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 ‘ROI’
Talking About PRSA, IABC, IPR on PRConversations Blog
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Another IABC International Conference…
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010I recognize that if I’m not a speaker at the big IABC soiree, I’m probably not the target audience for it. I’m not surprised, therefore, that my first blush reaction to the Toronto gathering wasn’t particularly positive. My goal for attending this year was to meet some new people and make contact with some who I haven’t seen in a while. I hope to eventually get some business from it, but really just need to expand the network.
The programming and format are nearly identical to my first International, in 1995, also in Toronto. That one was a revelation — I was just 4 years or so into the profession, and everything was new. Every session offered fascinating insights or enhanced skills. I met scores of people and hung out with many, enjoying my first trip to Toronto and my first extended business trip in several years.
In 1997, L.A. was a different experience. Many of the speakers were the same as two years earlier, and in 2002 at Chicago, there were just a few sessions that really caught my eye. So I took a vacation from the big show until this year.
Things that impressed me:
Erin Dick from Pratt & Whitney — a social media case study that wasn’t from a Silicon Valley firm… Her use of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to help support P&W’s client (the U.S.Government) on the selection of an engine for the Joint Strike Force fighter was off the charts — brilliant. And it had a fairly strong measurement component. I decided to Tweet the session instead of trying to take notes. The benefit was that I had a great summary, though my thumbs threatened to lock up from BlackBerry-itis…
William Amurgis from American Electric Power — Looking for use of social media in internal communications? Amurgis delivered. AEP’s blogs, discussion boards, employee-uploaded photos, etc., set a high standard of participation. The company’s intranet philosophy? Enhance employee productivity, reinforce corporate messages and provide a place to meet for all employees. Everything has to pass through that frame, or it doesn’t happen. And, rather than buy software solutions, AEP makes their own. Amurgis has a designer and a developer on his staff.
The UnConference — OK, it was a bit different than other UnConferences (usually low-or-no-cost, open to anyone; you had to buy the day (at least) for the IABC Conference to get in, and it wasn’t cheap) — but the method of operation was different and fun. There was no pre-set program, just a list of ideas posted on the TorontoTalks website (that a few people did discuss first), and three 5-minute “keynotes” — very informally delivered. The three-hour session on Sunday afternoon was comprised of four 25-minute blocks of time with six possible topics (being held at six tables). We wrote on sticky notes our question or suggested topic, then stuck it on a flip chart in an empty time slot. The writer could lead the discussion, or someone else could. I talked measurement (what a shock!) with seven other folks and it was fascinating. We didn’t solve the ROI question in full, nor did we get into other facets of communication, but it still was valuable and fun.
The thing is, the (nice) venue, formal structure and overwhelming size of the show made it hard to connect with people. Even the formal networking session (the big one held on the floor of the exhibit show) was just an hour long — not near enough time to connect. (I also didn’t attend Monday’s sessions — none particularly grabbed me. That might have inhibited my networking activities, so shame on me!)
The cost was pretty high for a new entrepreneur, not only in travel but in the conference fee. I’ll be considering very carefully before jumping on again soon. But, if I wind up as a speaker…
{FYI, I’m speaking in November at IABC’s Research and Measurement Conference in Seattle, as well as at the PRSA National conference in DC in October. I’m also willing to come to chapter lunches, etc., and can make a deal for my PRSA/IABC fellow members!}
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.
Survey: Internal Comm Effectiveness ‘Important Concern,’ But…
Thursday, April 1st, 2010Researchers Dr. Juan Meng of the University of Dayton (Ohio) and Dr. Bruce K. Berger of the University of Alabama cut to the chase in their research presentation at the Institute for PR International PR Research Conference. Their first finding? “Though communication effectiveness has been an important concern for organizational leaders, the assessment of communication effectiveness has not been widely applied by using business outcome metrics in organizations.” Sigh.
Meng and Berger used both the results from the 2007-2008 IABC Research Foundation/Watson Wyatt international survey of senior communicators, and a series of in-depth interviews with 13 IABC Gold Quill winners to look for process links between internal communication effectiveness and organizational financial performance.
For me, this represents a sort of Holy Grail: we internal comms experts know that our work is impactful, but have lacked the hard evidence of causality that we perceive the C-suite respects and demands. I was disappointed, yet again, though that first finding is by no means the only one. In brief, the other five are:
- Measuring internal comm effectiveness should be standard operating practice.
- There’s lots of measurement going on, evaluating awareness/understanding; engagement; job performance; employee behavior, and improvement in overall business performance.
- Everyone has good reasons why measurement isn’t as robust as it should be, and they’re the usual culprits — lack of time/money/staff and the pain of finding actual cause-and-effect toward business results.
- The measurement approaches used are employee surveys, employee participation in communication activities and manager surveys.
- Four valuable purposes for internal communication: Explaining/Promoting programs and policies; educating about culture and values; providing information about performance and financial objectives, and helping employees understand the business.
At Goodyear, we made great progress toward true outcome measurement for internal communications, but didn’t quite get there. We did establish a strong link between employee knowledge/comprehension, intranet use and managerial behavior, but never got the chance to take everything to the organizational performance level.
At National City Corporation (the regional bank), our focus from the first day I arrived was on external measurement, for a variety of reasons. But the internal side wasn’t ignored — we were a Gallup Q12 company, and despite the wretched economic conditions and horrific, calamitous financial performance of the company, we still topped 94% participation in the Q12. Right until the last moment, we were using Q12 results in our planning process, as well as beginning to use editorial content more strategically. But, again, we weren’t reaching the business outcomes level of measurement.
Here’s a quote from one of Meng & Berger’s in-depth interviews:
I think the biggest challenge in measurement continues to be convincing clients to spend, not so much the money, but to spend the time. As the industry develops, I don’t have a hard time in convincing them about the validity of measurement, but they are reluctant to actually take the time away from business to actually administer surveys or focus groups or some other measurement tools.
Looks like we have to continue making those tools easier to use and more valuable, even as we continue to scale the mountain tops for the Holy Grail.
Communicators too often out the door in hard times
Monday, March 8th, 2010I’ve been a regular reader of the New York Times’ Corner Office series, where they interview a senior executive, usually a CEO, about how they hire, how they lead and manage and what they do. There is a central theme that runs through literally all of these interviews: communication excellence.
Every exec talks about how important communication is to their work — both by them and with them. Of course, there is a bit of the “usual” about that kind of statement. No one would ever say, “communication is not important at all in my work.” But what I find striking about this observation is that ostensibly, we public relations people are the experts in communication, but get too easily dismissed from the leadership table. We are welcome during times of crisis (the one time, it seems, that the mahogany row types understand our value) but aren’t regularly consulted about the communication dynamics of decisions.
Additionally, financial pressures often lead to cuts in the communication staff that could help the company deal with the financial issues, particularly internal communication. It’s a fact that internal communication pros earn less than their media relations colleagues and tend to be lightly regarded. I’ve encountered this in my own career. I feel reasonably comfortable saying that generally, businesses don’t care about internal communication very much at all. They care about “getting the word out” internally, or “making sure we’re all rowing in the same direction.” But honest improvement in the process of communication within the enterprise? Not so much.
Why?
Some of the issue emerges from a distinct lack of communication curriculum in colleges of business. Marketing, management theory, finance and operations, but no communication theory that could help leaders understand their workers (and customers) better. More of the blame goes to convenient financial thinking. It’s easier to impose across-the-board cuts than dig into an income statement and excise the real waste, duplication and nonessentials.
One company had a largely decentralized communication structure that permitted significant duplication in communication infrastructure. Some such duplication is inevitable in a multi-national company, but why have 40-something different intranets, run on multifarious platforms? Why not unify newsletter design under a singular brand? This company really has no idea what it spends on communication, because the units are autonomous — the financials are opaque.
Canada’s Bombardier (a few years ago) published a paper newsletter that permitted regions to wrap their own around the corporate version. All the design elements reinforced the brand. You knew it was a Bombardier newsletter whether you were in Montreal or Dublin, Ireland. That kind of consistency is economical.
How about automating manual processes on the intranet? Sounds like it should be an easy sell, but companies look at the up-front costs and decide to forget it.
I fault us. As the putative experts, we should have a deep understanding of how moving communications levers will create value for the business.
But too many of us don’t have a clue, and that means, when the going gets tough, we’re the ones who get told to get going…out the door.
The Measurement Debate Continues
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010The estimable Shonali Burke has started a fortnightly Twitter chat — #MeasurePR — that begun 2 February, with the equally estimable Katie Paine as first guest. I caught only the last half, which featured good discussion and the usual paroxysm over advertising value equivalency. AVE is bete noir for @KDPaine and @Shonali, who both are categorical in their condemnation of the practice. A couple of participants, however, say that there still is demand on the part of clients for AVE.
The Institute for PR Measurement Commission condemned AVE last fall, AMEC (the professional organization for media evaluation firms) has declared its intent to find a logical replacement, and a recent paper offered Weighted Media Cost as an element worthy of inclusion in measurement programming. Where does this leave us?
I have no stake in this game. My personal belief is that AVEs are bad science, but I’m also sensitive to the need to help clients. AVE is easy for a client to grasp — “if we paid for the space our story ran in, it would have cost us X.” Katie points out that doctors won’t prescribe a medicine if it’s not right for the patient. AVE isn’t life and death — but what do we do after we’ve explained the drawbacks and negatives and the client still wants it?
I can’t help but put myself in that situation — young company, trying to latch on with a client. Do I tell the client “No. I won’t do AVE” and risk having him/her say, “Well then, I’ll go find someone who will!” ?
#MeasurePR had much more great content than this AVE nonsense, and I really do wish we could collectively move on. I’m done writing about the debate, at least for now.
Looking for a quick way to improve measurement?
Start setting objectives and measuring your attainment of them. Stop worrying about generating lots of eyeballs and do some audience research to reach the right ones. Start looking for correlations between your various communication outputs (and outtakes) and business metrics, such as revenue, cost savings, cost avoidance, time saved, help desk traffic, speed of benefits enrollment, travel system savings, expense systems savings, etc…
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?
Still stuck on AVEs
Monday, November 23rd, 2009The 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.
Discussions you should read
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009Several good ones:
Rich Becker — great discussion in the comments on social media concepts…
Brian Solis — Do we need to redefine “influencers?”
Chuck Hemann — What impact on social media use/adoption does organizational culture have ?
Paul Seaman — The Excellence theory says PR is about fostering relationships. Paul disagrees.
