Defining measurement standards for ePR and eReputation

September 2, 2011 by Leave a comment

Lack of consensus on measurement methods has plagued the communications and public relations businesses for the past decade. Not only do measurement goals vary between practitioners, actual methods for a same goal also do, leading to sometimes unreliable and non-repeatable protocols and rendering accurate benchmarking very difficult. Excessive focus on ROI, rather than on understanding the effects of PR activities on their target relative to predefined goals, has notably led to the dangerous use of Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) as a proxy for financial outcomes.

Compounding this problem is the fact that, by allowing what used to be the ultimate target of communications programs – the public – to become a publisher in its own right and a mighty source of influence through peer-to-peer recommendations, new interactive and social media have rendered some traditional tools on content analysis all the more obsolete.

Measurement Standards

Standardization in Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation

The Valid Metrics Matrix, discussed in a previous post, is a useful attempt to provide a framework in which all items of measurement in a media analysis campaign are arranged in a logical order based on their contribution to the measurement goal and their place in the communications cycle.

A couple of weeks ago, David Michaelson, father of the Valid Metrics Matrix, sent me a report entitled Standardisation in Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation. The report goes further down the reliability/repeatability road by actually recommending specific measures for PR activities at every stage of the communications cycle, such as:

  • Target audience measures (awareness, knowledge)
  • Interest and Relevance
  • Intent
  • and Advocacy

    • Specific direct research question sets are suggested for each and every stage of the process, each having been show to be valid and reliable by statistical analysis.

    But for me, the most interesting part of the report is the chapter entitled Third party/intermediary measures that explains how to measure the relay effect of third-party publishing such as social media recommendations, peer reviews and online conversations.

    Measuring the impact of word of mouth on your online reputation

    While popular social media metrics such as facebook fans and twitter followers abound and can help to draw a complete picture of your online presence, they do little to measure the impact of online communities on your business or evaluate the efficiency of your activities on social media.

    What the report suggests is not new, but a time-tested method of media coverage evaluation transposed to social media: analysis of message accuracy online. Whether a community is commenting on your products, your CSR engagement or any of your reputation drivers, your communications towards it will contain specific messages that need to be relayed accurately. Relayed messages that are incorrect will help raise awareness but will be detrimental to most of your goals. Three specific measures can be put in place for this:

  • The presence of basic facts in community messages
  • The presence of misstatements or erroneous information
  • The absence or omission of facts

Measuring this is very straightforward: by defining two lists, one for messages that should appear and another for incomplete or erroneous messages that you anticipate, you can give your evaluation team a very precise brief or even automate the identification using advanced semantic analysis, for a very repeatable process.

Creating online communities and actively engaging with them is the best way to ensure conversations about your organization are happening in a controllable environment. And the method described ensures a very efficient ePR/eReputation evaluation process.

How are you measuring your social engagement?

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Creative Commons image by cstmweb

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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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Public Relations, Stakeholder Engagement and Corporate Reputation

January 7, 2011 by 3 Comments

On this blog, we’ve been talking alternatively about Public Relations, Stakeholder Engagement and Corporate Reputation Management. But comments have shown just how these activities relate.

It is no longer news that reputation has a huge impact on business. Companies with higher reputations have more numerous and more loyal customers, recruit better employees and see a lower turnover, establish more fruitful partnerships, are more easily supported by their stakeholders when controversy strikes …

In fact, it has been established that corporate reputation, as an intangible asset, amounts to over 60% of the market value of a company. In a recent post, I described the financial value of reputation. And, according to Leslie Gaines Ross, nearly one half of a company’s reputation is tied to that of its CEO.

What is less clear is the role of communications and stakeholder engagement in creating, maintaining and recovering a reputation:

  • And yet, the definition of an enterprise’s reputation is the global trust its various stakeholders have in it. So it becomes evident that engaging with these communities of stakeholders to identify their needs and align business practises with the most salient ones is an essential aspect of any business. As a KRC survey of 200 executives of major companies shows, Community action and communications work best together.
  • And, while it is true that “reputation wounds are self-inflicted” and that corporate misconduct, bad products, accidents are the source of reputation failings, their reconstruction is almost the exclusive territory of communication. Immediate, transparent and relentless communication.

The continuous emergence of new channels and forms of communications has made this a daunting process for many but we believe that best practises are to be found in the methodology described in engagement standards such as the AA1000SES and GRI G3. To help understand these matters, we are offering two FREE white papers that can be used as guides:

And these are the beginning of a series. Chief executives are almost unanimous in recognising that corporate reputation plays an important role in the achievement of business objectives, yet few have a formal measurement system in place to evaluate it. Our next two white papers will deal with measuring reputation and the tools that need to be used for this.

We hope you enjoy these two first documents and look forward to your comments.

A Happy, Successful and Engaged New Year to you all !!

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Post Advertising Value Equivalent – New PR Measurement Metrics

December 17, 2010 by 9 Comments

In a previous post, I lamented over the impression that the (deserved) worldwide ban of the AVE may not have been accompanied by enough replacement recommendations. Well, it’s time to make amends because yesterday’s PRSA/AMEC webinar, presented by David Michaelson, structured the field brilliantly.

Redux

Let’s repeat it once more: banning the AVE was not a rhetorical fad. It’s very calculation makes you examine your public relations work purely from an advertising point of view (ad space), thereby loosing much of your engagement work’s true value on the way. And, as it shows very little correlation with any meaningful outcomes, the formula cannot be used to bridge the gap between the CCO’s reporting and the KPI expectations of the other members of the board. However, the Barcelona Principles (AMEC declaration of PR measurement standards) always struck me as intellectually interesting in a French Declaration of Independance sort of way, but of very little field value to practitioners. To be fair, real life solutions have been described, notably at the London Measurement Conference but this webinar provided a very synthetic high level view, not found in other discussions, that every one should read and relate to.

Paraphrasing Dr Michaelson here would be of little value and his slides are available on the AMEC website. I will update this link asap). Instead, here are a few of my reactions to that very interesting work:

First of all, the backbone is a framework for describing the contribution of PR to the traditional marketing funnel. Imagine a matrix with one axis representing PR actors and (traditional) engagement stages (the content producer/the intermediary/the content consumer) and on the other,some marketing funnel stages (awareness, knowledge, interest, preference, action). Each cell is defines a precise situation to which a given set metrics apply best. So, to me, the completed matrix defines a measurement process that unifies MarCom quite elegantly.

The valid metrics matrix

Secondly, I believe this is an open framework that supports Barcelona Principle #2: Focus on outcomes (as in The Financial Value of Corporate Reputation) in many industries and situations. In the webinar slide presented above, sales are the desired business outcome and the horizontal axis follows a typical B2C marketing funnel. But the public relations and public affairs teams in many industries have other practical goals, and corresponding intermediate milestones, that could replace the funnel in the matrix. For instance, a pharmaceutical may focus on the market access of a new medicine. A bank may be discussing micro credits with the government of an emerging country or trying to extinguish a Wikileak fire (yes, I believe this measurement process would be great for crisis management scenarios). An energy major may want to monitor the impact of their engagement with local NGOs on their upstream activity. Each of these scenarios has a corresponding set of intermediate stages to replace the funnel and the corresponding matrix would define the measurement process for the campaign.

Thirdly, a partial disagreement on the integration of Social Media, and Facebook fans in particular, in this process. And this for two reasons. Reason #1: it’s my personal belief (and pet peeve, as regular readers will recognise ;) ) that Facebook Fans is the new AVE. It’s an easy metric to obtain and it flatters the ego in the same way. But, as argued previously (and heralded by Jay Baer) Facebook Fans only indicate previous affinity with a brand, not advocacy or the result of engagement. And, reason #2, it is my belief most Fans are attracted through reward marketing campaigns (Win an iPad, 10% off for new fans …) that turn a Facebook page into paid media. Still, people will use these metrics and at least this framework places them in a very meaningful context.

Fourthly, what I agree very strongly with, in terms of Social Media integration, is the focus on measuring conversations. And again, for two reasons: #1, The unidirectional PR process on the Y axis of the metrics matrix is still valid in a world with intermediaries such as bloggers and the media. But in social media that model no longer holds true as the consumer can also be the starting point of the conversation, even on the semi-owned territory of a brand page. #2, due to EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithmic response to Dunbar’s social relationships limits, only a very small percentage of page updates (0.2% to 0.5%) will be seen by fans. The image below illustrates the typically low levels of feedback and engagement found on a status update. Much as lowering the rebound rate on a heavily trafficked page can have a drastic effect on sales, stimulating conversations with existing fans will likely have far more impact on desired outcomes than adding a few more fans.

Typically low Facebook feedback rates

To conclude, the framework presented in the webinar may seem daunting to already super-busy teams. But the point is not to fill in all the cells. Rather, it serves as a great navigational tool to contextualize what measurement you already have going and understand its results. We are currently working on a white paper describing what forms of measurement can be helped by platforms such as those Augure produce (outputting engagement data so that is can be used in other C-Suite software for business correlation, using indicators that have been shown to correlate strongly with business outcomes, integrating new media with traditional media, plugging into web-analytics, message retrieval, use of sentiment analysis for research …) and it will be very interesting to map the results into this matrix to further help structure and simplify the landscape.

If you have comments on this measurement framework, I’d love to hear from you!

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Advertising Value Equivalency is dead. Now what?

October 22, 2010 by 3 Comments

PR value equals Editorial quantity (time, surface) * unit cost, officially no more. While the simple formula has been around for many years now, it always found more support from PR practitioners than from thought leaders in the industry. Now that the shunning is official and worldwide, what alternatives do Public Relations pros have?

Initially created as a laudable tentative to assign value to PR activity, the AVE had three assets:

  • Easy to understand and communicate (the media coverage we earned through PR would have cost this much)
  • Cheap to measure (before online and social media volumes and monetization schemes, that is)
  • The financial dimension made it easy (on the surface) to communicate with the board

After a few years, the shortcomings of the formula became apparent to many. The Institute for public relations published a white paper in 2003 to explain these. In 2006, the Canadian Public Relations Society proposed an (interesting) alternative model (Media Relations Rating Points). In 2009, the second AMEC conference in Barcelona voted on a set of PR principles which rejected AVEs. And last week, the IPR’s AVE task force officially banned the formula, declaring that AVE is not a proxy for measuring the ROI of Public Relations. And all the while it became increasingly trendy to pooh-pooh the formula in zillions of blog posts.

Anyone else feeling uneasy about this?
The thing is, years as a product manager have taught me that when an informed market requests a feature, there’s a real reason for it. And that’s where the general ban crumbles slightly for me. Because, let’s face it, most alternatives being proposed are no more consensual, much more complex (not to mention expensive) and are advocated using vague arguments such as: “outcomes should be measured, not outputs”, “use quantitative measures then do some research to complete with qualitative information”, “should include business metrics” … And while rejecting bodies promised replacement metrics, no one so far has been able to come up something realistic in terms of work load, technicality and costs.

Am I really defending the AVE, in this day and age?
NO! Anyone defending AVEs should read Katie Paine’s truly excellent PR Measurement Blog to chase away any impure thoughts ;o) But, as Seth Godin writes, “real artists ship”. And the hazy propositions so far simply do not fill the void.

And yet, many valid measurement techniques exist (weighted share of discussion, click counting on landing pages, engagement metrics) and even the AVE can be used in some circumstances (to leverage advertising investment during negotiations with a magazine, for instance).

What appears to be missing is the silver bullet uber-compound metric that will translate your efforts into a single line in the board’s balanced scorecard. On that topic, I’m with the pundits: it doesn’t exist. And that, to me, is AVE’s greatest sin: making the profession believe a single metric could sum up engagement. The AVE emerged in a world in which communications followed a pyramidal structure (the company => an elite set of journalists => the masses). The single metric promise was a fallacy at the time. It is even more so in a clique (a –social, eg – graph in which all people are linked to all others) and its distributed communication mode.

We are completing a white paper explaining the uses of the various modes of media evaluation we recommend. If you would like to read it, just leave a comment, drop us a line or contact us via the website, on twitter or on Facebook. As a product manager, I can tell you features can only be developed if you make your needs heard. I look forward to hearing them :)

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