I consider myself fortunate because I get to learn a lot from some very smart people.  I do social media in my day job, teach it at my night job, blog (duh) and get to so some freelance writing and podcast work on the side.

The best part?  Just about every day, I learn something new.

I have to confess, however, that my daily reading does not include some of the real blogosphere luminaries (I promised, no more about Scoble).  Aside from Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson (whom I consider A-Listers), my daily reading consists of some of whom I consider to be the “hidden gems” of the blogosphere.  And that’s why I came up with the wacky idea (boldly stealing #followfriday) with #blogmonday.

My dream is that, through blogging about other bloggers, we all can increase the reach and scope of our own blogger networks, help promote some really smart people who just don’t have the high Technorati rankings (yet) as well as share our own online rolodexes of “must reads.”

So please, feel free to join me in promoting some of the smart people out there.  And trust me;  I plan  to make this a weekly occurrence in the hopes that it takes off.  If you’re not in this one, you will more than likely make it into another.  So here are my entries for the inaugural #blogmonday.

Tried, True and Terrific

• Occam Razr’s – Ike Piggot’s blog not only makes me think about more things that just social media, I learn something new every time I read it.
• It’s Not a Lecture:  David Wescott makes you think;  and he developed (and executed) a brilliant idea on the “Global Moms” initiative.  Plus. he’s smart as hell.
• Rounding out this week’s list is a combined entry of Shel Holtz’s and Neville Hobson’s individual blogs as well as their out-of-this-world entertaining and smart podcast, “For Immediate Release.”

Blogs That Need to Make it Onto Your Blogroll

• Katie Payne’s Measurement Blog.  Katie literally wrote the book on public relations measurement and has helped me solve many an argument at work or consulting on the value of public relations.  She figured out the answers before many of us came up with the questions.

Blogs That You Might Not Read – But Should

• Shilpika Das’s “Wired Conversations.” Full disclosure:  Shilpika is a former student of mine, but writes amazingingly insightful posts.  She is smart, a great writer and someone who makes me think.  The student has become the teacher in this case.
• Matthew Chamberlin’s “Clearcast Digital Media.“  Matthew has been both a social media marketer and a video producer, so writes stuff that makes you think about the the differing aspects of social media converge.

Random Blog of the Week:

• Over the Monster – As a die-hard Red Sox fan (and I died hard many times before the first Red Sox World Series Championship, like in 1975, 1976 (Bucky Effing Dent) and of course, the Bucker-led 1986 team).  But if your are a Sox fan, add this to your blogroll.

Bonus Feature – Online Magazine and Podcast Series

• Media Bullseye.  This is Chip Griffin’s online, offline and “Radio Roundtable” venture, often executed by Jen Zingsheim (who, oh,by the way, announced that she hot MARRIED on Twitter last week).   Again this meets my criteria that every time I read or listen, I am educated and entertained.  Full disclosure:  I write for Media Bullseye and occasionally step-in as a co-host, but I wouldn’t do it, unless, in the New Hampshire vernacular, these guys weren’t “wicked smaht.”

That today’s inugural entry.  While it’s not as easy as #followfriday, won’t you please consider a quick post giving props to those whom you think are deserving of it?

Mark #blogmonday Story

OK.  I admit it.

I am so far in the tank for Katie Delahaye Paine’s body of work that if you tried to extract me from the tank, it would ten Navy SEAL divers and week of hard work.

In addition to helping we communications professionals  a) understand where we are, b) where we want to go, c) how to measure if when we get there, and d) how to correct and adjust as we go along, Katie’s teachings have helped me enormously to explain why measurement is important and why so many people are getting it wrong now.

Impressions – BAH!

Katie points out early in her book that good measurements include the following, based upon what you want to see at the end of a campaign:

1. Outputs – Katie describes this as the relative number of opportunities to see generated media relations versus other marketing/communications tactics.  it’s the relative cost per opportunity to see key messages and at also a public relations value ratio.
2. Outtakes – This is the recent of awareness of preferences  generated by public relations activities versus other marketing communications tactics (let the internal turf wars begin); and
3. Outcomes: The percent changes in sales, market share generated by public relations vs. other tactics.

Now, not all of these are easily to explain, but I wont’ give away the whole book.  In addition to writing it for my Georgetown students, this is designed to pimp the book, not replace it.

So for those of you who are new to measurement or fans of impressions, let’s hear your thinking on the three campaign outcome measurements above.

Mark

I love it when I get to read really smart analysis (thanks, Twitter) and love it even more when it comes from two smart people, Katie Payne and Todd Defren.

Todd blogged about this yesterday, but he and Katie had an exchange in which Katie commented on one of Todd’s recent posts about isolating public relations vs. marketing efforts. For those of us who have struggled with this, it’s hard – first of all, from a turf perspective. Marketing will want to claim credit for sales or brand awareness, and public relations will want to say that they are the air cover for the ground war — they created “awareness” which helped the marketing and sales people in the end. In Katie’s newsletter, she commented on Todd’s POV:

“Another popular reason that PR/SM ‘can’t be measured’ is that, ‘You can’t isolate PR from everything else the organization is doing!’ But yes, in fact, you can. It might take some coordination with advertising, or some sophisticated ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) but it can be done, and is being done every day. (Measurement is) hard … particularly for the math-phobic PR folks. It requires calculations and analytics and a bunch of things that PR people hate.”

Yout both are tight. Measurement IS hard. I hate math. Hell, I am adjunct faculty at Georgetown and got a “D” in the one undergrad math class that I took.

Damn Those Obstacles!

One of the texts in my class is the Bible of PR Measurement, Katie’s “Measuring Public Relationships.” All of that mathy stuff can, in fact, get done and made into pretty PowerPoint slides that anyone can understand. The fact that it can be done often runs into the immovable force of it will get done.

For what Todd and Katie are discussing, I see two major obstacles: human and fiscal capital.

By “human capital” I mean you have to find someone who not actually gets this stuff, but who is also committed to the idea that you can indeed offer precise measurements of public relations, marketing and other communications efforts — and isolate each one.

By “fiscal capital,” it’s more obvious, but most of the medium and small businesses (and even some of the large ones that I worked with in my 15 years on the agency side) can’t afford or don’t understand why they need to shell out the bucks for an outside firm like Katie’s. Katie – I have no idea what your billing rates are, so please don’t flame me!

There is astronomical value in measuring communications efforts. The hard part is very much related to a post that I wrote last week: “How To Sell Social Media to Your Dumb-Ass Boss.” It’s frustrating when you see the real value of something — and how it has the potential to really impact your business — and you get the “deer in the headlights” look from the people in the corner office.

In retrospect, maybe I’ll start a series of posts called “How to Sell REAL Public Relations Measurement to Your Dumb Ass Boss.”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

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