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.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , ,

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.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , , , , ,

PR Measurement Summit

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.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , , ,

Facebook, Texts Warn Students of Gunmen

Crisis communications plans, as I said earlier and as Dennis McDonald agrees, should have some kind of social media component, whether they use Facebook or Twitter or some other way of delivering text messages, along with “dark site” blogs.

The main idea is to build in multiple levels of redundancy for your communications, because no one method gets to everyone, and you can never trust in just one delivery mechanism because you need to account for the possibility that your primary means may be knocked out.

In a college environment, though, Facebook and texting via cell phone come close to being universal delivery methods, as St. John’s University and UW-Madison showed last month.

When a masked freshman came to campus at St. John’s University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.

I think that with the growth of social media sites like Facebook, and with high-profile examples of success like this, these methods are going to go from being back-ups and nice add-ons (like a belt and suspenders), to becoming the main way people communicate quickly in a crisis.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , , ,

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.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , ,