Metrica conducted a poll of PR professionals to find out what the consensus was in ters of How many messages are best. Here are the results!.

This study on Value of DTC Ads in Pharma is fascinating and not a little scary.
Is it just me, or is anyone else horrified that companies would spend $5 billion and not have solid data as to whether their efforts were working? Where is the shareholder outrage? Why aren't Boards of Directors demanding accountability.? And why is it that companies cheerfully spend billions on advertising based on bad data, and yet won't properly fund PR measurement? What's wrong with this picture?
The answer is that the dinosaurs of advertising are measuring success based on eyeballs and contacts not on real results. Can we say "I told you so?"

NH's own David Moore and John Zogby debated the methodologies and validity of polls on today's The Diane Rehm Show. -- Listen, learn and grow skeptical.

In case you know any one with an interest in measurement that's job hunting these days.. KDPaine & Partners is looking for someone to head up our sales efforts. We're also have a number of openings in our Berlin office, in case there are any skiiers or outdoorspeople out there that want to move to God's Country.

Not that we need another "grade" in our lives, but this will make some people feel important Twitter Grader - Measure Your Twitter Mojo.

And then I found this one as well:

Just to prove their IS life after (or more accurately in addition to) measurement-- my former COO, Jill Ury and her husband are featured in this great piece about their new restaurant, Gracie's Diner, now open on Deer Street in Portsmouth

This is a great piece eon how to measure your share of conversation on Twitterc using Tweetrush and Twist. The only problem is that most topics don't get enough "chatter" going to actually register on Twist. But if you're responsible for a major brand, this works.

I'll admit, I've never been a huge fan of New Jersey. I know nice people who come from there, but it's always been a place of too many people, too many stores and too many cars for my taste. And then I discovered  Sedge Island.
In one of those meant-to-be-moments, I was the only bidder on a weekend on Sedge Island being offered up as a raffle item at a conference I was speaking at 2 years ago. Having no idea what to expect, I checked out their website and blog, and decided to invite two friends to come with me. My friend Lisa I've known since 3rd grade and Sedge is not the sort of place I'd expect her to love, but she loves her husband and he feels about fishing  the way I feel about sailing, so I figured I'd be able to persuade her to come. If nothing else Barnagat Bay is fisherman's heaven. So we arrived via the pontoon boat on Friday morning and settled into this turn-of-the-century rustic cabin, (you can see how unhappy they were :) here we're eating the crabs we caught!

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We settled into bunk beds with a promise of a glorious view of the sunrise. We were not disappointed. This was our first sunrise on Sedge: Dsc_0525

We proceeded to spend 3 days kayaking, clamming, crabbing, fishing and reading in what has to be one of the most beautiful peaceful spots on the planet. We got so friendly with the local wildlife, I arranged a special photo shoot with my friend Segrit the Egret who was kind enough to pose for me as the sun set behind her: Dsc_0606

And, while I managed to avoid the subject of PR and Social Media Measurement for almost the entire three days, there is, nonetheless, a reason I'm writing about this in a PR measurement blog.

It all got me to thinking about reputation measurement and how, when I mentioned I was going to NJ, the most frequent response was that NJ and vacation in the same sentence constituted an oxymoron. Yet tourism is the second biggest industry in the state. And with places like this, (that's a link to all 200+ pictures I took while I was there ) it's not surprising.

But my point is in this YouTube and Flickr dominated era, we are all well aware of how reputations can be destroyed in a flash (and frequently without a flash). But they can also be changed by the same technology. Simply by showing them surprising photos of a place that you always associated with refineries and turnpikes, I've changed people's opinions.  So next time you're looking at your most recent image survey, trying to figure out what to do about it, don't spend hours trying to refine the message. Just remember that a few photos and/or one YouTube video is worth far more than a thousand words.

Once again the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications is putting on UGA Connect, which if it is anything like last year's conference, will be a very fun and fascinating discussion about social media. This year's measurement track will feature some of my favorite Measurement Mavens including Jim Fetig and Kathi Wallace of Georgia Tech and Kami Huyse.

This could be the silliest survey ever. I recently lost my stylus for my H P iPAQ and ordered a replacement from their on-line store, since you can't buy them in a store any more apparently. So today I received what has to be the silliest  email ever: 

Dear Customer,

Approximately 1 month ago, you purchased or registered the following HP product(s): HP iPAQ Universal Stylus Kit

As part of HP's continuous improvement program, we are interested in receiving your feedback getting these HP products up and running for the first time. It will take about 10 minutes and also provides an opportunity for you to instantly alert HP to any issues or concerns you are currently having. Your feedback will help us to continually improve the experience we deliver to our customers.

To participate in the survey, simply follow this link Take the survey

Thank you for your participation!

Best Regards,

HP Total Customer Experience & Quality Web Survey.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Mark Hurd's obsessions with metrics and HP's desire to measure everything but do you really need to know how long it took me to take a small plastic object out of a package and start using it? It's a stylus for pete's sake!I figured out how to use them while I was still in diapers, but back then they were called sticks.

Don't get me wrong,I'm all for customer satisfaction surveys, but this is a classic example of how a survey can actually result in a less satisfied customer, simply because they left everything up to an automated system.

Seems like an ordinary human might be able to go thru the list of products purchased and at least eliminate those things that have no moving parts and that replace parts that came with the product and presumably  people have known how to use since they first turned the product on.

More importantly, rather than spending the money on surveys like this, HP could improve satisfaction far faster by hiring better support personnel.

Show your support for PR measurement by clicking on this link to PR Weeks blog Competition - go to the lower right hand quadrant and click on PR Meaurement Blog!

Blame it on Do Not Call lists and the rising dominance of cell phones, but the cost of conducting market research via phone surveys has tripled in recent years. As a result, as much as our clients may want to listen to their audiences, fewer can afford to do so. So we decided we'd try using  social media instead. We're calling it "MarketFramer" because it's designed to help you better frame your messages for the marketplace.  What do you think?

Nary a day goes by without me looking at  list of messages we're tracking for one of our clients that I don't wonder how they can possibly expect reporters and/or bloggers to remember HALF of what they're trying to put out there.. Most of the time, our data shows that only one or two messages ever break thru the clutter, anyway. So thank GOD, Metrica has started this survey to find out:  What is the optimum number of messages to clearly communicate for an organisation?  Please give us your thoughts.

Nary a day goes by without me looking at  list of messages we're tracking for one of our clients that I don't wonder how they can possibly expect reporters and/or bloggers to remember HALF of what they're trying to put out there.. Most of the time, our data shows that only one or two messages ever break thru the clutter, anyway. So thank GOD, Metrica has started this survey to find out:  What is the optimum number of messages to clearly communicate for an organisation?  Please give us your thoughts.

As a long time premier executive member of United Airlines, I have to say that the Remove Glenn Tilton website definitely caught my attention. It's an extraordinary accumulation of horror stories, failures and gripes that only pilots could produce. It also makes me very very nervous about flying United in the future.
But what is truly amazing, is how clueless about social media the folks at UAL must be. First the site URL is www.glenntilton.com -- how COULD they have let THAT happen? Secondly either they're not listening at all, or the lawyers are telling them to shut up because there isn't any UAL management voice in any of this. A classic case of bad crisis management and worse social media management. 

Nathan Gilliat at the Net-Savvy Executive has just published  Guide to Social Media Analysis, 2nd edition.
I will admit that I lambasted Nathan last year for leaving KDPaine & Partners off his list, but it was still a great resources. This year's version is up to 145 pages and profiles 63 companies. So if you're trying to decide what you need and who you need to help you thru the jungle of social media measurement, this is the place to start.

Thanks to Kami Huyse for helping us understand: What Is Measurable in PR and Social Media Campaigns.

No computer aided content analysis is perfect, but having used and seen many of them, I would argue that Cymfony is the best of the lot. Well it seems they just proved it with this anlaysis of Visa and the Olympics.
It offers several great lessons. The first is the importance of digging into data and not just going with the supervision numbers. The second is the importance of defining tone correctly, and finally, it's a brilliant example of why you still need humans to figure out what all this stuff needs. As I've said before, Cymfony has done a really great job teaching computers to think like humans; KDPaine & Partners teaches humans to think like your customers :)

I had a most illuminating conversation with someone in my workshop last week. He asserted that there was no way to tie his social media efforts to organizational goals because his entire organization – a cable channel -- is focused on boosting "ratings' I accepted his assertion, and went on with the workshop. A few hours later, when we started the "develop your own dashboard" part of the workshop, I had the opportunity to dig into issue and I know that my perspective shifted, if not his. I asked him why ratings were so important. What is it about ratings that makes advertisers value them above all else 00 and therefore media organizations value them above all else?

Would advertisers be happy if ratings went up 20% but sales went down by 50%? Would they renew their contracts? Probably not. I think somewhere back in the annals of advertising history someone lost sight of the fact that ratings meant reaching a certain percentage of the population with a message that would convince people to buy something. And, that the assumption was that you spent all that money to buy all those eyeballs, he/she would buy something or believe whatever it is that you were telling them. However, in a world where the average individual is bombarded with 6000 messages a day, it no longer matters how many "impressions" you make, the impact is going to be less, because consumers are far more likely to be influenced by recommendations , word of mouth and other people like themselves, than they are by that ad for which you shelled out so much money.

So back to my friend who needed those ratings. For him, we can easily bypass ratings altogether and demonstrate to his advertisers that people were actually more engaged in his brand and actually y bought stuff. Thanks to readily available Web Analytics, we can easily demonstrate engagement, brand loyalty, purchase and numerous other valuable outcomes.

Now, you might argue that approach doesn't work in a B to B world. If you're selling a $1 billion contract, chances are you're not going to tie a story back to a purchase decision. But neither can you rely on last-century metrics. With traditional media, you calculated "Impressions" or opportunities to see by looking up the audited circulation figures of the publications in which your story appeared. We prefer to call them "Opportunities to See" because you're not really making an impression, rather you are creating an opportunity to see your message. The problem is that "OTS" doesn't translate into an online social media world.

First of all the "impression" counts provided by most services are notoriously unreliable. A 2007 audit by the Interactive Audit Bureau found that the discrepancy between the two leading providers of numbers was larger than the population of Texas. They still have yet to resolve the differences.

Secondly, anyone trying to evaluate communications in today's multi-media world, will inevitably end up comparing apples to lobster. How many eyeballs are reached by a story in New York Times the online version of which gets referenced in a blog, bookmarked on Stumbleupon and Twittered about? Certainly more than the traditional 1.1 million audited circulation rate, but how many more? If you're the PR person who may have had something to do with "placing" that story you're going to say A LOT more. And use the biggest number possible. If you're the competition, you're going to use the smallest number possible. Either way, the system is just full of possibilities for manipulation and inaccuracy.

The solution is to measure your share of conversation against the competition. We at least know that share of conversation impacts your business. What is your share of conversation on Digg, on YouTube, on Twitter, and in the blogs that discuss your marketplace? Compare that to your share of discussion in your trade media, the business press or whatever other media your customers pay attention to. And leave those AVEs and impression counts to people who don't care as much about accuracy and ethics.

It's not exactly Paris Hilton or the Olympics, but looking at the PRWeek Blog Competition, the fact that this blog and Measuring UP won the last round tells us something.
I was also fascinated to find this blog ranked 17 in the top 100 PR Blogs.
My theory is that for years there was an inherent belief in the value of PR that made it not so necessary to measure. Sure the early adopters signed up with KDPaine & Partners and my competitors, but I'm guessing that less than 20% of all corporations are measuring their PR with any degree of accuracy.
The arrival of Social Media on the Communications stage has changed all that. Communications is happening in places and ways never before imagined. Money is increasingly being spent in Social Media and my belief is that measurement has always "followed the money."  The more dollars get spent, the louder the call for measurement.
The boon for PR is that you really can't talk about measuring Social Media without measuring those fundamental elements of PR -- relationships, beliefs and outcomes. Social Media is incredibly frustrating to those AVE Advocates (we prefer to call them menaces) that insist on counting eyeballs and applying old-world metrics to a new world of communications. With luck, those dinosaurs will soon die off and a new world of accurate measurement will emerge.

If you care at all about Social Media Measurement, vote for the amazing Panel that Kami Huyse has put together for next year's South by Southwest Measure This! Practical Ways to Quantify Social Media Results.

Diva Marketing Blog's done the industry a great service in putting together this post -- lots of good stuff here.

12 tips to get a better tan, and a better measurement program, plus book reviews and more in The Measurement Standard, KDPaine & Partners' Newsletter of Public Relations Measurement.

This new report is a must read : New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations.

I love the Brits -- only they would have a government body smart enough to decree: Don't cite 'hits' as a measure of website traffic!

Vote for my blog in the PR Week Blog Competition - I'm up against Phil Gomes (its the lower left quadrant) and as much as I like Phil, he is from Edelman, and they aren't exactly what I'd call Measurement Mavens :)  So lets show them that really good measurement really matters