Analytics Is King

At the risk of sounding like a complainer, or as someone who is always ranting, I wanted to take a second to address some recent developments in social media. Of course, there are things daily that cause one to shake their head or pump their fist. Social media elicits strong opinions from all sorts of people. Whether you're on the client or agency side, young or old, you likely have an opinion on something related to social media. That's cool. In this case, opinions are mostly good. Opinions mostly help us push the space forward. However, as with anything in life these opinions have limits.

There are several memes in social media that should cause you to scratch your head. If you aren't scratching your head, you aren't close enough to your clients or bosses to understand what's really important to them. For example:

• Social media experts are "clowns." Let me be perfectly clear for a second - I think Gary Vaynerchuk does amazing work. He's an incredibly smart guy who's done a lot more for the space than I have done to date. However, when he called 99.5% of social media experts "clowns" he was wrong. Not that there isn't a large number of faux experts, it's just that companies don't care. If you're good, companies will recognize it. If you suck, companies will cut bait. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. And no, for the record, it doesn't make the job for those of us who know what we are talking about harder. It actually makes it easier in the end.
• Snake oil salesmen - This is another one of those memes that should die a very quick death. It's in line with my first point here, but companies just don't care. They don't care what you think of other people in social media. They care how YOU can help THEM. End. Of. Story.
• Social media is not really media - Tell you what, try an experiment with 10 people you know within large companies. Ask them whether they think social media is actually media, or whether it is an accurate reflection of what the space is or does. I'd bet my life that 10 out of 10 will either stare blankly, say they don't care or both.
• Defining ROI - Again, I'd bet you a significant amount of money that a marketing professional within a company has never once asked themselves whether ROI in social media actually means return on influence or return on engagement or whatever other stupid RO acronym you'd like to come up with. ROI within companies is return on investment. Nothing else. Stop it.
• Does PR or corporate communications or marketing own social media - This is one you could possibly argue, but realistically companies only care how those elements come together to deliver a strategic approach to social. Who owns it is a secondary concern at best.

Just so you don't think I'm a complainer, what should we be talking about?

• Measuring social media effectively - We need less talk and misinformation about measuring social media. At Ogilvy, we approach measurement as KPIs and diagnostic measures. KPIs could be things like sentiment, or positive share of voice or, gasp, sales. Diagnostic measures are those that are specific to the platforms you are using. If you are using Facebook you might look at clicks/post, likes/post, comments/post, etc... Again, it depends on your goals. Lets start talking with companies about how they can effectively measure social media success.
• Defining, measuring and implementing influencer programs - There is a significant amount of debate about how to measure and define influence. A lot of informed opinion, I might add. The jury is still out, but influencer programs aren't going away any time soon. We need to land on appropriate proxy metrics for influence, and soon. We need to understand how we're appropriately leveraging our lists, and soon. There may never be total agreement, but we need to get closer than we are currently.
• A more strategic approach to social - Unfortunately, social media is still overly tactical. Companies that are incorporating elements of paid and earned media into social campaigns are actually few and far between. We need more of that. We need more companies who want to leverage social across the entire enterprise (read: a truly social business). Social media can help your business, but only if you let it be more than a broadcast channel.
• Using listening data proactively - There is some value in using listening data reactively as a marketing intelligence tool, but it is most effective when your content is nimble enough to be influenced by conversations you are seeing online about your brand and your industry. We need to be formalizing listening teams at the brand level in order to do this well. Yes, it costs money, but ask Dell whether the social media listening command center hasn't already paid for itself. I bet it has, and not just by a little.

I'm sure there are other things we should be talking about, and I'm hoping you'll come and do that for us. Either way, social media needs to stop acting like the next iteration of Ringling Brothers Circus by focusing on things companies couldn't care less about. Lets refocus on what's important, and help to really drive business value. Who's with me?

 

Just when you thought you had seen everything... Here I was, just going about my Monday...Catching up on e-mail and my Twitter stream when my good friend Heather Whaling sent me a link. Now, I think the world of Heather, and the work she does for her clients so naturally I clicked on the link. If only I could hit the rewind button and NOT click on that link. I spent the rest of my Monday trying to calm down after reading this post. What post is that you might ask? Ragan's PR Daily posted an article written by Jessica Epperly of The Wakeman Agency on measuring the value of editorial coverage. This post starts off innocently enough comparing and contrasting the role of advertising and public relations within organizations. Advertising is paid and media placements are earned...Yada yada yada... We've all heard that song and dance a million times. Where this article really comes off the tracks, at least for me, is in the discussion of how we measure success in PR and advertising. Yes, my friends, you thought right: We're back in the world of advertising value equivalencies. Ugh..and here I thought we were well on our way to moving beyond these ridiculous metrics. Perhaps we are and this is an isolated case? One can only hope, right? I don't want to go too deeply down the path to discredit advertising value equivalencies as a metric, but if you wanted to read more on the subject I'd suggest you check out the works of Don Bartholomew, Katie Paine and Sean Williams. All of them have done EXTENSIVE work to discredit the value of AVE's as a metric to evaluate success in PR. Much of their work can be found on their blogs, but I'd also encourage you to check the work from the Institute for Public Relations on this subject. It's all great, and it all, pretty much, tells the same story - advertising value equivalencies are a scourge on the PR profession. As I said, I don't want to go much down the path of discussing the science (or lack thereof) behind AVEs. However, there are a couple of things that have me very concerned after reading this article:

1. This is what makes measurement hard to talk about with companies - There is no doubt that Ragan.com is a reputable site. I read PR Daily myself, quite often, when it comes across in the stream. However, publishing an article like that is pretty reckless. We already know there is great misunderstanding about measurement in the marketplace, and by posting something that's so egregiously wrong you only serve to feed that beast. Similarly, there are going to be a lot of companies out there reading that article, looking for a measurement solution and using it as sort of a "bolt on." This will only lead to companies measuring the wrong thing more often than they currently do.
2. For the 400th time, advertising and PR DO NOT carry the same value - I'm not getting into which one of the disciplines is better than the other. I truly believe that a successful communications mix incorporates all elements of paid, earned and owned media. That being said. there hasn't been any research that I believe that would suggest advertising and PR deliver the same value to organizations. The answer, in most cases, is it depends. Some companies get more mileage out of advertising, while others get more out of PR. It depends on where you sit.
3. Page rank is so bogus I think I want to vomit - As if the discussion of AVEs in this article isn't enough, we go down the page rank path?! Oh, for the love of... "Whether your story appears at the beginning or the end of a magazine can impact the media value," says Epperly. Well, no shit! However, are you sitting over the shoulder of someone reading said magazine to know if they are making it to the end of the magazine? The answer is no, and the math behind trying to apply some sort of figure to those kinds of situations is less than ideal.

Listen folks, I'm all for integration. I want an integrated approach to communications and measurement. Unfortunately, blending PR and advertising by using advertising value equivalencies is a recipe for disaster. The better approach is to come up with a list of metrics that are reasonable measures of success for PR, and run with it. If some happen to be influenced by advertising, then great. Have that conversation. Until then, though, DO NOT USE AVEs. THEY ARE A SCURGE ON THE PROFESSION. CAN I GET A WITNESS?

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.