I’m honored (or honoured) to have written a guest post on one of the best blogs in all of PR/Communications — PRConversations — thanks to Judy Gombita, who recruited me. The topic is my tripartite professional association affiliation — IABC, PRSA and the Institute for PR. Namely, are they valuable, necessary and a good value? The comment stream alone is worth reading, with several luminaries weighing in (and no cursing or objects thrown so far, thankfully.) Give it a read and tell me what you think!
Posts Tagged ‘Blog’
Talking About PRSA, IABC, IPR on PRConversations Blog
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Internal Communications at its Best
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010The UK’s Liam FitzPatrick wrote a post decrying the tendency of internal comms people complaining about manager communication incompetence. FitzPatrick says: “I believe we get the internal clients we deserve. If senior managers are used to a diet of crap communications support, that is all they’ll ever understand.”
He’s right, and he’s wrong.
The challenge always is whether to keep fighting or just give managers what they want. FitzPatrick relates a story about a senior manager who wants “intelligence” about what employees are saying and thinking from her internal comms support. There are a lot of things a skilled internal communicator can do to gather that intelligence, but much of the budgetary process is more output-focused than outcome-focused (echoing the same tendency elsewhere in corporate communications.)
The key for any of us is research (he said self-servingly — my practice includes research services, just sayin;.)
The research doesn’t even have to be quantitative, though tying qualitative assessment to intranet traffic, for example, can shed a lot of light on the effectiveness of our internal comms activities. We don’t have to do formal surveys, which can be very expensive and time consuming, if all we’re looking for is a snapshot to share for planning and strategy.
At Goodyear, we used an intranet poll to get just that sort of intelligence — it was a great window into what at least some employees were thinking, and it gave us a source of content, too.
But, there is no replacement for more formal measurement — even with qualification of our poll results, we still got management questions about the reach of opinion, which is a valid criticism. The old ROPE method (Research, Objective, Programming, Evaluation) still holds truth.
Meanwhile, read FitzPatrick’s piece. It’s worth reading (and commenting — no comments on his blog, so I wrote this post!)
Mainstream Thinks it ‘Gets’ Social Media
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010Two mainstream media stories 1 June tackle social media. The Wall Street Journal ($) offers perspectives on the ultimate measurement of social media effectiveness, direct sales through social channels; Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer looks at the risks of permitting social media use at work, quoting security consulting companies, lawyers and interactive marketing expert Dominic Litten (@DJLitten).
The Plain Dealer story is fairly predictable — “corporate challenges” presented by social media, together with tales of employees fired, foolish companies and an emphasis on the need for strong policies. The central message is “CONTROL.” This disappoints me, especially because the story dwells so much on blocking social media. Katie Herbst (@katieherbst), who manages social marketing for an insurance company, offers a good counter to the blocking argument, pointing out that time-wasting won’t necessarily be limited by the lack of social media.
The Journal piece talks about apps that can turn social media platforms into sales generators — unmentioned is the time-honored technique of pointing people to a URL. A couple of strange notes — a marketing professor is quoted saying that businesses must advertise to make people aware of their Facebook fan page, and that large numbers of fans are needed to “sway” buyers. This is a very traditionalist approach that ignores the relationship-building that’s at the heart of social media’s appeal.
Also, the story includes the requisite warning that social media could make for customer service challenges — another professor recommends an even higher level of service to support a Facebook page than other channels. A Houston sports retailer added a Facebook app to its Facebook Fan page in 2008, but has sold only 50 products through it. Again, a narrow view of success, because unmentioned is the impact of Facebook relationships on other sales channels.
In both of these stories, the reporting is surface-only. The frames in which they operate are very much rooted in mainstream marketing, and little in either story (apart from @DJLitten’s good perspectives on technology and productivity) reflect the reputational and relational opportunities that social media is really all about.
Of course, many marketers are guilty of similar biases — they see the “captive” audience of Facebook fans and want to broadcast to them. Learning to see these tools in their proper context is a challenge all its own.
Present company definitely included.
Measurement Crucial to PR’s Business Value
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010My learned Australian colleague Geoff Barbaro waxes rant in a post from 17 May (US time), where he inveighs against measurement. Perhaps not the concept, as much as the practice. He asks:
Do you measure how you look after your family? Do you count the meals, the trips to school, the time spent with children to evaluate effectiveness? When you buy that great new dress or suit that you love, did you then sit down and work through complex metrics to measure what you did?
So why do you think it’s different in business? I’ll tell you why, it’s because you don’t trust people to do the job you employed them to do. You don’t believe they are motivated and care about their work, so you can only make sure they are working by measuring what they do, and then argue that this is the motivational tool. Measuring because “we do what we measure” is a failure of leadership, a failure of motivation, a failure of selection, a failure to define values, a failure of engagement and a failure of communication.
Sorry, Geoff, but this is fuzzy-headed thinking about a vital enhancement to the profession of Public Relations.
I started a comment on Geoff’s blog (a fine and interesting read, btw), but found that it was all too likely that I’d hijack it. And that’s not right. So, here is my reply to Geoff’s shot across the bow. Man the torpedos!
========================
Oh, my. Nothing like an existential rant to get one’s blood up, eh Geoff?
Let’s start by differentiating terms. Measurement isn’t gotcha. It’s not “check-up-on-the-poor-employees.” Neither is it merely about outputs or activities, at least not when it’s strategic.
We in PR have long been the only department in a firm that can say to the C-suite, “trust me” and get away with it. The question on the CEO (and CFO, especially) mind these days, however, is, “What business value do I get for my investment in PR?”
We can take a SWAG (stupid, wild-assed guess) at the answer, but then we sound like witless weasels (um, we build reputation and protect…uh, no, uh, we get media coverage…no, uh, we help the organization communicate effectively, wait, ummmm.)
The fact is that most of us don’t have a clue what the quantifiable business value of PR is, and that’s why PRSA has commissioned a task force to work on that very question. It’s also one of the driving forces in modern PR. It’s created an industry specialty that people are finding value in, even though there is much sophistry and bad measurement out there.
In modern business, every department must contribute to the bottom line. So, direct sales and the support for sales is a winner, as is direct effort to improve efficiency, save money, etc. There’s also credible research about the effect on brand awareness, attitude and disposition of various PR activity. On the internal side, engagement metrics, and employee knowledge and behavioral metrics lend credence to a communicator’s value.
The trick is to a) Measure what matters; and b) Link communication outputs to business outcomes. This is, indeed, a hairy process, filled with risks — bad math the most prevalent, if you ask me. Correlation is not causation, but frequently it’s a pretty good stand-in for it, if your math is good. We mustn’t give up on the goal of establishing impact metrics and ROI just because it’s so much easier if we don’t!
I don’t know, Geoff, if I agree that “what gets measured gets done,” but I’m sure that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.
Cheers,
Sean
@commammo
Theater of the Absurd in Social Media Metrics
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010As we PR people feel our way along in social media, the marketers are declaring the End of Times for everything else. Anecdotal evidence shows that big companies are pulling big money out of traditional advertising and funneling it into social media, and that bears examination. But as I’ve said, I’m not ready to write obits for ma
ss marketing/advertising in favor of “marketing to a segment of one” right this very minute.
I first heard that phrase (Marketing to a segment of one) from the lips of Steve Cone, legendary marketer and then-CMO with KeyCorp. He was the architect of dropping the “Corp” and/or “Bank” from the company name in favor of the symbol you see at right.
That made Key one of just three companies in the US bearing an eponymous symbol for its name. Shell and Apple are the other two.
Key made a strategy of getting people to see the Key logo and associate it with “bank,” as in, “I need to stop by the Key on the way home.” The idea, Cone claimed, was to stop thinking of mass marketing — with all of its efficiency and logical, numbers-driven strategy, and think of “marketing to segments, eventually to a segment of one.” So then came emerging affluents, wealth management, small business, middle market, large corporate — all of those categories based on grouping customers in some logical way, then changing strategy to target them.
This requires information about customers and prospects. When it comes to social media, that information is scattered to the four winds, unless you’re on Facebook. Twitter’s foray into geo-location, Foursquare, and many other social media firms are trying to gather as much data about YOU as possible to facilitate what is a pretty old marketing model.
Just as at the onset of the Web Age you had hundreds of companies popping up to “help” companies enter the Internet realm, now at the onset of the Social Media age you have companies popping up to “help” companies enter this realm. The part that twists my noodle is when companies purport to know how to measure social media come up with yowlers — like the Vitrue Facebook fan value imbroglio, the Altimeter study on correlations between social media activity and stock appreciation, and now Vitrue’s assertion that frequency of mention in social media is somehow a reflection of its social media reputation.
Vitrue offers a chance to compare brands in a handy Flash gobo that produces a cool pie chart. Just for fun, I compared Ford (which Vitrue pronounces its winner) with a couple of random words — sure enough, pop “the” in there, and you find upteen thousands (OK, 134,000) ‘somethings’ and the aforementioned cool pie chart. Ooh, and there’s a bar chart too! So kewl. W00t!
I could go on for 1,500 words, but won’t. It’s another cow pie pretending to be a metric. Resist this assault on rational thinking.
Hooked on PR Research
Monday, March 22nd, 2010One of the great professional pleasures of my life involves an academic conference filled to the brim with fascinating public relations research. It’s the International PR Research Conference put on by the Institute for Public Relations, and I’ve attended four of the past five years. That it’s held early in March in Miami, Fla., has NOTHING to do with it!
OK, well, it has a little bit to do with it. The tropical breezes feel especially fine in the icy wake of February in Cleveland, and there is terrific food, shopping, pleasant walks and an excellent pool. But, other than that, it’s all business for three days.
I’ve had the good fortune to present at IPRRC twice; the first time, 2008, I presented a paper with my research pal Dr. Julie O’Neil of Texas Christian University that covered one large company’s internal communication program, focusing especially on the measurement of the work. It won an award, of which I am very proud indeed – the Jackson-Sharpe Award for research by an academic and a practitioner (I’m not the academic, or wasn’t…).
This year, I presented a work in progress, an exploratory study of corporate blogs and Twitter activities, with an eye on whether they’re demonstrating James Grunig’s Excellence Theory – are they conversations? – or other PR theories.
The idea is to see what actually IS in this space for 18 companies – the work is ongoing (frantically; the final paper is due May 1), and I was able to share a few key findings.
- There’s a lot of using social media as a broadcasting tool – no two-way, no evidence of symmetry (mutual change) – and persuasion, therefore, still rules.
- There are a couple of firms that are doing yeoman’s work and engaging in conversations – there are also seven or eight companies who’ve abandoned their blogs since December 2009.
- One industrial giant, interestingly, has subject matter experts blog and then engage engineers and customers in a discussion about improving the product – this is a rarity.
- Twitter as link-bait is quite in evidence.
- The Cluetrain may have left the station, but it’s creeping along a siding, not hurtling on a MagLev track.
This is hardly conclusive or particularly scientific – that’s why we call the paper exploratory. Dr. O’Neil and I have more work to do this coming month, but this paper is intended to be the first of three. Next step is a qualitative discussion with some of the people behind social media at our subject companies, followed (we hope) by a quantitative survey of users of corporate blogs and their associated Twitterverse (we’ll see; that’s going to take some cash…).
In the meanwhile, stay tuned over the next few days as I recount some of the work that impressed me the most at IPRRC this year. Once our paper is done, we’ll share.
Driving Me Crazy: Southwest Didn’t Err
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Sometimes I really think the end of the republic is nigh. A large man who usually buys two seats (because he is so large) wants to snag an earlier flight which has only one seat, cannot fit without discomfort to himself and his hapless row-mates, so he cries, “discrimination!” Oh, and he also has a new film coming out soon. Hmmmmm. Grrrrrr.
According to a story in the Newark Star-Ledger website, Kevin Smith fit into the middle seat with the armrests down, but the flight crew believed he was a safety risk and removed him from the aircraft. Smith activated his 1.6 million Twitter followers to take Southwest Airlines to task.
The story clips from several bloggers, including Sonny Gill, the HuffPo and a couple of others. The debate seems to be over whether airlines need to make accommodations for “persons of size.”
Southwest has a policy. If you’re big, buy two seats. Smith knew the policy and often did so, according to numerous media reports. As a frequent traveler, I know that it’s good to get home early if you can. But if my choice is to wait a while and have my comfy two seats instead of being a human Panini, I’m waiting.
We all know that air travel today is like bus travel in 1966 (which I remember, thanks) — crowded into old, creaky seats, mashed together, with substandard sanitary facilities and somewhat, er, limited cuisine. Southwest does a fab job, in my book, of making a rather unpleasant task bearable, mostly with good cheer, Heineken and tasty bags of peanuts.
I don’t think they needed to apologize.
I can’t shake the idea that the esteemed Mr. Smith is subscribing to the old adage that all publicity is good. I wonder if we compare movie openings press coverage, that his clip count will be higher this time around.
Effective Messaging is Not Passe
Thursday, January 7th, 2010As 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.
Cautionary tales on Twitter ‘metrics’
Friday, December 4th, 2009The 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.
Objectives most critical element in measurement
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009One smart PR pro told me years ago that even the best road map is useless without a destination. Because so many communicators are struggling to understand the role of strategy in a world of fascinating tactics, it can seem like the universe is throwing map after map to us, shouting “you need this right now!”
When I step back from “being strategic” (quite a trick for someone once called, with some derision, “strategy boy”) it is no exaggeration to say, echoing the travel metaphor, that the best strategy is useless without an objective.
Strategic objectives need three things: 1) a benchmark. You need to look back to see where you’ve been. 2) A target. You need to look ahead and see where you’re going. 3) A time period. You need to articulate how long it’s going to take to get from where you were/are to where you want to be. If you’re missing any of those things, chances are good that you don’t have a strategic objective.
The trick is, too often, we set objectives with no clear understanding of where we are, let alone where we were. That’s where research comes in. It’s right out of PR 101 — start with research before you launch a campaign — and we find lots of reason not to do the research. Sometimes it’s related to cost, sometimes to our own skillsets. We like to think of ourselves as creative geniuses, unencumbered by such trivialities. This attitude is especially prevalent in media relations, where our relationships and seat-of-the-pants skills can mean so much in a crisis; when things go right in our activities, that can reinforce the perception that PR is art, rather than science.
Of course, our “gut” is merely the application of our accumulation of experience, both in terms of time and in terms of education. We think we know what our employees, or our customers, for example, know/think/feel about our organization, when we could remove any uncertainty with some simple research.
But, I digress — the objective-setting process is even more important when considering social media. Too many organizations are jumping in without a clear idea of what they want to accomplish. More on this topic to follow.
What about your communication planning process? Does it start with objectives?
