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That's right, stop what you're doing. In down times we're always under pressure to cut budgets, but that is in fact a great way to measure the effectiveness of your tactics. For example, a year ago, we were spending over $1200 a month on Google adwords but had no idea whether it was really helping us bring in qualified leads. Sure, we could tell it was driving traffic, but was there any real ROI in it?
Yes, there are lots of variables, like the key words, style and content of the specific ads, that can influence effectiveness. But across the board we saw no drop in traffic whatsoever, and, more importantly, no reduction in leads. In fact, by blogging and tweeting more often, we've doubled traffic across all of our sites and according to Leadlander the leads we are getting are actually more qualify.
Now obviously if I had to pay someone to spend an hour or so a day blogging or tweeting the ROI calculation would be different, and obviously my time isn't exactly "free," but as a way to test the effectiveness of one of our marketing efforts, it's pretty clear that the ROI isn't there.
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True confession time. I've gotten so many compliments on my outfits of late, I decided it was time to come clean with my source.
Yes, all these pictures were taken at various speeches I've given in the last few years, but there's one other element they all share. They all came from my favorite boutique, which should be called
"La bonne volonté" but is, in fact, my local Goodwill store. Now, in the interest of transparency, Goodwill is a client of ours. But I was a big fan of Goodwill long before they became a client. I just realized that as I'm trying desperately trying to reduce my carbon footprint, one way I could do that was not to buy yet another piece of clothing that was manufactured in China or Honduras and traveled god knows how to my local Macy's. I think of it as recycling chic.
If you know your labels, and as the daughter of an edit
or-in-chief of Harpers Bazaar I better --- you can score some amazing deals. Nothing makes your day like finding a $500 suit for $19 and then finding the shoes to match for $5. Most of these outfits cost less than $50 and the most expensive element is probably the earrings.
Goodwill is yet another in a long line of non-profits that is effectively using social media to change and upgrade its image. And, as it happens, one of our recommendations to Goodwill was that they needed to use visuals more in their social media efforts. I decided I better practice what I was preaching.
Warning, if you're only interested in learning more about social media measurement, come back on Monday because today is Saturday, and I'm taking a day off from measurement to just write. I'm staying in a friends gorgeous apartment overlooking the Oyster River (it's for rent by the way if you're looking for a to-die-for place on the Seacoast of NH) . Remnants of Hurricane Ida are making today a classic rainy fall day, and the notion that I have two whole days with nothing on my agenda is inspiring me to write. I've spent the last two weeks on the road at amazing conferences, talking to really smart people and needless to say have a lot to write about. But before I get to that... there's what I'm calling the Mamma Mia post.
This should probably be on the Sweet Scoops blog, but since they haven't started it yet, here goes. First of all SweetScoops is what I call "the No Confession Confection" -- a creamy wonderful frozen yogurt that tastes like really rich premiuim ice cream but has half the calories. So when I'm feeling like I really need to indulge my sweet tooth, I pick up some of their Ginger or Mudslide or Blueberry and feel wonderfully self-indulgent, but not nearly as guilty as I normally would.
Which got me, a wickedly lapsed Catholic, thinking about guilt and indulgence and all those decisions we make every day that seem to be all about achieving some balance between the two. Normally, when I have a bunch of writing to do and I have 5 hours on a cross country flight, I'll whip out my computer and write like crazy until I run out of battery power. That's what the "good" Katie Paine would do. The "bad" Katie Paine would watch Mamma Mia the movie. A movie with no redeeming intellectual value, but with a bunch of music I adore.
So last week I had this conversation with my friend Pam that took place while I was making my annual batch of apple Thyme jelly:
Pam: "Why can't I grow time"
Katie: "That's an incredibly profound question"
Pam: "Not really, I plant it every year and it never comes back"
Katie: "That's even more profound. What would happen if it did? "
What would happen, I wondered if somehow the time you "Spend" could actually be redeposited in your life. You wouldn't have to make nearly as many decisions.
Philosophers and parents might lead you to believe that life is made up of big decisions, but life is really made up of a continuous stream of tiny choices that somehow become the story of your life. I live in a world where, in order to achieve a bit of balance, I am constantly shushing the voices of the Puritans, the Catholics and the other guilt mongers I grew up with, and just take a break. But if you could "grow time" you wouldn't have to make those diminutive decisions. You could actually have a time for everything in the season.- A time to indulge in desert and a time to "eat healthy."
- A time to watch a movie on the flight home, AND time to plow thru 300 emails.
- A time to read that "bodice ripper" AND time to read a report.
- A time to listen to all those podcasts of "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me AND a time to return all those phone calls
- A time to the green house AND clean the bathroom
- A time to feed your funny bone watching all those Jon Stewart episodes you tivoed AND time to feed the cat
- A time dream your next garden AND time to weed the one you have
- A time to run thru the mountains, or back roads or streets of town you’ve never been to before AND time to run thru spread sheets
- A time to sail away AND a time to make sales.
- A time to write a friend a hand written note AND time to write up the meeting notes
- A time to comfort a friend in trouble AND time to stay up on your contacts on Twitter
- A time to walk with a friend AND time to talk to a client.
- A time focus on the beauty of an autumn afternoon AND time to focus on the numbers
- A time pay attention to wildlife (#NWF) AND time to pay attention to profits
- A time to forage for new plants AND time to forage for new clients
- A time to make pickles & piccalilli AND a time to make speeches
- A time to stop everything and get out and listen to a friend play your favorite music and a time to stop everything and finish the damn report.
This is what my life is made up of, and I thank Sweet Scoops for taking decision #1 off my list.What's your life made up of?
I give it another year before US agencies will follow suit.
I'm currently getting ready for a marathon trip that includes Boston for a BankerStuff event, the SNCR Symposium and Awards Gala, PRSA International, a day of consulting at PARC, another SNCR Meetup, an all day offsite board meeting, an IABC and SMC Louisville event, and finally a reception for recipients of the Seacoast Concert for a Cure funds.
Never mind trying to pack for multiple climates.. just keeping the tickets straight is proving daunting. So when my friend Ann Boyce sent me the above, I dropped everything and just started to giggle. You probably didn’t feel it, but on Friday October 16, 2009 there was a shifting of the tectonic plates in Portsmouth, NH. No, it wasn’t recorded by the USGS, but if you’re in the PR world, you would have felt it. That was the day that the IPR Measurement Commission voted definitively -- 19 to 2 -- to “reject AVEs (ad value equivalency) , the concept and the practice. “ At the time, I tweeted that I could now die happy because for so long I’ve said that my mission is to get to have “she killed the AVE” written on my tombstone.
For those agencies, clients and providers out there that are now left in limbo, making money off of a practice that has now been rejected by leading experts in both Canada and the US, I can only say: "move on."
The Canadians did. They went thru this debate five years ago, when they rejected AVEs and settled on the MRP Standard . Today, when I speak in Canada, I am constantly amazed by the intelligence and sophistication of my audience and the questions they ask. They don’t bother with questions about “what’s the AVE of a blog” but rather challenge me with questions about correlations to outcomes.
If anything, this vote comes at a perfect time. PRSA is pushing a set of guidelines that specifically address PR’s contribution to the bottom line – whether in terms of sales, revenue, cost savings or stock price. Check it out.
At the same time, with the rise of social media, AVEs have little meaning when the value of the most traditional media is dropping daily, and the power of individual blogs, many of which don’ t accept advertising, is growing exponentially.
The good news is that every week, a new and better way of demonstrating contribution to your organizations bottom line presents itself. Sodexo measures its Twitter success via $300K in recuirtment cost savings. Non-profits are correlating success in fund raising to social media programs. Southwest has seen such success from its social media efforts that it can quintuple the size of its department.
So why do clipping firms and PR agencies have such a hard time weaning themselves from this outmoded metric? Like any bad habit – heroin, porn – pick your analogy -- it sometimes takes tough love to go cold turkey. With luck that’s what the IPR vote will accomplish.
So rather than seeing this as an earthquake. I prefer to see the vote as PR's emancipation proclamation. As of Friday October 16, 2009, we are free from the shackles of a slavish devotion to silly numbers, false metrics, and thinking that outputs are all we do.
We can now focus on those things that really matter. Quantifying our real contribution to organizational success.
should come as a surprise to no one. Increasingly the clipping services are becoming obsolete and if they're planning on surviving, they need alternate revenue streams. Additionally the act of collecting content from the various vendors (we use about 10) is becoming the biggest challenge for those of us on the evaluation side. I wish the newlyweds all the best.
Having spent 2 days at the Inbound Marketing Summit I learned the following:
- 8 out of 10 mktg execs believe social media can build brand and relationships.
- Nieslen saw a 70% jump in use of social media in the last year
- In the last month one of the major news corps in Canada plus Gourmet Magazine folded
- Ad revenue is down dramatically
- Traditional Advertising is dead as we know it.
So why, at the same time the IMS09 is going on, was another speaker at another PR and marketing conference: advocating using AVE (Ad Value Equivalency) as a measurement for PR? Why would PR want to compare itself to an industry and a business that is in, if not its death throws, certainly in the process of morphing into something we've never seen before.
The speaker's argument is that since most PR people use AVEs anyway, we might as well teach them how to "do it right." To me, that sounds like Southerners in the 1840s that argued against emancipation because "everyone does it," but then suggesting perhaps a Martha Stewart makeover for the slave quarters. There are lots of things that "everyone does" that are still the wrong thing to do. One of my fellow suppliers, Burrelles, justifies its use of AVES because "Customers demand it." Makes me wonder if "customers" demanded child porn and heroin would they deliver those as well?
Folks, it's time to face reality. AVEs are irrelevant when traditional media is going away in its current form, when Procter & Gamble is says it only wants to pay for engagement, IBM declares Advertising dead, and Southwest Airlines and Dell are measuring their PR/Social Media efforts in terms of revenue. The customers that cling to this metrics deserve to be fired, and with luck, they'll soon get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with improving, and measuring our relationships with our constituencies. For my colleagues in the measurement business, advocating a metric that will ultimately mislead the client is simply the wrong thing to do.
The big (yawn) conclusion, is that most enterprises are using or considering using "free" analytics -- i.e. Google Analytics. But from our perspective, given that we have been saying this ourselves for years --- the most important insight is this one:
Our point is this. There's a new tool released every week. Some are free, some cost money and some are a combination of the two.. All of them do the same thing -- reduce the blogosphere/twitter/social media to a giant bucket of words, pull out the relevant ones, count them. and produce some attractive charts and graphs. NONE of them measure reputation, relationships, brand health, brand strength or anything else. In order to figure out what works and what doesn't; where your money is better spent, where you're getting the best ROI, you need a sapient human, familiar with your goals and objectives that can look at those numbers and charts and draw some conclusions and make recommendations.
Essentially what Shelby Bonnie is advocating is the same thing I've been saying for the past three years -- EYEBALL are irrelevant and a bad metric.
What's your Twitter ROI? How to measure social media payoff.
bringing its powerful analytics to people who design websites and other online content. Essentially making every online move you make measureable. Today we learn that Facebook is going to provide Ad Data to Nielsen --
another move to make the ubiquitous social network more measurable.
Clearly,analytophilia is setting in in corporate america, making measurement if not cool, at least highly desirable. But what I liked best about the Facebook announcement is how they're actually going to get the data they'll provide to Nielsen? SURVEYs -- no high tech mumbo jumbo, no quasi-scientific computer generated numbers, they're going to ASK the users. What a concept! Okay, you can let your collective breaths out now.. Its old tech, but it still works.
in her brilliant piece Scoring with Social Media: 6 Tips for Using Analytics .
but Forester's Suresh Vittal's quote in this analysis of the move, brought it home. "By embedding measurement into content," Vittal says, "you can compare apples to apples. Eyeballs and impressions shouldn't be the only deciding factor for where to place advertising. [Companies] should start thinking about very value-based metrics on the eyeballs." Even if a Web site sees fewer visitors, he says, each of the customers who do reach the site may be more valuable. "It helps to think about a new standard," Vittal says, "one around audience evaluation more than measurement."
As I keep telling myself, "you're never wrong, you're just early." I reached the same conclusion as Vittal did when I attended my first e-Metrics conference and heard what Omniture was doing, and saw the type and nature of data it was providing to its customers. You can get much of the same data from Google Analytics -- but the difference is, the people that are actually PAYING for that data, seem to use it more effectively. If this generation of PR and communications professionals wants to succeed, they should definitely be watching what happens with this merger.