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It's not all about ROI

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:55:08 +0100

The focus of much discussion about media measurement seems to be demonstrating ROI. But that's only one part of it. Most all successful companies have a PR strategy which supports its business objectives. Without specific goals PR becomes the poor relative of other marketing disciplines.

Media measurement / PR evaluation has a crucial role to play in goal setting. As the saying goes - you cant hit a target you can't see. Where do you stand right now? How successful is the competition?, what is your share of editorial coverage?, which journalists are covering your space?, what are the key messages your competitors are using? The answers to these questions will help you set realistic targets and guide your PR strategy. Don't be afraid of the results – every company has to start somewhere.

Media measurement can help you decide exactly what you need to achieve and assist in planning for its accomplishment. Regular updates ensure you're continuously working toward the goal, adjusting tactics as and when necessary: PR evaluation will allow you to understand what the competition are doing to produce results and provide inspiration for your own PR campaign.

Using media measurement research to help set targets then monitor your progress toward your goals will greatly improve your PR success. Measurement is as much about helping you achieve your goals as demonstrating they've been achieved.

The Challenge for Media Measurement

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:15:07 +0100

Talk to a company ten years ago about its media measurement strategy and the response would be "yes, we're covered - we track our monthly cuttings volume". There was probably little, if any, demand from senior management to see even these basic numbers.

Since then the metrics demanded by PR teams have become more and more complex, moving to incorporate competitor benchmarking, message analysis etc. At the same time the media on which the analysis is based has moved from almost exclusively print titles (of which there were comparatively few) to web and social media (of which there's been an explosion). Companies are now talking about tracking not only the myriad of blogs and public discussions forums, but also looking at ways of analyzing walled garden content e.g. private Facebook groups or other forums to which you have to be a member to view the content.

Whilst the collection and analysis of media is becoming more complex the demand from the C-Suite is for ever more concise metrics - the board are no longer interested in 40+ page documents filled with charts and commentary on their press coverage; ideally they're looking for one chart or one figure that will demonstrate how PR is performing. This is perhaps one reason that, even today, many companies use AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) figures. AVE is wholly discredited, but it's used because it's a fairly quick and easily arrived at metric that puts media coverage in dollar terms. Until there's a way to cost effectively demonstrate the ROI of a PR campaign - a way without spending a huge chunk of the PR budget on a study designed to strip out the effect on sales/leads/web-hits of other marketing activities - I suspect its use will continue.

So we're now in a position where companies want to monitor more online discussions and media sources than ever (sources which make the AVE even more meaningless than ever) and senior management require ever more concise metrics which demonstrating the ROI of their investment in PR.

Don’t overlook analysts in your media measurement program

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:31:00 +0100

I'd say that I find editorial coverage more influential than advertising. And, on the whole, industry analyst comment more influential than journalist comment. So I find it surprising that so few companies use media measurement to get a detailed understanding of what analysts are saying about them in the press. It's not uncommon to find managers relying on being fed the occasional press cutting by their comms team. However systematically tracking which analysts are talking about you and your competitors can yield significant results, both for the PR and AR teams. Regularly benchmarking the volume and favourability of analyst coverage against key competitors allows you to track any change in analyst perception over time. Analysts who talk favourably about a vendor to the press will invariably be positive to their customers too. In the event of negative or erroneous comment this can be quickly identified and addressed where possible. There are tools out there that benchmark both the sentiment and volume of analyst comment relating specifically to a client and its competitors. Some go further and identify which analysts are talking about specific products or services, such as Cloud Computing, or cited on topics such as Green issues. This is a useful way of ensuring your AR -and PR - programmes do not overlook relevant analysts. In addition, by identifying the journalists who most frequently cite analysts, you can exploit the synergies between analyst relations and public relations. A journalist will often return to a particular analyst which he or she has used in the past and knows will provide useable comment. By identifying these analysts you can ensure those analysts are properly briefed, helping reduce the possibility of negative or ill-informed comment.

5 free sentiment analysis tools, 5 very different results

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:48:58 +0100

With PR budgets under pressure it's understandable that PR teams would look seriously at using some of the growing number of free measurement tools available online. 5 such resources that appear frequently on blogs and websites discussing media measurement are: Twitrratr, Twendz, Twitter Sentiment, Tweet Feel and Newssift This morning I opened each tool and simultaneously searched for "Kaspersky". Of course, I wasn't expecting the different platforms to return identical results, but the outcome left even me surprised. Tweet Feel was unable to return a result. The others scored the percentage of negative sentiment as anywhere between 3% and 67%. The percentage of positive sentiment ranged from 6% to 53% The chart below shows the results returned from each of the sentiment analysis tools.

I accept that the data analysed may differ - possibly some tools analysed coverage dating back further than others and Newssift is not limited to Twitter. But the point is, if I was a marketing manager, I'd have performed the search on any of these tools expecting to get an understanding of how favourable the coverage of my brand is.

Automated sentiment analysis is still way off the mark. For sure Kaspersky has had some negative coverage recently. But as high as 67%? I'd be very surprised if it even approached the 43% suggested by Newssift. Looking at a selection of the stories that were classed as negative gives an insight into why the figure is so high. Take as an example: Malware found on brand new Windows netbook

This highlights a key issue with automated analysis - it looks at the tone of the article as a whole, or picks up on certain keywords, as opposed to looking at how an individual brand comes out of the story. Sure the article was discussing nasty things like malware, but nothing negative was said about Kaspersky. To me these resources seem more akin to a fairground "test your strength" machine than a serious measurement tool. They do measure something (although what exactly is unclear), are somewhat entertaining to play with and produce less than scientific results. Still, I guess they're free. Unlike the fairground attractions.