The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Your Reading Lists: 21 New Articles and Resources

Over in the right hand column of this blog are Your Reading Lists, where we post links to articles and sources related (OK, some only vaguely related) to social media measurement and public relations measurement. We think you might find them interesting.

Here are some recent posts there:

Your Reading List:
Fun and Informative

• This Is The Inspirational Quote Apple Employees Receive On Day One - Business Insider
  "There's work and there's your life's work..."
• The Numbers Guy, in The Wall Street Journal
  Carl Bialik examines the way numbers are used, and abused.
• delanceyplace.com
  Eclectic little non-fiction excerpts delivered to your email every day.

Your Reading List:
Measurement

• Predicting the Next Social Media Trend Using Social Media Analytics | Social Media Today
  Track Social's Social Media Zone is a portal for assessing the activity of all Social Media Brands on the major platforms - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. We looked at the leaders in Audience Growth Rate in order to predict what might be the next big thing in Social...
• Data Driven: Improving Business and Society Through Data - Forbes.com
  A special report that includes almost 100 articles about using data to make business decisions, many concerning social media.
• Despite Scandal, There Are Brands That Can’t Be Broken - PRNewser
  ...Wal-Mart, which is currently facing a public relations problem with a bribery scandal in Mexico, has fared better than other brands like Taco Bell and Target, according to data from YouGov BrandIndex, which measures “buzz score” on a point index.
• Do You Know What You Don't Know? - Art Markman - Harvard Business Review
  No matter the scale, discovering your explanatory gaps is essential for aspiring innovators. An undiagnosed gap in knowledge means you might not fully understand a problem. That can hinder innovative solutions.
• Evolving Social Media Analytics: Insights from Marshall Sponder | The Customer Collective
• 4 Google Analytics updates you should know - iMediaConnection.com

Your Reading List:
Social Media

• 10 Things You're Doing Wrong With Social Media | Idealware
  You’re on social media... and you’re having some success, but you know there’s room for improvement... Here are 10 such mistakes you can turn around with a little effort for quick, improved results.
• Data Driven: Improving Business and Society Through Data - Forbes.com
  A special report that includes almost 100 articles about using data to make business decisions, many concerning social media.
• Lee Odden: Why chasing social media 'influencers' is a waste of time
  Say goodbye to the idea that if you could just get that one famous person to say something positive about you, things are going to happen.
• 13 Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn - Business Insider
• Facebook CPMs Climb Despite Falling Clicks
  Click-through rates on Facebook are going down even as the cost of advertising on the dominant social network continues to rise. Average CPM rates for non-premium display ads on Facebook in the first quarter are up 41% from a year ago, and up 15% from the fourth quarter of 2011. At the same time, click-through rates dropped 8% from the prior quarter.

Your Reading List
Social Science Research Blogs

• sciencefriday.com - making science user-friendly
  NPR’s Science Friday site has articles and videos and a wide range of fascinating science-related material, dedicated to making science user friendly.

Your Reading List:
Science & Technology

• Roulette beater spills physics behind victory - New Scientist
  A PROMINENT mathematician famous the world over for successfully turning the odds of roulette against the house has broken his decades-long silence about how he achieved the coup.
• Building Data Discovery into Your Organization - Thomas C. Redman - Harvard Business Review
  There are many ways to "put data to work," each with its own strengths and challenges. And while no one fully understands the various forms data-driven organizations will take, we can make some intelligent guesses.
• Survival's Ick Factor: Disgust's Evolutionary Role is Irresistible to Researchers
  "Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologists, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes. No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics."
• Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
  The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

Your Reading List:
New Hampshire News

• Exploding keg kills Redhook Brewery worker | SeacoastOnline.com
• Police Officer Shot Multiple Times In Manchester - New Hampshire News Story - WMUR New Hampshire
  "A police officer was shot on Manchester's west side Wednesday evening and taken to a hospital where he underwent surgery and was listed in serious but stable condition, authorities said."

Todd Defren: PR Measurement Formula #Fails?

You will rarely encounter as lively and informative a discussion of the fundamental concepts of public relations measurement as is right now going on at the PR² blog. Hop on over there and read Todd Defren’s PR Measurement Formula #Fails?. Don't neglect the 20 or so comments. The dialogue touches on the role of PR in marketing, linking PR with sales, setting measurable business-related objectives, how and what to measure, and in short most of the grand measurement-related questions of our times. Our highest recommendation.

--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.

Review of Tools to Predict and Monitor Competitor Web Traffic

Check out Sam Crocker's post “Tools to Predict and Monitor Competitor Web Traffic” at The Daily SEO Blog. Includes reviews of: Alexa, Compete, comScore, Google Ad Planner, Google Insights, Google Trends for Websites, HitWise, Quantcast, and SEMrush.

(KDPaine&Partners uses Compete for most of its clients.)

--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.

Best Recent Posts on Public Relations Measurement

Amber Naslund: Wiring In Social Media Measurement

sysomos: Exploring the Use of Twitter Around the World

Gary Hayes' Social Media Stats Counter 

Nicole Rawski: 10 signs you don't understand web analytics

Katie Delahaye Paine: Measuring Engagement is just another term for Measuring Relationships

MetricsMan: Twitter Influence Tools: Beware of Shiny Objects!

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 Interpretation of Dreams: Dreams as Public Relations Measurement -- I Dream of Hillary, I Dream of Barack

Many public relations professionals find that media analysis or survey research are tools sufficient to measure their programs. The more adventurous bring in external data and more esoteric measures of success like donations or number of new memberships or even lives saved. In politics, KDPaine and Partners has recently used YouTube video counts to predict primary results, and our Ms. Paine has ruminated on the possibility of using the number of political lawn signs as an election predictor. Not until now, however, has anyone used dreams to measure political progress.

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath writes about Sheila Heti and her new blog "I Dream of Hillary... I Dream of Barack." This blog, a repository of reader-submitted dreams about the candidates, can be interpreted as a rough poll of interest in those candidates. As Mr. McGrath says, "...what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people's dreams were meaningful in the aggregate?" As of the writing of the article, "..Obama's edge in the over-all dream count... was roughly equivalent to his lead in the latest Gallup poll."

Ms. Heti's blog has been so successful she plans to open an I Dream of McCain section, so in the future we will have bipartisan dream data to go on. --Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard

Paul Gillin's "The New Influencers" Gets Highest Recommendation

Your Measurement Reading List

Understand the Coming Change
The New Influencers by Paul Gillin

There have been countless books written about the blogosphere, ranging from the worthless to a handful that are truly useful. Paul Gillin's The New Influencers is at the far end of the scale: It is really great, exceptionally good. It has my highest recommendation. In the Must-Read-If-You-Want-to Survive-the-21st-Century trilogy, The Cluetrain Manifesto is the prequel, Naked Conversations comes in the middle, and now The New Influencers is the sequel.

As I say in my Paine of Measurement column for this issue, my standard answer to a wide variety of questions is "Ask your customers." When asked what someone should do about the blogosphere, I tell them: "Read Naked Conversations." And from now on, I'm adding, "Read The New Influencers."

Now, I have to say that author Paul Gillin is one of the people who have changed my life. Way back when, I was interviewing for the Director of Corporate Communications job at Lotus, and I was presented with a story that he'd just written that was critical of the company. The question was: "What would you do about this!" I think I said I'd take Paul to lunch and find out what was on his mind. It must have been the right answer because I got the job. And about a month later I really was having lunch with him, learning the ins and outs of the PC media world.

We've crossed paths numerous times in the intervening two decades and he's always been just a little ahead of the pack. And that's exactly where you need to be in this new, ever-evolving world where deadlines and gatekeepers are as useful as buggy whips and 8-track tapes. So go read this book.

What makes The New Influencers really great is not just the solid practical advice, but also how Paul approaches the fundamental dynamics of the new media world. He makes you understand the DNA of this new society and how it works, which is a much better place to start off from.

Too many people do not comprehend how fundamental the coming change is. If they read Gillin's book, then they will. -KDP

Don't Ask Me... Ask Your Customers!

The Paine of Public Relations Measurement

The Top Five Questions I'm Really Tired Of

Don't get me wrong, I love being your friendly neighborhood public relations measurement guru. But, I'm getting real tired of people asking me questions that only their customers have the answers to. Here are the top five:

1. Should we start a blog?
2. Should we respond to bloggers?
3. Should we sponsor this race or this concert?
4. What should we do to improve our internal communications?
5. How do we get our customers more engaged in our brand?

All good questions, but why are you asking me? You should be asking your customers!

Let's take these one by one:

1. Should we start a blog?

Answer: I haven't a clue. But here are some questions that will help you figure it out:

Do your customers pay attention to blogs?

Does social media drive their purchase behavior?

Are you trying to recruit from among the Gen Y and YouTube crowd?

If your answers are "Yes," then you should start a blog. In some circles The Huffington Post is a lot more influential than The Washington Post. And among automotive types, there are bloggers that carry as much weight as Road & Track. But, if you're trying to sell cruise missiles to the 150 or so people on the planet that can buy them legally, then chances are pretty good that those 150 aren't going to turn to Facebook -- or your blog -- for their buying decisions.

So ask your customers what they consider reliable sources. Where do they go for information? What sources do they trust? Whose recommendation carries the most weight?

2. Should we respond to bloggers?

Answer: It depends what they're saying. And it really depends on your answers to question 1, above. You should always welcome an opportunity to listen to or have a conversation with your customers. You should also be open to conversations with what Paul Gillin calls The New Influencers.

3. Should we sponsor a race or sponsor a concert?

Answer: Will your customers be there? That's all that matters, (at least until you can measure the actual event). I can remember a very smart CMO asking me whether he should be sponsoring a sailboat race, a NASCAR event or a concert. My response was, again, "Don't ask me... ask your customers!" Where are they most likely to be? What is most likely to improve their loyalty? One key benefit of sponsorship is the hospitality. Are your customers more likely to enjoy a box seat at the Opera, going back stage at a concert, or having inner circle access at Nascar? I don't know, ask them.

4. What should we do to improve internal communications?

Answer: I don't know... ask your employees. Chances are they know a lot more than I ever will about your internal communications and what needs to be improved.

5. How do we get our customers more engaged?

Answer: Listen to them, hear them, pay attention to what they love or hate about you. Ask them what they hate, then fix it. Ask them what they love, and do more of it.

Listening Isn't Hard, It's Just Different

What I'm getting to here is that it's not hard to listen to your customers. They're talking all the time, to each other, to your competition, to others in the industry. You just need to listen.

Sometimes its as easy as monitoring consumer generated media (CGM). In other cases you just might have to do a survey. We recommend using the Grunig relationships instrument as a basis for any survey you do. (It's free and downloadable here.)

The point is that listening isn't hard. It's just different. For years we've spent all the money and focused all the effort and energy on screaming ever louder at our markets. Now it's time for the customers to talk and for us to start listening.

Happy Holidays,