BYU's Susan Walton
and Robert Wakefield paper at #IPRRC2010 suggested a corollary to their colleague Brad Rawlins' transparency research – translucency. They recommend being "translucent" in a crisis i.e. telling your publics as much as you can and being clear about when you can tell them the rest. They postulated that transparency isn't always desirable and in many cases translucency might be a more appropriate stance for a corporation. They suggested that the type of "front door" a corporation or organization has, might vary depending on the crisis or situation at hand. For some, the door is solid oak, a barrier to the world that no one can see into. With no way to see in, these organizations are vulnerable to attack from the media and the community for their lack of transparency. On the opposite end of the spectrum are organizations that are fully transparent. Beth Israel Hospital and CEO Paul Levy's "Running a Hospital" blog is a good example of how total transparency can built trust and enhance communications. Then there are the vast majority of organizations that fall somewhere in between, with doors that are more "frosted glass." As Professor Walton put it "you can see shapes moving about, but not the details." They advocated that "translucency" as a more ethical behavior in some situations. For example, if your CFO is leaving, it's one thing to not comment, or say that he/she is leaving "to spend more time with his/her family" but you may not want or be able to go into the details of the sex scandal he/she was caught in. Their paper put some very useful definitions around the concept.

1. Translucency is a commitment to communicate to your stakeholders – not an advance commitment to what that communication will contain. I thought this was particularly useful in the age of Twitter when a rumor can go viral in minutes – long before you have time to even track down the facts.
2. Translucency occurs when credibility has already been established -- in other words, translucency only works when your stakeholder believes that the sender has their best interests at heart.
3. Translucency might be most effective when there is reason to believe an organization's arguments and data are rock solid but not persuasive.
4. Translucency is most effective when an organization already has in place a process and structure for bringing greater light thru the glass

Every year, I look forward to Michelle Hinson

and Don Wright's paper on the use of social media among PR professionals. For the past five years they've surveyed PR professionals - members of IPRA, PRSA, IPR and others -- on their use of social media. This year they received 560 responses from around the globe.

What they found:

• Twitter and Facebook saw the greatest increases both in usage and as the preferred source of news. In 2009, respondents saw search engine marketing as most important. This year Facebook and Twitter were seen as most important.
• In 2009, less than a third of respondents were using Twitter regularly. The percentage more than doubled in 2010 to 64%. Similar increases were seen in the use of Facebook. In 2009 just a bit more than half of respondents were using Facebook regularly. This year, nearly three in four 73% said that they regularly used SoCal networking sites to catch up on news.
• Across the board, PR practitioners feel that whether you call it new media, social media, or blogs, their influence on the practice of public relations is growing. In 2007, just over half said that they believed that social media had changed the way their organizations or their client organizations communicate. In 2010 83% felt that change – which actually made me wonder what caves the other 17% were living in? Even the Taliban would agree that social media has changed the way people communicate. 96% said they spent part of their average workday working with blogs or social media.
• Social media is winning over the skeptics. In 2008 just 66 percent of respondents said that blogs and social media have enhanced the practice of PR. By this year, 81% agreed that it had enhanced the practice.
• Another dramatic shift that Hinson and Wright found this year was in the credibility of social media. While the majority gives traditional news media higher credibility scores, this year fully half of respondents now expect blogs and social media to be honest, tell the truth and advocate for a transparent and ethical culture, up from just 40% a year ago.
• The measurement gap extends to social media: Sadly, while 84% of 2010 respondents encourage research to measure blogs and social media impact, only about a third is actually doing it. Even sadder is that while 90% agree that one SHOULD measure behavior – i.e. outcomes -- the vast majority are just measuring outputs – i.e. Hits (as in How Idiots Track Success).
• On the good news front, people seem to accept the fact that social media encourages two-way conversations. One respondent suggested that "new media enables companies to quickly learn what publics and consumer are saying about their goods and services. And that they enabled communications "without gatekeepers."
• Wondering where to put social media within the organization? More and more people are putting it under the public relations functions – 81% said that's where it belonged in 2010, compared to just 66% in the year before.
• Where the measurement of social media should saw the same shift. Up to 94% percent this year, compared to t88% last year.
• Not surprisingly younger respondents were more likely to recommend using social media in public relations.

I've now had nearly 48 hours to digest the ideas, papers and theories that flew by me at IPRRC 2010 and can at least take a stab at digesting them into some sort of conclusion. You'll find more detailed descriptions of each of these theories later this week and in The Measurement Standard. But here's my 10,000 foot view.     

1. Ethics – this was the theme of the conference. And while many of us ignored the theme and just presented our latest interesting research, many people actually paid attention to the theme this year – 21% actually discussed Ethics, or at least had ethics in the title. And, while some of the ethics papers felt like they'd been force fit into the theme, a number of them were truly inspiring, particularly BYU's Susan Walton and Robert Wakefiled translucency corollary to their colleague Brad Rawlins' (Shown here enjoying desert)
   transparency research.
   
2. The second major theme of the conference, as it is every year, is how best to manage communications in a crisis. .Lets face crisis makes for great papers, and whether it is T= Mobile, or Tiger Woods, there were fabulous papers on this topic. The major takeaway is that most of the old rules no longer apply. The blogosphere doesn't respond the same way traditional media does, the public is more skeptical and more likely to ignore your messages, and if you don't have an existing relationship with your stakeholders in the blogosphere, you can't create one overnight. What this means for CEOs – complete and total apologies are in order.
3. New/Social Media –naturally I gravitated to papers on this topic, and there were plenty of them. Michelle Hinson and Don Wright updated their longitudinal study of PR usage of social media, Marica DeStaso
   
   and Marcus Messner updated their research on Wikipedia, Tina McCorkindale didn't make it to give her Twitter paper, but there were lots of others to fill in gaps.
4. CSR – Finally, there was definitely a growth in the number of papers researching the effectiveness of CSR. In the minds of IPRRC presenters it Is clear that CSR and ethics are inseparable issues. Depending on whose research you believe, it is or is not effective.

As always, its impossible to declare any single paper to be "the best" (which is, no doubt, why there are so many different prizes and competitions) but the ones you'll see in this space and in pages of The Measurement Standard, are the ones that stood out for me. And, of course, if you want to see what we all look like click here. 

With a title like "Developing a Paradigm of Global Crisis Management Response Strategies" it is hardly surprising that Roxana Maiorescu's (Purdue & Virginia Tech)  (she's the one on the right, Dr. Sherry Holloday is on the left.     

presentation would draw a crowd. But she clearly didn't anticipate who would be at the table. And thus I witnessed the quintessential IPPRC moment.

A bit of background—Roxana's paper was essentially a recommendation for a global standard for crisis management response using a combination of crisis theories put forth by several thought leaders in the field of crisis communications research, including  Drs. Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay ( Eastern Illiniois University) and others.

Using the case of T-Mobile's parent company, Deutche Telekom, which was accused in 2008 hiring an investigator to spy on its board of directors (did they not learn anything from HP?) she suggested that a combination of strategies could form the basis of a standard global approach. She made many excellent points in her 15 minute presentation but the best moment came at the very beginning.

Like many presenters, she began by acknowledging the sources of her paper, and looked around the table and saw those sources sitting there. In a moment of delightful transparency she said "when I submitted this paper, I never thought that the people I would be citing would be sitting at this table!" Get used to it Roxana, that's what IPRRC is all about.

Addendum: For Roxana's full paper, click here: Download ROXANA PAPER

Measurement Conferences:
A Preview of the 2010 International Public Relations Research Conference, March 10-13, Miami

Measurement Tools:
Katie Delahaye Paine's New Product Launch Measurement Checklist

Research Tips and Strategy:
Make Data Your Bitch: Dominate your data in ten easy steps.

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 1:
Guidelines for Establishing a Corporate Vision

Jenny Schade's Making It Count, Part 2:
Do Your Employees "Get" Your Corporate Vision?

Measurement Mavens of the Month:
Four Who Score: Gailanne Barth, Sue Burke, Al Orendorf, and Krista Thomas

Measurement Menaces of the Month:
Web Analytics Guys Who Fail to Account for Social or “Earned” Media

The Paine of Measurement:
How’s all that Tweetey Changey Stuff Working Out? Time to Get with the Social Media Program

Social Media Measurement
A SMUG Is Born: A social media understanding group to help everyone get up to speed on social media issues and standards.

Can This Reputation Be Saved?
SeaWorld’s Whale of a Problem

Rapid Writing, by Daphne Gray-Grant
Do Your Readers Get the Point? Five ways to connect the dots when you write.

It is clear that all of us data and research geeks are finally coming into our own. With entire conferences like OMMA, WAA, eMetrics and IPRRC  devoted to data analysis and metrics, you’d think we’d have our own awards ceremony by now. Sure, there’s the “Jack Felton Golden Ruler of Measurement” Award, but that’s limited to PR measurement, and with only one winner and a handful of entries, it’s hardly representative of the broad and growing spectrum of people who are coming out of the woodwork these days to “Make Data Their Bitch.”  I’m talking about the few, the proud, the data junkies and research geeks who just love digging into data and finding those nuggets that explain why that bar chart goes up or down. Or what caused that anaomaly in March.  You can tell them by the way they talk. Take this dialog from yesterday. I was reviewing a report with Erica, the KDPaine & Partners Director of Research, (otherwise known as one of the  “Paniacs”)   and when I essentially told her she needed to regenerate about 20 charts and come up with about 10 new ways of looking at the data,  she said “cool, this is the fun stuff.” That’s how data geeks talk.

So I think its time to start nominating these pioneers of performance indicators for an annual award.  I haven’t figure out what to give them as a prize.  Probably a new HP calculator – or better yet, get SAS or SPSS to sponsor us and donate their latest software. My first  inclination was to nominate my clients, who tend to be on the geeky side of the communications spectrum. But frankly, I think we need more visible heroes.

So here are my first nominees.

1.       Rachel Maddow.
@maddow is a self-proclaimed geek, who encourages her millions of viewers to "give in to your inner geek" This is what she said last night:  “So this is the only tv show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever. Best graph we've ever had. Admit it! You are excited for that and you would never hear a tease like that on any other show ever .It's okay.Just give in to your inner geek." What other television personality has ever, or would ever say such words! What she showed was a bar graph that showed the impact on the budget of various bills passed under reconciliation.  It was a very simple explanation of a very complicated subject.  She is the quintessitial data wonk.

2.       Another one that gets my vote is Abbie from NCIS.
Imagine a data geek being the hero of a TV crime series! Abbie’s love of data and use of analysis to solve impossible conundrums makes her a perfect candidate for Data Geek of the year.

3.       My third set of nominees are the guys from the NPR’s Planet Money team, Adam Davidson Chana Joffe-Walt  
Alex Blumberg    David Kestenbaum   Caitlin Kenney and Jacob Goldstein .  These guys have taken enormous amounts of data,  digested endless debates, and followed convoluted serpentine money trails to produce  their riveting broadcasts.  Whether its healthcare, the great mortgage meltdown, or the banking collapse, leave it to these guys to crunch the data into a comphrensible story.

So this is just a start, send me your nominees and I’ll start working on the prize!

First to all of you who are wondering, we're fine. Just cranky.

It's not that being without power for five days is the end of the world. You have wonderful spontaneous dinners with friends around the wood stove. You can even work in the greenhouse while the sun is out (not very often.)You gain enormous sympathy and understanding of your forefathers (how did they do it? they had more time and different priorities.)And there's the never ending wonder at the power of nature.

And for more photos, go here.

But lets face it, when you're 56 years old you have your routines.  I'm used to hair dryers, and washing machines and  having NPR on throughout the house pretty much 24/7. So when these things go away, its not the end of the world, its just disruptive.
Going to bed looks like this: 

1. Go to basement, find coleman lantern.

2. Replace broken mantle.

3. Realize the globe is also broken, light it anyway. Take to bedroom.

4. Realize you left the flashlight downstairs.

5.Take lantern downstairs and find the flashlight.

6.Take lantern back to bedroom, go back downstairs for glass of water and cell phone.

7.(Keep cell phone charged at all times because its the only portable phone and alarm clock in the house.) 

8.Set alarm clock.

9. Read till you fall asleep or you run out of propane ,whichever comes first. 

Then there's getting up in the morning.

1. Find flashlight.

2. Light lantern.

3. Put lantern in bathroom.

4. Go downstairs and find coffee pot.

5. Move coffee pot to only working plug.

6. Start coffee.

7. Go back up stairs to shower and realize that the propane has run out of the lantern.

8. Go to the basement and get more propane.

9. Replace propane, burn fingers on lantern.

10. Pick up lantern and watch it fall to the floor

11. Pick it up, burn fingers again.

12. Pick up broken glass from what is left of the globe.

13. Realize you cant vacuum the glass up because there isn't any power.

14. Put on shoes

15. Take shower.

16. Realize there isn't enough light to put on makeup.

17. Run fingers thru hair pretending they're a blow dryer.

18. Get dressed, where what you took off the night before because at least you know it all matches.

19. Grab your laundry, get in the car and get drive as fast as you can to the office in Berlin, where they never lost power.  

So to everyone who has asked. Really, I'm fine. But you might not want to get in my way.

A slightly different perspective on why fans and followers matter, or don't as the case may be :)
Why isn't anyone asking if all this nonsense sells more (or fewer) records, or garners more (or fewer) votes or viewers or better (or worse) poll numbers?

I get asked a lot about which social media channel is "the best" and of course my answer is always "it depends," and you should ask your customers But this week provided a fascinating contrast in the types of conversations that go on in each space.

On Tuesday, I hosted a Social Media Chat (#sm47) on the topic of measurement. TodayI spoke to the Portsmouth, NH Social Media Breakfast(#smbnh) on the topic of tracking success. Both events generated a remarkable amount of chatter on Twitter. Most of it was what KDPaine & Partners would categorize as "expressing support" (one of our 27 types of conversations). Most of the tweets would be rated by almost any system as positive in sentiment, except of course the tweets that called me "Wicked awesome" and "Sick" -- unless someone has figured out an algorithm to detect local slang. But in general the discussion was essentially agreeing with my premise that social media CAN be measured, and can be tied to measurable outcomes.

At the same time, I was also engaged in a variety of conversations on Facebook. Mostly having to do with either politics or music and people I adored in the 70s. It was fun, and silly and made me laugh a lot.

And then there was Linked In, where I've been fighting a battle over AVEs and counting hits should be a valid metric for PR. The gist of that conversation is that the measuring clips and mentions is all that needs to be measured.

I've also noted that I can say the exact same thing in my blog and get almost no response, but put the same post on My Ragan and get a dozen comments violently disagreeing with me.

Obviously the responses and the level of dialog are determined by the knowledge level and background of the audiences. And I haven't decided yet what this means for my social networking activities or what to do with this information, but it's pretty clear that we need to set different levels of expectations, and thus different measures of success for different channels.

This all started with a Linked In discussion http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=13905943&gid=1877517&commentID=12015063&trk=view_disc about the appropriate metric for online and social media. In essence the initial query was a request to know what the new version of AVE and GRP was? Naturally, I argued the point that in an age where companies can measure engagement, interaction, sales leads and outcomes, there was no point in even asking that question.

Someone else answered that:

"A number of the UK monitoring providers use a fixed rate to calculate an AVE for offline and online/blogs" .

After I breathed into a paper bag for a while and got rid of my apoplexy over the use of completely made up numbers, I responded that I spend most of my days talking about "the new metric for social media" and NOT ONCE have AVEs or "impressions" or any other form of eyeball counting come up. In fact, when I ask people if they consider it, most people laugh. I added that today, measuring how many people saw your brand, matters less when you can measure what they did after they saw it. If P&G no long cares about how many eyeballs they reach, but what people DO -- i..e. the outcome -- after they've seen it, we have to rethink our definitions of measurement.

I then received this response:

For many PR agencies and PR representatives, the desired goals are not sale figures or new clients or something like it, but they are potential contacts with readers, share of voice, attention in the media and room they took "for free" with their communication actions (e.g. press release, event, ...). … do not forget PR, where the goal are the articles…

And that's when the lightbulb went off. The PR people who have the proverbial "seat at the table" are the ones who understand and can explain and demonstrate how their program impacts the organizational goals. The ones that sit around whining about why they don't get a seat at the table are the ones who think that getting "a hit" or an article or a blog post IS the goal. Until they bother to answer the question "why is an article important? and what bottom-line benefit does the effort have on the organization" they won't get, and do not deserve a seat at that proverbial table.

 NPR and Tina Brown talking about this piece got me thinking.. What are we going to do when 90 seconds is all we get to communicate our messages?

According to Michael Kinsley in The Atlantic

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

The piece goes on to explain why the traditional newspaper style that I was taught by my parents and mentors back in the 1970s, doesn't work any more. Ya Think?

I did a mini survey on Twitter this week to ask people how long a video they would watch. The average answer was 90 seconds.

And how many of us have sat in meetings hammering out messages and strategies that require a 10 page document to explain?

I tell my audiences all the time that if they can't fit their messages into 140 characters they can't get them across. But what does this mean for measurement?
 

• The importance of a "visibility" metric is more important than ever. For years we've urged clients not to put much weight in a mention that appears at the end of a long article or posting. This is more true than ever before.
• This makes human coding more important, since most automated systems don't have ways to figure out where or how prominent a mention is. Who cares if your mentions are trending positive, if no one will ever see them?
• It makes short impactful videos more valuable and memorable than long ones. So does that minor mention at the end of 5 minute video matter at all? I"d argue not at all.

Much of the arguement around the Weighted Media Cost metric isthat when you factor in the part of the article that is "owned" by the company being mentioned, it affects the correlations to outcomes. Based on Kinsley and my mini-video survey I have no doubt that this is true. In fact I think one might argue that that is WHY the correlations are better with WMC -- not because of the actual media costs themselves but because this research took into account what I call the prominence/dominance factor.

The lingering question is, should we even include in any of our measurement, those endless articles that only get to the point in paragraph 6 and only mention your brand in paragraph 12?  Probably not.

I hate dragging my laptop out on those tiny commuter jets. There's never enough room, and I always think my seat neighbor is reading over my shoulder. So it was fortuitous that I was stuck on one of these contraptions this morning with the most recent Forrester Report on US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014. It actually came out in July and I've just now gotten around to digging into the data.

It is based on interviews with 204 marketing executives from firms with more than 200 employees across multiple industries. What is says is fascinating and should serve as a heads up to all of us in communications A few of the more interesting conclusions:

1. "The majority of marketers find that interactive tools are more effective than traditional ones. When faced with budget cuts .. these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable and better for direct response than traditional media.
2. Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience…42% of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.
3. CMOs will begin to buy their own technology... solutions like campaign management, web analytics etc.
4. Consumer readership of newspapers and magazines has dropped 17% and 6% respectively. Ad revenue is down 20% in 2009.
5. When asked "how will you fund increases in your companies interactive marketing budget 60% said that they will "increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing" The top three losers: Direct mail, newspapers, magazines and television.
6. 86% of marketers expect to create social media assets before the end of the year.
7. In a typical week people are spending more time on the internet, more time listening to the radio, and less time watching TV< newspapers reading magazines.
8. More than 80% or marketers embrace paid search and SEO
9. Advertisers prefer pay per click over impression-based ones. In 2009 58% prefer performance-based measurement, and this is expected to grow to 66% by 2014.
10. Forrester expects a 34% compound annual growth rate in the next 5 years for social media.
11. Traditional agencies will expire

But if all print and traditional media is being valued less by marketers, why are we devoting so much space and intellectual energy debating how to better value something that marketers are abandoning in droves.

I agree that whatever method we use to "evaluate the medium" should enable us to judge which is the best, most effective medium for clients to get their messages across. I don't see how WMC enables us to make an informed decision as to whether one should be paying more attention to The Economist or the Planet Money Blog or my Facebook page. If it can do that, I'm all for it. But given the fact that marketers are pulling money out of traditional media and putting it into Facebook, Twitter and other interactive media by the millions, I worry that we are working hard to measure something that won't matter in 5 years.

First let me say that I actually trust comscore data far more than most numbers i see. but I was reading their most recent update in their efforts to more accurately count online viewership and discovered this astounding statement:

• One of the earliest – and perhaps most obvious – findings along the way is that we’ve seen ample evidence of the foibles of server-side analytics for measuring the number of unique visitors (i.e. people) who visit a site. Due to many inflationary factors, including cookie deletion and rejection, bot and spider traffic, and site visitation from multiple locations, we’ve found clear and direct evidence that web site servers routinely overstate actual people counts by a factor of two and higher. In particular, the inflationary impact of cookie deletion is consistent with independent research from a variety of other research companies, including Forrester, Belden, Jupiter and Nielsen. The inflation in server data has also now become apparent to the IAB (see their Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines) and academics such as Max Fomitchev, an assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Pennsylvania State University who conducted an exhaustive study and concluded:

  “Cookies are about just as inaccurate in estimating unique visitors as unique network addresses. This is the new and unrealized fact in the industry that has a direct impact on Internet advertising as currently reported unique visitor / core audience size numbers tend to overestimate the true audience size by a large factor (7-30, depending on the visitation frequency and the sampling period).”

As we have reached critical mass among websites participating in 360 programs, we have found some astounding statistics. In the month of December alone, we have seen over 1.5 Billion unique cookies just in the US. For instance, we have found 259 million cookies for AOL. That is a reach in excess of 125% compared to a true reach of 54%. These statistics mean that it is imperative to develop sophisticated methods to remove inflation caused by cookie deletion, rejection, multiple browsers, multiple devices and multiple locations of access such as home and work.

Amber Naslund's (@Ambercadabra's) brilliant post about getting started in Social Media Measurement got me thinking. Her premise is dead on, that measurement of social media isn't the issue, and it's measurement in general. I can't tell you how many companies either don't measure any of their marketing programs or don't KNOW how they measure their marketing programs. And her advice is terrific – if you are in the business of selling stuff, in other words, if you are either a B to B or B to C Company. But for the other 50% of PR people out there that work for non-profits, educational institutions, government entities, associations etc. most of this good advice is irrelevant.

This brings us to another reality of social media measurement. How and what you measure, and how you define ROI is very much dependent on what vertical market you play in. If you're in higher ed, you're "selling" ideas – the brilliance of your faculty as industry experts, and/or you are in the business of recruiting – be it faculty or students or parents of students. You have lots of different audiences to deal with and the measurement playing field looks very different.

If you're a non-profit, you may be selling the cause, but your metrics are, again, different. You want to measure not just donations, but engagement in the cause, and the enthusiasm of your fans, followers and donors.

If you're a government entity, your mission may be to educate, to lower cost, to "sell" a concept – and thus you are measuring not "leads" or "conversions" but rather the degree to which people buy into whatever it is you are trying to convince them of.

Last summer, I gave two workshops back to back. The first had the full spectrum of industries represented. Government, media, agency, consumer packaged goods, services, education etc. The other just happened to be entirely populated with people in charge of communications at educational institutions. The content of both workshops was the same, but the satisfaction levels were dramatically different. After the second one, every attendee went away happy, with tools they could use, and full of ideas of how to better measure his/her success. The feedback on the first one was all over the map, with some people very disappointed, and others thrilled. What I learned was that whether you're teaching measurement or implementing it, you have to tailor your thinking to the industry you're dealing with.

This may seem to be an obvious conclusion, but one only needs to read a few posts to hear a dozen people express the need for "One good social media metric we can all use." There is no such thing.

Until he popped up on cable news this week, suggesting that Haiti's recent disaster was all their fault for "making a pact with the devil," I had assumed that tele-evangelist Pat Robertson was sufficiently irrelevant (and crazy) that he had passed quietly from our lives. But there he was, generating publicity for a suggestion that was so heinous that even conservative talk show hosts repudiated it.

That's kind of how I feel about AVEs. Back in November, I wrote with unbridled exuberance about the fact that IPR's measurement had essentially killed off the AVE, by voting overwhelmingly to reject the theory, concept and practice of calculating PR based on what the equivalent ad space would cost. And now, just when I thought we were safe from this insidious notion, its back, this time disguised as "Weighted Media Costs," and the very IPR that rejected the notion last fall, is now promoting it.

And while media cost weightings may not be as heinous as Pat Robertson, there are at least half a dozen things wrong with this notion.

1. Renaming a bad idea seldom make it better. Whether you call it AVEs or WMC, it is still valuing PR for its outputs (i.e. clips and publicity) rather than for the relationships it builds, education or reputation it builds or cost savings it generates.
2. It is a metric promoted by and only available from VMS, a commercial supplier of clippings. Our neighbors to the north at CPRS ran into a similar controversy when they launched their MRP system several years ago, but they at least put out an industry-wide RFP for solutions before they crowned News Canada's system as "the standard."
3. The paper uses correlations to sales as a way to compare three different ways to "evaluate" PR. Specifically, it factored in the tonality of each article. It then looked at actual story counts, impressions and WMC - refined Story Counts. But for the WMC calculation the researchers determined how much of each story was "owned" by the brand under study. This introduces another factor to the analysis, so I'm not clear as to whether the better results are due to this "owned" factor or to the actual WMC. If I did a similar analysis using what we call dominance/prominence – in other words was the story exclusively about the brand, or was the brand mentioned in passing, or in an equal way with other brands -- as well as where in the story the brand was mentioned – the headline, top 20% of the story or bottom 80% -- wouldn't I get the same results?
4. Because a great deal of influence in today's society is generated via Twitter and other on-line media properties not covered by SQUAD, Nielsen or VMS, it gives greater to weight to mediums that are in decline and insufficient weight to media that is on the rise.
5. This takes PR in the wrong direction. PRSA recently published a great document entitled 'The Business Case for PR" that shows people how to measure their contribution to the bottom line, Increasingly, smart communicators who want to be accountable are measuring greater efficiency, cost avoidance and actual sales revenue or leads from their efforts. This is essentially says to PR people – hey, keep measuring your activity, that's what people really care about.
6. It's a distraction. Do we really need a better way to measure our activity? Shouldn't we be focusing our time effort and attention on better ways of measuring outcomes?

I was asked over the weekend to comment on Jason Fall's post on measuring engagement and it got me thinking. The reason that engagement is so important to today's marketers, and why everyone, is trying to figure out how to measure it, is that engagement is essentially the first step in building a relationship between your customers and your brand. And in this era of drive by flaming and overwhelming inundation of data and messages, an organization's relationship are what will differentiate it from everyone else. Engagement is a way to determine whether you are having a dialog, or are you just yelling ever more loudly.

If I'm managing communications for the USO and my ultimate goal is to increase donations, I know that somehow I need to form a relationship with a potential donor if I'm ever going to have a prayer of getting him or her to give me money. So let's call our potential donor/stakeholder Veronica. The USO's relationship with Veronica starts when she sees a volunteer at the airport, or when a friend suggests she become a fan on Facebook, or when she watched Stephen Colbert's show in Bagdad. All those points of contact are potential points of engagement. However, as we know, just reaching Veronica's "eyeballs" is an opportunity not engagement. Engagement begins when Veronica takes some sort of action beyond lurking that indicates a desire to have further contact. So it may be subscribing to your blog, following you on Twitter, downloading your YouTube video or becoming a fan on Facebook. I call these actions "Level 1 engagement. "

For those of you familiar with Grunig's relationship theory, at this point the relationship is pretty much pure exchange. In an exchange relationship, one party gives benefits to the other only because the other has provided benefits in the past or is expected to do so in the future. In other words, it's not much of a relationship at all. Veronica registers, and the USO sends her content that she wants. Veronica become a fan, and as a result is entered into a contest. Both the USO and Veronica benefit, but there's not much loyalty involved.

Nonetheless, that action is a step up from lurking and therefore, to the USO or to Procter & Gamble or any organization participating in social media, it may move people closer to that donation or sale. Unfortunately, first level engagement is where most relationships end. The vast majority of fans, friends and followers never go past that initial point. So Engagement Metric #1 should be the ratio of lurkers to people taking any action at all.

But let's assume that Veronica has won the prize, or is interested in the content the USO is sending her. Maybe she's found a friend with similar interest on the Facebook page. Something happens that moves her to Level 2 engagement. That's where Veronica is now engaged enough to comment on the blog, respond to a thread on Facebook, and maybe rate a YouTube video. Now the relationship is more of a communal one. -- In a communal relationship, both parties provide benefits to the other because they are concerned for the welfare of the other -- even when they get nothing in return. For most public relations activities, developing communal relationships with key constituencies is much more important to achieve than would be developing exchange relationships. Because, when the relationship is communal, you will be forgiven for mistakes, you will get past a crisis faster, people will pay more for the product and they'll recommend it to their friends.

So your second key metric is the increase in level 2 engagement over time, which you can determine by the analytics that most sites provide. What you really need to know (and can find out by analyzing your web analytics data) is: What are you doing/writing/posting that has convinced all those lurkers and Level 1 folks to go to the next step? What is convincing them to care more about you/your organization/your cause. You need to examine your activities, post by post, tweet by tweet to see what is increasing the engagement level and bringing that stakeholder into a communal relationship.

At some point, some percentage of these partially engaged fan/follower/friend will either get bored or become just passive observers and the relationship stagnates. At this point your key metric is to determine if your relationships are progressing, therefore, you need to examine the ratio between new and repeat visitors, and between those that come once and those that return more than 4 times a month.

The good news is that Veronica hasn't gotten bored, and in fact, thanks to a combination of Colbert shows, compelling videos, and good word of mouth, is ready to move to the third level of engagement -- taking action on your behalf. Somehow from all that Veronica has read, or learned about the USO from all the PSAs, stories, videos, word of mouth and updates, she is now ready to take action, i.e. volunteer to stuff care packages, or share a message with the troops or better yet donate. What this means from a relationship standpoint is that you've been able to move her to a level 3 -- at which you have added the components of trust and commitment to the relationship. In Grunig's definition:

• Trust -- One party's level of confidence in and willingness to open oneself to the other party. There are three dimensions to trust: integrity: the belief that an organization is fair and just … dependability: the belief that an organization will do what it says it will do … and, competence: the belief that an organization has the ability to do what it says it will do.
• Commitment -- The extent to which each party believes and feels that the relationship is worth spending energy to maintain and promote. Two dimensions of commitment are continuance commitment, which refers to a certain line of action, and affective commitment, which is an emotional orientation.

   

So your key metric for Level 3 engagement is the number of new volunteers, number of new contributors and the number of visitors to those pages on www.uso.org that encourage a visitor to take action. Again, what you should be measuring is the increase over time, not just the raw numbers.

By now Veronica is fully engaged, actively participating in Facebook threads, retweeting news updates from the USO and sending out YouTube videos to all of her friends. – and presumably convincing her friends to do the same. But measurement can't end there. You still need to make sure that she is satisfied with the relationship. According to Grunig Satisfaction is the extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced. A satisfying relationship is one in which the benefits outweigh the costs. So to measure this the fourth and final level of engagement you need to look at Veronica's loyalty to the cause. How often does she contribute or volunteer? Is she bringing other volunteers with her, and is she expressing satisfaction with the relationship to her friends? You can track her comments thru Social Mention, Google News or any number of monitoring tools like Sysomos and Radian 6. But ultimately at some point you will probably want to survey all the Veronica's (and Archie's) out there and really find out how they're feeling about your organization. This is where the Grunig relationship instrument comes in.

For each of the components of relationships there are a series of statements (listed below) that you can pose to your audience and ask them to agree or disagree with each one. You can do this via phone (very expensive) or mail or email, but ideally you would administer the survey prior to starting a social media campaign and then six months into it to see how you're doing on each score.

So back to Jason's post – it there one simple way to measure engagement? No, there are lots, but if you follow this path, you'll know a lot more than "are they engaged" you'll know what is increasing engagement, what is turning people off, and how likely are they to act on your behalf.

And if you're wondering, here are Grunig's relationship statements.

Questions to measure trust, including the dimensions of integrity, competence, dependability

This organization treats people like me fairly and justly. (Integrity)

Whenever this organization makes an important decision, I know it will be concerned about people like me. (Integrity; original dimension: faith).

This organization can be relied on to keep its promises. (Dependability)

I believe that this organization takes the opinions of people like me into account when making decisions. (Dependability)

I feel very confident about this organization's skills. (Competence)

This organization has the ability to accomplish what it says it will do. (Competence)

Sound principles seem to guide this organization's behavior. (Integrity)

This organization does not mislead people like me. (Integrity)

I am very willing to let this organization make decisions for people like me. (Dependability)

I think it is important to watch this organization closely so that it does not take advantage of people like me. (Dependability) (Reversed)

This organization is known to be successful at the things it tries to do. (Competence)

Commitment

I feel that this organization is trying to maintain a long-term commitment to people like me.

I can see that this organization wants to maintain a relationship with people like me.

There is a long-lasting bond between this organization and people like me.

Compared to other organizations, I value my relationship with this organization more.

I would rather work together with this organization than not.

I have no desire to have a relationship with this organization. (Reversed)

I feel a sense of loyalty to this organization.

I could not care less about this organization. (Reversed)

Satisfaction:

I am happy with this organization.

Both the organization and people like me benefit from the relationship.

Most people like me are happy in their interactions with this organization.

Generally speaking, I am pleased with the relationship this organization has established with people like me.

Most people enjoy dealing with this organization.

The organization fails to satisfy the needs of people like me. (Reversed)

I feel people like me are important to this organization.

In general, I believe that nothing of value has been accomplished between this organization and people like me. (Reversed)

Communal Relationships

This organization does not especially enjoy giving others aid. (Reversed)

This organization is very concerned about the welfare of people like me.

I feel that this organization takes advantage of people who are vulnerable. (Reversed)

I think that this organization succeeds by stepping on other people. (Reversed)

This organization helps people like me without expecting anything in return.

I don't consider this to be a particularly helpful organization. (Reversed)

I feel that this organization tries to get the upper hand. (Reversed)

Exchange Relationships

Whenever this organization gives or offers something to people like me, it generally expects something in return.

Even though people like me have had a relationship with this organization for a long time, it still expects something in return whenever it offers us a favor.

This organization will compromise with people like me when it knows that it will gain something.

This organization takes care of people who are likely to reward the organization.

After sitting inside for three days glued to my laptop, finishing up the last of the rewrites on version 2.0 of Measuring Public Relationships, I finally emerged to a foot of snow (well almost) and no let up in sight. I'd been watching the storms come over the mountains from my perch on School Street  
since Friday – fire in the fireplace, polar fleece aplenty, enjoying the winter as only someone raised in New England can do.

But shortly after I hit "send," shipping the last chapter off to my editor, I donned my boots, grabbed a shovel and dug my self out. I grabbed my camera and decided to see what I could see. The answer was, not much, since it was still snowing and the normally glorious views were still shrouded in gray. But I did get a glimpse of a the North Country that one doesn't often see.

I made my way up School to Spring Street,
and then took a right on Hillside a steep upward climb that almost always yields a perfect shot or two. I pass a woman, a considerably older than myself coming down the street who greets me with a smile that would light up a room. "Isn't it great out here?," she asked. "I couldn't stay inside a minute longer." I agreed with her, at which point she looked at me quizzically and said "Don't I know you? Lori, right ?" and I responded, "No, Katie." She reached out her hand warmly and said, "It's so good to see you, I haven't seen you in years, how have you been?"

Truth be told, as far as I know, I've never set eyes on her before, but the warmth of her eyes and strength of her handshake was all that mattered. I said fine, she wished me a happy New Year and we went on our way.

Next I ran into a man who was clearing his driveway and brushing snow off his car. "How far do you have to go? Can I give you a ride?" he asked. I explained that "no, thank you, I'm really out for the exercise." He explained that he thought my car couldn't make it up the hill, and wanted to make sure I could get where I was going. I thanked him profusely and continued up the hill.

Another woman, easily in her 60s was finishing up the shoveling of her very long driveway and stopped, leaned on her shovel and said, "isn't it beautiful out?" We chatted a bit, agreed that it was indeed beautiful. She wished me a happy New Year, and went on with her shoveling and I continued up the hill. After a few more good wishes along the way, I made it up to my favorite view, 
only to find that it was all pretty gray.  
So I headed down again, taking the long way home down Norway Street to the river.  

I heard a shout and take NHPR out of my ears, and there 's a man shoveling at least 18 inches of snow off his roof. "Happy New Year" he shouted at me. I wished him the same and once again, we agreed that it was a great day.

Now I'm sure it was just as great a day, and perhaps even better in Florida and California and Arizona, where my friends have been sending me tempting invitations and weather reports. But for now, the kindness of strangers is keeping me plenty warm, thank you.

.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

So I'm a journalist at heart, and a former employ of the Washington Post, which gives me a very very loose affinity with the authors of this masterpiece. But in all the brouhaha about the end of journalism as we know it, some of the very best journalism is still being created, and I consider this photo essay series to be among the best I've ever seen.

As it happens, thanks to my friend Ron Wyman who is doing a documentary on the movie Someplace like America that will be shot in Berlin, NH, the photographer  Michael Williamson was hanging out in my house in Berlin last week.

He was there along with writer Dale Maharidge because together they wrote Journey to Nowhere which is the inspiration bethind Someplace LIke America. SO I got to cook dinner for  Buzz McGloughlin, producer of the film and Writer/Director  Aaron Weiderspah and wait up for and then talk till  2 am with these guys.

I love my life.

Not surprisingly, we run a metrics- driven shop here at KDPaine & Partners. Each of our client service teams is evaluated monthly on 4 key criteria:

1.   Profitability (Client billing minus time+materials)
2.   Efficiency (number of clips read per hour)
3.   Accuracy (intercoder reliability scores—minimum acceptable level is 90%)
4.    Client delight (number of “happy customer” emails, renewals or other communications)

Whichever team scores best in each category wins an Amazon gift certificate.  This  allows us to easily identify best and worst practices, and figure out what we need to do to continuously improve. And it works, since we implemented the system a year ago, almost every team has seen its performance on each criteria double.

But now that we’ve gotten the basics down, we’re going to add another metric – engagement – i.e. the degree to which an employee is engaged in the present and future of KDPaine & Partners.  And so we began to talk about what an engagement metric would look like.

As with any good measurement system, we started with the goal:

• ·         Our goal is to have a team of people all of whom are essential to the success of the company not just today but five years from today.

And we came up with some easy metrics:

1. ·         The number of blog comments or yammer messages that an employee makes, since that’s where we discuss measurement theory and the bigger issues facing our industry.
2. ·         Time spent on our internal blog
3. ·         Number of times you get voted “hero of the month” – a monthly honor given by the entire company that goes to the employee who has gone the farther above and beyond their daily job responsibilities.

The former being those messages that start with “Maybe we should try this” with a link to an article, blog posting.  Or the demonstrations of big picture understanding. “What implications does this have on us or our competitors? Or even the “why do we do it this way?” questions that can alter the way we do business.

And then there are the “all about me” emails. You know the type and I'm sure can fill in the blanks. “Sorry I’m late/can’t come in/will miss the meeting ______ ,  I have to take my kid/pet/parent/significant other  to school/doctor/hockey practice/court. “  All legitimate, but all about the employee, and no information that is of any benefit whatsoever to the organization.

You need and obviously see both, but am I wrong in thinking that there should more of the former than there are of the latter?  Is there a proper ratio?

More importantly, what are we missing, what other metrics should I consider?All ideas are welcome.