The news here is that we are in the process of standardizing our social media monitoring on the tool provided by Radian 6. Overall, we looked at a bunch of different apps and services and we think R6 is the way to go for corporate PR teams and agencies. The things that sold me on this tool was the ease of data export, since we still grind a lot of stuff in Excel and QuickBase(best cloud DB/PaaS on the market--full disclosure it's our client's product); and the workflow tools for managing responses to content posted about a client's brand.

Other free stuff that I like for social monitoring includes TweetScan and BackType. But the killer app and the tool I run and see on everyone's desktop here at the agency is TweetDeck. The cool factor is largely due to Adobe AIR. It's what iGoogle used to be back in the day.

Not to sound like too much of a broken record, but I will yet again make my point about the difference between monitoring (the tools I mention here) and the value of measurement and analysis as a driver of communications strategy. We've actually taken a step forward in this regard with the launch of a new media analytics offering, we call d3.

d3 is a new service designed to help clients effectively engage with the blogosphere and build long term, meaningful relationships with influential on-line voices. The key component to d3 (Data, Discovery, Decision) is ABIE™, the Access Blog Influence Engine, a proprietary scoring methodology we developed in-house that determines the influence of blogs. Disparate blog measurement tools only provide a one-dimensional picture – we designed ABIE™ specifically to achieve communications and public relations objectives, identifying the most-relevant and influential blogs and ranking them by audience and market segment in a single view.

Intro: Deirdre, kudos on PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, it’s an important milestone in the industry’s understanding of PR 2.0 strategy and tactics; and it’s a fast and enjoyable read. Great job! Being a measurement guy, I wanted to get your insights on the measurement of social media and all things PR 2.0.

PR Measurist: Most of the online monitoring tools I’ve seen don’t live up to their promise (hype) mainly because we still require a smart, well-trained human to evaluate the context, the messages and the tonality. It’s easy to get a giant vacuum to suck up every bit of content in the blogosphere, but the real challenge remains making sense of it and reporting it back to the business in a meaningful way. Do you think we’ll ever solve that problem? Can Natural Language Processing do the job? Is it ready for prime time? What other tools might emerge?

DB: First, I’m glad that you enjoyed PR 2.0 and we share similar thoughts about monitoring. I do think that great strides have been made to gather up content in the Blogosphere, so that brands know that conversations are taking place daily. However, it’s up to those brands to decide if they want to do something with the information and what resources they will designate to the monitoring process. I interviewed so many professionals for my book and feel that Natural Language Process sets us in the right direction. I do believe it’s ready for prime time. I discussed in my book how most blog monitoring is done electronically through advanced artificial intelligence and the key term here is Natural Language Process. All that really means is that the computer is reading the story more like a human being than like a computer. As a result, you can move beyond just gross impressions and a reading service that provides you with a bunch of editorial clips.

Today, through the Natural Language Process you can evaluate the tonality of a story, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral. The computer is going to be scoring the same way day in and day out. It’s going to be doing it in an unbiased fashion. And, the computer will do it more quickly than we could do it as human beings. No more waiting two weeks for the reading service to send your clips by mail. With the Natural Language Process, you can differentiate between a negative subject and a negative tone which really allows you to analyze how the market perceives your brand. The best part of advanced 2.0 monitoring is that you react quickly to the intelligence and focus your communications on squashing any negative comments that can be damaging to a brand.

PR Measurist: Have you come across any new metrics that communicators should be considering when monitoring Social Media/UGC?

DB: I came across an extremely interesting company called Fas-Research that does a fantastic job analyzing social networks. Fas-Research helps leaders to understand social networking from a social science perspective using metrics and visualizations. In my book, I discussed how the company’s proprietary analytical techniques, social network visualization technologies, and data mining algorithms help clients see their markets as systems where people and institutions are connected and influence each other. Their techniques allow clients to harness the potential for change latent in the underlying social structure of markets, win new customers from existing ones, and systematically find a path to the tipping point for their ideas, products, or people. These types of monitoring metrics are so advanced; it makes the days of the clip books completely antiquated.

PR Measurist: Thanks for driving another stake through the heart of the clip book. It’s a relic from a soon-to-be forgotten era. In your opinion, what reporting format do you suggest should replace it?

DB: I guess the traditional clip book served a purpose for quite a long time. Believe it or not, I still have clients who want their monthly or quarterly clips. I guess we are creatures of habit. However, now many want digital books. There are many service providers who monitor and compile information for brands. For instance, I interviewed PR Newswire in my book and its service eWatch is a system of tracking key words that the company provides on hundreds of thousands of articles each and every day. Key words usually are the company’s name, a product name or service and key spokespeople. Of course, the tracking goes well beyond gross impressions, which was as in-depth as the interest went pre-Web 2.0. The Web universe is so sophisticated now that it requires you to go beyond the pure number or mentions. As a result, PR Newswire signed a deal with Technorati, one of the leaders in blog tracking, to provide more complete monitoring for the company’s clients. Technorati provides PR Newswire’s customers with the ability to track online conversations triggered by news releases. Today, both B2C and B2B companies are realizing the importance of monitoring conversations and rely on blog monitoring to know how their brands are being perceived in the market.

PR Measurist: Do you have any thoughts about how to score a blog’s influence or impact? Do you think a natural Darwinian order will emerge in the Blogosphere making the top-tier blogger the prized targets of PR people? What do you advise clients about targeting the long-tail bloggers who have no reach, no relevance and no influence?

DB: I usually check out Technorati and Blogpulse to score a blog’s influence. In my opinion, as much as the A-List bloggers are important, they are inundated with product and service pitches that they only have a small amount of time to cover a topic and then they need to move on. However, there are some really important long tail bloggers. These bloggers are in the magic middle and they can be extremely influential with followers. Their followers tend to trust and rely on their information. These long tail bloggers have tremendous influence and allow brands to get to the people who will buy their products or services; people who they could never reach before. I think it’s really important to develop a strategy so that you can engage with the A-Listers (after all they are influencing the traditional media), but at the same time make sure you look for those other bloggers who can make a difference and get right to the people who want to buy your product.

PR Measurist: You’re a master of Twitter, have you had to summarize a client’s brand reputation, or buzz in the Twitosphere? Any advice/counsel?

DB: If you’re going to summarize a client’s brand on Twitter, then it has to be your best elevator pitch ever. Today, this has been the subject of many conversations. That’s the beauty of the micro blog, like Twitter, a brief, concise statement to communicate information with meaning or value, in 140 characters or less. I just mentioned in a blog post how happy I feel when I’m able to communicate in brief, succinct statements on Twitter. This is the tool that PR people dream of…not the traditional news release riddled with hype, spin and jargon, made up executive quotes and ultimately, too many words.

For me the best elevator pitch gets right to the essence of the company. In Twitterland, I would advise that a statement about a brand shouldn’t tell me about the 10 great things that the brand can do for me or my company (there wouldn’t be enough characters available for this description). Rather, it should focus on the one thing that the brand does best, and why it will benefit me (how it will this help me in some meaningful way). After all, whether it’s a micro blog or another social networking platform, you are sharing information to assist people in their decision-making.

Ah, the Holy Grail...Anyone who has ever worked in PR has at one time or another heard this question from a boss or a client. If only there was an easy, one-size-fits-all answer that would satisfy every questioner and situation. But alas, there just isn't!

There is definitely linkage between PR outcomes and business impact, and it's our job as PR people to find it and prove it, but you can't do it alone and it will require additional resources, processes and data. You will need help from sales, product development, marketing, IT, IR, customer service, product development, business development and anyone who touches customers, interacts with stakeholders or manages the brand.

In our experience, marketers who exhibit precision and discipline in how they track brand awareness, corporate reputation, sources of sales leads, prospective employees across all channels and mediums will be best suited to answer this question. Anyone who professes a finger-in-the-wind, gut-level, I-know-it-when-I-see-it approach to the marketing discipline probably won't.

A word of caution: Low the claims by various industry alchemists (e.g. PR firms, trade groups and so-called measurement vendors), who through divination (see also: unnatural acts with data), to have a secret code that correlates PR activity and outputs to brand equity, stock price or corporate reputation, you can be assured that it will make for an interesting meeting, but it won't apply in your case. It's not that there isn't a link between PR and business impact, there is. It's just that it's different for every company and every situation. You won't be comfortable wearing someone else's clothes.

So where do you begin? A good starting point is to understand how the sales team tracks sources of prospective opportunities—how did new customers hear about your company? New customer opportunities and ultimately wins can often be directly traced back to someone reading a byline, a blog, case study or feature article. Make sure the mechanisms for tracking sources of customer interest are present, being utilized and the communications team is getting regular downloads of this critical data.

Similarly, the communications function can have a direct positive impact on employee engagement. This is a complex area of analysis colored by many individual factors including title, tenure, reporting relationships, compensation and other workplace issues, but employee morale and engagement can measured and monitored using interviews, pulse sessions and surveys. Since this is such a complex subject, I’m going to get some insight from one of the leading authorities in the space, Warren Egnal the head of Engagement Strategies.

A thorough media measurement program must include a competitive monitoring and analysis dimension to track how a client's company, products and ideas are faring against the competition. This aspect of measurement requires an ongoing commitment to using actual human beings to scan, scrub and catalog the search results.

While there are a number of useful applications out there to help cull the Web and blogoshpere for relevant mentions of your client (I'm currently testing a very promising application from start-up Andiamo Systems), there is no substitute for trained human judgment to read and categorize coverage, evaluate messages and score content and tone.

Definitely use software to automate data collection for competitive intelligence, but you still have to rely on people to analyze and report, lest you sow the seeds of disappointment through sloppy data.

Very often, thin or irregular attention is paid to the content of a company's media coverage, so systematic analysis of content is a huge step up in measurement maturity.

The easiest thing to track is high-level subject matter: Is the coverage about products, financial performance, philanthropy, executive vision, community relations, etc.? Standardizing the subjects you track and tagging coverage this way will go along way to answer questions about what part of the corporate narrative is getting picked up by the media.

The next level of analysis is to understand message pull-through and spokesperson inclusion, as well as to tag and summarize which third-parties (promoters or detractors) are being quoted in your media coverage.

When reporting media program results to clients, there seems to be a strong tendency in the PR business to show the highest reach numbers possible: “Our product launch campaign achieved 134 million media impressions!” Sounds good, but what does that really mean?

Business-side stakeholders often don't understand or even trust media impressions as a valuable metric (it’s largely an industry convention/invention), so it’s a better idea to demonstrate the precision of the effort rather than just talk in terms of gross reach. To do this, try segmenting your reach by target audience as a way to demonstrate the quality of the reach: “We reached four million small business decision makers” or “We reached 12 million stay-at-home moms.”

Additionally, if you want to take this idea a step further, try using a “net audience” qualifier to show qualified reach for each publication targeted. For example, only 10 percent of Wall Street Journal’s subscribers may have an interest in your enterprise security products, whereas 90 percent of InformationWeek subscribers would count as qualified targets.

I’ve found it helpful to provide clients with both gross and net reach data as a way to add precision to the reporting and gain buy-in and credibility with skeptical internal audiences.