This post is about two related developments – the latest from "The Conclave" (aka the #SMMStandards Coalition), and "A New Framework for Social Media Metrics and Measurement".

Measurement standards

"Perhaps the most important Social Media launch of the year" is how Katie Delahaye Paine portrays it. This is so-Katie that I can actually hear her saying it right now (as she might hear me cry "the most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain"!)

Katie refers to a suite of social media measurement standards that represents the work of a collection of organisations (including AMEC, a full list is appended here) informally referred to as The Conclave. Following 18 months of long conference-calls, meetings, slidestacks and email threads, we have posted standards for:

1. Content and Sourcing
2. Reach and Impressions
3. Engagement and Conversation
4. Influence
5. Opinion & Advocacy
6. Impact & Value

Congratulations to everyone involved! A PDF of the definitions and status is available here. Comments remain open until the end of July, so dive in! I'll be feeding back some of the points I've stumbled across in considering a new framework...

A new framework

Having consistent definitions represents significant progress. It reminds me of the progress the Web Analytics Association (now the DAA) made more than a decade ago in formalising the analysis of website performance. And indeed of every other more established profession, not least my first love – engineering.

But what to do next?

The Oxford English defines a framework as a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. Now that we're close to having the component parts, subject to comments, we can turn our attention to the framework for their assembly so to speak.

Don Bartholomew and Richard Bagnall took on the mantle of reviewing the current landscape and presented their recommendations for a new framework at the AMEC summit. As Don writes in his accompanying blog post, their work seeks to answer the question: How do we take the standards work coming from The Conclave and operationalize it to create proper social media measurement?

Readers of my blog and my book The Business of Influence will know that I advocate integration of social media measurement into business performance management (BPM), of which the Balanced Scorecard is the dominant framework. If you're not familiar with this management approach, I recommend my slidestack for the Madrid summit, "What, exactly, is the value of social?", and perhaps my May 2013 ebook Attenzi - a social business story.

If you want an even shorter explanation of my advocacy, it goes like this – why reinvent the wheel?

So you can imagine my interest in the framework proposed by Don and Richard was piqued when the only mention BPM secured in Don's post is as follows: "There are certainly other ways to think about this (e.g. Business Performance Management) and we intend to possibly add others based on industry feedback and suggestions."

Remaining an advocate of BPM as the logical conclusion to this debate, I will review this proposed framework in that light. Here goes...

Comments on the proposed new framework

It's worth noting Don's clarification of the difference here between model and framework: "When we use the word model, we are referring to a representation of a system, in this case social media. In the original Valid Metrics Framework, the model used was the traditional sales funnel. A framework adds additional dimensions to the model and is operationalized with metrics."

1. Associated models

First up, I couldn't agree more heartily with the conclusion that the sales funnel is an inappropriate model in this context. As Don writes, it's "not the best way to model common uses of social media like customer relations and building relationships with stakeholder groups". And as I wrote in The Business of Influence, "the application of the marketing funnel to the horizontal axis [of the existing AMEC framework] may turn out to be a weakness in its ability to help to identify appropriate metrics if ‘action’ is translated simply in terms of ringing up the cash register."

However, there appears then to be a contradiction, at least in emphasis. Having referenced the criticality of 'social' when it comes to all stakeholder groups, Don and Richard pick out Forrester’s Customer Lifecycle and McKinsey’s Customer Journey models in the same paragraph as the phrase "social media marketing"; three references to a continued focus on the customer above all other stakeholders. I say there appears to be a contradiction, but fortunately the resulting model does not reference the customer exclusively. I fear however that the couching of the model may lead many to read it with the customer solely in mind.

Here's the proposed new model:

2. Audience

The model references the "audience". It quotes the new measurement standards definition of impact – "effect of a social media campaign, program or effort on the target audience". It also qualifies exposure – "create potential audience exposure".

I know I can be pedantic when it comes to words and their definitions, but our thoughts and behaviours are influenced by the very language we employ. In this instance, the Oxford English explains that audience means "the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event". With this in mind, I always think references to audience in the context of social media are inappropriate. It's only appropriate in terms of broadcast. I usually defer to the word stakeholders instead, and some prefer publics or constituencies (ie, those having a say). And at the end of the day perhaps "people" or "people with an interest or that matter" says it all.

3. Influence

The model clarifies "influence" by reference to the definition in the measurement standards, but the measurement standards as they stand only recognise the top level definition of influence presented in WOMMA's Influencer Guidebook, and not the accompanying qualification: "There are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. The potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/after)."

As I wrote in my post about the guidebook, I'd prefer to emphasise the second of these over the first if only for the simple reason that it's the very outcome that so-called influencer marketers seek. Indeed, what is the intended outcome of your marketing (customer) and PR (all stakeholders) campaigns, and the design of your organisation overall, if it's not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you'd like, and to be sensitive to how they'd like you to think and behave? Put like this, influence is the final outcome of any model in the context here, the consequence of which creates mutual value (and business profit, in the context of for-profit entities), or not.

4. Value

Under "impact" the proposed model defines value as "the financial impact". This is counter to the current standards documentation, which, following some last minute tweaks admittedly, defines value as "the importance, worth, or usefulness of something." ROI is one but not the sole way to express the value of something.

5. Advocacy

In my view, any model that acknowledges the possibility of advocacy emerging must also recognise opposition and advocacy for competing agenda. I also don't quite understand why advocacy comes after impact.

6. Programmatic-level, channel-specific and business perspectives

Here's the proposed new framework:

It recognises the need for tiered metrics ("programmatic-level, channel-specific and business perspectives") – a similarity it shares with or perhaps borrows from business performance management. Interestingly, the Balanced Scorecard also talks about perspectives, although with an emphasis on aligning human, information and organizational assets, processes and corresponding performance metrics with strategy.

6. Paid Owned Earned

Don writes that an alternative version of the framework employs the Paid Owned Earned media (POEm) taxonomy to address the framework's 'phases', and that this will be published shortly. The model also references "owned" and "earned" under "engagement".

I dislike this taxonomy for the simple reason that I haven't seen it contribute any strategic value. In fact, all I have seen it do is prop up 20th Century organizational silos and reinforce misconceptions (eg, that PR is focused on earned / unpaid media when in fact it's agnostic in this respect). See "The Influence View of Content" for more on this.

I wouldn't mind then if this alternative version didn't surface, but I do seem to be alone in my dislike of POEm.

7. Impact

The standards assert that "impact and value represent the ultimate outcome of a social media effort." I don't believe then that any framework can consider programmatic-level or channel-specific metrics in terms of impact. It just doesn't make sense to me.

The influence scorecard

Don, Richard and I have spoken at various lengths about this topic, and indeed the Influence Scorecard framework I have outlined to connect social media measurement into the Balanced Scorecard and similar BPM frameworks. Blog posts are a great way to exchange ideas and air points of view, and I hope such "working out loud" continues, but I wonder if AMEC and The Conclave might not host a workshop on just this topic.

Mr. Leggetter? Katie?

Members of the Conclave

• Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication
• The Chartered Institute of Public Relations
• The Institute for Public Relations
• The Public Relations Society of America
• The Council of PR Firms
• The Global Alliance for Public Relations
• The International Association of Business Communicators
• The Society for New Communications Research
• The Digital Analytics Association (previously the WAA)
• The Word of Mouth Marketing Association
• The Advertising Research Foundation
• Federation Internationale des Bureauxs d'Extraits de Press.

The Conclave's #SMMstandards initiative also includes:

• The Media Rating Council
• The American Association of Advertising Agencies
• The Association of National Advertisers
• The Interactive Advertising Bureau

and the following "client organizations":

• Dell
• GM
• McDonalds
• Ford
• P&G
• SAS
• Southwest Airlines
• Thomson Reuters.

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According to its website, the Open Mobile Alliance "was formed in June 2002 by the world’s leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content and service providers. OMA delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across all geographical boundaries, on any bearer network."

The OMA met today in Dublin to discuss aspects of big data, and I was invited to present on personal data, social media and social business.

I've met some great people today and we've covered some pretty geeky things between us, but the experience has left me with a renewed appreciation of the differences between 'net' and 'telco' people. For example, this was the first conference I've been to in many years that didn't have an agreed hashtag, or many people tweeting come to that. And mine was the only stack not to claim copyright, rather my normal Creative Common licensing. Trivial examples maybe, but indicative nonetheless of a different (but no less apposite) mindset.

I've tried my best to persuade a standards-setting collective to think harder about when to intervene and about the longer-term ramifications they might have on all the good stuff the Internet, the open Web and related technologies can do and are doing for humanity and our custodianship of the planet. That's not to undermine the value of standards, far from it, but as the saying goes, everything can start to look like a nail when you have a hammer.

I asked them to think about "humans" or "people" rather than "consumers" and "users", and about putting the facility for all humans to realise their full potential ahead of shareholders. That's not counter-capitalist. I put shareholders' best interests first by putting them second. You can find out more about this perspective in my recent ebook, Attenzi - a social business story.

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I’m fascinated by innovations in the language of innovation. Is it the inclinations of the innovator or the characteristics of the innovation that suggests new words and phrases? When and why is existing lexicon deemed inadequate? Why do we embrace some expressions yet others wither and die?

A quick browse at netlingo.com turns up such beauties as advermation, mouse potato, and idea hamster. All new to me, and for all I know dead already. I had a go a few years ago with Internetome to describe the physical manifestations of the Internet of Things, and let’s just say the word hasn’t made the Oxford English. Yet.

Enter the phrase “social business”, bandied around with increasing frequency. What is it exactly?

Well perhaps this particular turn of phrase is sufficiently nascent to mean different things to different people. The candidate meanings form a spectrum to my mind, with “an organisation that uses social media” at one end (with the hashtags #socmed and #socbiz used interchangeably), and a deep, transformative opportunity at the other. Whether or not such a profound transformation ends up being labelled social business, we’ve tried hard at Euler Partners to articulate what it might mean in less ambiguous terms.

In setting out our stall, the first assertion we make is that social media are the eggs in the social business cake... a memorable catchphrase we hope that conveys that social media is essential but far from sufficient to effect social business. And then things get a little separated from today’s typical worldview, which I guess is the property of anything that might be described as transformative. Here’s our thinking.

We don’t have (social) media for media’s sake, but to communicate. And we don’t communicate for communication’s sake, but to influence. You have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, and influencing and being influenced is part and parcel of organisational life. Indeed, of life.

Organisations have invested lots of money in information technologies over past decades to track the flows of time, money and materials, and now, with the advent of digital services, social media and powerful analytical capabilities, they can contemplate tracking influence flows too.

In our view, reputation management does not actually mean managing reputation, and brand management does not actually mean managing a brand. They mean actively attending to the business of influencing and being influenced such that the resultant beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are conducive to our achieving organisational objectives. There’s influence in everything an organisation does. And sometimes in what it does not do.

We define social business then as designing the organisation around those influence flows, connecting: its people, partners, customers and other stakeholders; data, information and knowledge in and all around it; more openly, productively and profitably with the application of social web, big data and related information technologies.

And because those influence flows are in constant flux, the design of the organisation is too. Critically, the organisation is no longer defined as the sum of its payroll either.

This is the organisational perspective of social business, but what of the human viewpoint? What about the everyday reality of individuals in a society that ‘gets’ social business? What question might we ask ourselves to gauge progression of this transformation in this respect?

Here’s a candidate.

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organisation (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build richer, more productive relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability, shared values and shared value?

We believe that organisations that pursue such a definition of social business are more likely to secure competitive advantage over those looking simply to apply social media technologies to support 20th Century ways of working. Hopefully, you get our meaning.

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The past several months have been hectic for the steering teams at AMEC and The Conclave ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid, 5th - 7th June. We've been trying to pull together a cohesive and cogent set of definitions for social media measurement, and my last post described just one such workstream, on defining influence.

It's gone very well so far I think, not least due to the earnest leadership from people like Barry Leggetter, Katie Delahaye Paine, Richard Bagnall and David Rockland. So well in fact that we're now left training our attention on perhaps the biggest question of them all: What's the value to my organization of doing all this stuff?

It's a tricky question once you've found all the good reason to ignore much of the smattering splattering the web, but one I believe can be approached effectively with diligence and professionalism. The slidestack here is my contribution to the debate, and I hope it motivates you to contribute your points of view.

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WOMMA's new guidance on influencer marketing begins with the assertion: "This is not an update to the 2008 WOMMA Influencer Handbook - this is a complete rewrite ..."

I'm not a WOMMA member but I am a special adviser to AMEC and The Conclave, and it was in this capacity that Brad Fay and I invested more than a few hours with WOMMA's Neil Beam to lend our insight and points of view and, we hope, help make this guidebook the complete rewrite it's turned out to be.

I've expressed Euler Partners' approach to influence in recent posts, notably "Influence - request for comments" (slidestack included below for your convenience), and we were delighted to have the opportunity to present these to the WOMMA team. In particular:

7 billion influencers

There are, I'm told, 7 billion of us on the planet, so there are 7 billion influencers. The new phrase then for those considered to be more influential than others is "key influencer". This may sound like semantics, but behaviour is affected by language. If practitioners don't appreciate the complexity of influence they will be less effective in their consultancy and practice.

A cohort

The mathematicians and data scientists presenting their work at the ACM SIGKDD Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining investigate what they call "influence maximisation" (see the slidestack for more information). Importantly, they've discovered that we can't readily attribute one individual with 'having' influence. We can only approach the problem by identifying a cohort of individuals who together may help the influence sought spread further than otherwise.

I'm particularly delighted then that there are seven references to "cohort" in the guidance.

Defining influence

We define influence as a change in opinion or behaviour. The guidance proposes: "The ability to cause or contribute to a change in opinion or behavior."

We still defer to our definition because it's the very outcome that so-called influencer marketers seek. Any quantitative attribution of influence being 'possessed' by an individual can only be qualified by looking for this outcome. This distinction has been recognised in the guidance however, and appropriately so:

"There are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. The potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/after)."

Reciprocity

So far so brilliant then. Yet we believe one thing is missing from the guidance, and from our experience of working with marketing practitioners and those intent on the excellence model of PR, this omission characterises the different emphases of the two disciplines.

We have a mantra: to influence better, be influenced better.

This reciprocity is not blatantly recognised let alone promoted in the guidance. The nearest thing to it comes in the listing of five key ethical principles: trust, integrity, respect, honesty, responsibility. You could argue that to build trust and demonstrate respect requires working as hard at being influenced by those that matter to you as trying to influence them. We think our mantra should stand alone from a pure effectiveness perspective however, and perhaps we can continue to exert influence as and when the guidance is next up for revision.

Visit www.womma.org/influencers now to get your copy of the guidebook.

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My new ebook is out today.

I'm really excited about it because I'm excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here's how the book is presented.

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

The story is designed to galvanize the organization.

As the tale unfolds, you’ll consider aspects of organizational design, business performance management, marketing, public relations, branding, complexity, and the imminent empowerment of the individuals that make up any and all organizations. In fact, although you’ll likely be reading the book in a professional capacity, you’ll be noting the implications for your other roles in life too.

Perhaps most controversially, the story begins to explore the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated management thinking for the past two decades.

I could write more here, but I've been doing a lot of that lately, so perhaps I should just invite you to click over to the ebook now.

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I've been writing Friday Roundups for five and a half years and this is my last one. The circulation has grown from eleven to nearly eleven thousand, we merged it into the CIPR three years ago, and I'm delighted it's carrying on in their safe hands.

We have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render "social media" in font size 100!

Increasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name "social business", and it's increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

I've tried to design one question to both convey what social business might be exactly and to give the person attempting an answer real pause for thought in relation to their own organisation. I think I'm making progress with the following question, what do you think?...

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organisation (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build richer, more productive relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability, shared values and shared value?

If this challenge whets your appetite for social business, allow me to finish my Roundup years with a plug. My new ebook tells the story of a team embracing social business, and it's out mid-May. Free. Hashtag #attenzi.

Thanks for your attention and enthusiasm over the years. All the best.

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You should not make edits to a Wikipedia entry when you have a conflict of interest, as any PR practitioner does in relation to their employer or client. Simple.

This Wikipedia rule is reflected precisely in the CIPR's Wikipedia guidance, published by the social media panel last summer and supported by PR bodies in Canada, Australia and South Africa. (Although not yet in the US.)

In actual fact, Wikipedia's rules for PR practice aren't necessarily that accessible or readily understood, which explains our effort last year to co-develop this more cogent guidance in full partnership with Wikimedia UK representing the Wikipedian community. It was a lengthy and detailed process, but very worthwhile I believe.

BP has been following these expectations to the letter. Its public relations representative has been engaging with Wikipedians on the talk pages of relevant entries, specifically regarding the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, but not editing entries directly.

And yet here's CNET's headline: "BP accused of rewriting environmental record on Wikipedia." It took the publication three days to update its article: "This piece was re-edited to stress that BP is following Wikipedia guidelines."

The "rage" CNET describes amongst Wikipedia editors is aimed as much at their own for taking suggested contributions from BP verbatim. But Wikipedians are also critical that the editor representing BP is paid by BP and "checks with his higher-ups before responding to any questions."

In Wikipedia speak, this is known as paid editing. As a PR practitioner, you are a paid editor when it comes to Wikipedia entries relating to your organisation or client. Wikipedia's corresponding policy asserts that "paid editing of a talk page is generally acceptable, but undisclosed paid editing of a policy page is forbidden. All paid editors are required to disclose their paid status on both their user page and on the affected article's talk page."

BP's editor did just that.

The excellence theory of public relations states that the profession is about working towards mutual understanding to build goodwill. Well, it seems to me that misunderstanding still reigns here.

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See you there?

To coincide with this event, I'm calling for comments regarding the standards setting process for the concept of influence ahead of the AMEC European Summit in June. Please take a look at this stack, and influence proceedings :-)

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Student elections were at fever pitch, and there was a real energy about campus. The students at The Media School were on top form – in fact, I usually only get the calibre of questions they threw at me days or weeks after someone has digested my book or a presentation. So thanks to everyone who attended and participated.

HT to @lauramanninen, @kbadders, @hannaherowley, @edinjel, @JessicaNorthPR, @lottsGC, @FleurieFM, @morellopr, @BenjaminDeacon.

Here's the stack.

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