved 300 million opportunities to see -- tell me what got me there. And then tell me how I can get to 400 million.

10. Test, measure and test again
Measurement is an ongoing process. You're not going to learn everything the first time out. So when something doesn't work, recognize the opportunity to tweak it. Measure it again to see if the tweak worked. If it didn't, try something else.

Wishing you large measures of success,

Establishing the ROI of Social Media

The Paine
of Measurement

 

The true value of social media is in bottom line benefits and improved relationships.

All this week Twitter has been the scene of furious debate, later picked up in conferences and in blogs, over how to establish the ROI of social media. One side says that without a solid monetary return, it's all just "pixie dust." The other side says that social media is all about building relationships, credibility and trust -- things that don't necessarily translate into bottom line benefits.

I argue that both are right.

To assume that there is no bottom line benefit to improved relationships is simply wrong. Vince Hazelton's team at Radford College demostrated in their paper from the 2006 IPRRC that improved internal relationships lowered operating costs and legal fees, and increased efficiencies. Sandra Duhe in her seminal paper on the impact of CSR (given at the IPRRC 2004) showed that there was a direct connection between an organization's relationships with its community and its financial performance.

And beyond the academic literature there are a ton of additional current examples:

• In a field known for its notoriously high employee churn, Best Buy measures the ROI of its internal "Blue Shirts Nation" community in terms of lower turnover rates.
• The National Association of Manufacturers measures the ROI of its blog in terms of greater access to the halls of Capital Hill. What's the value of that access? I suppose you could calculate it in terms of LFEs (Lobbyist Fee Equivalent), but I bet they don't bother.
• Dell measures the success of its IdeaStorm community both in terms of lower support costs and in the number of new ideas generated. How much is a new idea worth? Technically, it probably depends on how much revenue it ultimately brings in. But you could calculate a "consultant fee equivalency." Just calculate what you pay to outside consultants to creatively solve your problems, I bet it's a lot higher than $100 per idea, which is less than what Dell's costs are.
• Sea World reached out to roller coaster enthusiasts with its social media program and measured its ROI in terms of lower outreach costs as well as tickets sold.

Monitoring vs. Measurement

There's been too much confusion of late between monitoring and measurement. It's great that companies like BuzzLogic and Radian6 can calculate your share of discussion, or even that KDPaine & Partners can calculate your tone, positioning, prominence and dominance. That data tells you which programs work and don't work in terms of improving your messaging and positioning. But we need to get our calculators out to go beyond those easy numbers and start calculating the impact social media is having on organizational mission and the bottom line.

Katie Paine's Top Ten Must-Do Items for Your Social Media Measurement To-Do List

#1. Define measurable goals: a business or mission benefit.

#2. Measure your market, not yourself. Always include the competition.

#3. Make sure everyone agrees on your definition of positive and negative.

#4. Measure messages not just tone.

#5. Measure positioning on key issues, not just sentiment.

#6. Look at comments for at least 4 days (but a maximum of 14).

#7. Don't forget to measure YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

#8. Measure what matters, not what is popular.

#9. Tie results back to your goals.

#10. Repeat on a regular basis.