Turning News Into Knowledge

As PR and social media measurement gains strength and focus from experts and various audiences, bashing eyeball count, or reach numbers, and advertising value equivalencies (AVE) has become a favourite sport.

While I am in full agreement with the new measurement theories and understand the importance of starting with your objectives and measuring outcomes that meet the set objectives, I would insist that eyeball count still plays a part in the overall picture and here are some reasons why:

Connecting is the first step

If you are putting out a press release, tweet, blog post, podcast or any message, your goal obviously is to communicate with your desired public, engage them and generate the desired outcome from that engagement. The fact that they have seen (eyeball count) is the first step towards this process. The higher the eyeball count, the higher the probability of engagement. There is an old saying “the beautiful peacock danced in the jungle, but who cares no one really saw it.” It’s the same here, you might have the best concept, but if nobody read it or saw it then you’re not going to go much further with your campaign.

Hence measuring the reach is your first and important step in the process of measuring the campaign success. If we stop at this step, (which traditionally we have been doing) then it does not mean much. But it’s an important foundational step to further build upon the full picture of impact and measurement.

Create departmental synergies before you knock off the eyeballs

Conceptually, any campaign, when created, involves top management, marketing, sales, PR and other departments. Ideally they should all be talking to each other through implementation to measurement. In reality, due to time and resource constraints or simply poor management, the implementation and measurement happens in independent silos. This prohibits percolation of original concept and messaging to all decision makers, especially when external PR and marketing consultants are involved.

Now the task of truly measuring the impact of a campaign in a cohesive way is an even bigger challenge. In the end, each unit ends up highlighting results for their individual efforts instead of focussing on the objectives of the campaign and company goals. So while sales have its numbers to show, marketing has its branding and advertising results, PR (and specifically the media relations unit) often is left with showcasing the reach and AVEs as a quantitative measure of its efforts. So until we get to the utopian world of perfect communication synergy, eyeballs are here to stay.

I absolutely love all the discussions and focus on new measurement concepts, and it’s just the right kind of thinking that will help elevate the importance of communicators, but in doing so, I would be careful to not step on to the media relations people and discount their efforts. Eyeballs and AVEs aren’t the be-all, end-all of measurement but they have their place in the big picture.

from Katie D. Paine's blog

Still winding down from an exciting day at #Meshmarketing in Toronto yesterday (huge thanks to the organizers for a great event). I sat in on four fabulous presentations, but the highlight for me was Katie D. Paine’s “Social Media Analytics – What, Why and How.”

All day, there were lots of questions about social media ROI and what to measure, both in the presentations, and in talking with other attendees. Katie’s presentation at the end of the day wrapped it up perfectly: The main point was “yes, you CAN measure social media ROI”

She explained the seven steps to social media ROI, you can find all this and more in her presentation, but in short they are:

1. Define the “R” – What are the expected results?
2. Define the “I” – What’s the investment? (She also points out that social media is not, in fact, free–”Do you work for free?” she asked)
3. Understand your audience and what motivates them
4. Define the metrics  (what you want to become)
5. Determine what you are benchmarking against
6. Pick a tool and undergo research
7. Analysis – because research without insight is just trivia

The best part about these steps is that they don’t *just* apply to social media, but any type of measurement.  The challenge with social media is it’s not yet widely adopted, but now you’re equipped to go out and lead the way, so what are you waiting for?

If you missed Mesh Marketing, but were in Ottawa, I hope you were able to catch Katie at Third Tuesday Ottawa. If not, I encourage you to check out the slide presentation or follow her blog.

Being the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at MediaMiser, I’m constantly having to prioritize projects. Developing a successful application is about solving real problems and constantly being weary of cool ideas that add no value.

MediaMiser has been successful, in part because we’ve avoided features that add no value to our customers — features that are more cool than useful.

That said, six months ago we had to make a decision on whether or not to leverage Twitter content. The hard questions were asked:

• Was Twitter a flash in the pan, or is it here to stay?
• Does Twitter provide real value, or is it a forum for vacuous banter?

To figure that out, I had to experience Twitter first hand. I had to become Jane Goodall living with the apes — hence my user handle icon.

I registered myself on Twitter and decided to act like a good monkey and play nice with the locals.

What I found is that Twitter has real value and fills a void that other social media have problems addressing. Soon after, we started developing processes for collecting and analyzing twitter content in the MediaMiser platform.

What communication problem does Twitter solve?

Many refer to Twitter as a micro-blog. Twitter has a text limit of 140 characters–imposed so that Twitter could be made compatible with SMS messaging on cell phones.

That said, cell phone compatibility is not the only value of Twitter. Twitter has developed into a communications platform that addresses many different issues more efficiently than other media.

Blogging alternative

Blogs are a great way to share and broadcast information. However, maintaining a blog can be a challenge for the average person and many times people have only a little bit to say. The 140 character limitation of Twitter provides a less formal and time-consuming medium for the self-conscientious writer to update the public.

Many business professionals are turning to Twitter because it’s less time consuming than a blog. Blogs have to be well-thought out (especially for executives) and, in many cases, executives don’t have the time. Transparency, however, is important in maintaining the trust of staff and clients.

An easy to use two-way RSS feed

RSS feeds are an excellent way of providing and consuming news information. Many people use RSS feeds to keep up with techniques specific to their professional field or areas of interest. RSS feeds, however,  don’t allow for instant and two-way communications.  Twitter does.

Sharing news

Whether it’s from your website, blog,  or a news site, Twitter provides an excellent forum for re-broadcasting or sharing news information.

Forum for Corporate and Consumer related issues

Twitter offers consumers a forum for elliciting product information or providing both positive and negative feedback on products or services.  Conversely, Twitter also provides companies and organizations a mechanism to respond quickly to issues and get feedback to improve their company or organization. At the same time, companies and organizations can demonstrate and project transparency to the public, which evokes trust.

Networking and facilitating business

Twitter provides a platform for people to foster relationships and businesses to promote their brand through simply having a Twitter presence. Also, as mentioned before, Twitter also allows companies and organizations to broadcast news.

Many journalists and opinion leaders are also using Twitter to cross-promote themselves. In many cases, journalists will leak information on Twitter to create a buzz or communicate live events. During the 2009 NHL entry draft, I followed Darren Dregger and received news and draft information before it was officially published on the TSN web site.

Furthermore, using the courts, a law firm attempted to prevent a British daily newspaper from reporting a question in the British Parliament. However, outrage ensued on Twitter and other social media. The publication ban was later rescinded, partly because of the outrage on Twitter and partly because of the realization that even if there was a ban, there was no way of censoring Twitter.

Final thoughts

By leveraging the Twitter information within MediaMiser, we were able to perform competitive analysis and issues management, and identify pending issues for our clients, etc…  However, most interestingly, we were also able to correlate news information and measure the viral effect of a news story. We successfully demonstrated  the viral relationship between traditional and social media by analyzing the United Breaks Guitars issue.

Will Twitter continue to be an important communications tool? Only time will tell. It’s possible it could be displaced by a newer medium that more effectively addresses the same issues as Twitter.

That said, even media that Twitter has supplanted have not disappeared, and the same will probably be said of Twitter when other new media emerge.

We’ve finally settled into our new office at 11 Holland Ave. in Ottawa. (view news release), so it’s about time we shared some photos!

First, some before and after shots… followed by a few extra shots of the new place:

Old office

New office

Old kitchen

New kitchen

Old office

Analysts

Brett

Pragya

Boardroom

e-Marketer today published a study saying that social media measurement lags adoption. The difference was quite large: while 86% of respondents had adopted social technologies, only 16% were measuring ROI.

Shocking, yes. But does this tell the whole story? While ROI is a great metric for tying efforts to a dollar value… It’s not the be-all end-all of social media measurement. In fact, if it is the only metric you’re looking at, ROI is actually poor measure of social media efforts.

If you are using it to its full potential, the real value of social media is in the relationships you build with customers and potential customers. The stronger these relationships are, the more likely they are going to turn into money–either directly or through referrals. This is what is often referred to as community building, and why many companies are hiring community managers. The downside to community building, from a measurement point of view, is it’s not an immediate gain… It’s not easily measureable and it’s definitely not easily turned into an ROI figure.

How can you measure community building? Engagement–Look at who is talking about you and how often. Sentiment–Are people talking about you positively or negatively? If you do it well and track these relationships over time, you’ll likely see them turn into dollars.

It should also be mentioned that community building is not just about posting to Twitter/Facebook, blogging and creating Youtube videos. It’s also essential you have a solid product or service and excellent customer service to succeed. This is another measurement obstacle, because you can have the best community manager in the world, but still fail if your offering is not up to par. This problem can’t necessarily be captured in ROI or any other metric unless it’s overwhelmingly obvious (it’s often not).

I can’t comment on whether or not the respondents in the study are measuring more than ROI, but I would hope so. What do you think? Should I be more worried about the lack of ROI measurement?

Have you ever jotted down an idea for a blog—then let it swirl around in your brain for awhile to get your thoughts in order? I do this all the time and quite often never get around to writing the blog in the end.  I’m trying to find a cure for this laziness, I think it’s called Twitter.

This was just the case a few weeks back when I read the first half of a feature story in the August (print) edition ofVanity Fairabout Politico–a politically obsessed news organization that reports every whisper heard in Washington on-demand.

On the first go around I had only read page one of the feature and I was already thinking about the great blog post this story was going to make about how Politico could salvage the future of newspapers.  You see, the sub-headline read as follows

Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site, whose audience of six million obsessives and insiders consumes–and feeds–a real-time download of power data. The twist? Politico’s print version is what’s helped make it profitable.

few paragraph’s into the story I was extremely intrigued.  Four mainstream print guys had bucked the institution, created their own gig, figured out what their audience craved, and were profitable…and get this: it was the print edition that was helping them roll in profits.

They had 100 staffers, 6.7 million unique monthly visitors for politico.com, and seemed to scoop all the mainstream media on a daily basis.  What was the secret to their success that they could share with the rest of the media world? I was curious to find out and blog about it—but got pulled away from the story with something more pressing.

A week later I finished reading the article, and to my dismay, there was no secret.  There were no profits. Just projections of perhaps breaking even according to the CEO.

‘it appears….according to C.E.O. Fred Ryan, that Politico, paying its staffers at nearly the level that The Washington Post pays (starting salaries for reporters at the Post are about $45,000 per year), has hit breakeven.’

As the story unfolds we find out the online advertising wasn’t strong enough to keep it afloat, so a print version with almost verbatim copy is being produced as a freebie. The additional ad revenue from print is bringing in just enough to help keep it going.   Unfortunately, despite how much politico’s love Politico, they had not as I hoped figured out a secret business model for media to thrive.   All of their ideas have already been tried by mainstream media in attempts to survive:

• • Pay journalists peanuts. Check.
  • Build up our online audience. Check.
  • Help journalists become trusted brands. Check.
  • Scoop the competition. Check.
  • Try a freebie print version supported by ads. Check.

I’m definitely being a little unfair to Politico; building an online audience of 6.7 million people with a century mark of employees is a great success story.  But the sub-headline of the story had promised me so much more—it had sparked a good idea for the blog and I thought I knew what the message would be.  And there’s the saving grace and an actual link back to media analysis. You can never judge an article by just the headline or even the first few paragraphs.  To properly assess an article the full story needs be taken into account, and inherently that is problem with automated sentiment analysis the way it is being done today. It can take words and phrases out of context (or in this case in context) and not properly relay the right information to decision makers in an analysis report.

Over the years we’ve relied on our analysts to provide clients with a human touch–including toning and sentiment analysis. I’m a big believer in automation – and I think there are strides being made to increase accuracy and insights – but any proper media analysis program needs to have human intervention at various checkpoints to ensure the information being shared can be trusted and acted upon.  Otherwise you might just think that the solution to the newspaper industry’s woes have been solved…I’m still waiting, but hopeful.

One of the great dangers of social media is not saying too little, but saying too much.

Being a decision-maker and founder at MediaMiser, not only do I have intimate knowledge of where my company is going, but I also feel I have intimate knowledge of where the industry is going.

MediaMiser has a lot of credibility in its space and that opens the door to many different relationships. Plus, since a lot of my time revolves around technology and the operation of my company, I’m exposed to many leading-edge concepts.

There is so much I would love to communicate, but can’t. If I did, I could alienate partners and clients, and provide our competition with an edge.

This should not be just my dilemma, this should be everyone’s.  “Keep your cards close to your chest!”

So the question is, how do you give back and provide value so you are relevant?

The answer is there is no right answer.

It’s a tight rope walk that you need to struggle with and there maybe times where you make a mistake.  Hopefully, it’s not a big one. Keep in mind, when you say too much, you are not just hurting yourself, you could be hurting coworkers, partners, investors, etc.

Tips to avoid saying too much:

1. Don’t get emotional and always keep your ego in check: This is tough, especially if you are naturally competitive like most entrepreneurial people are.
2. Think of the consequences of communicating something and remember you can’t take it back.
3. Try to vet your information through someone else, especially if you are unsure. I personally do this a lot. It is not a weakness to know your limitations.
4. Provide a reason ‘why’ or an objective to posting information. If you can’t answer why, maybe it’s not a good idea. Warning: if you have a reason, make sure it doesn’t conflict with point 1, ‘don’t get emotional’. Some ideas seem good at first. Also, when justifying something, deploy point 3.
5. Wait a day before communicating something. This helps flush out ideas based on pure emotion.
6. Have a clear idea what your target medium is designed for. This may also aid in preventing abuse.
7. Develop a social media usage policy for your organization.
8. Develop internal social media networks. This has the potential of also creating a new set of problems, but at least in theory the damage will be limited internally. This also allows people to get familiar with social media. Practice makes perfect.

These tips aren’t designed to remove spontaneity or to stifle creativity.  However, it may be a side effect. This is why I wrote, “it’s a tight rope walk.”

First-if you’re an RSS subscriber, please click through and check out our blog re-design!

However, this is more than just a “come look at what we’ve done” post. Although this is the first time MediaMiser has re-designed this blog, I’ve been through the process several times before at previous jobs. I’ve also re-designed my personal blog many times. So I thought I’d go through some of the reasons why you should re-design a blog, or more specifically, the benefits of a re-design… In no particular order:

1. Usually leads to an increase in traffic and/or subscribers
   I’m not exactly sure why this is, perhaps because when you re-design, you may consider new or updated SEO tactics that help drive traffic or perhaps you’re so excited about it that you start pumping out great content that gets people interested. Whatever the reason, more traffic and subscribers usually follows!
2. Re-energizes your company about the blog
   Especially if it’s a multi-author blog, a re-vamp can get contributors excited about blogging again. Complacency is social media’s worst nightmare and it’s no different on your blog. Also it gives you the opportunity to promote it internally and get employees excited about your corporate blog. This, in turn, could lead to point # 1.
3. Helps you keep up with the times
   Things change so quickly online… Re-designing the blog helps you stay current by thinking about what could and maybe should be present on your blog. For example, we’ve now integrated our @MediaMiser twitter feed in the sidebar. We’ve also put the option to re-tweet posts, and to follow the individual authors on this blog.
4. Creates some buzz
   If people like what you’ve done, they may talk about you! While it’s no guarantee, it’s got a better chance of happening vs. not re-designing!
5. It’s a lot of fun!
   Maybe not for everyone, but at least from a PR or marketing perspective, it’s an opportunity to look at your brand and be a little creative. We believe the look of a blog should be inspired by the company web site and brand, but not identical, so it’s a great opportunity to have some fun and experiment with your branding.

So that’s it! Please let us know, either via comments (or email me directly) what you think about our re-design or share some other ideas about why it’s great to re-design. Or what about the other side of the argument, is there a downside to a re-design?

On July 10, I wrote a blog posting called Beware of the viral nature of media.

It dealt with the United Breaks Guitars video, which went viral across the web and mainstream North American media.

Joe Boughner responded to the posting quite rightly questioning how much damage was actually being done to United Airlines’ brand. Joe also hoped that someone would do a six-month post-analysis on the story.

Well, we decided to do a one-month analysis of the United Breaks Guitars story and have some interesting results.

Whether long-term damage was done is still up for debate, especially since our analysis covers only the month of July.

That said, you can find the complete analysis on the Resource Center on the MediaMiser website. You can access it without providing personal information.

For those who don’t want to read it, here are some of the findings, which are backed up by the analysis in the report:

• Even though blogs and Twitter may have alerted traditional media of the story, traditional media outlets supercharged the story and made it a real issue for United Airlines.
• The majority of micro-bloggers (Twitter), tend be heavily influenced by the mainstream media.
• Do not underestimate the influence of blogs.  Even though the popularity of other social media is on the increase, and the number of people writing blogs may be waning, many are still relying on blogs for information.
• Not surprisingly, United Breaks Guitars dominated the news for United Airlines during the month of July.

Chart showing the different media interaction over time.

I’d say a very important skill in the field of PR measurement is to not be complacent. The industry is constantly changing–especially when you factor in social media and start measuring alongside your other PR efforts. If you feel it’s time for a refresher on what’s hot and what’s not in measurement, see this post from the Metrics Man, which is a fabulous compilation of great advice for PR measurement.

Happy measuring!