Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

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

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

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

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

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

Monte Lutz:

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

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

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

More on this panel in another post.

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