Posts Tagged ‘@commammo’

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Web Tools Expanding (Slowly) into Internal Communication

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

A small but eager group of professional communicators met 7 September to explore the current state of Web tools in internal communication and found a slow, but steady increase in their use.  Twitter-based #ICChat totaled more than 200 tweets in a fast-paced, hour-long online discussion from 2-3 p.m. North American Eastern Time.

The most basic tools — e-mail and intranets and RSS — are expectedly common, but social tools — blogging, varieties of microblogging (such as Twitter) and shared document management are seen as near-term priorities.

@irosen: Q1: There is an increased demand on “basics” found on the internet such as RSS feeds, microblogging and embedded media #icchat

@Wedge: Slowly reducing our reliance on emailing Word documents around; moving to intranet web pages and shared space on intranet for docs #icchat

Microblogging, including Yammer, offers the potential for collaboration and instant access, according to the company website. The tool could lower data processing costs by redirecting communication away from e-mail, particularly for the short, direct sort of questions-and-answers an employee might need on the spur of the moment. I made the same argument for RSS and other tools

@CommAMMO: One angle @csledzik is to quantify amt of email traffic – if you banned Word doc attch’s in fav of Google docs/Sharep methods #icchat

@CommAMMO: @wheati @irosen Less email through the wall means lower data proc costs – RSS is seemless, no? #icchat

But reducing direct cost wasn’t a prime driver in one person’s opinion:

@wheati: @CommAMMO @irosen @Wedge Weren’t concerned with data cost. Interested in ease, security of doc access. And “one stop” shop for info. #icchat

Trying to reduce e-mail — for the sake of employees’ productivity — is a critical factor, in my opinion. Aggregating nonessential (but still important) material is a decidedly old-school response, though social tools offer an advantage beyond financial impact.

@jpchurch: We’re about to launch a complete intranet re-do, and introduce more targeted info & collaborative tools. Still far too many emails. #icchat

@jgombita: Q1 If staff, clients R spread out (geog’phy), working with wiki (or Google docs) is effective and inexpensive #icchat

@csledzik: So theres 2 objtvs: 1) reducing data proc. $ & incr’g knowledge sharing. Soft goal is key, but not the driver. #icchat

There currently is no organization I know of which has gotten knowledge management particularly right — though many have made progress: Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Knowledge predates the Web, using Lotus Notes databases to gather info from employees and make it available. Kind of early crowdsourcing…

Microsoft’s Sharepoint suite — with its Wiki-Blogging-Discussions, etc. — came up a fair amount as a means of supporting knowledge sharing, with one participant looking for guidance on initial deployment.

@tnerko: Most excited about #SharePoint for wiki features as most in my company on a 3 year rotation and knowledge leaves often #icchat

The embrace of web tools within the workplace (particularly social media) is a referendum in organizational trust, transparency, according to one participant:

@csledzik: .@CommAMMO I see mgmt thatNot comf. w/ trust or transparency. Don’t understand benefits of sharing inter/externally. #icchat

The latter part of that tweet is pretty close to the truth: Internal communication, generally, isn’t as highly regarded in the workplace as is media relations. We shouldn’t be surprised that internal audiences are subject to fantasies of tight control — one senior leader told me that internal communication was, “a warm-fuzzy for employees” who don’t really care about the business.  It was some years ago, so I’m hopeful that opinions have moderated. But the advent of social media has shaken business leaders to their very boots in fear of loss of control. Control, by the way, that they haven’t had in 50 years, at least.

@wheati: A concern is also about company reputation. Exes want to control and package it, but SM is about neither. #icchat

@jgombita @pointsoftrue that’s why the key is guidelines #icchat

Indeed, guidelines are critical. The trick is to convince leaders that their employees can be trusted to follow them. This is a huge issue in regulated industries, such as securities firms, banks, medical.

The too-fast conversation wrapped up talking about how these web tools — in particular intranets — are measured.

@Wedge: To Q4: behaviour change. Impact, rather than ‘hits’ (although ‘hits’ are a baseline to indicate use / usefulness. #icchat #intranet

@wheati: Loosely…% of front line adopting RSS was one measure. #icchat

@CommAMMO: @wheati Tying the stats back to outcomes, even just simple correls is helpful – language of C-suite. #icchat

@tnerko: Word of mouth and feedback links for now, looking forward to commenting in sharepoint and will run focus groups as well #icchat

Next #ICChat is 21 September, 2-3 pm Eastern (North America), and we’re open to suggestions as to topic and potential guests. Hope to see you then.

What would you add to this? How can we make #ICChat better? Use the comments, or send me an email.

Sean Williams can help you: Consulting, Strategic Planning, Measurement, Training, Writing/Editing.

CommAMMO: One angle @csledzik is to quantify amt of email traffic – if you banned Word doc attch’s in fav of Google docs/Sharep methods #icchat
6:16 pm CommAMMO: @wheati @irosen Less email through the wall means lower data proc costs – RSS is seemless, no? #icchat
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Posted in Internal Communications, Intranet, Measurement, Social Media | Comments Off

The ‘Professor’ Becomes The Student

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

It's 1992...AGAIN!

For 15 years, I’ve known that when my corporate career wound to a close, I wanted to teach, write and speak. That always has meant I’d need to get an advanced degree, and the question only was exactly when that would happen. The master plan was to start a master’s degree in 2009, which would have been the start of my second year at National City Corp. You want to make G-d laugh? Make plans.

My experience at regional bank National City began in January 2008, just in time for the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. By the end of the year, PNC had acquired National City with government help, and in short order, Communication AMMO was born. I flirted briefly with the idea of enrolling in a master’s program right away, but jumped on the small business train instead. Now, after nearly 18 months toiling through the Great Recession, and a year after beginning my teaching career at Kent State as an adjunct prof, the academic fire is burning pretty brightly in me.

So, I decided to start the next phase of my communication career with pursuing a master’s in public relations from Kent State University.

This presented an interesting sidebar — in my Theory of Mass Communication class, seven of my fellow students took my PR Theory and Ethical Practice course last fall, and one of them is in the PR Tactics course I’m teaching this fall.  No copying off Professor Williams!

I’m excited and a bit terrified — I was last a student about 20 years ago, and wonder if I still remember how to study.  Preparing to teach is an education in itself, but being accountable for academic readings and schoolwork is a dim memory. The first week of classes (I’m taking two) is under our belts, and I still have time to complete the initial assignments. I count that as a victory!

With three speaking engagements this fall (PRSA International, the Parma, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce, and the IABC Research and Measurement Conference), the two classes, the one I’m teaching, the twice-monthly Twitter meeting, #ICChat, and the position as membership director for IABC Cleveland, I’m not going to lack for things to do.

I hope to still remain active here and elsewhere in social media, but don’t be too surprised if my frequency drops and length of post shrinks.

Of course, there no doubt are many of you who are hoping for just such a reduction. Anyone want to write a guest post?

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Posted in Education | 9 Comments »

Mainstream Thinks it ‘Gets’ Social Media

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Two 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.

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Posted in Media Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 5 Comments »

Measurement Crucial to PR’s Business Value

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

My 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

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Strategy | 7 Comments »

Theater of the Absurd in Social Media Metrics

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

As 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 mass 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.

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Posted in Measurement, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Employee Engagement: HR Claptrap, or Communication Result?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

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.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, Research, Strategy | 8 Comments »

Amanda Chapel is Still Relevant, and Important

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Mark W. Schaefer’s {Grow} blog carries an interview with Web. 2.o critic Amanda Chapel this week that asks whether the acerbic commenter is still relevant.  I believe Amanda remains most relevant. The rivers of Kool-Aid flowing in social media need to be dammed (and damned) and few of us consistently do so.

I’m grateful that Amanda included me in her list of “critical thinkers” along with Kent State prof Bill Sledzik, Ike Pigott, Joel Postman and Mark; that’s high praise from an important voice.

Look, I’m a committed capitalist, so I don’t begrudge anyone from making money, in particular, people who are early adopters and make the personal investment needed to stay just ahead of the crest of a wave. A bunch of people have done so, and are making a terrific living at it.

Some of those people don’t have anything but an expertise at sales and a gift for jargon to qualify them, and that’s a big problem in social media. Consider that we don’t even have licensing for mainstream PR and marketing — and think about how much really bad advice organizations get from those professions.”

At least in PR and Marketing there are longstanding professional associations with codes of ethics, increasingly strong academic and theoretical foundations, and a body of research-based knowledge (Cutlip, Center, Broom, 10th ed., p 120) that qualify us as members of a profession. This is despite our many weaknesses, including the presence of our own charletons.

Social media isn’t even there yet, and it needs to get there soon in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Despite worthy efforts from Institute for PR Measurement Commission colleagues Katie Paine, Don Bartholomew and a few others, we’re still working on how best to measure social media effectiveness beyond output metrics.

We need Amanda to continue to call out snake oil salespeople, foggy logic, asinine commentary and the real danger of a lost of authoritative, professional conduct in such a fast growing area of communication practice. That she does so with wit, style and occasional vulgarity keeps the stew from being too bland.

So, count on me not only to declare Amanda relevant, but for vote #3 for the return of Strumpette — 140 characters at a time isn’t enough space.

As for “her” anonymity — I have been of two minds about it, both “yea” and “nay,” especially following my rather “eventful” introduction to Amanda last year. But in the end, I don’t think it affects credibility at all and it offers the freedom to focus on the message rather than its sender.

Finally, skepticism is not negativity, as I asserted last June. We surely are not lemmings, powerless in the thrall of the “wisdom” of the crowds, are we?

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Posted in News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 3 Comments »

A Manager Who Can’t Communicate Can’t Lead

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.” It’s been years since Peter Drucker offered that bon mot, but it certainly seems to be truth. The New York Times’ Corner Office feature, which runs Sundays on page two of the Business section, talks to business leaders of all stripe, and each of them has something to say about the importance of communication to their business style.

Dec. 6, Joseph J. Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings (the insurance broker whose name now graces the former Sears Tower in Chicago), was Corner Office’s subject. He said:

I spend 25 percent to 30 percent of my time calling my associates — whether they had a family problem or pulled off a great deal and brought in a new client, or saved a client. Two-minute phone call, or handwritten note. I can’t begin to tell you how important that stuff is. E-mails are easy, but sometimes they get in the way of really feeling how somebody feels about your effort.

Is it time consuming? Yes. But that’s what you’ve got to do…

Plumeri goes on to say that helping people understand and believe in the choices the company makes is essential to realizing business vision.

On Dec. 13, Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, a Netherlands-based information services company, says “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions” as she relates how her leadership style changed over time according to the communication styles of her team.

In the Netherlands, where our company is based, people really want to be heard early in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”

Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done.

Shocking news, really, that one’s leadership team expects to have a clear strategy in place before acting, and wants the freedom to choose how to accomplish the goals they’re responsible for.

What concerns me is how few middle managers (or even executive managers) have undertaken the sort of self-examination that both McKinstry and Plumeri evidently have. In 20 years, I’ve met only a handful who embrace the power of participative communication. By the way, they’re the leaders who typically win in the marketplace.

Why don’t more organizations evaluate the communication strength of their leaders?  One reason is the perception that you can’t hold people accountable for “soft” skills. Yet, we know that there are very strong correlations between effective communication behavior and employee understanding and comprehension. So, if we want an informed, educated workforce which understands the business and their role in it, their managers will need to be the ones providing context and leadership.

Therefore, let’s evaluate communication skills among managers and come up with ways of helping those managers improve and thrive. It’s not too difficult a concept.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 8 Comments »

Objectives most critical element in measurement

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

One 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?

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Still stuck on AVEs

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

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.

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

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