Katie Delahaye Paine's Measurement Blog

Which channel is best? It depends

I get asked a lot about which social media channel is "the best" and of course my answer is always "it depends," and you should ask your customers But this week provided a fascinating contrast in the types of conversations that go on in each space.

On Tuesday, I hosted a Social Media Chat (#sm47) on the topic of measurement. TodayI spoke to the Portsmouth, NH Social Media Breakfast(#smbnh) on the topic of tracking success. Both events generated a remarkable amount of chatter on Twitter. Most of it was what KDPaine & Partners would categorize as "expressing support" (one of our 27 types of conversations). Most of the tweets would be rated by almost any system as positive in sentiment, except of course the tweets that called me "Wicked awesome" and "Sick" -- unless someone has figured out an algorithm to detect local slang. But in general the discussion was essentially agreeing with my premise that social media CAN be measured, and can be tied to measurable outcomes.

At the same time, I was also engaged in a variety of conversations on Facebook. Mostly having to do with either politics or music and people I adored in the 70s. It was fun, and silly and made me laugh a lot.

And then there was Linked In, where I've been fighting a battle over AVEs and counting hits should be a valid metric for PR. The gist of that conversation is that the measuring clips and mentions is all that needs to be measured.

I've also noted that I can say the exact same thing in my blog and get almost no response, but put the same post on My Ragan and get a dozen comments violently disagreeing with me.

Obviously the responses and the level of dialog are determined by the knowledge level and background of the audiences. And I haven't decided yet what this means for my social networking activities or what to do with this information, but it's pretty clear that we need to set different levels of expectations, and thus different measures of success for different channels.

Why some PR people deserve and get a seat at the table and others do not

 

This all started with a Linked In discussion http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=13905943&gid=1877517&commentID=12015063&trk=view_disc about the appropriate metric for online and social media. In essence the initial query was a request to know what the new version of AVE and GRP was? Naturally, I argued the point that in an age where companies can measure engagement, interaction, sales leads and outcomes, there was no point in even asking that question.

Someone else answered that:

"A number of the UK monitoring providers use a fixed rate to calculate an AVE for offline and online/blogs" .

After I breathed into a paper bag for a while and got rid of my apoplexy over the use of completely made up numbers, I responded that I spend most of my days talking about "the new metric for social media" and NOT ONCE have AVEs or "impressions" or any other form of eyeball counting come up. In fact, when I ask people if they consider it, most people laugh. I added that today, measuring how many people saw your brand, matters less when you can measure what they did after they saw it. If P&G no long cares about how many eyeballs they reach, but what people DO -- i..e. the outcome -- after they've seen it, we have to rethink our definitions of measurement.

I then received this response:

For many PR agencies and PR representatives, the desired goals are not sale figures or new clients or something like it, but they are potential contacts with readers, share of voice, attention in the media and room they took "for free" with their communication actions (e.g. press release, event, ...). … do not forget PR, where the goal are the articles…

And that's when the lightbulb went off. The PR people who have the proverbial "seat at the table" are the ones who understand and can explain and demonstrate how their program impacts the organizational goals. The ones that sit around whining about why they don't get a seat at the table are the ones who think that getting "a hit" or an article or a blog post IS the goal. Until they bother to answer the question "why is an article important? and what bottom-line benefit does the effort have on the organization" they won't get, and do not deserve a seat at that proverbial table.

Get to the point!

 NPR and Tina Brown talking about this piece got me thinking.. What are we going to do when 90 seconds is all we get to communicate our messages?

According to Michael Kinsley in The Atlantic

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

The piece goes on to explain why the traditional newspaper style that I was taught by my parents and mentors back in the 1970s, doesn't work any more. Ya Think?

I did a mini survey on Twitter this week to ask people how long a video they would watch. The average answer was 90 seconds.

And how many of us have sat in meetings hammering out messages and strategies that require a 10 page document to explain?

I tell my audiences all the time that if they can't fit their messages into 140 characters they can't get them across. But what does this mean for measurement?
 

• The importance of a "visibility" metric is more important than ever. For years we've urged clients not to put much weight in a mention that appears at the end of a long article or posting. This is more true than ever before.
• This makes human coding more important, since most automated systems don't have ways to figure out where or how prominent a mention is. Who cares if your mentions are trending positive, if no one will ever see them?
• It makes short impactful videos more valuable and memorable than long ones. So does that minor mention at the end of 5 minute video matter at all? I"d argue not at all.

Much of the arguement around the Weighted Media Cost metric isthat when you factor in the part of the article that is "owned" by the company being mentioned, it affects the correlations to outcomes. Based on Kinsley and my mini-video survey I have no doubt that this is true. In fact I think one might argue that that is WHY the correlations are better with WMC -- not because of the actual media costs themselves but because this research took into account what I call the prominence/dominance factor.

The lingering question is, should we even include in any of our measurement, those endless articles that only get to the point in paragraph 6 and only mention your brand in paragraph 12?  Probably not.

AVE, WMC? Does any of it really matter? Forrester doesn’t think so

I hate dragging my laptop out on those tiny commuter jets. There's never enough room, and I always think my seat neighbor is reading over my shoulder. So it was fortuitous that I was stuck on one of these contraptions this morning with the most recent Forrester Report on US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014. It actually came out in July and I've just now gotten around to digging into the data.

It is based on interviews with 204 marketing executives from firms with more than 200 employees across multiple industries. What is says is fascinating and should serve as a heads up to all of us in communications A few of the more interesting conclusions:

1. "The majority of marketers find that interactive tools are more effective than traditional ones. When faced with budget cuts .. these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable and better for direct response than traditional media.
2. Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience…42% of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.
3. CMOs will begin to buy their own technology... solutions like campaign management, web analytics etc.
4. Consumer readership of newspapers and magazines has dropped 17% and 6% respectively. Ad revenue is down 20% in 2009.
5. When asked "how will you fund increases in your companies interactive marketing budget 60% said that they will "increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing" The top three losers: Direct mail, newspapers, magazines and television.
6. 86% of marketers expect to create social media assets before the end of the year.
7. In a typical week people are spending more time on the internet, more time listening to the radio, and less time watching TV< newspapers reading magazines.
8. More than 80% or marketers embrace paid search and SEO
9. Advertisers prefer pay per click over impression-based ones. In 2009 58% prefer performance-based measurement, and this is expected to grow to 66% by 2014.
10. Forrester expects a 34% compound annual growth rate in the next 5 years for social media.
11. Traditional agencies will expire

Just as I finished reading this report, I saw another email in the ongoing debate about Weighted Media Costs (WMC). WMC is seen by some (including me) as a distraction in the measurement discussion. But Professor Brad Rawlins of BYU who co-authored the paper on the subject explains "The way WMC is being used is as a comparative tool for evaluating the medium in which the message occurs, not comparing the news message to advertising value.  Obviously, certain media channels are more valuable to your messaging strategy than others." Which makes a certain amount of sense.

But if all print and traditional media is being valued less by marketers, why are we devoting so much space and intellectual energy debating how to better value something that marketers are abandoning in droves.

I agree that whatever method we use to "evaluate the medium" should enable us to judge which is the best, most effective medium for clients to get their messages across. I don't see how WMC enables us to make an informed decision as to whether one should be paying more attention to The Economist or the Planet Money Blog or my Facebook page. If it can do that, I'm all for it. But given the fact that marketers are pulling money out of traditional media and putting it into Facebook, Twitter and other interactive media by the millions, I worry that we are working hard to measure something that won't matter in 5 years.