Reputation, Research, Relationships and Messages

What Big Data Is (From a PR and Communications Perspective) and Why It Matters

2014-12-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I’ve been studying Big Data and how PR and communications people are (or are not) using it.Today, it seems, the most common way we are using it is to spot trends in social media so we can react to them. While this is useful, I don't believe it to be what is most important about Big Data for communications.

However, I find many folks are confused about what, exactly, Big Data is.

What Is Big Data?

According to Wikipedia:

Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand data management tools or traditional data processing applications.

While that definition is good, it is not particularly useful for communications people. Assuming the work of communicators is to persuade and manage relationships with stakeholders, I think it’s more useful to think of Big Data as burgeoning amounts of data on stakeholder behavior.

Now I will paraphrase Wikipedia:

People and organizations are creating and using these larger data sets, because they can derive new and useful insights by combining a number of individual smaller data sets into one large data set. This allows users to apply statistical and other search tools to the combined database to “spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.”

Where Is Big Data Coming From?

The individual data bases that are being combined into Big-Data type databases are coming from a number of places. Here are some of them:

Traditional sources, such as:

· Government data (e.g. broad demographics, voting records)

· Product warranty forms (e.g. names, addresses)

Newer sources, such as:

· Retail store loyalty cards (e.g. purchase history, household demographics, total spending, seasonal spending, media purchases)

· Credit cards (e.g. purchase history, household demographics)

· Health care records (e.g. ailments, prescription history, treatment history)

Online sources, such as:

· Internet activity (e.g. browsing history [favorite sites and media], purchases, sites from which purchases are made)

· Facebook (e.g. comments, likes, timelines)

· Smart phones (e.g. shopping, travel patterns, localities)

· Cars (e.g. travel patterns)

· Smart houses (e.g. when you're home, household appliances you have)

· Personal health monitoring (e.g. exercise habits, factors suggesting overall health)

· Records of personal interactions (such as a conversation at your door with a political representative. While this kind of interaction would be considered traditional, recording notes from the conversation and putting them into a database is new)

There are undoubtedly many more sources of data and kinds of information that can be drawn from the sources above that I do not know about.

Why Does Big Data Matter To PR and Communications

As a consumer this is all a bit scary. But, from a communications perspective, it hints at the extraordinary power Big Data can have in helping organizations determine:

· What products and services to bring to customers and clients

· What to say about these products and services to encourage people to try them

· How to fine tune the selection of media to reach potential users with pinpoint accuracy

While these questions are oriented toward sales and marketing, Big Data can be used to address similar policy and operations questions for shareholders, employees, communities and other stakeholders.

When we consider customers alone, it is quite clear the insights Big Data can provide can be critical to successful communications. However, when we add in the total mix of stakeholders and the importance of balancing the wants and needs of each in order to ensure the organization succeeds in the long run, Big Data becomes an even more important source of potential insight for policy and communications. Those organizations that understand Big Data and how to use it are consistently demonstrating they have a competitive advantage over those that do not. (According to a 2013 Bain & Company report, companies “with the most advanced analytics capabilities are outperforming competitors by wide margins.”)

I expect that communicators who understand Big Data and how to use it will have a similar competitive advantage, especially in those organizations already using Big Data in their business operations.

The Potential Value of Big Data to PR and Communications

2014-08-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

This Blog is adapted from a comment I made on an IABC LinkedIn Discussion on Big Data, which was initiated by Natasha Nicholson. I am also indebted to comments in that discussion by Mike Jenkins and Sam Ford.

In my mind, the promise of Big Data for PR is in planning successful communications campaigns.

However, I am concerned that communications professionals are not well prepared to use Big Data. They face a number of challenges. Some are database management challenges--making the data accurate, making it inclusive and making it represent what it purports to represent. Beyond these challenges are those of coaxing meaning from the data, which are data analysis and statistical issues. For the most part, I do not believe these skills exist in communications departments or consultancies, with the possible exception of research departments.

What communications people should be able to do is ask the right questions of the data. I believe these should start with the basic questions of business and communications such as:

Who are my stakeholders?
What do they care about and why?
What messages are likely to resonate with them?
What are the best media for reaching those stakeholders with those messages?
What trends and issues matter to these stakeholders that may have an effect on how and how well I can communicate with them?

My last bulleted question is sometimes addressed by the folks monitoring media. So, at least we are doing that.

To summarize, I believe communications people understand communications and the questions that need to be answered to communicate effectively. However, to use Big Data to inform and drive successful communications campaigns, they need also to understand and be conversant in database management, data analysis and statistics. Beyond being conversant, they need people who can actually do these things to answer the communications questions the communicators pose.

We know that the Obama campaign effectively used Big Data to help win the presidency in 2012, but beyond that, proof points for Big Data's use and effectiveness in PR and communications are sparse, to say the least.

I expect that the first organizations to actually use Big Data effectively outside of politics will be large, well funded organizations that actually value communications and its effect on reputation (think Fortune 100 here). They will have the communications expertise and the influence to be able to draw on the database management and data analysis and statistical skills elsewhere in their organizations to put together the whole package necessary to make Big Data work for stakeholder relationship management.

Until then, what I believe communicators should do to prepare themselves to use Big Data is develop an analytical mindset. They need to start asking the questions above as well as other questions of the data they have access to. First and foremost, this would be the data in their organizations from such places as marketing, sales and HR. If their organization is using data resources in other parts of their business (for example risk management), they should learn how that data is being used and try to think of ways they might be able to adapt it to use in communications (e.g. Sam Ford's suggestions in "4 Ways to Use Data to Tell Stories," in IABC's Communications World Magazine.

For those of you who already have access to Big Data, I suggest you think analytically, jump in and swim.

The importance of doing research before diving into social media

2014-07-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

Before jumping into social media do general research to determine which social (and traditional) media are most appropriate for your target audience. Check out the article I wrote for the Measurement Standard: http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/2014/07/dont-dive-social-media-learn-target-audience-heres-ask/

How To Link Communications to Your Organization's Business Goals and Objectives (Part II: Evaluating Your Success Against Your Goal)

2014-05-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

How To Link Communications to Your Organization's Business Goals and Objectives (Part II: Evaluating Your Success Against Your Goal)

In my last Blog I wrote about how to set measurable communications objectives that are linked to the business goals of your organization. In this Blog I will outline how to evaluate the success of your program against your communications objectives.

As you will recall, our business goal was sales, and the measurable communications goal we derived to support sales was:

Increase awareness of the product by 10%

Among U.S. women (or women in a specified market)
With children five-years old and younger
Household incomes of $80,000 to $150,000

Within six months

Measuring An Outtake Goal

To measure your success, you would want to do a pre- and post-campaign survey of the target audience as defined above to determine the change in awareness before and after the campaign. In the best of all worlds you would do this survey by telephone. To reduce costs, you could buy one or two questions in a reputable omnibus survey, such as the one done by Opinion Research, and have them cut the data to represent the target audience definition. This should only cost you a few thousand dollars per question.

"A survey!" I hear some of you saying. "Those are expensive. What about our media and content analysis service. Can't we evaluate using that?"

Measuring An Output Goal
Yes, you can, but it takes you one step further from the business goal you are trying to support. Our business goal is increase sales; this is what we in measurement call an outcome goal. Our communications goal is increase awareness among the target audience by 10% within six months;.this is what we call an outtake goal. If we have not the budget or for some other reason cannot measure awareness, we can step down to how you expect to achieve the communications goal and create an output goal.

In this case we assume that if we get coverage in traditional, digital or social media that we know reach our target audience, that some part of our target audience will see the coverage, become aware of our product as a result and buy it. These are all fair assumptions, but, as you can see, we're getting to be a number of assumptions away from the business goal. Our output goal might be some number of impressions that carry our message in the media we know reach our target audience. To measure our success, we then need to monitor those media and evaluate the coverage to ensure that it actually carries our message points. It also is useful to determine how much competitive coverage is mixed in with ours. For example, are we in a round up story including all the competitors? If so, how did we come out? Is it a feature story only on us? Obviously, these would be rated differently in terms of the success of the output.

Getting Your Media Analysis Vendor To Provide What You Really Need
One of the problems many media analysis vendors have is they do not understand PR very well, and they do not know how to articulate output objectives that support communications (outtake or business objectives. Consequently, when they set up their programs for clients, they end up measuring the wrong things and their measures have limited usefulness in assessing the success of campaigns. If you as a practitioner can make explicit what the business, communications (outtake) and output goals are, you will be in a strong position to demand from your vendor that she provide metrics that enable you to evaluate your output. If she cannot, find another vendor who can. There are good ones out there.

Measuring By Activity
Now to the lone practitioner who has virtually no budget. I meet these folks regularly. They want to demonstrate their value to their clients, but their clients have budgets so small that any kind of external evaluation is out of the question. In these cases I still suggest research, but it is the up front research that should drive all PR. Identify the target audience for the business goal, determine through further research the kind of message that is likely to persuade that target audience to behave in the way that will enable the business to achieve its goal and identify the media that will reach that target audience. Unfortunately, with limited resources the research to do this may not be as sophisticated as we would like. Much of it may come from those who are in contact with customers. Perhaps the practitioner can talk to some customers herself to find out why they buy and how they find out about the product.

But once that is done, set some specific targets. For example, if your research suggests your target reads some specific trade magazines (traditional or digital) and blogs, make a list of them and make your goal be to get your client's product mentioned in six (or some other reasonable number) of these media venues in the next six months. Make this agreement with your client.

Here, too, you might be able to get unique URL in the material you place, which would give you an actual link to behavior in the form of web site visits that would lead to achieving your client's business goal.

What's Stopping You?
So, it can be done. The only thing that's really stopping most practitioners is the fear that measurement will show they have not achieved their objective. That's just unprofessional. How will you ever get any better at your profession if you don't regularly assess how well you're doing?

How To Link Communications to Your Organization's Business Goals and Objectives (Part I: Setting Goals)

2014-05-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

How To Link Communications to Your Organization's Business Goals and Objectives (Part I: Setting Goals)

According to research done by Jim Sinkinson, publisher of The Bulldog Reporter, one reason PR practitioners have trouble adhering to the Barcelona Principles is they don't know how to set measurable objectives. Another is they have trouble tying their results to corporate strategic objectives.

In my next two Blogs, I'll outline how to do both.

For reference, I wrote a paper with Linda Hadley on this topic for the Institute of Public Relations Commission on Measurement and Evaluation back in 1999. David Rockland, Mark Weiner and I updated that paper in 2010.

Tying Communications Results to Corporate Objectives
To tie communications results to corporate objectives, you need to start with corporate objectives. These might be:

Increase sales
Increase share price
Reduce employee turnover
Reduce supplier costs
Etc.

Sometimes you can tie a communications campaign directly to a business result. But this is unusual because communications is usually only a part of what makes behavior happen. In sales, for example, price, supply, shelf placement, advertising, promotion, competition and many other factors affect a sale. With share price, management's business model and strategy must be solid, no matter how good the communication. With employee turnover, research I have done suggests an employee's immediate supervisor has a much greater effect on retaining that employee than does communications. Some sophisticated organizations are using marketing modeling programs to assess the effect of PR on sales. You can find a paper on that here.

Unique Internet Links
Another way to tie communications directly to business outcomes in our online world is to include unique links for actions. For example if you can get a "for more information" link in the material you place, make it go to a unique page. Then you can not only get credit for the information request, but you may also be able to track the person who made the request on to sales.

The Communications Goal Link
Though we can rarely tie the effect of communications directly to achieving a business goal, we can articulate a communications goal that supports the business goal your organization is trying to achieve. Some useful questions to ask before coming up with the communications goal are:

Who is the target stakeholder group
What does the organization want this group to do (what behavior does it seek)
By when must this be accomplished

A Measurable Communications Goal
Let's take our first business goal as an example: Increase sales. What will increase sales depends very much on what you are selling, who you are selling it to and the general sales environment. But generally speaking, communications might help sales by increasing awareness of the product and its features. By doing homework with the sales and marketing people in your organization and by doing research on your target audience, you should be able to identify the primary barriers to sales and come up with a communications objective that should help achieve the business objective of sales. Let's say that in this case the communications goal that will support increasing sales is:

Increase awareness of the product.

However, that's a bit broad. A better communications goal would include a tighter definition of the target audience. Increasing awareness of the product among people who will never buy it would be wasted effort. If our sales target is U.S. women with children five-years old and younger and with household incomes of $80,000 to $150,000, we should include that in our objective. We should also note the time frame. Finally, we should put a stake in the ground and say how much we are going to increase awareness.

So a good communications goal that supports our business goal would be:

Increase awareness of the product by 10%
Among U.S. women (or women in a specified market)

With children five-years old and younger
Household incomes of $80,000 to $150,000

Within six months

Management Agreement On Goals
You also want to get agreement from your management that this is indeed an acceptable communications goal. Then, when you achieve it, there will be no question about whether you had done the right thing.

Do Research So You Actually Achieve Your Goal
Note, too, that you need to develop a message that appeals to and use media that reach the defined target audience. If you want to succeed, you will need to determine what these are. You may be able to get this information from your marketing and sales people, but you may need to do your own research.

Measuring Success Agains Goals
Next week I will Blog about how to measure your success against your goals.

Evidence from Ad Age that PR Gets Big Data and Analytics

2014-04-17T10:11:00.001-07:00

Finally actual evidence from Ad Age that PR agencies understand some of the real potential for big data and analytics: http://adage.com/article/agency-news/pr-agencies-rush-tap-holding-companies-data-streams/292593/.

Though the article doesn't say it, this also suggests small agencies without advertising parents will be at a distinct disadvantage as the agencies with such parents become sophisticated at using the data to which they have access.

"What You Think You Know About the Web is Wrong" from Time.com

2014-03-11T15:58:00.002-07:00

Excellent article from Time.com with the subject title: http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/.

More Successful Online Surveys Tip 3: Design the Research Correctly

2014-03-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

In my earlier Blog, 11 Tips for Doing More Successful Online Surveys, the third tip was "Design the Research Correctly." By this I mean: don't do an online survey if some other kind of research is more appropriate.

Online surveys are a great research tool, but they are only one tool. Alternative tools are:

Other kinds of surveys, such as telephone, mail and door-to-door surveys
Qualitative research, such as focus groups and one-on-one interviews
Secondary research, such as online searches of the Internet and specific data bases as well as good old library research

Secondary and Qualitative Research
In the example I've used in my last two blogs (One Way Research Can Help You to the Management Table and More Successful Online Surveys Tip 2: Get the Question Right), we've used as an example a not for profit that's suffering from decreasing contributions. The first research I recommended in this hypothetical case was reviewing internal records to determine where the decrease was coming from. That would be secondary research relying on company data. I also recommended that once we determined the kinds of people who were not giving as much, as frequently or at all, that we talk to a few to find out why. This would be either one-on-one interviews or small focus groups--both forms of qualitative research. After learning some reasons for people not giving as much, we could incorporate those into a survey and quantify it. That is, we could determine which reasons accounted most for the fall in giving.

Surveys
I assume we could do this survey online, because I assume we would have the e-mails of people who had given in the past. Even if we sent the survey to every person who ever had given to the organization, meaning we sent it to the entire population or a census, we still would probably not get a representative sample of this population, because there likely would be some bias related to those who wanted to respond and those who didn't. But in this case, I don't think it would matter very much whether the sample was completely representative. We're simply trying to get a handle on what's going on, and rough numbers will probably be good enough for that.

If, however, we were doing a survey that was going to be critical to making a very important prediction, such as who will win an election, or on which your organization were going to make a high stakes decision, such as siting a new multi-million- or billion-dollar facility, an online survey might not be the best methodology.

Representative Sample a Prerequisite for Statistic Validity
When the stakes are high, you want your numbers to be as close as possible to the real numbers for the population you are surveying. This means you want your sample to be representative of your population. If your sample is representative (and you avoid other biases), the results you get from your survey will conform to statistical rules, and you can assign probabilities (confidence levels) to how likely it is the percentages for the sample (within specified ranges) represent the true percentages for the population.

Clear Population Definition
Before you pursue your representative sample, you need to clearly define your population. If you wanted to determine who was likely to win an election in Illinois, you would not include people registered to vote in Wisconsin in your poll. You probably would not even include all people registered to vote in Illinois. You would narrow your population to those likely to vote in the next election and might even use a question like that to screen respondents. You would not be able to survey the entire population, so you would want a representative sample of, say, 1,000 of them.

Definition of Representative (Random) Sample
This means you want a sample in which every member of the population is as likely to be included in the sample as every other member of the population. This is the definition of a random sample, and in order to get one, you need access to every member of the population.

Can You Get a Random Sample Through an Online Survey?
To achieve a representative sample through an online survey, you would need to have a list of the e-mail addresses of every member of the population. You may well have all the emails for all the employees of a given organization or all the customers who have ever purchased a product online. But when you start talking about the U.S. population or the community around a potential factory site, you almost certainly do not have an e-mail for every individual. So, in these cases, some of the people in the population (those for whom you do not have e-mails) do not have the same likelihood of being included in the sample, and you cannot survey a random sample online.*

How Polling Companies Get a Random Sample
Traditionally, polling companies have done this kind of survey by telephone using telephone landlines. Now, because more and more households (especially younger households) are dropping land lines in favor of mobile phones, polling companies use a mixture of randomly selected land-line and mobile-phone numbers to generate representative samples.

Think Through What You Need
I apologize for going into so much detail regarding sampling methodology, but I wanted to make the point that sometimes even when a survey is appropriate, an online survey may not be.

So, returning to my main point, if you want your research to truly help your organization, don't just rely on surveys. Instead, determine what kind of information you actually need and think through the best way to get it. It may be an online survey, but then again, it may not.

_____________________
* Another issue with e-mail lists is that you may also have more than one e-mail address for some individuals and only one for others. This increases the likelihood of those with multiple addresses being included in the sample. This, too, reduces the randomness of the sample.

More Successful Online Surveys Tip 2: Get the Question Right

2014-02-10T18:28:00.000-08:00

In an earlier Blog I offered 11 tips for doing more successful online surveys. Tip 2 was:

Get the research question right. Know what you really want to know and how you will use the information in decision support.

What the Experts Say
Two of the marketing texts I have on my bookshelf quote the same adage on this topic. So, I will continue this potentially plagiaristic tradition and quote them: "a problem well defined is half solved."

What You Learned in High School and College
Think back to the research papers you had to do in high school and college, and you'll get a sense of how the research question should work. First it needs to capture the specific information need for your organization. But it also needs to be narrow enough to focus the research so your survey doesn't end up taking 30 minutes to complete and generate data that confuses the issue at hand.

A Case History
In my last Blog I discussed an imaginary case in which a not for profit organization's donations were going down. We determined that our research needed to identify which scenario was drying up funding (fewer funders, funders giving less, fewer new funders, etc.), and once we'd determined that, we would do research with the right group to determine why their behavior had changed and what we needed to do to get them to give at previous or higher levels.

Applying Analytics to the Data We Have
I'd like to point out that the first part of this research--determining which scenario was responsible for the loss of funding--would almost certainly be research into the data the organization already has. It would be applying analytics to the organization's receipt records. So this wouldn't be an external survey but would generate information essential to asking the right research questions and creating a successful survey. This is an important principle: we should take advantage of all the data we have to enrich our understanding of business situations.

Questions and Probable Methodology
So the research questions we would want to address in our followup research are:

"Why are funders no longer giving the same amounts they used to (or why are fewer funders giving)?"
"What can we do to turn this around?"

We'd probably want to start with some one-on-one interviews to get a list of reasons why and actions we could take to reverse the situation so we could then survey the right target and determine which reasons and actions are most important to respondents. The answers to these questions likely will be rife with both policy and communications implications.

While we are at it, we might add the question

"What communications channels are most appropriate for reaching funders?"

The Right Questions Focus the Research
So we have three questions that will focus our survey. We've also done background research to ensure we know which set of stakeholders we should be doing our research with. By formulating clear research questions we have given ourselves a solid base for a successful survey.

One Way Research Can Help You to the Management Table

2014-01-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

In my last Blog, I offered 11 tips for doing more successful online surveys. The first tip was:

Understand the business context for the research. Know what business decision will be affected by the research and how.

Research Should Help Align Your Communications with Your Business Objectives
One of the strengths of research is the thought that goes into it. Done right, it can link your communications programs to the business goals of your organization and help you on your way into the top management group.

An Imaginary Case History
Since most of my readers and I are in communications and marketing, let's suppose we work at a not-for profit organization that fights a disease. Our management comes to us saying we need to do a communications campaign to raise the organization's visibility.

Our first question is, of course: "Why?"

As it turns out, our organization fights the disease by raising funds and then donating those funds to institutions for medical research to find a cure. For the last two years, donations have dropped, and management is in crisis mode. If this trend continues, the organization will fold.

Management's immediate reaction is that the organization must need more visibility. Or at least more visibility can't hurt, while they try to figure out what the real problems might be.

However, as communicators, we know that if there are issues with the organization itself, (e.g. donors are losing faith in it, or for some reason do not trust the organization's management) raising visibility could make matters worse, if the trust issue is not addressed first.

What Research Should We Do?
Now we understand where the request is coming from. We also know, we need to research the business situation before we can do an effective visibility campaign or argue that we should not. We know, too, that the research needs to focus on funding. But what information do we need to help our organization and to communicate effectively about it?

It seems clear the real questions are:

What can we do to reverse the downward funding trend?
Why has our funding dropped?

Thinking as researchers we might come up with some hypotheses to test. For example:

Funding has dropped because there has been a drop in the number of funders.
Funding has dropped because funders are donating less on average than they used to.
Funding has dropped because we used to have a regular influx of new funders and that has dropped off in either number or average amount.

And there may be others.

Internal Analysis
Testing these hypotheses probably is a matter of reviewing internal records on donation sources. And once we know which of the above hypotheses is true, we know who we should target for our external research.

External Research
Whichever group the initial research suggests, we need to ask these people why they are no longer donating in the way they were. We might start with one-on-one interviews and follow with a survey to quantify our findings.

Communications and Business Insights
This information should lead us to understand the root cause of the drop in funding and suggest a messaging strategy. More important, though, it likely will suggest business strategies to better align the organization with its key funding stakeholders. For example, if the problem has to do with something about the organization or its behavior, management likely will need to address that to reverse the funding situation. And making those changes is what the communication should be about.

A Real Case History
For example, I did work with a not for profit organization that was suffering falling donations. We did interviews with four stakeholder groups and learned that every one had the same complaint: They felt the organization listened to them but never did any of the things they asked.

As it turned out, the organization actually did do some of the things its stakeholders asked of it, but didn't communicate to stakeholders that it had. This could be easily fixed through increased communications.

In addition, management decided the organization should be more responsive to its stakeholders. It increased the amount it communicated about the actions it took. It also took the time and effort to explain to stakeholders why it did not take some of the actions stakeholders requested.

This turned around the fortunes of the organization as donations picked up significantly.

So, by using the research to understand the business issues as well as the communications issues, the communications people who initiated the project made a significant contribution to the management of the organization. And this was recognized by senior management.

# # #

If you'd like help working through issues like this with your organization, please contact me.

11 Tips for Doing More Successful Online Surveys

2014-01-06T18:22:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

A number of my future Blogs will address how to do better online surveys, such as those we do with SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. I use and like both.

Surveys, when done properly, are a great way to gather the kind of information you can use to create communications campaigns that achieve business objectives because they are based on real information and insight into the target audiences surveyed rather than guesses and assumptions about them. Real information on what they care about, how best to reach them and so forth.

These tips are for all surveys. I mention online surveys, because they are so easy to use that more and more folks are doing surveys themselves. Unfortunately, the insights users get from these surveys frequently are less than they had hoped. They sometimes are even be misleading because of methodological issues I will discuss.

So here are my top tips. These are the ones that have come to my mind, and I'm sure many of my research colleagues will have others. I invite them to add their comments.

Understand the business context for the research. Know what business decision will be affected by the research and how.
Get the research question right. Know what you really want to know and how you will use the information in decision support.
Design the research correctly. People frequently think they should do a survey when they should be doing focus groups, one-on-one interviews, searching data bases or even going to the library.
Select and sample the right population. Online surveys depend on e-mail addresses, so people doing this kind of research tend to survey the people they have e-mails addresses for. However, they should be thinking about the actual target stakeholder universe and how they can get a representative sample of that universe. Consider that presidential election polls are not done online.
Write questions that do not lead respondents to answer in a specific way (bias the question).
Write questions that offer the answer choices respondents would select, so they can answer honestly and appropriately. For example, I have seen rating scales used that offered only positive responses ("Did you like this class, or did you really like this class?"). In such a case you get a positive rating, but you've learned nothing and your results may be misleading.
Develop questionnaires with a logical flow. Flow problems can be jarring to respondents or inadvertently reveal information that biases answers to later questions.
Use question formats that are easy for respondents to manage. For example, do not ask them to rank order the importance of 20 elements.
Keep your questionnaires to two to three minutes, if possible. Try to focus on one topic.
Use graphs and charts to present the data in a form that is easy to grasp. Online survey services and Excel offer ways to easily visualize data. But, for your audience to grasp the data, it is important that you use the right chart or graph for the situation and format it to be easily understood. For example, if you ask respondents which topic they would most like to hear about, your chart should be rank ordered to show the most popular topic at one end and the least popular at the other. This way, your audience will quickly grasp what is important and what is not.
Make the leap from data to insight. This goes back to our first point about understanding the business purpose behind the research. When you have the answers to your survey questions, you need to make a case for what kind of decision the data supports. But business decisions are not just about data. They are about what is best for the organization. So, making insightful recommendations requires integrating your understanding of the data with your understanding of the business context. And the broader your contextual understanding is (that is, if it goes beyond communications to finance, accounting, HR, research and development, marketing and sales, etc.) the more valuable it will be to your organization.

I will go into more detail on these bullets in future posts.

If you'd like help developing, executing or interpreting surveys, please contact me.

Science News Post on Big Data and Science

2013-11-29T15:34:00.001-08:00

A Science News article argues Big Data is bad for science. One comment says it is still good for marketing.

A Great Example of PR Using Data

2013-10-04T12:03:00.001-07:00

In my most recent posts I've talked about the importance of PR using data -- whether big or little -- to drive what it does, so that PR contributes to achieving business goals. David B. Rockland, who heads the research and change management businesses at Ketchum has written this case history on how Fed Ex did just that. Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/np9m5pb.

It's Not Big Data, It's Analytics

2013-09-26T16:58:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last Blog, PR luminaries, including Paul Holmes, are calling for practitioners to tap into "Big Data."

The Summer, 2013, Issue of Kellogg Magazine (published by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University) includes "Embracing a Big Data Mindset" in which Florian Zettelmeyer, professor of marketing at Kellogg and an expert in data analytics, talks about the mindset that organizations such as Reader's Digest, Capital One, Amazon and Facebook all have in common. He calls it the "Big Data Mindset" and says it encompasses four elements:

Designing marketing processes with data in mind
Engaging in research and development everywhere
Using predictive analytics
Challenging conventional wisdom

Notice he does not mention "Big Data" itself.

I highly recommend you check out the article at the link above, and while you're there, look into the other articles on big data in that issue of Kellogg. I would also broaden Professor Zettelmeyer's first element to "Designing all processes with data in mind," not just "marketing processes." We need to get out of our PR and marketing towers and understand our entire organizations if we wish to add value.

My recent reading about big data suggests the key to it is really analytics. I believe our focus should be on that rather than "Big Data" per se.

Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, in their marvelous book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, write that "Analytics" means:

The extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions. ... Analytics are a subset of what has come to be called business intelligence: a set of technologies and processes that use data to understand and analyze business performance.

That the power of big data is really in analytics brings us back to the point I tried to make in my most recent post ("Big or Little as Long as It's Data"): PR organizations -- both agencies and organizational practitioners -- need to be data- and insight-driven to succeed in the evolving business environment. It doesn't really matter whether the data is big or small, as long as it is good data and managed according to best practices to generate insights that lead to more effective business decisions and communications programs.

Going to a top management meeting without analytics to support your recommendations and demonstrate your results will be like going into a pro football game wearing sandals and carrying a Nerf football. At best, you won't be taken seriously; at worst, you'll be carried out on a stretcher.

Big or Little as Long as It's Data

2013-07-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

Many have commented on Paul Holmes's call to put "big data at the center." Paul is one of the luminaries of our industry, and I agree with him completely on this point. However, I would broaden it to include data in general. PR needs to be information- and insight-driven whether the data driving this information and insight is big or little.

It strikes me that putting "big data at the center" is easier said than done. Big data is undoubtedly a marvelous resource, but aside from all the issues around the data itself (formatting, accessibility, processing, etc.), it still is only a mass of data. The trick to making it useful is determining useful ways to query the data, or determining useful hypotheses to test using the big data sets you have at hand. The skills required to do this are not common, so Paul's suggestion that agencies should have chief data officers is also right on target.

Returning now to these queries or hypotheses that will make big data useful, they will most often come from outside the big data. They may be hunches or they may be well reasoned based on other research, but they will be stem from the basic questions that have always driven business and communications. Questions such as:

Who are our stakeholders?
What do we need them to do?
How do they feel about us and our products and services?
Why do they feel that way?
What is going on in the world that is going to affect how they feel about us?
What can we do to encourage them to do the things they need to do for our organization to succeed?
How and why will that benefit them?
What are the best ways (media) to communicate with them?
What are our competitors doing and how is that affecting our stakeholders?
Etc.

One question I left out, and which big data may be best able to answer is "How are our stakeholders behaving now?" This of course leads to all the questions about how we might want them to change and what we can do to encourage that.

The answers to questions like these can lead to communications programs that not only are highly effective, but that are demonstrably so. This would be good for PR.

However, while big data may have answers to some of the questions above, it is more likely that the organizations we work for do. And we should seek that data first. If it exists, it almost certainly will be easier to obtain and more relevant than any big data out there. So I suggest looking for the smaller data first.

Must-read new paper: Social Media Measurement: A Step-by-Step Approach, by Angie Jeffrey

2013-06-10T12:45:00.001-07:00

The Institute for PR has just published a great new paper by Angie Jeffrey, an expert in PR Measurement and member of the IPR Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation. If you are interested in Social Media Measurement, this paper is a must read. Here is the link.

By way of disclosure, I am on the Papers Committee of the IPR Commission and was one of a number of Committee Members who reviewed the paper before publication.

Corporate Misalignment: When Communications Is Not the Answer. A Case History

2013-06-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Client Challenge
When I was the Research Director for GolinHarris, we did a communications audit for a national bank. It had grown through recent mergers and acquisitions with smaller regional banks, and management wanted to re-launch the enlarged entity as a single customer-oriented organization.

Research and Findings
I conducted management interviews, ran focus groups with employees, and reviewed customer research already completed by the bank. I also interviewed customer specialists and synthesized research done by other members of the team who worked with investment analysts, community thought leaders, regulators and legislators.

The research clearly showed stakeholders – customers and employees in particular -- did not feel the Bank was customer-oriented. One reason was, because of the Bank’s rapid expansion through acquisition, it was using at least seven separate technological platforms. The fragmented technology led to very visible problems such as customers with bank accounts in one state being unable to cash checks at the bank's outlets in other states. Moreover, because of the multiple technological platforms, the bank was unable to be nimble in the way that most customer-oriented organizations are. For example, for the CEO to send an e-mail to all employees, different subsidiaries would have to re-input the message to reach their employees.

Recommendations
The team recommended that the bank not present itself as customer-oriented. Employees and customers would not have believed this. Worse, by making statements these audiences did not believe, the bank would most likely cause them to question other positive messages from the Bank that might well have had solid experiential support.

Instead, we recommended messaging that showed the bank recognized the problem and that it was trying to become more customer-oriented. We futher recommended they support this by talking about the steps they were taking to be more customer-friendly.

In addition, we told the Bank we believed it could never be leading edge in customer responsiveness until it solved its platform infrastructure problem. In our view, the Bank was not operationally aligned with the promise it wanted to make, so it should not make that promise until the alignment was fixed.

Results
I would like to share with you that the bank took our recommendations and is now considered the most customer-friendly bank in the United States.

Unfortunately, I cannot.

Two weeks after our presentation, the bank was merged with another bank, the CEO who had commissioned our work left, and I never worked with that bank again or heard the final fate of our recommendations.

Despite this, it was great to be able to work on such a high level project. I was also pleased to work on a consultation that concluded that if an organization cannot operationally deliver on a promise it wants to make, communications is not the answer. On this occasion, we communications consultants were the management consultants we should be.

How to Evaluate the Contribution of CSR or ESG Programs to Achieving Business Goals

2013-05-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

I recently worked with a client who wanted to demonstrate a social-good program (SGP) the company was doing with schools makes a positive contribution to achieving the organization’s business goals.

How We Did It
My client’s product is only available to people who use the Internet. So, we drew a panel sample of 1,000 balanced to represent the US online public. Because we were concerned our sample would not include enough people aware of the specific SGP for in depth analysis, we decided to expose half to a concept statement describing the program. This enabled us to compare attitudes toward the company and likelihood to use the client’s products between those exposed and those not exposed to the concept.

Results
The results showed:

Non-product users exposed to the concept statement were significantly more likely than those not exposed to agree with every positive attitude statement describing the company.
Those who were not client product users and who were already aware of the SGP were significantly more likely to say they were likely to use the client product in the next three months than were those who were not aware of the SGP.
One of the client’s corporate goals is to increase usage of other services it offers. We found that current product users who are aware of the SGP are significantly more likely to report using the other services than are those who are not aware of the SGP.
Another corporate goal is simply to increase customer product use frequency, and we found that client product users who are aware of the SGP are substantially more likely to use the client’s product one or more days a week than are those unaware of the SGP.

Relational vs. Causal
These results were all relational rather than causal. That is, while the results show a relationship between awareness of the SGP and achieving these business goals, they do not show that awareness of the SGP causes the achievement of any of these business goals. For example, it could be people are more likely to use the client’s products, because they are aware of the SGP. However, it also could be that they are aware of the SGP, because they are frequent users of the client’s products and services. My guess is that both are true.

Nevertheless, we see these as very positive results for the SGP.

Why is This Important?
The results suggest in this case that publicizing the SGP to current and potential customers could actually help the client to be perceived more positively and even to drive sales. At the very least, publicizing the SGP could help the client elaborate its brand in the minds of its customers and add to the brand's story.

Is This True for all ESG and CSR Programs?
We have no way of knowing whether other corporate social responsibility (CSR) or environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) programs would show similar relational effects. But this methodology is one way to find out.

Please contact me if you'd like to learn more.

Check out Joan Trezek Blog on importance of stakeholder input

2013-05-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

I met Joan Trezek at an IABC event we both attended. We had a lot in common, including a belief in the importance stakeholder input when managing relationships. It turns out a couple of her recent Blogs are on this topic. You can check them out here:

http://trezekpublicrelations.com/blog/good-decisions-good-communication-need-stakeholder-input/

http://trezekpublicrelations.com/blog/sound-pr-practices-visible-in-aftermath-of-gun-tragedy/

Social Media Top 10s from Katie Paine

2013-04-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Katie Paine just published a new issue of the Measurement Standard with three great Social Media Top Tip articles:

Top 10 Social Media Keys to Success
Top 10 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
Top 10 Social Media Measurement Tips

Excellent Post on Importance of Understanding Someone Else's Point of View

2013-04-24T08:00:00.001-07:00

From HBR Blogs: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/how_to_really_understand_someo.html. The authors argue this to be critical to influence.

Great IPR Post from Sean Williams on Influence

2013-04-11T14:19:00.001-07:00

I've written before about the importance of defining what it is you are trying to achieve and measure. Sean Williams is my colleague from IPR's Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation. He wrote a paper looking at what social media influence means and presented it at the 16th International PR Research Conference in March. This is a link to his IPR post summarizing the paper and providing a link to the paper itself: http://tinyurl.com/co7daev.

Sean lists the three factors that address social media influence as:

Social impact
Group dynamic
Network position

Follow the link to learn more.

Great McKinsey Article on Integrated External Engagement

2013-04-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

I recently read a great article from McKinseyQuarterly.com: "Beyond corporate social responsibility: Integrated external engagement." You can find it here.

The article argues:

"Traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) is failing to deliver, for both companies and society. Executives need a new approach to engaging the external environment. We believe that the best one is to integrate external engagement deeply into business decision making at every level of a company."

The article goes on to note "Many executives recognize their current approach is inadequate." They suggest, based on their experience at McKinsey and British Petroleum, that organizations need to do four things to better engage stakeholders:

Define what you contribute
Know your stakeholders
Apply world-class management
Engage radically

They go on to discuss each of these in turn. I highly recommend the article.

Using Research to Avoid Communications Malpractice

2013-03-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

I had the good fortune to teach PR and PA Research online for George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management in January and February. Perhaps what I like best about the online teaching experience is the "Professor Chats" which I held for an hour each week. During these, my students would ask questions, and we frequently got some good discussions going.

One student noted that when his boss gave him an assignment recently, the student had suggested doing a bit of research first. The boss told my student to get on with the project and forget the research. My student asked what he should do in this situation.

I was flabbergasted. I do not understand how you can do any communications task without some research. If you are going to communicate:

You must know what your management or client wants to say
You should know who your target audience is
You should know what action your management or client wants to elicit from the target audience
You should know what the target audience cares about and what messages it will respond to
You should know which media are most appropriate for reaching that target audience in general and which are best for carrying the particular message you want to deliver this time
You should have some sense of what timing is appropriate (and how this fits with what your organization or client is trying to achieve)
You should have some sense of how you are going to assess the effectiveness of your communication

And these are just the basics. There a number of other issues you could research as well.

So, I told my student his boss was asking him to commit communications malpractice. Furthermore, he should be thinking about his future. In many organizations, this kind of boss will not last, and so, if the student liked the organization, he might wait for his boss to get fired or try to transfer to another department. If that wasn't going to work, I suggested he look for another job, because he is not going to learn how to do communications correctly in that kind of environment, and working there might even tarnish his reputation.

See IPR post on "Spotting Bad Research"

2012-09-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Frank Ovaitt, President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations recently wrote a blog on Spotting Bad Research in response to a request from Institute Trustee Maril MacDonald. You can find that blog here. Frank quotes a number of the Institute's Research Fellows and a number of folks (including me) commented on the post as well.

I believe the most important point the collective experts made was that for the research to be good, the process had to be transparent. That is, the researchers need to be clear about how they gathered the data and how they processed it. There should be no black boxes and no unanswered questions.

And, if you plan to use the results of the research for anything important, you should question everything you can think of from how the sample was drawn to how the questionnaire was designed to how the data was analyzed to how and why the recommendations were made.