Another slant on the 'Outs'

At the latest meeting of Measurement Camp Jason Ryan (I think) from ICrossing mentioned a model of consumer behaviour which I feel is somehow connected with the Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes model initially proposed by Walter Lindenmann back in 1990's. It seems to take a consumers perspective and uses the terms Awareness, Actions and Advocacy. I can see a strong link between media output and awareness and the idea of actions seems to correlate with user outtakes. Outcomes is always an intriguing area and, as I have discussed before, closely connected with the concept of advocacy.

My feeling is that outcomes can be divided into active and inactive outcomes, which could be supported by this this diagram from Ruby Quince of Bite Communications following-up on our break-out groups submission at the meeting. There is quite a lot of detail here and in effect it considers that initially an organisations needs to initiate a lot of social media interactions to generate participation, but as this increases the organisation can decrease its involvement as it gets nearer to the real brand advocates who demand higher levels of paticipation. Brad Little from Nielsen Buzzmetrics made the point that it becomes more difficult to accurately measure as you move from left to right on the diagram.

I hope this seems logical and I welcome any thoughts.

Is it time to out the 'Outs'?

The traditional method of measuring PR (pioneered by Dr Walt Lindenmann) was via the measures of Output, Out-take and Outcome. They have been widely covered in academic journals and used as a method of categorising response measurement. Dr Tom Watson in DummySpit outlines their use in this useful review. But there seems to be a problem as the ‘Outs’ are often misused and I think it is fair to say, poorly understood by practitioners.

So in response a couple of alternatives have been pitched. Dan Bartholomew suggests the Exposure, Influence and Action categories, while Jim Nail suggests Media Influence, Media Audience and Business Influence. They both undoubtedly have their merits and while I think they could be accused of introducing more jargon, discussion on this issue is healthy, particularly if it engages view from the wider PR community rather than from just within the measurement community.

Personally I prefer Dan Bartholomews option but as this is very early days much more information and practical application and testing needs to be done. And of course if a new option is to be adopted it needs to be much better than the existing.