Will Facebook’s Timeline help PR pros?

October 7, 2011 by 2 Comments

I don’t use Facebook much. It must be something wrong with me because 800 million users can’t be wrong. Still, I just don’t get the point of reading what sauce a friend had on her spaghetti at lunchtime or a brand’s opportunistic dedication to Steve Jobs.

But when word came about of this new Timeline feature, I must admit my curiosity was piqued and I was one of the nerds searching the net for the developer hack that lets you use it before the official release.

Pascal Jappy's Facebook Timeline

So, is it any good?

Well, it certainly looks great. Thoughtful design abounds.

Plus, Facebook has given its users a major chance to redeem themselves since, as you transition, you get to choose which of your past updates go into the new Timeline and which don’t. Users with a troubled past will likely love the personal branding opportunity (though it is still unclear to me what happens to the updates you leave out).

I now use my Facebook account almost exclusively to publicize an Augure photography blog and only left in my Timeline what was relevant to the field of photography. And many others should use the opportunity to refine their profile according to the professional/social use they want to make of it. All good stuff.

But what about PR?

Weeell … Other f8 features are really sharing oriented and it’s obvious that Facebook is pushing harder towards the global internet experience they’d like to be. The online world of tomorrow according to Facebook seems to be users being connected all day long, all consuming and sharing pictures, music and video from within.

But there are a few other points to consider:

  • LIKE and SHARE buttons will be customizable on applications. So a user on your page could click READING or VIEWING to inform his group of friends. This is intended to increase sharing and is probably good news for content publishers.
  • Targeting capabilities will be enhanced. Although aimed at advertisers, this is probably the most interesting feature for PR since it will let you taylor your messaging to your audience a lot better.

How all this will link to search still remains very obscure, but the role of sharing and recommendation will probably play an even higher role in social search. However, recommendation may be a powerful trigger with teens but older Facebook users will want to find information by themselves. The old fashioned search way.

So, as things stand, I see the recent evolution as more of a Google busting attempt – by making search redundant and by gaining market shares of the targeted advertising treasure trove – than something really useful to create a better link between companies and their public. Definitely not PR oriented, then. Mind you, not that is was ever touted as being that.

We’ll soon see what Brand Pages (notice the Brand, not Company) add to the mix. I’ll post a follow-up after that next update.

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Click! to a new PR measure

May 6, 2011 by Leave a comment

Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes! Three measures for three types of goals you can hope to achieve through your PR. While these are formally defined in the IPR’s Dictionary for Public Relations Measurement and Research, they are also explained very intuitively in terms of Exposure, Influence and Action by metricsman.

Measuring Outtakes (influence over your targeted audience) brings you one step closer to a true evaluation of ROI than measuring Outputs (the amount of exposure your PR bought you), and measuring outcomes (the action consequently undertaken by the audience you reached) is obviously even better. But the apparent complexity of a thorough A to Z measurement plan often leads to measuring Outputs almost exclusively and relying on such indicators as Advertising Value Equivalency in the hope to estimate financial profit from the measurement of Outputs only.

Click! Dollar!

Internet publication has both simplified and complexified this debate, as a quick glance at #pr20chat on Twitter will confirm.

  • On the one hand, it has multiplied the number of publication outlets and corresponding measures of success. A consequence of this diversity is the emergence of holy grail indicators just as silly as the AVE in the hope to justify ROI in a simple fashion.
  • On the other, the growing number of websites (e-commerce or not) with a well-known marketing funnel has given us easier access to an understanding of what financial outcome can mean.

If your website and its social media outposts have been designed around such a funnel, the relative value of a visit to any page is fairly well understood and any traffic driven to it by PR efforts can easily be measured in very practical terms.

So a click is a financial outcome?

It can be! But before some people get red in the face: it can also be an output. Or an outtake, for that matter … It all depends on the document you linked to. And it doesn’t have to be financial to matter.

What was the goal when the document/page you are linking to was written? Every click contributes to this goal. No more, no less:

  • If you are linking to an article written about your product, you are driving more exposure and measuring outputs.
  • If you are linking to a health warning campaign and know that 3% of readers begin the program you are promoting, then every 100 clicks mean 3 new programs started.
  • If you are linking to the contact form of your B2B program and know that each such lead is worth 2000£ to your company and that the rebound rate is 80%, then each click is worth 400£.

Integrated and holistic

Just as important as knowing the practical value of a click is being able to benchmark the various channels for efficiency. Counting clicks is a first step towards measuring engagement (which really requires monitoring comments and sentiment).

Clicks on a link published on various social networks

It shows how many contacts were willing to perform your intended action and understanding whether this was easier on Twitter, Facebook, in your Newsletter, on your blog or on Linkedin is precious information for the planning of your future campaigns.

Counting clicks is not the Holy Grail of PR Measurement for two reasons: (1) it lacks the monitoring aspect mentioned above and (2) contrarily to searching for the Holy Grail, it is easy to do well and derive meaningful information from.

So are you still counting fans or are you clicking to a new PR measure? What are your thoughts?

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Social sharing in Augure’s reputation management suite

April 15, 2011 by 1 Comment

Regular readers know I never pitch Augure products on this blog, but today is different! The pitch will be short and the topic is not so much what I’m writing about as how I am writing about it !

Today, Augure shipped Version 6 of its PR and reputation management suite and this version is largely dedicated to pushing documents and information to social media and blog platforms and to monitoring stakeholder publications on all available channels directly from the software. Hence this post :)

Mixing it up! Social and traditional publication rolled into one

PR and Corporate Reputation Management are sometimes viewed very differently in different companies. Our vision is based on two main foundations:

  • A collaborative platform, to ensure consistency and speed
  • An integrated workflow, to ensure stakeholders can be reached using the most appropriate channel and protocols but also using the same process. Again, this is to avoid functional silos and disruptive actions.

Facebook update about the launch of Augure V6

V6 is a natural extension of these principles that helps users extend their reach to new channels and audiences without leaving familiar grounds or breaking the engagement and measure feedback loop.

So go on, pitch it!

OK! I promised I’d keep it short so here is a link to the new feature list and explanations on Augure V6 on our website: the sharing features, the analysis of impact on reputation and stakeholder relationship quality, how to use engagement history to plan new campaigns & how to use media coverage analysis in ComDecision, it’s all there.

The first piece of online content published via ComSuite

I’ll simply say that by publishing this link to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, email and wire from ComSuite I’ll finally be able to compare the efficiency of all these messages in one place. R&D even wrote its own URL shortener for more flexibility in analysing clicks.

Yeah, it may seem like a shameless pitch, but I’m actually pretty chuffed :)

So, please click-through so I can have fun analysing my reach and leave your thoughts and comments below !

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5 reasons not to count fans on Facebook

March 18, 2011 by 7 Comments

Coca-Cola has nearly 24 million fans on Facebook. That’s 600k more than Justin Bieber and 7 million fewer than Michael Jackson. Wow ! Want to compare other celebrities on Facebook ? AllFacebook has released a page that does just that:

Measuring Facebook Fans

What does that tell you about these brands/artists ?

Nothing !

Don Bartholomew (a.k.a. MetricsMan) describes Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers as Vanity metrics and here are 5 reasons they should not be used to measure social media success:

  • They are not (even) a measure of impressions! Now, measuring impressions has been described as a very old fashion metric but counting fans isn’t even that. Hypebot recently released a study showing that one in a hundred fans at most LIKEd brand updates. Previous studies of the EdgeRank algorithm that filters updates appearing on fan walls showed that 1 in 500 brand updates reached their targets!
  • They are not a measure of advocacy. I wrote about this in a previous post on using Facebook for PR And eMarketer research shows that Facebook fans are generally not more likely to buy from the brand after becoming a fan. In that research, the top two reasons to become a fan are “To receive discounts” and “I am an existing customer”.
  • They are not a measure of engagement. You can buy Twitter followers for about 1$/100. Possibly do the same with Facebook fans. Do you think they will engage? On any given update, Coca Cola receive about 5,000 LIKEs and comments. Justin Bieber, from a roughly equal fan base averages 30,000! Because Facebook’s in-house filtering algorithm uses a fan’s feedback to determine whether new updates from the brand will or not appear on his wall, the feedback level is crucial to marketers.
  • They are not tied to a particular objective The Barcelona Principles of measurement place “Goal Setting and Measurement” at the very top of the list. Unless your business objective is to obtain fans, measuring fans is not the way to go.
  • Your community may be small, but active. Don’t beat yourself down if your page has a small number of fans. Social media have opened up the way for niches. If your fans are engaging with you and responding to your updates in the way you are hoping for, you are doing fine.

What measures for Facebook engagement

This is not to say that a Facebook Fan page is not a good tool for marketing or corporate reputation management. But in 99% of cases, there are better measures out there:

  • Measuring click-through is akin to measuring impressions. If your update links to your online properties (a news release, a landing page, an online brochure, an article), the click-through rate will tell you how many fans read it. No, that isn’t the ultimate in PR measurement, but it at least tells you how many fans did what you expected of them.
  • Measuring on-page feedback is an adequate measure of engagement quality. Not only does it show how many fans saw your update and reacted to it, it also tells you how many are likely to receive future updates from you.
  • Monitoring global discussion volume and sentiment on your page will give you precious information on advocacy and reputation. It will also allow you to detect early warnings of crises or opportunities by showing which keywords are most used and polarised.

If you can measure the direct impact of your Facebook engagement on your bottom line, so much the better. That requires a specific dashboard for every goal you set yourself, which is beyond the financial ability of most companies. The three metrics above are a very good starting point that can be automated.

If you like this post, will you be my friend on Facebook ? ;)

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PR on Facebook : understanding and measuring success

November 12, 2010 by 3 Comments

For all its perceived potential as a marketing tool letting you engage directly with consumers in a half-a-billion sized tank of users, Facebook is not always seen as an easy ride for Public Relations and Stakeholder Engagement professionals. And yet, the opposite could actually be true.

Yes, Facebook is mainly a consumer oriented media on which hot topics include ice cream and the latest Lady Gaga adventure. Yes, brand bashing pages start or relay crises and have turned into PR nightmares (ask BP or Toyota). Yes, measuring your engagement, as described in many articles, is tedious and often based on flaky fan population sizes that can be slow to grow for non famous businesses and are meaningless to your board.

Flick picture by Kenny Møller

But let’s see the other side of the Facebook PR coin. Let’s start by defining the nature of a Facebook page, as a venue for Stakeholder Engagement and PR. It differs from traditional media in two essential ways:

  1. It is neither owned, earned media nor an opt-in list, but what Forrester refer to as partially owned media. You can’t invite people to your party and ask them to shut up once they arrive or not reply to them. Yet, that’s what some big corporate accounts have been doing and that’s what explains the ensuing PR nightmares (cf the Toyota case and Sinar Mas case).
  2. It pushes engagement towards real-time, leaving no time to consult VPs, CEOs or lawyers. Discussions must be open, honest and timely. BP’s PR ordeal can mainly be attributed to the breaching of these rules, and not only on Facebook.

Flickr image by European Parliament

I think Facebook may be a better place for PR than for marketing. For a quartet of reasons:

  1. Facebook isn’t all about Ice Cream. Essential stakeholders for many businesses have a presence on the social media. And whatever your sector, it is a great place to reach out to the general public: discussions posted on a regular basis make your page a repository of precious information that doesn’t require a visit to your corporate website.
  2. Even among Facebook marketers, the consensus is that the social media isn’t a good place to grow your audience, but rather a place to nurture your existing one through passive attention, maintaining brand awareness via regular updates to a semi-captive fan base. There are no built-in ways of identifying new prospects as on LinkedIn or of getting people to follow you as on twitter.
  3. More often than not, Facebook fans are already fans of your brand when they like your page, or are lured by the promise of short term profit (a discount or a lottery prize, for instance). In his excellent recent trilogy of articles on the subject, Jay Baer writes: « … what I can’t abide, and what I want to put a stop to right now, is the notion that Facebook fan pages are a cause of advocacy. Instead, Facebook fan page “likes” are primarily the manifestation of advocacy that already exists. »
  4. Thanks to the EdgeRank algorithm that decides what appears on your wall and what doesn’t, it is estimated that only one in 500 of a company’s updates actually reach its fans. Whereas when responding to mentions of your brand (using adequate monitoring), you will automatically be seen.

So how do you start?

  • Facebook itself has a good PR page teeming with discussions on the more modern variations of PR such as Webinars, blogging tips, welcome pages …
  • Engage openly. Tell your side of the story firmly but keeping in mind you share the room with very sensitive and sometimes vocal people who you can turn into powerful advocates or hateful enemies. Few industries are more exposed than energy and mining, yet Rio Tinto navigated the “Rio Tinto get the hell out of Madagascar” troubled waters efficiently.
  • Incorporate your monitoring and engagement in the broader context of a stakeholder engagement process and platform in order to produce meaningful reports (Hint: my employer is an editor of such solutions ;) )
  • As for measuring, nothing has changed: whenever possible try to link desired outcomes to your activity. If not possible, analyze the quality of your outputs to estimate outcomes. Counting fans? Really? If your research can tie a financial value to a fan, go ahead. Otherwise, focus on conversations and measure each update as you would a small article: accuracy of message, tone of voice, benchmarking …

If you have other ideas or experiences on this topic, please share them in the comments ! Happy Facebook.

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Augure Gets Social!

March 15, 2010 by Leave a comment

Yes, that’s right – we are now social! We recently launched on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin – in order to get in touch with our users and community. This is obviously just the beginning – you can expect to see us on other platforms as well very shortly. But check out some of the details on our current social media initiatives below:

Twitter (@AugureRepMgmt): We officially launched our Twitter account at the beginning of the month. Tweets include everything that happens in Augure’s social media space – as well as occasional contributions from our CEO.

Facebook Fan Page: We went live on Facebook last week as well. We leveraged our Fan Page for the rebranding and renaming of our products, which will be announced soon. We’re hoping our Fan Page will be another place for our community to share their thoughts. Note: almost our ENTIRE team is on Facebook, which makes the Fan Page great place to connect!

Linkedin: We’ve revamped our Linkedin presence the Augure Linkedin Group! The group includes corporate and general industry info, articles as well as discussions regarding particular sectors - including: energy, finance, automotive, fashion & beauty and health & food. Our entire team – everyone from R&D to sales – will be available to respond to questions and comments on Linkedin.

Blog: Yes, the blog! We also launched our lovely blog (which you obviously managed to find) - where we will continue to share behind-the-scenes info on what happens at Augure, product tips and tricks and anything we think may be useful for people in the corporate communications or reputation management industries.

Have a suggestion? We’d love to hear from you as well! If you have any suggestions or ideas for what you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.

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