The Intersection of Online and Offline

Once again, smart people like Todd Defren write smart blog posts.  I began this Sunday morning (like other propeller-heads out there) by perusing my Twitter feed and my favorite blogs, searching for some writing inspiration ok…ok..it was AFTER the sports section).  It did not take long.

In Todd’s post “Content Marketing: Think MULTI Media,” he lays out some thinking that I believe is at the (”INTERSECTION” - shameless blog self plug) of good social and multimedia thinking overlaid with the new marketing fundamentals that you have to deliver meaningful content to your target audiences in pieces that they can choose.

Summarizing what Todd’s sports-dad buddy said:

In other words, you may need to create a white paper and/or a podcast and/or a videoblog and/or a webcast of the same content because different types of prospects will have different engagement preferences. “

“Engagement preferences,” to me, means a couple of different things.  One of which is some people like to see video (if you are interested in seeing an excellent demo of the Google Android phone, check out what Neville Hobson did), and others like simply to receive the information in a language that they can understand:

It all starts with a “content asset audit.” With an average tenure of just under two years, most corporate marketing executives can’t even find most of the content on file at the corporation, much less map it to a strategy. Think, ‘random acts of content.’

“Once content assets are cataloged, marketers need to map assets into a sequential lead nurturing ‘curriculum,’ i.e., moving prospects through a series of content-focused engagements - each of which signify a higher degree of complexity/value and a closer proximity to sale.”

I read this as, it’s “figure out the information and format that people want, and give it to them in pieces that interest them.”

This is critically important.  Just this week in my day job, I spent quite a bit of time developing a new way of measuring our media coverage.  Thanks to Katie Payne’s excellent thinking, I am basing much more of my analyses on the fact that most people don’t read stuff anymore — they scan. That’s why a headline is more important than the first paragraph which is much more important than the 12th paragraph.

My take-aways?

1. Understand your audiences
2. Segment them
3. Develop multiple forms of content that are likely to appeal to them, based upon some research
4. Spoon feed them digestible forms of content
5. Rinse, lather, measure, repeat.

Another great post, Todd.

Mark

I’m doing a lot of thinking these days about measurement of the effectiveness of public relations programs.  We’re covering this in my class and my day job is, well, getting kicked around a bit of late.

I have long been a proponent of the premise that, in order to do good measurement, you need a “mashup” of tools.  You need to look at, of course, print, blogs, Web sites, message boards (especially in the world if finance), but measurement often lags behind the subject matter that it measures.

I’m coming late to the party, but ReadWriteWeb reported on the Twittermeter, a way to measure mentions in Twitter.  They state:

Enter Twittermeter. Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site’s public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter. Though database overages have forced the site to display only results for the past week, they have data since November 6th, 2007 totaling over 14.5 million words from 2.1 million status messages.

Twittermeter creates buzz graphs comparing words. For example, the graph below for the word “earthquake,” clearly shows a spike during the UK quake that took place earlier this week.”

Cool.  The challenge, for communicators, is now to add that to one big tent.  I am an unabashed fan of Custom Scoop, a platform that, while collecting information for thousands of print sites and blogs, also offers one of the opportunity to accept .xml feeds from other sites.  The more that you can measure under one big tent, the better. Tweetscan (or Twitter Search, whichever you call it) can also do it.

And while I am at it, measurement should not be about the tone or favorability ot articles, but of mentions of the company or issue that you are tracking.  Thanks to Katie Payne, I am now a disciple of “Measuring Public Relationships.”

Mark

I’ve just finished preparing a lecture for my upcoming class this week and have been culling some wonderful information from Katie Delahaye Paine’s book, “Measuring Public Relationships.”

Among the absolutely useful and easy-to-understand advice Katie offers are nuggets like:

1. AVEs - Advertising Value Equivalents are a bad measurement of value because, among about 50 other reasons, you can’t compare apples to oranges:  As Katie says, “..there is no scientific evidence to demonstrate that a six-column inch ad has the same impact as a six-inch story in the same publication.”  Amen.
2. There are indeed other valuable, albeit not perfect, ways to measure the impact of, well, impacting relationship with stakeholders like CPMs (cost per thousand impressions - and maybe someone can explain to my mathematically-challenged self who the genius was who thought to throw a “1,000″ in the formula, and CPMCs - Cost Per Messages Communicated (better) that is based upon message impressions, rather than article impressions.

Measurement is wonderful, and in the field of public relations (NOT ADVERTISING, NOT MARKETING) something that I consider to be an evolving area.  But here’s the rub:

Too often than not, I have seen fastidious and excellent research carried out (usually internally and not paid for through a vendor) that absolutely contradicts the thinking of a senior executive or company leader.  And I have died a little internally when I have seen this wonderful research get treated like CIA secret documents headed for the burn bag.

What to do then?  Katie mentions, importantly, to run the internal traps before planning a research program, but I have often seen that senior executives are fascinated with research — until it goes against their thinking.

Mark

Often, in my professional life, either in an academic or private sector job, I get asked one of Those Frequently Asked Questions: so what does it all mean? How do you measure this “online” stuff? The short answer is that there are about a million ways. Measurement is such as hot topic that Shel Holtz has reviewed Katie Delahaye Paine’s new book, “Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success.” I have not read the book yet but plan to, as soon a summertime rolls around. In the meantime, providing easy-to-understand and measurable statistics in one of the best ways to “sell in” online at your workplace. Some of the tools that I use include those which provide charting features. Remember that, for people who don’t necessarily understand what it all means, pictures are important. Among my favorites are:

• Custom Scoop - full disclosure, I write for their online and offline magazine, Media Bullseye, but it is still the best and most cost-effective measurement tool I have seen.
• Technorati - by no means perfect, but like Winston Churchill said of democracy, “it the worst form of government except all others.” Their big measurement tool is the “authority ranking,” which is simply the number of people who have linked to you in the last six months. Not the best, but one of the only games in town.
• Blog Pulse - great way to find out about blog traffic - and chart it.
• Google Blog Search- offers what Technorati does not, which is a way to do a date-specific search of blogs.
• NADatabase - this online service (free sign-up required), offers you subscription statistics for most newspapers in the United States. Quantifying online vs. offline impact is critical as well. impressions
• Morningstar - if part of what you are measuring includes stock price, imagine how impactful a chart is that contains circulations statistics overlaid with tone (positive, negative, neutral), blog traffic AND stock price. Put together, they tell a powerful story. And tralking stock price often gets the attention of senior management inpublicly-traded companies. This is often the “ooooh and aaahhh” moment when you make you case about the impact of communications.

Bottom line: if you want to sell online (and the intersection of offline) to a skeptical or ill-informed audience, tell a story; tell it with pictures and statisitics and suddently, you are the Measurement Wizard. Mark Story