"Morally toxic and destructive"

I used the Brandwatch system to put together this word cloud from today's coverage on Goldman Sachs. Not surprisingly it is dominated by the resignation letter on one of their derivatives directors Greg Smith. It might just be sour-grapes or possibly a window in on a genuinely dis-functional organisation. 


I think most will be pretty horrified by this portrayal of life at this truly globally significant organisation. Could it make any difference? I Doubt it. They probably ‘know’ enough and are perceived to have saved enough money for their 

clients to guarantee their survival. Personally I was disturbed by the notion that society has allowed these qualities to be somehow valued above almost all others.  

This is a great posting by Mark W Schaefer all about the social media measurement ney-sayers he recently encountered. The post got 38 replies in a day or so...that's some ROI and just shows the importance of the issue. I still can't believe there are big firms who do nothing...monitoring or analysis. Just crazy how they can justify putting their heads in the sand. 

This sort of thing is challenging. To make it work requires real thought; you can't just pick a solution off the shelf. Organisations are unique, as are their methods and delivery, and therefore should be their measurement. It also needs educations and PR needs to learn not to be frightened of numbers.

The Power of Local PR

I read this article this morning and it resonated with me. If new/social media has proved anything to us it is that focusing your effort is key. Gone are the days when you could catch a large portion of your target audience through  a couple of newspapers and broadcast news items. The audience is now consuming from a vast array of sources and the younger the age, the less likely it is to be from traditional news sources.

Communities are now key. They might be around a special interest, or a specific geographical location. This blog post makes the point that if it is the latter there is no substitute for regionally based PR support, focused on the local media (social and traditional media) community.

(Trying to) Look ahead

I have been having a few conversations with people regarding the Barcelona Principles and how this relates to different types of organisation and while it is not possible or recommended to transplant a PR plan from one similar organisation to another, there are a number of common themes which keep on coming up:

The importance of objective setting. It is becoming increasingly accepted that setting relevant, measurable objectives is the most important, and sometimes the most difficult bit. 

There are many in the PR/measurement area who want to find standards and common metrics however I would be very surprised if they fall in behind a single measure to supplant the AVE. One view I would uphold is that of Philip Sheldrake, who could be loosely described as the CIPR's measurement 'guru':

“Your organisation is unique, your market is unique, your vision is unique, your strategy is unique, your execution is unique and your measurement & evaluation is unique”. 

If you condone this view I accept it places the onus on organisations to have the confidence to develop and use their own metrics, and to be prepared to argue that it is the best option. As far as I can see it, the best course is to think in simple terms...why a story/campaign might benefit; examine those ideas with a  view to isolating the tangible benefits, like memberships, sales, attendance, media sentiment and hang your metrics off of these. 

There are a few things coming together to make this not at all simple. Unquestionably, departments increasingly need to account for their actions/time and coming up with relevant metrics is a challenge; then add-on digital media and it's seriously complex.

If I were to look a little into the future I would hope the much-wanted 'standards' might consist of a number of measurement techniques, with their use and benefit clearly understood, supported by a large selection of 'cause & effect' case studies which people can refer to. This is what could be referred to as the PR measurement 'back-end'. The front-end has to stay with the PR team...deciding the strategy & objectives. Sure, you can get help with this (general PR frameworks) but it would be from people who don't really understand the nuance of what you are trying to do.

Ofgem come under social 'flack'

Listening to the news this morning it quickly became clear it was not going to be a good day for Ofgem - the governments watchdog for the UK energy market. They has announced that the energy firms were making about £125 a year from customers, instead of the more normal £15 per person. Aside from the technicalities of the energy market which is often portrayed as more broken than mended, why not let the social media reaction decide quite how the bad it is for Ofgem?

Using Brandwatch I looked at the social media exposure on Ofgem for the past 24 hours. The system collected almost 600 social media references, mostly being form news sites and Twitter. I would liked to have manually confirmed their sentiment rating, but as time is short and I don't half a day to spare for the exercise, I am working with their auto sentiment rating. Frankly I thought it might have been worse, but it is fair to describe it as pretty bad....48% negative, 50% neutral and 2% positive.

Assessing the measurers

Over a period of 6 weeks my intention was to use of as many online/social media monitoring tools as I could; aiming to understand their strengths, drawbacks and pricing options. I will deal with this latter issue in a follow-up post. The organisations tested included Brandwatch, JamIQ, Lithium, Trackur, UberVU. Obviously this list in not exhaustive. At the last count there were more than 100 providers in this space.

One of the criteria when deciding who to test was they had to be a player in the lower cost (non-enterprise)/self consultancy space. Believe you-me...you could spend considerably more than those I have tried! Indeed, if you include bespoke dashboards and human validation of articles tone and messaging you could easily spend many thousands of dollars a month. I wanted to understand more about the lower-cost players; see what you can get for a couple of hundred dollars a month, over the free tools we all use like Google Alerts, etc.

It is quite easy to point to the things which they all come with. You get a social media capture featuring stories relevant to your keywords covering Titter, Facebook, Linked-In and other online sources. You get the opportunity to compare and contrast these keywords (they could be a list of competitors or an agency's clients) either in a list or graphic form. It was also notable that this latter option would allow the user to click on a peak or trough and see what were the stories making it up. I last tested a few of these tools about 18 months ago and this is a new (and very welcome) addition to many of the providers service.

Another welcome addition to many of the providers is the ability see the impact of various commentators/Media sources. Whilst I am reluctant to describe it as a measure of influence, the combination of MozRank, Klout and similar scores are a welcome indication of media impact.

So what were my experiences with the providers listed above? It's probably easiest to firstly separate them into 2 groups based on ease of use. In the easy to use camp I would put Lithium, Trackur and UberVU. This is not say they are simplistic tools. Far from it, they have the ability to be customised and adapted to meet a variety of requirements and I would defy anyone using them for the first time not to be able to generate some kind of meaningful results in less than 5 minutes. Quite an achievement and very important considering that not everyone in PR has a Masters in statistics!

It is necessary though to draw meaningful categories, and if you are after a more comprehensive style of reporting you would do well to consider JamIQ and Brandwatch. I like the accessibility of the Asian based JamIQ portal. It is logically laid out, offers scalability and a broad selection of features including a nice dashboard, graphical interfaces and the ability to 'drill down' to the actual media coverage from most points.

Brandwatch is similarly feature-filled, though the set-up process is longer winded and involves several stages. In time I am sure the different groupings and queries would become logical, but I have to emphasise the point that it sometimes does not seem entirely logical. On a number of occasions I had to follow one of the online video tutorials (involving several stages) to be left with the impression that I had done what the others providers allow you to do almost intuitively.

All said, it is probably my favourite provider, generating coverage lists I could be confident with and filterable via and wide range of attributes. Other useful features included topic word clouds (I particularly liked the ....coloured plug-in version), and the ability of download as a CSV, Excel listing Or JPG for the charts.

This is a fast changing space and I will try to keep my views updated. I will also try and follow-up with a posting on their relative charging structures and value for money.

In preparing material for the talk on 'How to Measure: Beyond the AVE' for the CIPR I have been collecting information from mainly online sources. It has been a few months since I have done a talk on this subject and I have been amazed that none of the key pointers I have used are more than a year old. It only goes to show quite how fast-moving an area this is.

The main thrust of the talk is to discredit AVE and highlight the alternatives. The thing I need to try push home to people is that the alternatives to AVE are not as easy to do. AVEs are simple, easy to convey and are often portrayed as a proxy for ROI. It is the lazy person’s PR measurement.

Brian Solis at the recent Dell B2B Huddle in London warns on the problems of using others case studies as templates for your own measurement. People who are doing this for the first time are spending a lot of time (and money) finding what works, which metrics correlate and how effort transfers into measurable outcomes. As such this work is valuable and as a result it is understandable that people keep it to themselves.

There is also the issue that, as Philip Sheldrake points out, organisations are unique, as is their vision, strategies, and therefor so will be the correct measurement. Often this stuff does not travel well – we have got to bear that in mind.

I am looking forward to the talk and in particular to the Q&As as it’s bound to get some opposing views! I will put the slides up on Slideshare in the coming days.