Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

KD Paine:

The 7 steps to social media

• Define the R — define the expected results
• Define the I — What’s the investment?
• Understand your audiences and what motivates them
• Define the metrics — what you want to become
• Determine what you are benchmarking against
• Pick a tool and undertake research
• Analyze results and glean insight, take action and measure again.

Classical strategy, leavened with several critical items — we know benchmarking is essential, but Paine asks, determine what you’re benchmarking against…

Paine also offers:

• Research without insight is just trivia:
• Look for failures first
• Check to see what the competition is doing
• Then look for exceptional success
• Compare to last month, last quarter, 13 month average
• Figure out what worked and what didn’t work
• Move resources from what isn’t working to what is

Paula Berg now has seven people working with her at Southwest Airlines on the social media beat. What’s that tell you about the future of measurement in the social media space?

Brad McCormick focused mostly on search engine optimization — which is outside my expertise. But, certainly, even as a consumer, I thought it really interesting stuff.

Finally — We’re running out of excuses — social media is here to stay, and it may replace some forms of mainstream media. We’d all better figure out how to measure it effectively.

And right soon.

P.s. Blogger Marcie Casas waxes rhapsodic about Twitter; as I’m recently on it, I’ll reserve judgment.

Because of my involvement with the Institute for PR Commission on Measurement and Evaluation, I get a fairly consistent diet of measurement theory across many disciplines of PR.  But even after three-and-a-half years, I still get a little astonished about what’s possible.

At the PR News Measurement Conference on June 3, I got a master class on measuring social media.

• On the agency side, Monte Lutz, Edelman’s SVP of digital public affairs and Porter Novelli’s Brad McCormick, EVP of U.S. Digital.
• On the supplier side, KC Brown from Cision, who moderated the panel, and KD Paine.
• From the client-side, the always interesting Paula Berg, from Southwest Airlines.

Each presenter (given just 5-7 minutes each, so the speech-i-fying  was kept to a minimum) offered tangible suggestions for capturing the right data in this brand new media space. Each of them also made the case for how similar — and different — the social media realm is from traditional media, calling on people to recognize the participation as a necessary communication outcome of the vehicles.

Here are a few of the basics for those of you still grappling with how to do measurement.

Monte Lutz:

1. Volume — how big is the conversation?
2. Velocity — how quickly does the conversation spread?
3. Sentiment — what is the tone of the conversation
4. Influence — are you reaching the right people?
5. Groundswell — are you sparking additional conversations?
6. Impact — are you changing the conversation?

Lutz offers these six elements as the base for deciding what to monitor and how to respond. Obviously, you want to see positives, but monitoring the six gives you a frame for understanding the dynamic of the conversation. Some of these are exactly what you’d expect — velocity and groundswell, perhaps less so.  Lutz also gave capsules of several different monitoring and measurement tools, including Radian 6, SM2 by Techrigy, ClearForest and TruCast by Visible Technologies — all really interesting pieces of the puzzle.

{My comment: So much of this approach reflects the newness of the medium; it is pretty basic — and yet, even selecting the areas to evalute is frought with politics and matters of opinion.}

More on this panel in another post.

From McKinsey Quarterly:
“In a March 2009 McKinsey Quarterly survey of senior executives around the world, 85 and 72 percent of them, respectively, said that public trust in business and commitment to free markets had deteriorated. According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, those executives are reading the public mind correctly: 62 percent of respondents, across 20 countries, say that they “trust corporations less now than they did a year ago.”

The esteemed Quarterly seems obsessed with external constituencies, but does feature one sentence on internal communications, even as they slander PR with the word “spin:”

“Many companies, though, rely primarily on small, central corporate-affairs departments that can’t monitor or examine diverse reputational threats with sufficient sophistication. Moreover, traditional PR spin can’t deal with many NGO concerns, which must often be addressed by changing business operations and conducting two-way conversations. Managers of business units have a better position for spotting potential challenges but often fail to recognize their reputational significance. Internal communication about them may be inhibited by the absence of consistent methodologies for tracking and quantifying reputational risk…

“…they must try to influence stakeholders through techniques that go beyond traditional PR approaches, with an emphasis on two-way dialogue.”

Have these people never heard of two-way, symmetrical public relations? The Excellence Theory?

There is more:

“Reputations are built on a foundation not only of communications but also of deeds: stakeholders can see through PR that isn’t supported by real and consistent business activity.”

This is all presented as though it’s brand new — well, Grunig and Hunt called for symmetrical PR and ethical PR 25 years ago. Grrr.

“In this more complex world of influence strategy, no single kind of approach is likely to be sufficient to deal with fast-moving situations. Companies must instead initiate a multidisciplinary, cross-functional effort that can quickly identify reputational issues and plant responses in broader strategy, operations, and communications. The groups involved might include regulatory affairs, the general counsel, PR or corporate communications, marketing, corporate social responsibility, and investor relations.”

Jeepers, isn’t this exactly what top-shelf PR people have called for for years? Sheesh!

Read it for yourself (though, gosh, couldn’t they get a good editor?). (free, subscription req.)

How many of us really think about the audiences for our communication efforts, beyond the obvious?

An excellent white paper from Dr. Brad L. Rawlins, of Brigham Young University, offers a four-step process for prioritizing stakeholders.

1. Identifying all potential stakeholders according to their relationship to the organization
2. Prioritizing stakeholders by attributes
3. Prioritizing stakeholders by relationship to the situation
4. Prioritizing the publics according to the communication strategy

The use of the term “stakeholder” encompasses what PR academics call “public” and what we typically refer to as “audience.”

Too often, PR pros are capricious about how they decide where to place most focus, the most resources and effort. Dr. Rawlins’ paper offers a clear argument for a more disciplined way to do so.

I typically prioritize according to the objective. What do we need to get people to think, feel or do through our communication effort? In essence, that’s the foundation of my consulting business.

With common objectives reaching across different audiences, sometimes you’ll need to look more deeply, which is the point of the question I asked at the opening of this post.

Even defining audiences can be a trial — we really need to be specific. I assume we can agree that external stakeholders need to be sub-divided, and we should agree that it’s not enough to simply say, “employees.” We need to define communities within that group.

Dr. Rawlins examines various theories in the paper — don’t let that scare you off. The fact is that too many of us are ignorant of theory and its applications. That makes us quite a bit different from other C-Suite staff which are much more firmly grounded in management theory, finance theory and of course, legal theory.

I’m interested in your perspectives — how do you prioritize?