Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

« Older Entries

Crisis Analysis, SocMed Use, Get Globe/Mail Attention

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Canada’s outstanding The Globe and Mail has two stories today worth noting.  Vancouver, B.C., retailer Lululemon is using Twitter to gather intel from its customers about what sizes and colors to stock; British Petroleum gets second-guessed in its crisis communication strategy under the headline, “Lessons in Leadership Spill from BP.”

BP’s feckless communication strategy, especially demonstrated by company CEO Tony Hayward’s frequent gaffes when speaking off the cuff, deserves to be pilloried. Hayward and company were obviously led by lawyers in this regard, minimizing the potential impact of the disastrous gusher, appearing too rarely in public and pointing blame to subcontractors. Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” rang especially tone-deaf in the wake of 11 deaths and the potential for catastrophic wildlife impact (not to mention the economic peril for the gulf fishing industry.) Several communication experts get quoted in Wallace Immen’s excellent piece, including Michael Stern (Michael Stern Associates), Prof. Julian Barling (Queen’s University School of Business), and Guy Beaudin, (RHR International).

Lululemon sells athletic ware, and by all accounts does a bang-up job of it. Some of the success, according to CEO Christine Day, is due to its use of social media — Twitter and Facebook.  Reporter Marina Strauss quotes Day: “We learn more about [which items are in demand] on Facebook and social media: what are the guests really screaming for, and so we use [the feedback] to get a little bit more indication.”

Keeping an eye on its 127,000 Facebook fans and 32,000 Twitter followers gets Day and company a faster view than its store performance metrics (and offers perspectives from people who are just thinking about going to the store, rather than having bought something there — that’s an interesting view on potential demand, the pipeline, some call it.)

The social media use has two purposes, according to the article — to gather information, and to drive traffic to the company website. When we’re looking for ways to measure the effectiveness of social media, website traffic is more often cited than the research value, which is a pity.  Going back to the ROPE method of communication planning (Research, Objectives, Programming, Evaluation), you don’t have anything without the research.

If social media served no other purpose than market intelligence, it’d still be worth the investment, no?

{P.s., my Canadian sojourn is nearly complete – back to a more regular schedule next week.)

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 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

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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.

  • Share/Bookmark

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

Two Important Reads

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Will all that’s been going on lately (teaching class, presentations, conferences, client discussions) I’m a little behind on my reading. Good thing Google Reader keeps stuff around for me.  Two pieces from the Harvard Business Review website (AP Style says that’s OK now) bear a close read, one on the use of Twitter-type tools for internal communications, and the other summarizes several new perspectives on business strategy.

Tools such as Yammer have brought Twitter capabilities (microblogging) into the enterprise. Authors Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd cover the cases of LG Electronics and Meredith Corporation in using Yammer and Socialtext to reduce the lengthy process of designing training programs and communicate speedily and across silos, respectively. Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity is worth your time.

In Strategy By Any Other Name, Walter Kiechel notes that speakers who usually discuss business strategy have been shoved aside by economists and journalists talking about the global financial crisis. He finds, however, that strategy has just gone a bit underground — it’s showing up “all over the place in contemporary management literature, albeit sometimes under different cover.”

Kiechel covers a lot of ground, with links to many resources. One that looks particularly interesting is The Power of Pull, by John Hagel and John Seely Brown.  Their core thinking is that the old economy “was based on ‘push,’ forecasting what would be needed or what would sell and then mustering resources to fulfill that demand.   The new world is one of ‘pull’ — find people and resources exactly when you need them, attract them to you even before you know they exist, and then pull the best from within them, and yourself, to achieve your potential.”

Certainly Hagel and Brown’s idea has history — we communicators have been trying to puzzle out the push vs. pull argument for a really long time (at least as long as I’ve been in this career, anyway.) I’m eager to add the book to my summer reading list.

In the meantime, check these two pieces out — and if you’re not reading HBR in some form, get on it.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Hooked on PR Research

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

One 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Twitter as link-bait is quite in evidence.
  5. 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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Public Relations, Research | 4 Comments »

Driving Me Crazy: Southwest Didn’t Err

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Sometimes 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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Crisis Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media | 7 Comments »

The Measurement Debate Continues

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The 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…

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 8 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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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?

  • Share/Bookmark

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

Cautionary tales on Twitter ‘metrics’

Friday, December 4th, 2009

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries