It’s been quite a year. Here are 7 trends in public relations and social media measurement from 2015:
Trend #1:
2015 was the year we did away with the bundling board.
For years most corporations have kept a giant corporate bundling board* between social and traditional media monitoring. Like the Puritans, they admitted that the two parties had occasional contact, yet there were strict rules designed to keep them apart.
In reality, companies used different vendors and different methodologies because most traditional media monitoring companies didn’t understand social media listening, and most social media listening companies didn’t care about (or were really bad at) collecting traditional media.
2015 changed all that because new platforms have emerged that do BOTH well. And unlike social listening firms of old that eschewed the very notion of human intervention, these new platforms understand that humans are a critical element to their success.
The two best that I’ve seen so far are Talkwalker and CyberAlert. Talkwalker has taken the best of social media listening—speed, elegance, and a beautiful interface—and married it to a great PR platform that doesn’t just tell you how many mentions you got, but adds in sexy details like the number of shares, data on the publications, and human coding for messaging and other parameters.
CyberAlert’s new dashboard takes all the great features of Talkwalker and raises the bar a little higher by incorporating broadcast media, web analytics, CRM data, and social analytics into a single dashboard. (CyberAlert has also brought on board much of the old KDPaine & Partners team so I can vouch for the quality of their work. 🙂 )
Frankly, I don’t care who’s doing it, as long as someone is getting rid of that damn bundling board for good.
Trend #2:
2015 was the year that brought more indigestion instead of integration.
Almost exactly a year ago, I was anxiously anticipating the big reveal at PRSA’s International Conference (#PRSAICON) where we would learn the new name of the conglomerate that used to be Cision + Vocus + Visible + Gorkana + ViralHeat. In what has to be the industry’s Yawn of the Century, the big news is that the name did not change at all. Thus far, Cision’s integration process resembles my putting together dinner when I’m confronted with 6 extra people at the last minute: Open the fridge, give whatever is in there a sniff, throw the good stuff into a big pot, add a dash of wine, some garlic, fresh herbs, salt and pepper, and hope you don’t poison anyone.
Cision certainly isn’t poisoning anyone, but they’re not making clients very happy. It looks like Vocus’ technology and Visible’s staff seem to have passed the sniff test, and they’ve substituted ViralHeat for Radian 6. Gorkana is in the mix somewhere. All that means a lot of changes to a lot of customers and a number are starting to look elsewhere.
Similar growing pains are happening at Carma, which has now combined the remnants of Report International, KDPaine & Partners, and Salience Insight. Once again, the shift to a brand new platform has been a rocky one.
The other major media monitoring marriage of last year, that of LexisNexis and Moreover, seems to have taken an equally disjointed path to integration. Moreover is maintaining a distinct brand identity from its parent, but its Newsdesk offering is now offered as LexisNexis Newsdesk.
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Trend #3:
2015 was the year that data throttling became a thing.
First Twitter launched its own mobile video broadcasting app Periscope and then it strangled its closest competitor, Meerkat, (the talk of SXSW this year). By blocking Meerkat’s access to its social graph, Twitter rendered Meerkat’s contact import feature inoperable. This move is hardly surprising, given that Twitter wants to support Periscope.
Then Twitter cut access to its firehose of data by third party developers, and will now force everyone to buy its data through Gnip, the social data provider it acquired a year ago. Companies that already had a partnership with Gnip like Simply Measured, Brandwatch, and UberVu did the happy dance while their competitors scrambled.
In the meantime Facebook made it much more difficult for brands to access data about their customers via the world’s largest social network when it placed huge restrictions on access to its user’s data in May. Monitoring companies and other heavy Facebook users went scrambling for alternatives. Thus far, with LinkedIn and Twitter also increasing restrictions, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative.
Look for networks to exert ever more control (i.e., monetization) over their data in 2016.
Trend #4:
2015 was the year we had to look somewhere besides PR for excitement.
Probably the biggest development of the year was the invasion of software and technology into the internal communications space, with companies like Bananatag pitching themselves as “the MailChimp for internal email” and offering metrics that are almost as good as those offered by, yes, MailChimp. The ability to measure not just opens, but clicks and other forms of engagement which result from your emails is a game changer for internal communications measurement. Now you don’t have to rely on the dreaded “newsletter survey” to see if your content is what your employees want to read.
Then there was the news from Engagement Labs that they were buying word-of-mouth measurement company The Keller Fay Group. If, as predicted, Engagement Labs merges Keller Fay’s off-line word-of-mouth research with their brand engagement measurement tool, eValue, we’ll have the first true integration between online and offline engagement. Pretty exciting stuff.
Trend #5:
2015 was the year of modest movement towards more standards.
You might have missed this breaking news but the Barcelona Principles, which helped kickstart the movement toward measurement standards, turned five last month. In honor of the birthday the Institute for Public Relations, PRSA, ICCO, the Global Alliance, and AMEC (the founding coalition that wrote the Principles back in 2009) have regrouped and rewritten the original principles to incorporate a far broader definition of communications. No longer do the principles apply just to the media relations side of corporate communications. They now also cover the broader communications umbrella that includes internal communications. The language has also been rewritten to acknowledge that many organizations aren’t for-profit.
In a related development, the IPR Measurement Commission has taken on the task of testing and validating the standards established by the Conclave on Social Media Measurement Standards in 2013. Specifically, they’ll be validating the standards around sentiment and engagement, using the process established by David Geddes, Julie O’Neil, and Marianne Eisenmann for traditional media in 2014. Trained experienced professional coders are reviewing the coding instructions and the studying social media conversations from 3 disparate organizations:
- A consumer company (Southwest Airlines)
- A government agency (U.S. National Fish & Wildlife), and
- A non-profit (Goodwill Industries).
You can read all the details here.
Trend #6:
2015 was a year of progress toward measuring visuals.
Ditto arrived on the scene promising to track and report any sightings of your brand images. Secondly, Sysomos just released Gaze, which promises to “find images of your brand across social channels and bring them together in one place.” This is an important requirement for anyone measuring results, given the rapidly growing use of Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Trend #7:
Finally, 2015 was the year of the end of digital advertising as we know it.
In 2015 the people spoke and what they said to advertisers was: “We’d rather pay for an app than your ad.“ NPR’s Marketplace reported that 35,000 people have already downloaded iOS ad blocker Purify since it launched on September 16th. It’s one of many new ad blockers entering the arena since Apple enabled this technology. At $3.99 a pop, Purify has earned over $150,000 in revenue; however, that’s not the only way to make money blocking ads. Advertisers can get past the filter with “acceptable” non-intrusive ads—and a fee. ∞
* A bundling board was a wooden plank used to keep the man and woman separate from one another in bed. Boards might be as long as the bed itself and varied in style. Some rose quite high and created a substantial barrier between the bed’s occupants.
Thanks to ProCapitalist for the image.
