There was so much terrific research at the International PR Research Conference put on by the Institute for PR, that I was rendered speechless whilst there. No Twittering to speak of, no posting during sessions. I was just too busy enjoying the dialogue and discussion. (obviously, I’m a very sick man…)
More to follow this week.
Today’s #icchat, moderated by @susancerulla and featuring @lindabeth on Twitter spilled over for an hour or so, at least for a few internal communication experts. @mklein818, @wedge and @danasml had a Tweet-convo that featured Mike’s opposition to engagement as an appropriate focus for internal communicators. He and Dana went back and forth a while defining the term (and disagreeing), and Mike averred:
“Why ‘m critical about ‘engagement’ stuff –one-size-fits-all approaches dominate and many employees don’t need to sing comp song”
I think this is the crux of the argument. The Gallup Organization has been doing engagement research for a very long time, and it’s Q12 system includes, “I have a best friend at work.” In their defense, they have tons and tons of data that support the idea that social matters are a huge part of employee satisfaction. But to me, in the modern age, this is irrelevant.
The engagement infrastructure wants to systematize employee sat, distill organizational behaviors to a checklist of things to do and declare victory. But we know that different employees are motivated by different things. If we focus on productivity as a function of satisfaction (positing that productive employees are more into their organizations than unproductive ones), does individual happiness at work count?
I know that if we help our employees better understand our business, competitors, processes and strategy, they ought to be better at their jobs. Workers need to have the information they need to do their jobs. I know that providing information in a way that’s valuable and resonates with workers is critical to that process of building understanding. And I know that workers who have a clear understanding of how what they do every day fits into the organizations objectives tend to be more knowledgeable about the business and better at their jobs.
So, do they need to “sing the company song,” as one of Mike’s tweets read?
No, they don’t. Look, employee happiness is too dependent on factors outside of my control. I need respect and involvement. The #icchat today was on how to make employees ambassadors, and the central thought was that it’s a fairly organic process that requires organizations (especially leaders) to walk their talk. You can’t create raving fans among employees by starting an ambassador program, for gosh sakes. It will be the rare organization who’s ready to ask their employees to step up. But, if there is a sense of shared sacrifice (that is real), shared purpose, shared potential success — you’re in the game.
The term “engagement” has been abased, turned into a supposed cure-all for corporate cancer. It isn’t. If an organization isn’t transparent with employees, treats them like children, doesn’t give them the responsibility and accountability they need to be successful, loads them with useless trivia and then asks them to be influencers in their personal orbits, that organization deserves scorn.
There’s going to be more on this topic, that’s for sure. To take part in the discussion, join @susancerulla, @lindabeth and me each Monday at 1 p.m. Central/ 12 noon Eastern U.S. time. Oh, and read today’s Tweet Stream too.
The debate over how best to measure the effectiveness of media relations has encompassed multiple streams of thought, moving from saying “it’s impossible,” all the way to saying, “it’s quantifiable.” Unfortunately, advertising value equivalency (AVE) became a popular means of applying dollar figures to unpaid media. You take the number of column inches in print, time of mention in broadcast, or space on a Web page occupied by the mention of the company or organization in question, and ask, “How much would we have had to pay to take out an ad of equivalent size/time?”
The AVE practice has been under attack by some of us, poorly understood by others, but more widely used in PR agencies than many would like to think. It even was formally condemned by the Institute for PR Measurement Commission this fall.
AVE has major flaws — measurement experts (including one notable, even famous one) have decried the practice and detailed why frequently. I’ll not repeat the argument here. This paper provides those details in part. Instead, I’ll merely say that even with substantial adjustments to methodology, it never represented a business outcome, was based on an assumption of equivalent understanding on the part of the receiver, and was wholly unsuited to describing success in social media. That alone was a huge problem for me.
The thing is, there is substantive research that supports the idea that editorial content about a product and an ad are perceived similarly by receivers. A paper by Dr. Don Stacks and Dr. David Michaelson (albeit based on one experiment) found ads and editorial to be equally effective in generating interest in a new product. If that’s so, evaluating the PR placement in comparison to ad cost makes sense. PR costs orders of magnitude less than advertising.
Two papers by Angela Jeffrey, Dr. Stacks and Dr. Michaelson explored the linkages between volume of media coverage and share of media coverage and business outcomes (such as unit sales, tickets sold, etc.) and included media cost data in calculations. This set the stage for a controversial finding: Media costs improved correlations, significantly.
Now, Jeffrey, vice president of research for VMS, and Dr. Brad Rawlins, Brigham Young University, and Bruce Jeffries-Fox of Jeffries-Fox Associates, have written a brilliant paper further detailing the relationship between cost and outcomes, with four case studies. The “Weighted Media Cost” has a strong effect. From the paper:
…if we’re getting better results with costs for purchasing media space and time data, should we…set new parameters for its proper use?”
Emphatically, yes. The paper, written in a very approachable and intuitive style, makes a compelling case.
Read the paper if you care at all about measurement in our profession.
As much as many of our social media mavens would like to have it so, the concept of messaging isn’t going away for some time. The methods of delivery are definitely changing, but in public relations, we still have to reach people.
There’s a fashionable trend denouncing “talking at customers” as opposed to “having a conversation.” the trend is going on15 years old, at least. Social media’s recent sprouting of new tools (kind of like a Swiss Army Knife) has made me ponder whether the inexorable decline of mainstream media would lead, finally, to a lack of organizational interest in messaging.
If so, that’s bad news for the PR industry, as Marc Hausman (@StrategicGuy) wrote today.
But I still believe that as long as organizations have objectives, they’ll need messages: crafted, interesting, tailored to audience, pithy, memorable, descriptive, fascinating, thought-provoking and even wise. For that, they’ll continue to need lowly, ink-stained (er, pixel-stained?) wretches who understand the transformative power of words.
A friend once wrote that words are powerful, they create reality. Motivation, excitement, laughter, sadness — in our Western culture, we depend greatly on words.
This becomes even more important in the social media age, when everyone is a publisher, and it’s up to the individual to glean the seeds from the dirt and chaff. There still needs to be an organizational voice carrying consistent, clear messages to stakeholders. It may be one of many (and it should be), but it needs to exist.
Marc is right — if PR firms rely totally on media relations for their enterprise, they are doomed. Or, at least, they’ll be a lot smaller than they are now. Of course, social media doesn’t scale very well — cultivating a relationship with a blogger takes as much effort as doing so with a magazine editor or a reporter — but the number of people reached is typically much lower.
Now, before the “it’s not about eyeballs” people light torches and scream for my head, let me say that until we better understand the communities we might want to reach in social media, we’re stuck with the lack of scalability complaint. It holds us back from helping organizations see the benefits to them of social media engagement.
Once we can get a better read on the characteristics of communities, we can make the scale work — it’s not much different than looking to reach readers of a given magazine. But, we need independent data on the communities and a clear understanding of what we can expect, whether we are selling directly to them, or merely engaging them for reputation purposes.
As astonishing as the advances in technology have been over the past five years, we still have audiences and we need words to help us reach, influence, reward and interact with them. We still have objectives to attain and a business to run. And messages aren’t going away just because the means of delivering them is.
After spending 15 weeks teaching public relations theory and ethical practice at Kent State, I’m fairly marinated in several PR theories, especially the work of the Excellence study. At first blush, I saw Excellence as a hopeful, uplifting theory of PR practice, an idealistic view of how PR could make a big difference in our profession.
This seemed especially appropriate when applied to social media – Twitter in particular, but also blogging, Facebook and elsewhere. After all, going back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, if markets are conversations and the Internet facilitates such conversations, then the tools of social media seemed perfectly suited to advancing that perspective.
As the semester progressed, however, and I continued my personal social media experiment (this blog, my Twitter activities (@commammo), and commenting on myriad other blogs, I began wondering whether the social media conversation was actually more of a monologue. From a marketing angle, that seems certain; there are likely many more “brands” on Twitter (for example) merely shouting to the social media crowd than actually engaging in dialogue.
My minimal observation wasn’t conclusive. That made me interested in looking more carefully at social media activity with a theoretical view – if I looked at six weeks of tweeting, and looked at several different organizations’ social media involvement, what would I find?
What are social media’s operating theoretical principles?
Knowing that just doing that kind of research for no purpose was a recipe to never get it done, I pitched a potential paper for the Institute for Public Relations’ International PR Research Conference for 2010, where I’d spoken in 2008 (and won the Jackson-Sharpe Award for research by an academic and practitioner with Dr. Julie O’Neil from Texas Christian University). The subject: “Theoretical perspectives in social media: Excellence versus simple information provision,” and my proposal was accepted. I’ll be at the conference, March 10-13, 2010. That the conference is held in Miami, Fla., held no sway in my interest…Riiiiight.
Of course, this now meant a significant commitment to actually doing the research and writing the paper during the break between Kent State semesters. Fortunately, we’ve no plans to travel during the next few weeks.
I’ve got a number of potential sources to help me understand the current research on social media, but it seems that precious little of it is specifically focused on theory. Seems a little surprising to me, unless, of course, social media is a temporary fad that no serious scholar is interested in tackling.
So I’ll ask you, Dear Reader – two-way conversation or one-way information subsidy?
The ever-excellent Don Bartholomew, MetricsMan, provides an overview of some of the Twitter applications that purport to measure “influence.” He says:
Influence is contextual not absolute. An individual may have the ability to influence certain people in specific subject areas. Authority and trust are important constituent elements of influence. Do they have the authority to speak within a particular area and are their words and deeds trusted? The notion of coming up with an influence score without context is inherently flawed. It might be interesting, but it is not actionable.
Read the post, especially if you use Twitter, but even if you don’t, much of the content can be easily extrapolated to other forms of social media. A fair number of social media “experts” are bottling measurement snake oil these days, and the rigorous concepts Don discusses are the antidote for such chicanery.
The continuing debate over advertising value equivalency reached the pages of the New York Times 22 Nov., with a “Soapbox” piece saying Hollywood studios are cutting ad budgets and using public relations as an alternative. One anecdote:
Disney recently went so far as to develop a computer program to help it determine how much monetary value was coming from such publicity efforts. It can quickly plug in data — “Access Hollywood” had a 30-second interview with a star of “The Middle,” a new ABC comedy — and the program spits out what that same 30 seconds would cost to buy.
AVEs are a sore spot in PR circles these days. KD Paine, measurement maven extraordinaire, has campaigned against them for years as bogus figures that don’t quantify the value of media hits. The Institute for PR Measurement Commission (of which I am a member) officially condemned the practice in October, and PRSA has formed a blue-ribbon panel to address measurement generally — looking to a world without AVEs.
I believe there are certain circumstances where AVEs are useful — product publicity, for one, where features and benefits are the subject. But AVEs need to be net of cost, be based on actual charges, not simply “book rate,” and the publication has to be targeted to the specific business need. My example is Goodyear, the tire company. If they get a product review in Road and Track, it’s going to be relevant to their audience, include features and benefits, and in nearly all cases quite similar to an advertisement. What’s unaccounted for is the reader’s perception of value — AVEs are limited by an inability to include the weight of third party independence.
Look, notwithstanding this last paragraph, AVE is a bad metric 90 percent of the time, and there are other ways of evaluating media coverage that are better.
So, why does it appear that so many firms are stuck on this difficult metric? Well, AVEs are simple to understand. Here’s what it would have cost us to buy this time or this space — that’s a lot easier to grasp for a lot of people. There also is the pressure on PR agencies levered by their clients — “I understand you don’t like AVE, but I have to have a dollar figure to tell my CEO, so if you don’t give it to me, I’ll find someone who will.”
Still, I wish that more companies would stop using AVE. Oh, and that more people would understand that PR isn’t limited to publicity and press agentry. Perhaps the best reason not to use AVE is that it doesn’t measure the reputation work that represents most of what PR work is in business these days. For every stunt PR trick, there are months of quiet conversations with centers of influence, months of work on helping employees better understand their industries and organizations, and programs designed to help people grasp the significance of a company’s role in the community. There is more to our profession than being a low-cost replacement for marketing.
Make a note. It takes practice to handle two conferences in five days’ time. Of course, maybe my energy level would have been higher if I’d been speaking at them instead of attending one (live-Tweeting my way through a couple of days), and introducing speakers and serving as sponsorship chair at the other. Anyone who knows me will aver that I’m a fairly well-smoked ham, so being at the center of attention is exciting for me, rather than exhausting.
But the stress of pressing the flesh, talking to new people, and simultaneously trying to stay engaged in a sudden spate of potential business opportunities turned out to be rather a bit tiring. I also wondered whether the evil humours surrounding new friend Richard Bagnall and his lovely friend Marian might have attempted to seize me, but as it turns out, a couple o’nights of good sleep returned me to fit-as-a-fiddle status. Just ask my students if I lacked energy 22 October in class… Hah!
But now, devoid of excuses, I’m faced again with the ever-growing list of things to do, with ideas for a paper roaming in my head along with the still-warm and previously mentioned business opportunities. Oh, and I do need still to write a final exam and figure out what I need to do when I teach “Face to Face Tactics” at Kent State in the next semester. I also had slowed the pace of my blogging, owing to the madcap hilarity of the past couple of weeks, but accelerated the Twitter-ing at #iprms09. The social media experiment continues.
So it seems that indeed, I’m finding a bit of normalcy amid the falling leaves and gathering chill. Providence willing, I’ll soon have a fall more complicated — this time by billable hours.
The Institute for PR Summit on Measurement took place last Wed. – Fri., and my social media experiment took a new tack. I “live-Tweeted” the proceedings. You can read my coverage on Twitter — @commammo — and read everyone’s coverage by searching Twitter for #iprms09.
Great panels, excellent speakers, outstanding questions and answers were only a part of what makes the IPRMS so good. The quality of the discussions both within sessions and during the networking times is a testament to the interest and seriousness of the attendees, who hail from all walks of PR life, from research companies to PR agencies to consultants to corporate communicators.
At many conferences, most presenters are attempting to sell themselves or their solutions. At IPRMS, it’s most typical that both supplier and client present, so the content is practical and focused. I’m obviously trying to expand my business network, which is an important reason why I attended. But I also got a view into the state of the art in measurement and evaluation.
More on this later, but a key learning for me was that the social media measurement situation is gradually getting closer to true outcome measurement, rather than output measurement. No one has quite cracked the DaVinci code at this point, but there is fascinating work being done.
As I say, more to follow.
On Twitter, you can read the play-by-play by searching #iprms09. Bill Margaritis of FedEx rocked the room. Terrific presentation about the centrality of Reputation in the company’s communication efforts.
All the content is very good, but Margaritis and the panel on Ad Value Equivalency stood out.
Also, kudos to Toni Griffin of MetLife and David Michaelson of Echo Research for winning the Jack Felton Golden Ruler award for excellence in PR measurement. Their work was use of media analysis to drive media outreach strategy.
The Institute for PR is also a great resource for research — the science behind the art. Find it at www.instituteforpr.com.
My Audio Clips