5 must-have steps in every monitoring plan

January 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Monitoring is an essential part of any PR and reputation management campaign management, but is often considered from the sole point of view of extracting information from the Internet, whereas a successful plan involves and requires many other steps.

In my previous post, I described monitoring as trying to a listen to a conversation happening 20 feet away in a crowded bar. This is the information extraction part often referred to, but what good is it if the conversation stays in your head as a string a words, not communicated to anyone or analyzed or used to take action ?

Here are 5 steps that define a useful media monitoring plan from the definition phase to the decisional aspects.

 

Defining entities

Cutting through the billions of conversations going on each day implies restricting both the subjects you’re interested in as accurately as possible and limiting the sources to the most useful ones. defining entities is the first part.

Most competitive monitoring plans will focus on brand names, products or services and company executives. That in itself can be quite a hurdle. I monitor the news for Augure (which means “omen” in French) and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes in from World of Warcraft, ancient mysteries forums, church organ players and death metalheads if I’m not careful in my keyword selection. Oh my … ;)

WOW Augure !

Once you have defined your keywords and potential namesakes or other pitfalls, advanced monitoring platforms use semantic analysis to extract the correct information using context in the article. This filters out most if not all of the noise without missing important data.

Defining sources

Where does your audience hang out? Are your stakeholders most vocal on Facebook or in blogs? Is offline coverage important to your success?

Listening to the social world

Listening to a social world

The natural temptation, in order not to miss anything important is to monitor the whole universe. And this leads to numbers games about the number of sources being monitored. But that’s meaningless and dangerous:

  • First because as soon as you have the technology to monitor a blogging platform such as wordpress, you can monitor over 50 million sources. Hook-on to Facebook and that’s 700 million, no 800, no 900 no … Numbers are meaningless. Far more important is to identify those that are influential in your industry, extract clean information from them (no adverts, no spam) and be able to add more as and when necessary.
  • Secondly because you will not be able to digest the result of too large a reading list. My photography-minded friend and Augure Product Manager Caroline set up one of our feeds to monitor the news about a new camera on social media. Like her, I doubt that you will enjoy seeing thousands of messages pile up every hour (unless what you want is a statistical dashboard), even on-topic ones ;) So be specific about what you need to include. By default, we suggest packs to our customers and it is always easy to build from that.

Homogeneizing

Forum messages and offline have very different structures. Mixing offline sources with online media requires some technical work in order to present readable and interpretable results. As a simple example: in your monitoring results, would you rather see tweets with shortened links or the article hiding behind the link ?

Analyzing

What is your goal with that monitoring? Are you interested in the share of blog coverage of a product you have just launched or is real-time sentiment analysis of a developing crisis more important to you?

Publication click-through statistics

Too often, analytics are an afterthought of monitoring plans. But defining the dashboard you need prior to anything else is important to determine what information your monitoring and/or qualification software/teams need to provide you with? Tone, volume, size, images, number of views, ranking, influence levels … ?

Sharing and collaborating

As social networks have changed public relations forever, companies have had to adapt by becoming more social themselves. Stakeholder engagement is no longer the exclusive responsibility of a few staff members in the PR team and more and more employees are becoming brand ambassadors after being trained and receiving proper engagement guidelines.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Media Monitoring On The Go

As will be discussed in the final installment of this series, monitoring is essential for successful engagement and its results should be share with anyone taking part in discussions on behalf of the organization.

Depending on the recipient, sharing may take the form of an analytic report, a webzine to read in the tube or a formal press review and reputation dashboard. Whatever the form taken, sharing is an essential and often overlooked part of success.

Now that you have the 5 steps in hand, how do you use your monitoring to enhance your social engagement ?

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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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Breaking free from reputation measurement silos

July 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

Silver Bullet In the first part of this article, I explained that no silver bullet single metric can adequately describe corporate reputation and described how most existing reputation measures fall into three categories:

  • Fashionable social media focused measures such as fans and likes
  • Primary research studies, periodically targeting either the general public or more specialized stakeholder groups in their surveys or focus groups
  • Monitoring-based solutions that evaluate in real-time the impact of (traditional, online and social) media exposure on a company’s stakeholders

While all these solutions have great advantages and some drawbacks, the real problem they present is a traditional one of ownership and measurement silos. Since results are rarely comparable and all target different services within the organisation, they make a bird’s-eye view interpretation very difficult.

Consistent messaging and consistent measurement

Reputation management has turned into a very fragmented market place with a very long tail indeed and the very definition of reputation has seen so many variations in the mouths of the numerous actors as to seem lost in myth. And it’s true that a formal definition of corporate reputation is hard to come by. The Financial Times Lexicon proposes the following, which is probably consensual enough for my use:

The term refers to the observers’ collective judgments of a corporation based on assessments of financial, social and environmental impacts attributed to the corporation over time.

More important than a definition, is the impact of reputation. The difference in corporate reputation between two companies mean that an identical event in both will induce different reactions from their respective stakeholder groups. The organisation with better reputation will recruit and retain better employees, increase profitability, lower legal costs, receive greater interest from investors and partners, navigate crises more smoothly, benefit from greater customer loyalty …

So reputation must be measured accordingly, as a perceptual capital in the eyes of all the organisation’s important stakeholder groups. Any (good) measurement system or study that focuses exclusively on one group and/or one department can be useful for tactical purposes, but in creating a measurement silo, it cannot provide the C-level with the complete dataset essential for strategic reputation management.

Just as consistent messaging from all communication touch points is essential for creating reputation, integrated measurement is a prerequisite for stakeholder analysis. And the two should hinge around the same communication pillars and messages.

Working with an integrated measurement framework

In Post Advertising Value Equivalent – New PR Measurement Metrics, I presented David Michaelson’s Valid Metrics Matrix, a table for organizing your various metrics into a meaningful framework.

Measuring reputation with the Valid Metrics MatrixThe matrix has two axes:

  • Horizontally, the progress from mere creation of awareness to the actions you would like your stakeholders to take
  • Vertically, the progress from company activity (press releases, community management, events) to intermediary effect (media coverage, blog posts from industry experts …) and finally to target audience effect (buying products, voting for a candidate, participating in clinical tests …)

The grid on the left is dedicated to reputation building. Click on it to access the complete version on the AMEC website.

Using such a framework, and having defined the most relevant topics on which you must communicate and measure perceptions, you can set goals and decide what indicators best represent success and track your progress within a meaningful context.

Sentiment EvolutionUsing our own ComSuite and ComDecision, for instance, you can define corporate messages, create campaigns and projects around them, distribute information organise events, meet with important stakeholders then measure open rates, click rates, stakeholder sentiment in surveys or social media, analyse media coverage, segments along countries, media types, sentiment scores, stakeholder groups, topics … ensuring all messaging and measurement hinge around common concepts whatever the service or targeted stakeholder group. You may also want to organise focus-groups or general public surveys. Combining all these reputation management tools within the context of the Valid Metrics Matrix guarantees that all the indicator values you have collected contribute to a common goal and can be interpreted with their true use in mind.

As usual, your feedback is welcome on this topic.

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Measuring reputation from A to Z

June 27, 2011 by 1 Comment

Or at least from A to M in part 1 (of 2) of this post. Part 2 now ready.

Regular readers will remember I have repeatedly argued against Facebook fan counting and the use of AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) for measuring PR efficiency because these unique – silver bullet – metrics fail to represent what is really happening behind the score.

So this post will obviously not introduce a new indicator that can magically represent the state of your reputation. Rather, it will describe a generic framework that can be used in most situations and activity sectors as a part of the virtuous stakeholder engagement cycle (Map, Engage, Measure) described in our free “Positive Engagement” white paper.

So, what is reputation and how do you measure it?
 

There are no standards for reputation scoring

Google the term and most answers by social media gurus will point you to counting fans as well as LIKES and comments. While there is merit in that approach, it is very partial as many a company’s most influent stakeholders make their voice heard through other media. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that @BPGlobalPR‘s anti BP tweets during the gulf disaster provided more comic relief to Tony Hayward than they distilled anguish, particularly compared to President Obama’s rulings. A more ideal system would measure how much social media actually influenced these rulings and the perceptions of other key stakeholders.

Then, there are the high profile scoring/ranking systems such as:

  • Fortune magazine’s “Most Admired”,a list published each spring and based on an extensive set of ranking criteria (Innovation, People management, Use of assets, Social responsibility, Management quality, Financial soundness, Long-term investment, Product quality, Global competitiveness).
  • Reputation Institute’s RepTrak, which measures how a number of attributes of 7 key dimensions (products/services, innovation, governance, workplace, citizenship, leadership and performance) are perceived by the general public.
  • Harris Interactive’s Reputation Quotient also measures 20 attributes along 6 dimensions.

A common point of these methods is that they resort to surveys and other forms of primary research to collect information on companies and evaluate their reputation along the lines of a pre-defined model. Consequently, measurement only occurs at regular intervals, every time a round of interviewing has been conducted and analysed.

Primary research studies are not comparable, as certain target the general public while others focus on specific interest groups. For instance, the Reputation Institute focuses on the general public and consumers whereas Fortune’s “Most admired” ranking addresses investors, analysts and executives.

These provide great insight. But their formula is locked, ascribing weightings to various themes and stakeholders, in a business world that sees trust factors and sources of influence change significantly from one year to the next (compare Edelman’s Trust factors for 2009 ‘trust in businesses and CEOs at an all time low’, 2010 ‘trust in businesses rises globally’ and 2011, for instance). The real irony is that the modern gurus who root for an exclusive reliance on social media scoring base their reasoning on antiquated 2005 and 2006 trust factors: “trust shifts from authority to peers” a.k.a “a person like me”, while industry experts are far more credible today.

Risk Analysis GraphIn contrast, monitoring-based reputation measurement seeks to evaluate public perceptions by analysing the media coverage they are subjected to and listening to their own tone of voice in blogs and social media. Therefore, this form of reputation monitoring lets companies evaluate perceptions as soon as they emerge and segment them accurately along more stakeholder groups than primary surveys usually focus on (patient associations, NGOs, regulators and legislators, business partners …).

Finally, there are other reputation studies performed by NGOs and specialist groups that target specific policy issues using in-house methodology.

In truth, even the Edelman trust barometer results (I refer to above) are debatable since the methodology targets only well off populations that might not reflect every company’s stakeholder base. And there lies the real drawback of any fixed methodology. In part 2, I will describe a general framework that can be used to integrate all these types of measurement into a meaningful and actionable result set.

Part 2 is now available.
Your feedback on how you measure your reputation is welcome.

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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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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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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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