Category: News Media

The PR Measurement Treadmill

PR measurement
I recently heard Shel Holtz on the Oct. 22 edition of his For Immediate Release podcast (with Neville Hobson) talking about the WPP communications conglomerate and its recent stronger-than-expected revenues for PR services. The explanation offered by WPP was that as social media have become more important, effectively placing stories in the mainstream media is more valuable, because that’s what helps seed the social media discussion.

I think that’s exactly backwards.

Some companies may be thinking in this way, but if so they are doing the right thing (increasing their PR focus) for the wrong reasons.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as big an advocate of social media as you’re likely to meet. And it’s not just because I’m 6′ 6″.

But using mainstream media stories to generate blog buzz is like the Minnesota Vikings giving Adrian Peterson the football to set up their play-action passing game. Having a record-setting rusher does cause the defensive backs to creep closer to the line of scrimmage, which with a competent quarterback (always a question for the Vikings) will enable more long pass completions. But getting Adrian the ball is the strategy; Brooks Bollinger’s improved passing is a welcome byproduct.

Likewise, mainstream media stories are “the real deal.” They are not primarily a means to the end of getting social media buzz. Social media have their biggest punch when they break through to generate mainstream media coverage. Like the guy who tried to cancel AOL. He did a blog post which led to New York Times and NBC Today stories. He didn’t pitch the Times and NBC to get blog traffic.

When his story made the leap from the blogosphere to the mainstream media, it did generate huge traffic to his blog. So much that it crashed his server. But the blog buzz (aside from being an end in itself) was a measure of the attention generated through traditional media. It wasn’t a goal of the mass media stories.

One of the benefits of social media is that they can give a mass media buzz biopsy, as Kami Huyse said in an excerpt of an interview highlighted in the same Oct. 22 FIR podcast. It was part of a report from Eric Schwartzman from the PRSA International conference in Philadelphia. Kami said:

Blogs are wonderful for analytics. You get all kinds of great numbers from blogs. How long did somebody look at a particular article? What did they come search for? How did they come to your site? By what search word? Once they’re in your site…do they use your internal search engine, and what do they search for there? Do they find it, or not?

Then Eric said, “I totally agree with Kami. I believe that the true value of new media communications and online PR is the ability to measure buzz and to prove it with numbers as never before.” You can hear the full interview at Eric’s On the Record podcast.

I agree with both Kami and Eric to a point. If you have skeptical business leaders who don’t believe anything has value unless you can “prove it with numbers,” social media can provide a lot of data.

But blog buzz is only the most immediately measurable byproduct of news media stories. Most word-of-mouth happens away from the web. People used to say “Did you see that story on the news last night?” around the proverbial water cooler. Now it’s at Starbucks. Unfortunately, that buzz can’t be easily or economically measured.

Web traffic, whether to a blog or a traditional web site, is just one concrete way of measuring results. And because web sites give such plentiful data, including counts of “conversions” to the desired consumer action, they are over-valued and over-analyzed.

Social Media tools are like a thermostat. They measure word-of-mouth buzz (temperature) and help send signals to raise (heat) it. And they are particularly effective for niche content that can’t attract a mass audience.

Mass media are like a furnace, kicking out the buzz BTUs. You don’t buy a new furnace to improve your thermostat reading. And if blog traffic is the way you measure your mass media PR, you will seriously underestimate your effectiveness.
If you get mass media coverage through your PR efforts, that’s the big win. And social media engagement is worthwhile in its own right. But mass media stories shouldn’t be seen primarily as means to blog buzz; they are, if not an end in themselves, at least a good in themselves with many consequent benefits, one of which may be blog discussions.

I have two main options for my personal exercise during my winters here on the frozen tundra: playing pick-up basketball or running on a treadmill. With the latter I get “all kinds of great numbers,” such as total time, average miles per hour, something called METS and a seemingly precise measurement calories burned. When I play basketball, however, I don’t get any of those “wonderful analytics,” but I get a lot more whole-body benefit through running and jumping, starting and stopping quickly. And I guarantee that I burn more calories. But I can’t “prove it with numbers.” Precise measurement doesn’t necessarily correlate with greater benefit.

I’m feeling another metaphor coming, but I think I’ll just leave it for now.

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Facebook > WSJ + Chicago Tribune + LA Times + Chicago Cubs + YouTube

facebook microsoft deal
So you still don’t think Facebook is a big deal? Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to purchase a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million. That pegs the overall value of Facebook at $15 billion.

In the real estate world, when setting a market price for a house my friends Ben Martin (or at least the people in his Virginia Association of Realtors) and Daniel Rothamel look at what they call “comparables.” They ask, “What price have similar houses in the neighborhood brought recently?” Let’s look at the comparables for Facebook. In roughly the last year:

  • Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp paid $5 billion for the venerable Wall Street Journal
  • Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune (which owns the Chicago Cubs and had earlier purchased the Los Angeles Times), for $8 billion
  • Google (GOOG) gobbled YouTube for $1.65 billion
  • Avista Capital acquired the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune (and a few blocks of prime downtown real estate) for $530 million.

Add them all together, and they’re barely equal to the valuation Microsoft placed on Facebook.

Which just shows that for Facebook there really aren’t any comparables. Why?

  • Facebook has 85 percent of college students in its network, and a similar percentage of recent graduates. At a conference I attended earlier this year, I heard that David’s Bridal has found that people spend more money in the five years after they get married than they do in any five-year period. Facebook has the ability to help advertisers reach these people in their golden spending years. If, as David Walker said about Medicare, “Demographics are destiny,” Facebook’s future is bright indeed.
  • Facebook’s growth in other demographics is similarly astonishing. In adding 200,000 new users per day, Facebook ran out of college students to bring in a long time ago. The great majority of the growth this year has been in older adults and internationally. Shel Israel said yesterday that in Israel, where the primary language is Hebrew, Facebook now has nearly 100,000 users, which is up 33 percent in the last 9 days.
  • Facebook users don’t (mostly) just sign up for an account and forget it. Over half of its users visit the site at least once a day, and the average time spent on Facebook is 20 minutes per day.

I will confess that when it was reported last year that Mark Zuckerberg had turned down $1 billion or more for Facebook, I thought he would regret it.

That was before I actually tried Facebook. If you haven’t tried it, you should. Shel Israel says it’s the most beneficial professional networking tool he has ever used. My other friend Shel, Shel Holtz, and his partner (in the podcasting sense) Neville Hobson, in their For Immediate Release podcast for PR professionals, talk about Facebook in every program. They’ve joked that they have a rule that they have to mention Facebook at least once in each of their twice-weekly podcasts, but the reality is Facebook is that important.

Steve Ballmer obviously thinks so. And if you’re in sales, marketing, PR or have any need for professional networking, so should you.

Lest Shel Israel take me to task for that last line, I want to emphasize that you need to understand Facebook and social networking, and not see it as just another channel to force-feed your marketing messages to a captive audience. They (we) are not an audience. We’re creating content, too. Markets are conversations, and that involves both speaking and listening.

Microsoft is betting big that Facebook is where a lot of those conversations will be happening.

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Priceline Music


Sometimes the juxtaposition of news events is, as one of the major credit card companies says, “Priceless.” This is one of those times.

In TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld put it well when he said “Court Victory for Music Labels Won’t Save Their Industry” in regard to the RIAA winning its first copyright infringement case to go to trial, and getting a $220,000 jury verdict against a Minnesota woman.

Over the past four years, the RIAA has sued 26,000 of its customers, but it won’t get the same windfall from all of those cases, since most settle for about $4,000. This was the first to go to trial. So the verdict (if it is not reduced on appeal) sets an important precedent. All the music industry needs to do now is win another 52,000 lawsuits with the same size penalty to match its revenues of $11.5 billion last year.

Someone should create some software for the RIAA that automates the serving of subpoenas, because they really have to step up their efforts if they want to save their industry. Or, the industry can spend its time and money trying to find new business models that encourage and profit from the way people actually listen to music today—on their ipods, streaming from the Web, shared among friends and peers. As music goes digital, it becomes more fungible. People are going to do with it what they want because they can. The law may be on the RIAA’s side, but the market is against it.

But while the RIAA anchors its hopes on the deterrent effect of lawsuits, recording artists are dropping the record labels like, well, an anchor. Two days after Schonfeld’s post, the UK Sunday Times Online reported that Radiohead had developed a Priceline-esque “name your own price” model for its newest album.

Having waited four years for their heroes to finish another record, Radiohead fans were understandably excited last week to learn that the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, will finally be released on Wednesday. But what really rocked the fanbase – and heightened the air of gloom enveloping the global record industry – was the news that In Rainbows could be preordered and downloaded perfectly legally for as little as 1p at Radio-head.com.

Currently out of contract and thus entitled to dispose of their recordings as they see fit, one of the most popular bands in the world had decided to let the fans decide how much their latest album was worth. An MP3 file of In Rainbows would have no price tag. Honesty boxes, it seemed, were the new rock’n’roll.

And the very next day TechCrunch reported that the record industry’s coffin is being sealed Nine Inch Nails.

Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor wrote on the NIN site that the writing is on the wall for the traditional music distribution model, saying that the music business has radically mutated from one thing to something inherently very different today and that “it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate.”

As the incremental cost of providing the goods or services approaches zero, free can actually be a compelling business model. Especially if the fixed costs aren’t that high.

That’s why bands are ditching the record labels’ scarcity model and going for a more direct relationship with their fans. Once they’ve recorded a song and converted to mp3, the cost of letting people download it is almost zero. So they can put their fans on the honor system with a “name your own price” proposition. And that way, they create more goodwill and find more fans, because the promotional value of having their songs widely distributed far outweighs what they can get by restricting access and attempting to charge premium prices.

It’s much better to attract bigger crowds for concert, to sell more souvenir T-shirts and otherwise profit from an expanding fan base.

The music label model worked when fans had few options for hearing new music (FCC-limited radio station licenses.) Now, with the web enabling anyone to distribute music directly to consumers, the value added by the labels is declining. Sure, they have promotional power, just as the mainstream media do. Both mainstream media and music labels are still the biggest things going. Most artists would love to have a recording contract with a label, and mainstream media enable you to reach a mass audience to which only the most contagious viral phenomena can spread.

But just as the mainstream media have lost their oligopoly and therefore are seeing continual declines in audience and circulation, so will the music labels see their market share dwindle in the new world of democratized media.
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Blogging My IPR Presentation

 presentation.jpg

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

Sign of The Times

A colleague just pointed this out to me. She knows I’m the blogging and new media guy, so she thought (correctly) I would get a kick out of the fact that the New York Times‘ online edition has a slightly different masthead. Instead of “All the news that’s fit to print” it’s (see lower right)…

picture-7.jpg

So…is this new, or did I just miss it previously? Is it a sign of the Times, or just a sign that my eyes don’t pick up the small print as well anymore?

And I see that Tara Parker-Pope, who previously had written for the Wall Street Journal, has her blog going for the Times. I had heard she was moving, but didn’t know she was starting right away. Seems she’s been at it for about 10 days, starting here.

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