From the SAS Voices blog comes this video of Jeopardy! champ Roger Craig at the SAS Global Forum. He describes how he reverse-engineered the game to predict which questions would be asked and devised an optimal training strategy. Includes some interesting background on how they film the show (they tape 5 shows a day) and some good tactics should you ever appear on the show (find the Daily Doubles and bet big). --WTP
Here's an eye-opening chart from Business Insider: "U.S. Share Of Time Spent On Social Media By Device." (Click on it to see it bigger.) I would have guessed, more or less, how mobile most of the social networks are. But Facebook and Pinterest, at half, are a surprise. This chart is part of a new report from BI Intelligence on the state of social media advertising. --WTP
Why is it that social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are so powerfully addictive? Maureen O'Connor's article in New York Magazine, "The Six Major Anxieties of Social Media," pins their popularity on our insecurities and the sites' abilities to stoke our feelings of inferiority. "Because each social media network rewards different elements of human behavior, each gives rise to a different inferiority complex. Let us explore the unique forms of oppression we willingly subject ourselves to when we join and engage... social networks."
But, hey, no worries: there are new apps that will automatically provide you with a fake social media life, much more glamorous than your real one. --WTP (thanks to FullContact for the image)
Daphne Gray-Grant's Rapid Writing
Once upon a time, a
man who now is a naturalist at the Grand Canyon was a nine-year-old boy. He was
fascinated by bugs and rocks but not too interested in sports. His parents,
however, had been schooled by his older, athletic brother and therefore insisted
that the nerdy, recalcitrant boy join the local baseball team.
The boy did as he was told and immediately, the other kids stuck him in right field where, as they put it, "he couldn't do any harm." In fact, they even said to him, "don't catch the ball if it comes your way," because they didn't want him messing things up. So he sat on the grass and looked at the bugs and rocks.
My husband told me this story, which is true, when we were walking along the top of the Grand Canyon a few years ago. We were there on a family holiday -- seeking canyons of every description -- from Red Rock, to Grand, to Bryce, to Zion. (Of course I must confess that along the way we also saw the first wonder of the unnatural world, Las Vegas.)
Anyway, my husband heard the story from the naturalist himself, during an evening lecture. I was initially impressed because many public speakers don't understand that telling stories (particularly stories on themselves) is one of the best ways to communicate facts. "So what was the point he was trying to make?" I asked.
"I dunno," my husband replied glumly. "The guy was a bit of a nerd." Coming from my husband, who has a degree in zoology and who almost never says anything mean about anyone, well, that was a serious blow! But was also a good reminder to writers everywhere:
Yes, tell stories. Tell lots of them. But always make sure they have a point. A story on its own is never enough -- it needs to drive the reader/listener somewhere specific.
Ironically, a few days later, I came across a perfectly calibrated story that illustrates the same point -- only from a positive perspective. On the plane ride home I was reading in the Atlantic, a terrific article headlined What Makes us Happy? It was about the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
For some 72 years this study has followed 268 men who entered Harvard in the 1930s looking at their careers, marriages, divorces and old age. It's one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Psychiatrist George Vaillant has been chief investigator for the last 42 years and this article focuses on his findings and his own life.
As part of the latter effort, the article included the following anecdote: "Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son's stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son's, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, 'Dad, I just don't know what I'll do with this watch. It's so fragile. It could break.' The other boy runs to him and says, 'Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!' "
I love that story, not jut because it's amusing but also because it seems to capture something both important and ineffable about the subject of the article. It's so much more than just a joke.
In the words of American poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser "The world is not made up of atoms; it's made up of stories.
Find them and use them wisely.
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(Thanks to Kettlebell.com for the image.)
A former daily newspaper editor, Daphne Gray-Grant is a writing and editing coach and the author of 8 1⁄2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. She offers a weekly newsletter on her website Publication Coach. It's brief. It's smart. And it's free.
Here's a video from IABC Calgary, in which Katie Paine provides some measurement tips. (It takes a minute to get to Ms. Paine's advice, and, yes, that background music is a bit much.) --WTP
On social media, nobody knows your whole life is a dog. That's becoming more true every day, with new apps to not just super-model your appearance, but airbrush the rest of your boring life as well. This article in Marketing explains how companies like Instasham and CouchCachet provide you with the life your feeble self can only dream of. From CouchCachet’s mission statement: "Start living the life you have always wanted without ever leaving the house."
This brings a whole new twist to social media measurement. If I've tweaked Twitter to tell the world I'm drinking Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA, but my real beer of choice is Bud Lite, then isn't that going to skew the research on beer consumption? (Actually, I'm a big fan of Torpedo, which brings on the massive hops but leaves me some change for Beer Nuts. Also, most any of the gruits from Earth Eagle Brewings.) --WTP (thanks to ThoughtPick for the image)
Go read this great article by Gini Dietrich at Spin Sucks: "How to Measure PR: Use These Tools." It includes an inspirational little case study of a content marketing program with the goal of getting people to a free trial. The nice point she makes is that once you settle on what to measure:
"...we know exactly how many people we need to get to the free trial landing page – through content – in order to get them to take it and then what kinds of content – through email – we need to send them so they’ll convert to a customer. It becomes science and math, combined with art, and it works really, really well."
Go read read it right now.
Expanded version of Don McMillan's 2008 YouTube hit "Life After Death by PowerPoint":
You think that good employees are a product of a good school, good grades, and months of training? Think again, says this article in Business Insider. New ways of gathering data and assessing employees has lead to new knowledge about what makes a good employee. Old school job-search staples like resumes and interviews are being replaced by online data, analytics, and the Moneyball approach to hiring.
The most valuable innate quality in an employee? "Over and over again, the people who perform best are the ones who don't need to be told what to do, the ones that love challenges, seek information on their own, and quickly adapt." --Bill Paarlberg, editor (Thanks to Innovation Box for the image.)
On May 15th, PR News will induct six longtime public relations measurement heavy hitters into its Measurement Hall of Fame at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Congrats!
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Definition of a Menace:
Any vendor or agency claiming to have a “universal measure” of anything having to do with social media.
The latest examples of this type of villain are Starcom MediaVest Group and ShareThis, who earlier this week announced that they've used the magic of algorithms to blend two proprietary indices into a “universal measure of social activity on the web.”
My favorite response to this was from Michelle Powers Godfrey: “If only I could call a quarter a dollar!” Yep. You know, I’ve been trying to call my Honda Element an Audi TT for years, and somehow it never seems to drive like an Audi.
Just because you call something a standard doesn't make it so!
A couple years ago we ranted about Klout calling itself “the standard measure of influence." And, when a group of very smart people from companies like Procter & Gamble and GM and McDonald's and SAS and Thompson Reuters and a whole host of professional organizations came together to talk abut setting real standards, the one thing they could all agree on was that Klout was not a measure of influence.
Porter Novelli made the same mistake when it launched PN Sonar last month, saying it tracks “the totality of the conversation.” It may well be a wonderful algorithm, but no, it does not track the conversations that go on in my living room, or in Business Class on a flight to London, or around a soccer field. It doesn’t track the text messaging that goes on between my friend’s teenage daughters, or the private conversations that take place on Facebook. Nor does it track emails, direct messages on Twitter, or private messages on LinkedIn. What it does is track about 1% of the “totality” of conversations.
The reason the Conclave came together was in a large part frustration with declarations like the ones that Starcom, Porter Novelli, and Klout made. We knew the claims were bogus, we just didn’t have a better alternative. Now we do, it’s called www.smmstandards.org. The Conclave and other groups are working together to hammer out standard language for measurement.
Standards are not set by huddling in back rooms dreaming up proprietary algorithms. Standards are set by hard-working practitioners who take time out of their busy schedules to come together and address in a very thoughtful way the things that are important to our industry.
That is a true universal standard.
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Katie Delahaye Paine is Chairman, KDPaine & Partners, (a Salience Insight company), and Chief Marketing Officer of News Group International.
KDP&P delivers custom research to measure brand image, public
relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced
speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, Chairman of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.
by Katie Delahaye Paine
Thomas Herndon is the UMass graduate student who found a spreadsheet error and thereby rocked the foundations of today's economic austerity movement. In recognition of his devotion to the data, his Excel skills, and the importance of his findings, we present him with our Measurement Maven of the Month Award.
In 2010 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper that has became part of the intellectual basis for the current and worldwide government austerity movement. Herndon, as part of a term paper project, reworked their data and found significant errors and omissions. And—I really like this part—his professors almost didn’t let him do the research because they thought it was too simplistic for a graduate project. See MSNBC for a summary, and also The Colbert Report for a much more irreverent summary.
We at TMS of course just love the fact that a single data geek, a student at UMass no less, has discredited so many of the world’s politicians and power brokers. And will hopefully change the course of economic history.
What Herndon did, however, is nothing more than what people like me do every week. Well, we don't change the course of history, but we do check the data. Whether it is our own data or data sent to us by desperate clients who have serious doubts about what their agencies or vendors are delivering.
My favorite example is the case of the CMO who was seriously skeptical when his agency reported that 3.3 trillion people had seen his messages in the past year. It took us about 30 seconds to figure out the problem: A well-known measurement provider had credited every Facebook post in the study with 850 million “impressions” – since that was the number that ComScore had provided.
What Herndon did is both common practice and common sense: Rework the numbers and see if you get the same results. We hope that Herndon has taught all of us a good—if basic and very simple—lesson. Do the math and check your formulas.
But, in truth, no one ever died or starved because someone included bad numbers in a quarterly PR measurement report. (Although I do know a few agencies that lost an account or two.) Unfortunately, thousands of people have lost their jobs and suffered as the result of the austerity programs based on Rogoff and Reinhart’s faulty research. Congratulations to Thomas Herndon for debunking their work. And for being our Measurement Maven of the Month.
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Anyone who has heard me speak has heard about the So What Rule Of Measurement. It states that whenever you're presented with results—and especially if they are in the form of a flashy chart—you have to ask “So What?” three times.
Suppose your agency comes in with a pretty pie chart that shows you got 20 trillion YouTube views. “So what?” What do 20 trillion impressions get you?
If no one buys your product, donates to your nonprofit, adopts your animals, or takes whatever action you want them to, then why do 20 trillion views matter?I recently asked a social media manager why he tweeted. He told me it was, “To get followers.”
“So what?” I asked.
“To get coverage in the media,” he replied. I suggested that I tattoo his company logo on my bottom and run naked through his city. He could alert the media and thereby generate far more coverage than 1,000 of his tweets.
So what? Would he end up with more customers? Would they be the right customers? Probably not.
Yes, everyone needs more customers, but they need profitable customers that fit within the scope of their business strategy. His tweets, on the other hand, were attracting adolescent girls who followed him because he’s a hunk. (A total hunk, let me tell you.)
I hate to break the bad news to Ragan and Nasdaq (who are proud of their recent and very useful survey of PR pros), but the single biggest problem with PR measurement is not a lack of standards, but a lack of PR professionals asking “So what?”
Far too many PR practitioners (and social media pros as well) simply take it as a given that their purpose in life is “to get coverage.” Or worse, “the front page of The New York Times.” They never stop to question whether all the coverage in the world will solve the problem that their company needs to solve. Suppose they do get coverage in The New York Times and the calls come in, is there a system in place to manage the leads? What if there’s no call to action, and thus no action at all?
There was once a time a while back when I was having relationship problems and whinging to my roommate about some slight that my ex or current or whatever had inflicted. And my no-nonsense roommate looked me in the eye and told me to “...put my big-girl panties on and deal with it: Remember, the goal is not the boy, it’s happiness.”
It’s time that PR pros put their big-girl and -boy pants on and remember that the goal is to get the business done, whether it is changing the world, changing minds, or changing the bottom line.
(Thanks to freejazzlessons.com for the image.)
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Katie Delahaye Paine is Chairman, KDPaine & Partners, (a Salience Insight company), and Chief Marketing Officer of News Group International.
KDP&P delivers custom research to measure brand image, public
relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced
speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, Chairman of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.
The amazingly energetic and prolific Beth Kanter has a recent post on how to measure your social media network. Lots on network mapping and social network analysis for Twitter.
Beth is the go-to guru for nonprofit networking. She is author (with co-author Alison Fine) of "The Networked Nonprofit," which introduced the powerful idea that nonprofits can increase their effectiveness by using social media to expand their supporters. This concept was taken a step further in "Measuring the Networked Nonprofit" which she co-authored with Katie Paine. --WTP