Right now Big Data is alot like breast implants. There is a wide spread belief that plastic surgery to improve ones figure gives you an advantage in the dating game.
But what if every woman magically was exactly the same size? The "Enhancement" Industry would go bust, so to speak.
Right now, having "Big Data" is seen as giving organizations first-mover advantage, thanks to some specatacular successes, most notably the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012. As a result, organizations of all kinds are jumping on the "big data bandwagon" but at some point in the next five years everyone will have accesss to all the data you need. Then what? Here are five tips for PR pros on how to maintain your advantage.
- Remember: It’s not about how big your data is but about how you use it.
There is a lot of data available today, but precisely because there is so much data, it is even more important than ever to know the difference between good data and bad data, and what is meaningful and what isn’t. Business professionals need to know not just how much, but why.
Between Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and 250 + monitoring and measurement companies in the marketplace, numbers are easily available. However, just having access to 100 different metrics is not particularly helpful. Knowing which of those specific metrics will help improve your organizational effectiveness is all that is important.
So the future of measurement will require different skill sets. Tomorrow’s successful PR pro should not only be able to run an ANOVA test, but more importantly, he/she will certainly need to know how to interpret the data and draw conclusions. Analytics alone is not enough, you need to understand the business and the marketplace as well as the new rules of social media if you’re going to put your data to work for you. Future PR pros will need analytical skills in equal measure to writing and relationship building.
2. Benchmarking will be a competitive advantage
Right now Big Data is giving the companies that use it effectively an advantage because they can quickly compare business outcomes between programs and understand how their performance stacks up against their peers. PR pros need to be able to look at their metrics and easily identify the best and worst programs so they can then move resources from the ones that aren’t working to the ones that are. Without that context, all the pretty charts and data points are meaningless.
3. Focus on the metrics not the tool.
20 years ago when I started in this business there were half a dozen other small companies doing PR measurement, now there are more than 200 that bill themselves as media measurers. Debates about which tools is best are as numerous as there are the tools themselves.
The reality is that tools are the last thing you should be thinking about. First you need to understand your marketplace and your customer. Then you need to agree upon measurable goals and benchmarks. Only after all those decisions are made can you even think about which tool might be the right one.
You do NOT want to be my client that after a 6-hour long workshop finally agreed upon a set of clear metrics to drive their business. The metrics were built around messaging and building engagement. Just as I was packing up my things, they said “By the way, we just signed a €40,000 contract with XYZ Company, are you familiar with their platform?” I said that yes, in fact I had seen a demo of it at a recent conference. “Will it produce the metrics we just agreed upon?” they asked. “No, it does not measure engagement, relationships or messaging.” They just wasted 20% of their entire budget on a tool that wouldn’t measure the KPIs they had just agreed upon.
Sadly, it is all too frequent. Clients get caught up in the shiny new technology and think that it will provide all the answers. In reality the answers don’t come from tools, they come from the experience and expertise of the people using them.
4. Be Data Informed not Data Driven
Data is wonderful, but like anything else, is best taken in moderation and with a great deal of insight. That is called being “Data Informed”
We are all at some point data-informed. When, instead of just feeling his forehead, a mother puts a thermometer in her child’s mouth to find out if he’s really sick, she became data-informed. We all use data to make better decisions every day.
Data-informed organizations use data on a regular basis to determine what is helping (or impeding_ their efforts to achieve their missions. From leadership, to strategy, to decision making, to meetings, to job descriptions, a data-informed culture has continuous improvement embedded in the way it functions. They define and use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as mileposts to determine whether they are making progress toward its goals. So having the right KPIs is critical.
Too often, however, organizations chose KPIs that simply reflect activity. KPIs are milestones, metrics that indicate progress. Measurement is the road that leads to those milestones. Measurement can be used for many things, and some of them are undesirable, like justifying your existence, getting someone fired, or proving a point. But data-informed cultures use measurement to continuously improve.
5. It’s not about how many likes but how much love
In his wonderful book, You Can’t Buy Me Like, Bob Garfield calls this “The Relationship Era.” Gone, he says is the marketing era, when the goal was to shout louder than the next guy at an audience that doesn’t care. A decade ago, marketers thought that they could somehow manage their messages and control their brand. Today the customer is in control, and your only hope for success, says Garfield, is to develop deep and committed relationships with them. That means having two way conversations, being honest, transparent and authentic, and most importantly, listening to their needs and responding with information and products that are relevant to them. But you know that. Public Relations has always been about relationships.
Whether the relationships were with the media, with fans, or voters, PR people were the ones whose primary responsibility was to build, strengthen and improve relationships with an organizations stakeholders. Today more than ever, organizations are waking up to the fact that relationships are key to their success. Or, put it another way, as my colleague Fadl Al Tarzi, CEO of SocialEyez, says: "If you make people angry enough, you will be replaced." His team at Social Eyez accurately predicted the fall and/or demise of every dictator in the Middle East by analyzing social media.
So forget spewing out press releases, get to know reporter via their social networks. Listen to customer complaints or requests, make your employees your ambassadors and stop trying to control the conversation. It is happening whether you like it or not, you might was well participate in it and learn something.
Use data to identify areas where your relationships need work, then put your efforts into maintaining the health of your relationships and increasing trust with your stakeholders. THAT will give you first-mover advantage forever.
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