Commonly Confused PR & Social Media Measurement Terms

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Measurement Sherpa Level 2

This article is part of The Measurement Advisor’s Special Issue on the Measurement Sherpa, an in-house data wrangler and measurement resource who organizes, queries, and gains insight from data. Our coverage follows the development of a Sherpa’s skill and experience, from newbie to pro, and is organized in three levels:

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Sherpa Level One: Getting Out of Base Camp

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Public relations measurement and social media measurement terms can sometimes be confusing. One of the important responsibilities of a Measurement Sherpa is to help their organization and coworkers understand these terms. The following is a list of about three dozen frequently misused or confused measurement terms:

Commonly Confused Terms
Term A Term B Explanation
Causality: A relationship between variables in which a change in one variable forces, produces, or brings about a change in another variable.  Correlation: A statistical test that examines the relationships between variables.  Correlation is simply a test to see if there is any connection between two variables. For example, you can use correlation to show that whenever earned media coverage increases, traffic to your website also increases. However, this doesn’t mean that the earned media coverage caused the website traffic to spike. Unless you factor out all other possible causes, like paid advertising, email blasts, etc., you haven’t proven causality.
Census: A collection of data from every person or object in a population.  Sample: A group of people or objects chosen from a larger population.  When an automated sentiment analysis tool analyzes every single mention of your brand, that’s a census of your brand mentions. If you decide that for accuracy purposes you want humans to analyze 10% of your coverage, that is a sample.
Impressions: Also referred to as Opportunities to See (OTS), impressions are a measure of the number of potential people exposed to a story or message. The term represents the gross number of opportunities for items to be seen, regardless of frequency of display, method of accessing the item, or audience duplication. Or if the item was paid, owned, or earned. Reach: Refers to the extent to which your ad or message has penetrated your specific target audience. Unlike impressions, reach is a “deduplicated” number that excludes anything that reaches the same person twice. Actual reach is very hard to determine in social media, due to the lack of audited readership data. In reality, most of what we can measure in social media is “Opportunities to Reach (OTR)” or “Potential Reach,” since there is in fact no guarantee that your message has actually “reached” a person or has made an “impression.” OTR or Potential Reach can be calculated by counting unique blog visits, number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn pageviews, community/forum size, etc.
Advocacy: A public statement of support for you, your cause, or your content. If a person issues a statement that supports your cause and recommends it/encourages others to participate, then it’s considered advocacy. If it lacks that call to action, then it’s classified as an opinion. Tone: Also known as Sentiment, it is a trend and content analysis factor that reflects the words used and the feelings expressed by the author. It is typically defined as positive, neutral/balanced, or negative. Positive: Leaves the reader more likely to support, recommend, and/or work or do business with the brand after reading. Negative: Leaves the reader less likely to support, and/or work or do business with the brand after reading. Neutral: No sentiment conveyed. The item just reports the facts, unqualified by praise or criticism, even if they are negative or is mixed, containing both positive and negative facts – balancing out the perspective – without indicating bias. Balanced: Both positive and negative tone are conveyed in the item. It is important to remember that tone and sentiment are typically measured by the words the author uses. This is especially true in social media. How anyone actually feels is only measured by behavioral testing or survey research.
Awareness: How many stakeholders can name a given company, brand, or product, with or without prompting. Exposure: The number of potential eyeballs that had an opportunity to see your message or brand. Opportunities to see or Exposure should never be used as a proxy for awareness. Awareness can only be determined by asking someone if they are or are not aware of a specific brand or product.
Baseline: An initial measurement against which subsequent measures are compared. Typically organizations will use the first three months of measurement as a baseline against which to judge progress. Benchmarking or benchmark study: A measurement technique that involves having an organization learn something about its own practices and/or the practices of selected others, and then compares these practices. For example, Rite Aid finds that Walgreens is making more sales than they are. Rite Aid does a benchmark study to find what Walgreens does differently and changes its marketing strategies based on what they find.  A baseline is simply a starting point, whereas benchmarking is a technique that compares performance against a specific competitor or time period.
Outcomes: Quantifiable changes in attitudes, behaviors, or opinions that occur as end results of a PR program. For example: We increased our number of YouTube ads and our outcome was a 10% increase in donations.  Outputs: The physical products of a PR program; anything that is published or directly produced by the public relations team. Outputs can be articles, white papers, speaking engagements, the number of times a spokesperson is quoted, specific messages communicated, specific positioning on an important issue, or any number of quantifiable items. Outtakes: What members of your target audiences take away from your program—the messages, perceptions, and understandings that your program has generated. Outtakes are the perceptions generated by your outputs.  While outcomes are generally considered the ultimate measure, output metrics are needed if you are going to understand what activity generated the outcome. Outtakes are the intermediary effect. For example, if you conduct a contest, the output might be the number of entries you generate, and an outtake might be that more people became aware of your brand. An outcome would be an increase in market share.
ROI: Return on Investment. A financial performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost. Impact or Value: The effect of a social media campaign, program, or effort on the target audience. Value is the importance, worth, or usefulness of something. Value may be described in financial terms (including ROI) or in non-financial terms, for example, in business performance management (BPM) terms. Value can be short term or long term. It may be expressed in any number of ways, including comparative cost savings, a shortened sales cycle, and increased customer retention or renewals.  Any measure of impact or value must be tied to the goals and objectives for your organization, brand, or program. Assessing the value and impact of a campaign is a complex process, with numerous variables that must be accounted for and included in any calculation. Variables need to be weighted appropriately and should be based on customer research data. It cannot be reduced to a simple formula that applies equally to all organizations. Value is contingent on strategy.
Earned media: Content of a media outlet or channel written by a journalist, blogger, or individual. As distinct from advertising content, which is determined by an advertiser; or owned media, which is generated by your organization or its agency. Earned media includes any shared content as long as the person sharing that content is independent of your organization. Paid media: Includes any content that you have paid to produce, including native advertising, banner ads, display ads, advertorials, paid blog posts, promoted Tweets, Facebook ads, TV commercials, radio ads, sponsored promotions, or underwriting credits. The terms POE (Paid, Owned and Earned) or PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned) are frequently used to describe the broad range of possible forms of communication.
Mention: An instance of a company or product or person that appears in the media. Counting mentions is not recommended for measurement. Any individual item might contain multiple mentions of an organization or its competitors. The number of mentions of a company is sometimes used as an indication of the extent to which that particular brand or company dominates the item. However, in shorter items, particularly in social media, this assumption may be false. In any analysis, if one is counting the number of mentions for organizations, a similar calculation must be done for all competitors. Item: A unit of analysis used in content analysis consisting of an entire communication product or tactic (e.g., an article, Tweet, blog post, Facebook post, YouTube video, photo, infographic, etc. Item has replaced the term “clip” or “placement.” Mentions are generally not recommended because they can be open to misinterpretation.
Poll: (1) A form of survey research that focuses more on immediate behavior than attitudes; (2) A very short survey-like method using a questionnaire that asks only very short and closed-ended questions.  Survey: The process of gathering data from a sample of a population. The instrument used in a survey is called a questionnaire.  Polling is a popular form of social engagement, but it should not be confused with survey research.
Public or stakeholder group: (1) A group of people whose behavior may have consequences for an organization or who are affected by the consequences of organizational decisions; (2) A group of people from which a public relations campaign or program selects specific targeted audiences in an attempt to influence behavior or attitudes regarding a company, product, issue, or individual.  Audience: A specified group from within a defined public with whom the organization wishes to communicate, build relationships, or influence. Stakeholders hold the fate of an organization in their hands. An audience is something you attempt to get your messages to.
Share of Ink (SOI): The percentage of total press coverage or opportunities to see devoted to a particular client or product. Share of Voice (SOV): The percentage of items that your brand/company/org appears in, in relation to competing organizations. SOV comes in two categories, desirable and undesirable. If the items you appear in are neutral or positive, then you have a share of desirable SOV. If the items are negative then you have undesirable SOV. For example: If you are a performer and are mentioned in 90 out of 100 items about a local battle of the bands, then you have 90% SOV. If a competing band was mentioned 5 times out of 100, then they would have 5% SOV.  SOV only works if there is competitive coverage of the event, but it is preferred over SOI.
Monitoring: A process by which data are systematically and regularly collected for a research program over time.  Measurement: A way of giving an activity a precise dimension, generally by comparison to some standard; usually done in a quantifiable or numerical manner. Monitoring is also called listening, and is typically done daily. Monitoring may be included in a measurement program. Both terms are distinct from evaluation, which is done to determine the relative effectiveness of a public relations campaign or program by measuring program outcomes relative to their cost, or to other programs. 

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Thanks to Kosmix for the image.

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