Conferences | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging My IPR Presentation

Because it’s really hard to do a blog post while you’re presenting, I’ve done this post in advance based on what I think I’m going to say. I’ll plan to update it later based on the discussion, and invite comments or questions to clarify what we’ve presented.
First, I took issue a bit with Shel Israel’s advice in yesterday’s panel to hire young kids to do your social media work, because they just naturally “get it.” I think that’s fine to a point, but it can’t be an excuse for not becoming conversant with social media. This area is growing so quickly and will be so important, that it amounts to “media malpractice” if you are a professional communicator who doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogging, Twitter and other technologies that are quickly becoming mainstream means of communication.

If you want to stay connected with me and learn about this together, you can Friend me on Facebook and go to my 12-step social media program for PR pros.

For more than 100 years, word of mouth of satisfied patients and their families has been the main way people find out about Mayo Clinic and therefore see it as a place they would want to go with their complex medical problems.

Another key driver of Mayo Clinic’s reputation, since we don’t do national advertising, has been news media stories. That is the main topic of my presentation, since I work in media relations. But in the future, we will see a synergy of word of mouth with media through “prosumer” social media. It all comes down to people telling their stories, either directly face-to-face or potentially globally through news media or social media.

My co-presenter, Angie Jeffrey of VMS, gave some background on the Share of Discussion metric for news media that she has developed, and showed how it has correlated to business outcomes.

Then I showed a few high-level slides from syndicated Share of Discussion studies Angie’s group has done that involved us, and related results from media to public perceptions about Mayo Clinic and some other outcomes.

Finally, I think it’s overly ambitious to try to boil down all media, both mainstream and social, into a single PR metric, as Microsoft described yesterday. Communications is mind-numbingly complex, as Jim Macnamara said yesterday, and today’s prosumers get information from lots of sources. Some we can measure and others we can’t. But just as physicians use tests of blood pressure, LDL, triglycerides and other indicators which correlate with health outcomes (but may not actually be the causes of disease) to decide how to treat patients, so a set of measures like Share of Discussion and appropriate social media indicators can be used as “screening tests” to identify potential problems and opportunities.

To be affordable, especially for non-profits and not-for-profits, these tools need to take advantage of automation to deal with the immense amounts of communication that is happening in the “everyone is a publisher” world.

Thanks to the Institute for Public Relations for putting on this Summit on Measurement and for the opportunity to present and to connect with so many interesting people. This has been a valuable learning experience for me, and I hope our presentation has been helpful for others.

IPR,Institute for Public Relations,PR,Media Measurement,Social Media,Microsoft,Angie Jeffrey,VMS

Measuring Blogs and Consumer-Generated Media

The first afternoon session at the Institute for Public Relations Measurement Summit is entitled: How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media. Panelists include Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, Kami Huyse from My PR Pro and Todd Parsons, BuzzLogic. Donald McLagan from Compete, Inc. is a late addition. His firm monitors (with permission) every click online for 2 million people. Katie Paine is moderating, and she’s something of a legend. This is the first time I’m getting to hear her or meet her, and I guess we’re going to dinner at her house tonight. It’s a really big house.

Shel says blogs and social media aren’t really about measurement, but instead are about conversations. They are “push” media, and the real value of what’s happening is their two-way nature and the ability to listen.

Should there be standards for measuring social media?

Todd sees standardization as a weapon that kills progress, and that with the speed of change with new products being introduced so rapidly any standard is always somewhat behind the times. For instance, Kami said she used to count her comments on her blog, but now she often gets comments through Twitter, so it’s difficult to get your arms around these fragmented data.

Don said MySpace has lost 16 percent of attention in the last year, while Facebook has more than doubled.

How can you get ROI for social media? Don says ROI can be complex and doesn’t just come from the web (e.g. Auto sites get lots of traffic but almost no one buys a car online.) Todd says it is hard to make the value of social media explicit, so he tries to find some simpler means. He works with a job site that he describes as a mash-up between Monster and eHarmony.com. People listening to people they trusted (through social media) were 45 percent more likely to sign up for the paid service. They went from spending money on Google Adwords to spending less on “influencer relations.”

Katie asked, “Is it easier to measure ROI for social media than it is for PR and advertising?” Kami says it seems so, and Todd agrees. There is just so much data available that you can’t get with counting eyeballs in advertising and PR. You can make connections that simply aren’t possible in traditional media.

A question was asked about people with seven tabs open in Firefox, each refreshing regularly via AJAX, which gives an overstated estimate of how engaged people are. Kami says she hasn’t seen time spent on site change much with adoption of Firefox.

Shel had some interesting anecdotes of what he has found through his blog:

Having a big picture on a post increases time on site by 34 seconds
A medium-sized picture is only worth an additional 14 seconds
If he has two links in a row to a site he wants to feature, it’s much more likely someone will go there. Adding a third link in a row makes people tend to stay on Shel’s blog because it confuses them; they can’t decide which to click, so they don’t click any.

Shel changed his blog name from Naked Conversations to Global Neighbourhoods because people Googling the term “Naked” who were looking for something very different from social media. He also told the story of the guy who was on the Alaska Airlines flight who took a picture of the hole in the side of the plane, who had almost no traffic on his blog previously, but whose picture ended up on national TV. People who are not in the top 2 million blogs in Technorati today can suddenly be incredibly influential.

Shel says we haven’t been doing this long enough to have “best practices.” People need to get comfortable with experimentation, be responsible in what they do, avoid standardization. “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.”

He also told of how when hot movies open, what happens is that one kid goes in and sends a text message 15 minutes into the show to all of his friends, and if he says “sucks” it doesn’t matter how much the studio spent on promotion. It ripples through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and the movie is toast.

As Shel says, “We are in a transformational time.” And for those who are concerned about getting into blogging from a corporate perspective, he says “It’s much better to be shouted at than shouted about.”

Technorati: Blogs, PR, Measurement, Shel Israel, Todd Parsons, Kami Huyse, Don McLagan, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Katie Paine

Institute for Public Relations Summit: Session One

The first session at the Institute for Public Relations Summit on Measurment was entitled “An Integrated Approach to Communication Measurement” and featured panelists Jim Macnamara, Ph.D., from Sydney, Australia, and Derek Tronsgard, Director, PRIME Research. Dr. David Rockland, Partner and Managing Director, Ketchum, moderated the discussion.

Dr. Macnamara led off with an analysis of marketing/advertising measurement and how advertising has gotten the huge share of spending on corporate communications. For half a century or more, the final ROI analysis for advertising that has been used to justify ad spending has relied primarily on correlation of spending with results. Ad spending goes up by x, and sales go up by y, so there is assumed (logically) to be some relationship.

But correlation does not prove causality. Many other factors enter into the purchase decision, and in the age of the prosumer, who may get messages from MySpace, her iPod, Facebook, a traditional magazine (for bathroom or lunch reading), billboards, bus signs, AIM, YouTube (and literally dozens more sources), identifying what factors “caused” or influenced a decision is going to become even more difficult in the future.

And people aren’t “audiences” any more, if they ever were. In today’s world they are producing content (commenting on blogs, blogging themselves, uploading videos to social media sites, sharing photos online) that also creates influence.

Interestingly, Dr. Macnamara talked about one company’s campaign that started with PR and got to a certain plateau of awareness/message recall, and then when the advertising phase started there was only maintenance of that plateau level, no increase. He also mentioned some AT&T modeling mix research from the 1990s that pegged advertising and PR as having equal impact on the purchase decision.

One of the problems Dr. Macnamara mentioned is the “silo” nature of Advertising, PR and New Media, all of which do their own studies “proving” that their tactic is working. He and Derek Tronsgard said they see an advantage of bringing these separate studies together, which could provide better information for the organization and also save money.

Derek had a great point at the end in response to a question about how non-Fortune 500 companies can afford measurement. He pointed to the low-cost tools available and recommended that companies start small, that these provide good information – maybe not perfect, but good info that can help you make decisions. Examples are online survey services and free blog monitoring.

This is consistent with what I will be presenting tomorrow, and with the “It’s All Free” section of this blog. Barriers to entry – whether in engaging in social media or in PR measurement – are getting lower or in some cases are nonexistent. The enemy is procrastination; it’s time to dive in and learn, and then when it’s time to spend some real money on solving a problem you’ll have a better idea of what solution you want to buy.

Technorati: PR, measurement, IPR, Institute for Public Relations

Microsoft PR Measurement

microsoft PR measurement
This morning at the IPR Measurement Summit we are hearing from Microsoft’s Chris Frank, Senior Director for Corporate Market Research. His co-presenter is Andrew Bernstein from Cymfony.

Chris saw the challenge that there is lots of counting, but not enough evaluating. There is no weighting of the massive coverage. He said Microsoft is the most written-about company in the world. They had too much output, but not enough study of outcomes.

Microsoft’s objective was to Develop a consistent, global measurement system to assess effectiveness and impact of PR.

…built on a framework of a set of common metrics

…along with competitive benchmarks to provide

…learning to reinvent the PR discipline globally.

PR turned to Market Research because they wanted an outside team to develop a new standard. They wanted rigorous quantitative background, and a neutral third party to develop the system.

They aren’t tying it yet to reputation data or to the bottom line, but are starting with baby steps. They do a global image measurement study, and government elite study, but they aren’t trying to connect yet.

The system also needed to take into account the increasing role of digital marketing, and roll it all into one number, the PR Index Scoring Model. They boiled it down from a blizzard of 17 factors into six that would be components of the one score.

Buzz – quantity/volume of coverage. Am I being talked about? Am I being talked about by the people I most want talking about me?
Advocacy – is the opinion embedded in the buzz. How am I being judged on the attributes I care about? What course of action is being advocated? For example, Walt Mossberg reviewing Windows Vista advised readers to wait for service pack 1.

Steps of the Microsoft process:

Define topic & Geo
Assess Buzz levels
Evaluate Advocacy
Score PR Effectiveness

PR Score = Number of impressions x influence of publication/author (between 0.0 and 1.0) x score on advocacy dimension measured (between -1 and 1)

Challenges:

Developing methodology – Defining the variables of the scoring system: How do you weight each variable?
Cost efficiencies – What has been don to make more efficient?
Segmentation of information – Microsoft one of the most talked-about brands in the world. How do you take an enormous amount of coverage and data and make sense of it?

Microsoft only rolled out this program October 1 (last Sunday), so they don’t have any real results to show yet for this scoring system, but it’s interesting to hear the PR measurement direction a company that has virtually unlimited resources is taking.

Technorati: PR, Microsoft, Measurement, Institute for Public Relations, IPR, Conference, Chris Frank, MSFT

PR Measurement Summit

The Institute for Public Relations holds its 5th Annual Summit on Measurement this week in Portsmouth, NH. I’m speaking on Friday morning, but before that I look forward to attending sessions including:

An Integrated Approach to Communication Measurement
How One Company Uses Measurement in Reputation Tracking (and that “One Company” just happens to be Microsoft)
How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media
What Price Reputation? And the Importance of Measuring It
Measuring Communication Effectiveness in the US Military

My presentation is entitled, “Challenges of Communication Measurement in the Not-for-Profit Sector.” Angie Jeffrey, Vice President Editorial Research for VMS, is my co-presenter.

I met Dr. Don Wright, who is the Director of Institute for Public Relations Forums, at the Arthur W. Page Society Annual Conference last month, where he received an award for his leadership in serving the PR profession. It looks like he’s put together a great program, and I look forward to participating. And I hope I will be able to blog many of the sessions, as Walter Jennings did so ably at the Page conference.

Technorati: PR, Measurement, IPR, Institute for Public Relations, Microsoft, VMS