Reprinted from a Media Bullseye article I wrote that was published on May 18, 2009.

The Spice Girls are, in my book, perhaps the worst band of the last century (sorry, fans), but I invoke the name of one of their more tortuous songs to talk about measurement.

This article has been bouncing around in my head since the “For Immediate Release” call-in show on April 25, 2009. The guests were Chip Griffin, CEO of CustomScoop (disclosure: a sponsor of The Hobson and Holtz report); and Aaron Weber, Insight Manager at Spiral16. (further disclosure: I am paid to write this article by Media Bullseye, a sister company of Custom Scoop.)
The guests described a variety of topics, including what constitutes good social media measurement and when it gets “creepy,” meaning you might make a Tweet complaining about a product and then hear from either the products’ representatives or perhaps a competitor. At that point, I had not encountered any “creepiness,” aside from a comment on my blog from Comcast after I took on DirecTV.

The lively podcast (and call-in) discussion got me thinking about “what I really, really want” out of a monitoring service. I have blogged and written articles about measurement and the ensuing steps your
can take for online reputation management ad nauseam, but I have a new wrinkle to add to the discussion:

1. Capturing the right information from the right sources is just the first step, but
   adding context to content is the next, critical step that many monitoring services lack; and

2. Those who do offer some sort of analysis of blogs posts, media mentions and not even
   tweets are often “hired guns” who lack the ability to ascertain the nuances that make a mention, positive, negative or neutral, let alone a favorability ranking. You can’t tell me that someone sitting in another office who has 10 other clients can know more about your issues than you.

The Conundrum

• Are those who do monitoring, either inside or outside of organizations, looking at
  the right thing to measure? and

• Are the right people actually doing the measurement?

My answer is: a) sometimes, and b) not really.

My public relations measurement uber-hero is Katie Paine, whose book “Measuring Public Relationships” is still the best read out  there on the topic, and I am going to borrow liberally from her book in order to help make sense of this.

What to look at

There are two types of horrendous monitoring, one worse than the other. The first is a “clips report” simply regurgitating a bunch of stories without providing any frame of reference to what it all means.

Lame.

What is still bad, but marginally better, is measuring “impressions.” Impressions are a made-up number that is still imprecise. Some organizations say it is 2.7 times the circulation number (counting pass-alongs) and some say it is simply the circulation number itself. This concept is fundamentally flawed as well because just because your article appears, it is a not a lock that the number of people
who see a publication = the number of people that you reached. This is at best flawed, and at worst, downright lazy. Still lame.

Non-Lame-ness

Here’s the Katie Paine part that, when I first read it (and then taught it) was one of those serene moments in which the universe makes sense. She offers up a simple way to measure the messages that actually get through to your audiences. Does it matter how many people buy the publication that your earned media piece runs in? Hell, no. But does matter how many people actually saw the message(s) that you were attempting to convey? Hell, yes.

Katie elegantly calls this revelatory statistic “Cost Per Message Communicated,” meaning that when you cut through all of the (lazy) monitoring mumbo-jumbo, the simplest and most precise way to determine the value of the public relations effort you have undertaken is to a) capture the right information an b) measure the messages that were available to your audiences.

I’ll talk more about this in the second article, but what I “really, really want” is a monitoring system (technology AND subject-matter experts) who will:

1. Capture all of the print, radio, television, blog, online news, Twitter and message
   board stuff that is said about my organization or issue;
2. Separate the “wheat from the chaff” and let me know – concisely – what I need to pay attention to; and
3. Help me understand the value of my public relations, public affairs or even crisis communications outbound messaging – not the “thump test” of number of publications or impressions, but how many of my key messages reached their intended audiences.

This was a pretty popular post when I first wrote it, so I have tweaked it a bit for my Georgetown students this semester.

So…

We have all been there.  You have killer ideas that can save your company money, your competitors are all doing it — and all you need to do is get the ok from your boss to implement a blog (internal or external), a podcast, Twitter, use You Tube, Facebook, hell, even an .rss feed.

And then you get “The Look.”

We’ve all seen it.  It’s something between hearing that Santa Claus isn’t real and the look on Dan Quayle’s face when Lloyd Bentsen said “”Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”  Too often than not, when those above you (or your clients), exhibit that look, you need to think fast or watch your social media dreams go up in flames.  So here are a few tips that might help you think fast before “The Look” becomes a “no.”

1. Knowing and reacting. It’s simple and unquantifiable, but the there is likely already conversation going on about your company/clients, their products, issues, executives and value — it’s already happening.  Here’s the simple part:  you can choose to be part of it or choose to ignore it.  So when someone blogs about you, good or bad, have a monitoring system in place and rules in place for if — or even when — to engage. I have written about monitoring reputation management ad nauseum, but the first step in engaging in the conversation is to know what people are saying about you, and who really matters.  It doesn’t have to cost a ton to monitor, and even Twitter search has an .rss output now.  No excuses.And here’s a little tip to help simplify it:  if you walked out of the building and heard someone trashing our company, wouldn’t you engage that person in conversation to offer your points of view?  Would you just let it go? What we’re talking about is no different.
2. Projecting your point of view. If you are reading this blog, you probably already have a pretty good idea of the arsenal that is available to project your company’s/client’s/executives’ view into cyberspace, so I won’t spent a lot of time on the tools and tactics.  Most CEO-types are bottom-line oriented, so if you can make can intelligent case about cost-per-contact (CPC) — talked about brilliantly in Katie Payne’s book “Measuring Public Relationships,” you have a winner.  For example, let’s say so implement a Twitter feed.  The only cost, really, is your time to set it up and monitor it.  If you make $60,000 a year (plus benes and work 2,000 hours a year), that’s going to be about $45 per hour.  If you spend an hour a day on Twitter and build up a network of contact of 500 followers, your CPC is going to be about $22.50  ($11,250/500).  Compare this to advertising (which you can’t appropriately measure, only guess, earned media or paid media, which again you can’t appropriately measure) and the $22.50 cost per contact is pretty darn good.  And this is only measuring the cost per acquiring each contact and does not add in the value of the conversations that are taking place via Twitter throughout the year.  And especially in a down economy, CPC is more important than ever.And one final note:  I maintain a Twitter account for my day job and can tell you that the vast majority of the major “traditional” news outlets are on it -watching what my employer has to say.
3. You can’t always have the ROI you want. I am directly lifting this from a must-listen “For Immediate Release” podcast in which Mark Ragan led a group of social media experts through a fascinating panel in which he pretended to be the “Dumb-Ass CEO,” and Shel Holtz discussed blogging.  Mark Ragan challenged: “You better be precise.  I’m busy.  Why is it that I need to launch this blog, which I don’t even know what it is.”  Sound familiar?  Shel had a great answer.  He said that many companies still invest in things like taking key customers to golf club memberships, greens fees, etc. to build relationships, and we don’t measure that, right?  Everyone gets that you are building solid relationships with these people in the golf course, and not one ever challenges that, right? The basis of social media, like blogs, is developing relationships.  You can’t always measure everything — and you have to be at peace with that.
4. Blogging baby steps. A lot of time, you have to take steps that are not 100 percent of what you want to begin with, so there are a couple of things you can do in the meantime.  First, talk to your boss about starting an internal blog — something that is apart from that God-awful intranet that you have.  Start slowly by talking to your employees – the people who are your brand and company ambassadors, and you might discover that you are ready for prime time — taking it to the “outside world” after all.  And a tactic that I have done more often than not, start a test blog.  Mock it up, don’t make it public, but if you have just a few moments to capture the time and attention of a senior executives, pictures and clicks are worth a 1,000 arguments.  While Mr./Mrs.  CEO is clicking through the blog, you can make your case about the fact that businesses are built on relationships — and having a blogging platform is a fantastic way to have a parallel set of relationships with your internal or external audiences.
5. Beware of the roadblocks. People hate change.  Especially people who have been doing it one way for a long time.  If you are attempting a “paradigm shift” (100 points for BS bingo, which I won on the “Hobson and Holtz Report: #399), talk to the people who might try to stand in your way.  My experience tells me that there are two prospective deal-killers in an organization:  IT and legal.When the Internet was for propeller-heads, IT owned it.  It was theirs, and we “communicators” simply did not get it.  And now we want to OWN IT???  Try a quiet, discreet conversation with someone reasonable (and high up) in IT to get buy-in on a shared project.And legal?  I have climbed this mountain so many times I have no fingernails left.  But here is my two cents, and it is pretty simple.  The right way to go about is is to start the conversation with “How can we do this?”  The wrong way is “Can I do this?“  Make the question about what THEY need to do to collaborate and make this a reality and don’t give legal any maneuvering room to kill something.  Sure, there will be disclaimers (be smart and cut and paste the disclaimer statement from a competitor and bring it to your meeting), but frame and conversations in terms of HOW it can be accomplished, not IF it can be accomplished.

But it’s not all about me;  Tell me about your own experiences when trying to sell in new media in an old-school job.  Or if you have not tried it, tell me how you would.

Mark

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

As usual, Jason Falls is smarter and more eloquent than I, so imitation is best form of flattery.  So I am “appropriating” (we use that word in Washington for lots of things) his unbelievably good presentation on how to engage detractors online.

Jason makes about a bazillion good points (and I have exhauasted the topic in a different way that I call “Online Reputation Management“), but the best way that I can help you get smart is to get out of the way and say:

1. Read his blog post. Now.
2. View the accompanying SlideShare presentation below.

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