Analytics Is King

That is easier said than done.

Some of the easiest things to say are often the hardest things to do.

You've probably heard one of those sayings in some form or fashion, right? We should be distrusting of the overly simplistic, but in this case I think there is a lot of merit to both of those phrases. It truly is much easier to say something than to do something. I'm sure you know the famous saying, "put your money where your mouth is," right? Again, overly simplistic but there's also some merit to it.

There is no word more simple in the English language than, "no." Well maybe the word, "yes," but that's the subject for a different post. Even though it is simple, no is easily one of the toughest words for professionals to say. And, being in the communications business, the natural inclination is for us to say that it is an affliction that only impacts younger professionals. Talk about a load of BS. Nothing could be further from the truth. Experienced, new, young and old it almost doesn't matter. It's a word that everybody struggles with.

Think about it... When was the last time you said no to something out of necessity? Go ahead... I'll give you a minute... Cue Jeopardy theme music... It'll take you a while. I know it took me some time. Whether they be in work activities or extra curricular things you might be doing on the side, chances are good you've not said the word no in awhile. Why do we have such a problem saying no to people? The easy answer is that we don't want to disappoint someone. There's a lot of truth to that, but if you don't know the person how can you really disappoint them? If you were asked to speak by someone you didn't know well and had to decline would you really feel like you disappointed the person? I'm sure a small part of you would, but what's the real reason?

Saying no, at least in my view, has more to do with personal achievement than disappointing someone you may or may not know well. We want to be the best, right? If you are going to come here and tell me no I'm going to call you a liar. It's just simply not true. We're all driven. We all want to be on the top of our game. To be at the top of our game, we think we need to take on all comers. You know that extra project you have absolutely no time for? No problem! You'll stay up until 3:00am to finish it. You know that speaking gig you were offered in a cool city that would mean you'd be on the road for five consecutive weeks? Absolutely! Why not... I don't need to be home to see my friends. Or what about that extra side project that brings you more stress than your real job. Whatever! That's a breeze. I can handle it.

If it sounds like I'm advocating a slacker lifestyle, you're clearly missing the point of the post. There's a big difference between working smarter and working harder. If you are going to be working harder, you need to know what you are working toward. You need to know all of the potential pitfalls and benefits to taking on that additional assignment. Hence, working smarter. Knowing all of the facts before making a decision is important in all walks of life. If someone says they cannot wait for your decision then politely tell them no. First of all, they are terrible shortsighted and would probably be pissed off if someone tried to pull that on them. Secondly, nobody needs an answer instantaneously (in most cases - whether to go through with emergency heart surgery probably would require an instantaneous decision). And, for the record, I'm just as guilty as anyone else. I can never say no to things. Again, I think if I were honest with myself it would have more to do with achievement than disappointment, but... there it is.

So, what can you do instead of saying no, especially if no genuinely isn't in the cards for you? A couple of things...

1. Rephrasing the request - This is probably the easiest thing to do that almost nobody ever does well. An example... If someone asks you to help complete a multi-stage project, rephrase the original request and ask if it is possible for you to help complete one of the stages. I can guarantee that the person making the ask will be accepting of any help he/she would get.
2. Suggest another team member - Now, don't go throwing a team member under the bus, but check with someone else in your group on whether they have time to assist. Then, go back to the person making the request and suggest the alternative. Again, chances are good that he/she would be willing to take that help.

If you have had success uttering the word no, please come tell us about it....

There has been a lot of discussion over the last few days about public relations and social media measurement. Actually, there has been a lot of discussion about public relations and social media measurement over the last few YEARS let alone days. Todd Defren got the ball rolling with his post about PR measurement fails, and using Web metrics as a gauge of success in PR. The truth of the matter is that Web metrics could be one potential gauge of success, but talking about it in a vacuum won't work. Then last night's #pr20chat discussed a very similar topic, and it didn't take long for the discussion to go slightly off track. Instead of talking about the process of identifying metrics, we ended up talking a lot about individual metrics. That, my friends, is what we call the measurement rabbit hole. As soon as you start down that path it's very hard to pull yourself out of it. By now we should all have the steps toward successful measurement beaten into our heads, but if not....

1. Benchmark research
2. Developing measurable goals and objectives
3. Creating a strategy and tactics
4. Implementing said strategy and tactics
5. Measuring results

There's a lot of explanation under each of those phases, but that's not the subject of this post. I know several people in this industry have tried (including the wonderful Katie Paine) to get people's focus off of one metric and onto the process above. This should be pretty self-explanatory for most of us but one metric is not an appropriate measure of success. Most often when one metric is used to define success it is impressions, and we know how imprecise that is as a metric. Why is there this over reliance on one metric? Is it just because of our hatred of math (which I think is a total cop out by the way)? Are we not spending the time to create a list of metrics using the steps outlined above? Do we not know what metrics we should be using? It is probably a little bit of everything, and that's where this post comes in... One of the things I raised in Todd's post and during last night's chat was using a series of metrics to create an index score. Now, before you start wigging out over the use of the word "index" give me a second to explain what I mean. I think if we put our minds to it and didn't cop out about our hatred of math, we could come up with a list of metrics that not only fit our particular campaign but are widely accepted as metrics in the field. This could be anything from impressions (I hate them, but you should know they are used still by many companies and are accepted), sentiment, mention prominence, spokesperson quoted, mention in a target publication, raw number of overall mentions and the presence of key messages in the articles. Those are mostly traditional PR metrics, but I'm sure you could come up with a similar list for social media. These metrics taken individually don't mean a heck of a lot, but brought together into some sort of score tell a pretty powerful picture. So how do we go about creating this "index?" The process is actually much easier than you might think...

1. Come up with a list of metrics - Ideally, you'll use the process outlined above to arrive at those metrics and not just cherry pick off of what you've always done or what you know others are doing. Frankly, it doesn't matter if you have 5, 7 or 10 metrics. Just come up with the right ones for your campaign.
2. Determine which metrics matter most - If you have a list of 10 metrics, you should think about which of those matter most as the ultimate gauge of success. Is it change in sentiment? Is it mention prominence? Whatever it is, you should identify some sort of ranking for those metrics.
3. Applying a weight - As I said, this isn't scary math. After you've come up with your ranked list of metrics, you should apply a weight to each of them totaling up to 100. So if you have 10 metrics the weights of those 10 metrics should equal 100. No, you can't just give everyone of them a weight of 10. :)
4. Creating the index - Truthfully, this is hard to replicate in a blog post using Excel but if you're using this post as a template feel free to drop me a line and I can help you setup the spreadsheet. It actually isn't hard, but I'll just confuse people trying to explain it. Suffice it to say that you should have three columns for each metric - the metric itself, the index and weighted index. Anyway, drop me a line if you have specific questions on that.
5. Coming up with the score - At the end of the day if this is done right every "mention" in your database is going to have a score from 0-100. You should figure out the ranges for what you'd categorize as a home run and what you might categorize as a bad hit.

That wasn't hard, right? You've incorporated a series of metrics into a cohesive PR measurement story. You can easily see now how a similar process can be applied to social media, right? This isn't tough stuff, if you build the process up front. Have you ever built anything like this? If so, come and tell us about it so we can all learn.

Does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man? I can't remember the last time I actually wore a suit, so for the purposes of this debate lets just go ahead and say that the man makes the suit. Anyway, a favorite sport for those of us who do data analysis for a living is bashing public relations professionals for not being as diligent with making decisions based on numbers. Or, better yet, not coming up with appropriate measurable objectives (or measuring at all to be totally candid about it) for their campaigns. I think we're getting better (hopefully Katie Paine would agree with me), but the PR profession is nowhere close to being data/measurement snobs. Will we get there? I'm not sure we need to have every PR pro be a versed data geek, but it wouldn't hurt. In the business, we'd call that last sentence a smooth segue... Yesterday, Keith Trivitt wrote a very interesting post on the heels of the PRSA National Conference arguing that social media is creating a data deluge for PR that will help create a new breed of professionals in the business. This had me thinking... does data create the professional or does the professional embrace the data and manipulate it to fit his or her needs. I'd like to believe Keith. I really would. But enough years working in research (either traditional or new media communications) tells me that an abundance of data does not necessarily lead to a more data-focused professional. Should it? Yes, absolutely. Will it is still yet to be determined. An even better question to ask is why would it lead to a more data-conscious professional? The data has been there for years, unfortunately, with little action taken on the part of the professionals. Just because the social Web has created more information than we can possibly digest doesn't mean professionals are going to immediately embrace it. I think they should, but that's a point for a different show. Even if the professionals did embrace this new dataset, would they know what they are looking at? Would they know how to pull out the insights? Would they know how to incorporate social data with search data with Web traffic information? What about with offline data? What about incorporating findings with their traditional media dashboards? I think you are seeing my point here...The shift occurs when the culture of PR shifts not when more data is created. This fundamentally starts at the collegiate program level, and I know several universities (Kent State University near my old hometown and the University of Southern California) are starting to realize it. However, we're not talking about a small problem. The universities, and then in turn the students must want to go there. I do a fair amount of speaking to students (much of which at the Universities I've listed above) and I can tell you that these kids aren't necessarily warming to data. Do they get there? Yeah, eventually. Will they embrace it when I walk out of the classroom? I don't know, honestly (further evidence for homing devices in kids?). This issue is more generational than anything. Will we see a seismic shift as the more senior members of this PR generation retire? Who knows. That's for someone significantly smarter than I am. I tend to think, though, that the new generation of professional has been brought up with a more data/measurement-conscious eye. The question is will that eye become fully trained in time to lead the ENTIRE profession into an era where there's more of a focus on making data-centered decisions than ever before. That is still TBD in my opinion. Anyway, after yesterday's more personal post I figured it was time to get back onto the wagon. What say you? Does the data make the pro or does the pro make the data? You tell me.

How often do you hear that communication silos don’t work? Quite often, right? We’ve probably read at least 10 posts on that over the last couple of years. They are right, of course, that for communications to truly be successful all parts of the engine need to be working together. Marketing needs to be talking to PR needs to be talking to customer service and so on… Without true integration, you’re a ship that’s dead in the water. Funny thing about this silo concept… it can also be applied to research. Most companies have pretty large market research departments that service multiple brands within the organization. The issue, as it so often is within communications, is that the disparate groups don’t often talk to each other. This group services “X” brand, while this group assists customer service, while this other group services marketing/PR. We, as researchers, need to get better at talking to each other. Most often, there are cross-brand learnings that never get shared because we’re in our own little worlds. That needs to stop, and fast! The explosion of data available through social media has only helped to amplify that disconnect. As we noted in the post about the social analytics lifecycle, we most often use data found in social media for PR and marketing purposes. We need to be using that across the organization – particularly in customer service, strategic planning and product development. But, in true silo fashion, strategic planning and product development researchers are off doing their thing. Improving collaboration amongst the different research departments is critical. With that as the backdrop, what does the research group of the future look like? Who participates in a super market research function? Here are six components of the ideal market research group:

1. Public Relations – This involves more than just sharing media monitoring reports, obviously. Many brands are doing interesting things in terms of measuring PR efforts – reports that encompass everything from topics covered by media, sentiment (ugh), story prominence, etc…
2. Marketing – Under this umbrella goes whatever social media listening/research you’re conducting. Focus groups, surveys (internal and external) also fall under this bucket.
3. Search – Before this blog dies, we’re going to hammer home the linkage between what’s being searched for and what’s being talked about online. Your search folks need to be an active participant in sharing data with this broader team.
4. Product Development – The reality is that the people we talk with in social media, or offline (through focus groups/surveys) can easily provide us new product ideas or just enhancements. If the product development research team is working closely with the marketing research team, we can start building those products more quickly.
5. Customer Service – We’ve all been hit by the unwanted customer service survey either on the Web or via phone. That kind of feedback is invaluable, however, both online and off.
6. Investor Relations – My friends over in the IR department are benchmarking performance against competitors from a financial perspective. That’s information the product development team could use as they work to build a case for a new product initiative, particularly if one of your competitors has launched a similar product already.
7. Management Reputation – some of this would fall under the market research, or investor surveying we do, but the strength of your management team is an integral part of your company’s valuation. Under this super market research group, we’d be conducting periodic surveys both in social media and the investor community to truly gauge sentiment.

I suppose what we’re getting at here is almost a “super dashboard” of data that a senior manager could access at any one time. This is where I see “market research” going in the future. Do you agree? What other components could be a part of the process?

I've had my fill of conversations about personal branding. Is there such a thing? Can you develop a personal brand? Are the people that are trying to develop a personal brand in the social media space "selling it out" somehow? 

There are a lot of smart people on both sides of the debate, but I don't think there can be any doubt that there are some who are trying to advance a persona in social media (often the people who shun the idea in the first place). 

Here's my quick take -- I share information on measurement, social media, social media listening, IR, PR, food and sports. Does that mean I'm trying to advance a personal brand? Who the heck knows. What I do know is that those are things that interest me. If folks respect what I say, then so be it, but it had very little about me trying to build a "brand." But, just because I'm not intending to build a brand doesn't mean it's non-existent. 

That's kind of a long way of saying that whether or not you are trying to build a personal brand in social media, one starts to form if you become active in the space and people respect what you have to say. 

Maybe I'm confusing brand and community? I don't know...be interested to hear what you think....

Great stuff in here from Allan on the excellent work they are doing at the CME Group.