Katie Delahaye Paine's Measurement Blog

As goes the MSM, so goes measurement

We've been having lots of conversations these days about the measurement mix between social and traditional measurement. And the question constantly comes up:  Is it still worth measuring MSM? Six months ago it was inconceivable to suggest to our clients that we they could drop MSM measurement all together. With today's news, it gets alot more conceviable.

It’s not world peace, but for our profession it could be the equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation

You probably didn’t feel it, but on Friday October 16, 2009 there was a shifting of the tectonic plates in Portsmouth, NH. No, it wasn’t recorded by the USGS, but if you’re in the PR world, you would have felt it. That was the day that the IPR Measurement Commission voted definitively -- 19 to 2 --   to “reject AVEs (ad value equivalency) , the concept and the practice. “  At the time,  I tweeted that I could now die happy because for so long I’ve said that my mission is to get to have “she killed the AVE” written on my tombstone. 

For those agencies, clients and providers out there that are now left in limbo,  making money off of a practice that has now been rejected by leading experts in both Canada and the US,  I can only say:  "move on."

The Canadians did. They went thru this debate five years ago, when they rejected AVEs and settled on the MRP Standard . Today, when I speak in Canada, I am constantly amazed by the intelligence and sophistication of my audience and the questions they ask. They don’t bother with questions about “what’s the AVE of a blog” but rather challenge me with questions about correlations to outcomes.   

If anything, this vote comes at a perfect time. PRSA is pushing a set of guidelines that specifically address PR’s contribution to the bottom line – whether in terms of sales, revenue, cost savings or stock price. Check it out.

At the same time, with the rise of social media, AVEs have little meaning when the value of the most traditional media is dropping daily, and the power of individual blogs, many of which don’ t accept advertising, is growing exponentially.

The good news is that every week, a new and better way of demonstrating contribution to your organizations bottom line presents itself. Sodexo measures its Twitter success via $300K in recuirtment cost savings.  Non-profits are correlating success in fund raising to social media programs. Southwest has seen such success from its social media efforts that it can quintuple the size of its department.

So why do clipping firms and PR agencies have such a hard time weaning themselves from this outmoded metric?   Like any bad habit – heroin, porn – pick your analogy --  it sometimes takes tough love to go cold turkey. With luck that’s what the IPR vote will accomplish. 

So rather than seeing this as an earthquake. I prefer to see the vote as PR's emancipation proclamation. As of Friday October 16, 2009,  we are free from the shackles of a slavish devotion to silly numbers, false metrics, and thinking that outputs are all we do.

We can now focus on those things that really matter. Quantifying our real contribution to organizational success.

Consolidation continues in the media evaluation industry

The fact that Durrants has acquired Metrica
should come as a surprise to no one. Increasingly the clipping services are becoming obsolete and if they're planning on surviving, they need alternate revenue streams. Additionally the act of collecting content from the various vendors (we use about 10) is becoming the biggest challenge for those of us on the evaluation side. I wish the newlyweds all the best.

Saying "everyone does it" doesn't mean its the right thing to do

Having spent 2 days at the Inbound Marketing Summit  I learned the following:

• 8 out of 10 mktg execs believe social media can build brand and relationships.
• Nieslen saw a 70% jump in use of social media in the last year 
• In the last month one of the major news corps in Canada plus Gourmet Magazine  folded
• Ad revenue is down dramatically
• Traditional Advertising is dead as we know it.

 Whether or not you agree with these statements (all made by the distinguished speakers at the Inbound Marketing Summit) you can't deny that the media and advertising world as we know it is over.

So why, at the same time the IMS09 is going on, was another speaker at another PR and marketing conference:  advocating using AVE (Ad Value Equivalency) as a measurement for PR? Why would PR want to compare itself to an industry and a business that is in, if not its death throws, certainly in the process of morphing into something we've never seen before. 

The speaker's argument is that since most PR people use AVEs anyway, we might as well teach them how to "do it right."  To me, that sounds like Southerners in the 1840s that argued against emancipation because "everyone does it,"  but then suggesting perhaps a Martha Stewart makeover for the slave quarters. There are lots of things that "everyone does"  that are still the wrong thing to do. One of my fellow suppliers, Burrelles, justifies its use of AVES because "Customers demand it." Makes me wonder if "customers"  demanded child porn and heroin would they deliver those as well?

Folks, it's time to face reality. AVEs are irrelevant when traditional media is going away in its current form, when Procter & Gamble is says it only wants to pay for engagement, IBM declares Advertising dead, and Southwest Airlines and Dell are measuring their PR/Social Media efforts in terms of revenue. The customers that cling to this metrics deserve to be fired, and with luck, they'll soon get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with improving, and measuring our relationships with our constituencies. For my colleagues in the measurement business, advocating a metric that will ultimately mislead the client is simply the wrong thing to do.

Brain Buffetted by Billions of Brilliant Brainstorms

As if the presenters at the Inbound Marketing Summit weren't enough .. Chris Heuer is challenging us all to think at even higher levels with his notion of Market Engagement Optimization (MEO) and Return on Participation.

Great Primer on Social Media Measurement

My IPR Colleague has written a great primer on Social Media Measurement:
READ IT

It's people not tools that matter

Google just realized a study conducted with Forrester  Appraising Investments in Enterprise Web Analytics.

The big (yawn) conclusion, is that most enterprises are using or considering using "free" analytics -- i.e. Google Analytics. But from our perspective, given that we have been saying this ourselves for years --- the most important insight is this one:

Companies are recognizing that analysts drive insights, not the analytics tool itself. According to the study, "sixty percent of decision-makers agree that investments in web analytics people are more valuable than investments in web analytics technology." This is in-line with Avinash Kaushik's 10/90 rule for web analytics success: invest 10% of your analytics budget on the actual technology and 90% of your budget in the people who deliver actionable insight, whether in-house analysts, agencies, or vendor partners. It's the people that matter.

Our point is this. There's a new tool released every week. Some are free, some cost money and some are a combination of the two.. All of them do the same thing -- reduce the blogosphere/twitter/social media to a giant bucket of words, pull out the relevant ones, count them. and produce some attractive charts and graphs.  NONE of them measure reputation, relationships, brand health, brand strength or anything else. In order to figure out what works and what doesn't; where your money is better spent, where you're getting the best ROI,  you need a sapient human, familiar with your goals and objectives that can look at those numbers and charts and draw some conclusions and make recommendations.