After years of complaining that we didn’t have sufficient data to measure our communications activities, we now find ourselves drowning in the stuff. Today the most frequent complaint I hear is from people who get a ton of reports, but can’t figure out what they mean. Which translates into: “I’m wasting money on this stuff because it’s not telling me how to improve!”
There are several causes of this dilemma:
- The first is that most communications professionals spent a lot more time in school manipulating words and ideas than they ever spent with numbers.
- The second is that few communicators have the time to immerse themselves in a bunch of spreadsheets and cross tabs. They’re too busy just getting their other work done.
- And finally, they probably don’t have all the data they need—at least in one place. It’s one thing to look at a chart of your sentiment over time. It’s a lot more revealing to look at a chart that shows the correlation between sentiment and goal conversions or social engagement.
Every data tells a story, don’t it?
As I’ve said before, the key to great reports is to use the data to tell a story. But teasing that story out of a pile of reports takes a good understanding of what the data contains as well as the questions and problems you need to answer.
The good news is that the problems are not insurmountable. It just takes a slight shift in how you approach your reporting. Okay, it’s actually several shifts, but it’s worth the effort. Here it is in four steps:
Step 1: Pick out the peculiar
Look at all your data over time, and find those numbers that make you go “Huh?” If they make you scratch your head, you know that your senior leadership will ask about them. So click on those numbers and discover the data—the stories or posts or whatever—that are causing the numbers to shift. The easiest way to do this is to sort all your data from lowest performing to best performing, and then dig in to discover what is behind the worst of it.
Step 2: Add call-outs for anything that stands out
Call-outs are the Xanax of reporting. Do this and, instead of a room full of skeptics scratching their heads and pelting you with questions, they’ll look at your chart and say “Aha! I see what you mean.”
It’s pretty easy to anticipate that a chart like the one below is going to encourage people to ask questions. Like, “Why did our positives go down? And what was that spike in negatives in Q1?”
But once you add call-outs, most of those questions are instantly answered:
For another good example of the use of call-outs, see our article “Is Samsung’s Own PR Killing It’s Reputation?”
Step 3: Bring in other data
One of the biggest mistakes most PR people make is to look at their data in isolation. Too frequently they have a singular focus on their own performance. Unlike their bosses, who are probably laser-focused on the competition. If you are scratching your head at a change in your numbers, then a clue could well be something the competition has done.
Which is why you need to bring in competitive data. Or at least look at your competitors’ websites and social activity to figure out what they were up to. Imagine your company is the blue bar in the chart below:
You’d probably wonder why your share of voice declined in the recent two quarters, and why your competitors have been steadily gaining ground. But if you took the time to drill down into the data, then you’d realize that the “other guys” have been pumping out announcements every week about new products, new discoveries, and changes in their financial performance. Also that your CEO has been invisible recently, while his peers have been out on multiple charm offensives:
Another great source of insight is to bring in web analytics. I was recently writing up a client’s monthly results and noticed that it had an unusual amount of balanced and negative coverage. I drilled into the data and discovered that the client had been the subject of a very funny jibe on Jimmy Kimmel Live! One could debate as to whether any mention on Jimmy Kimmel is really a bad thing. So I brought in their Google Analytics data to show that the mention had resulted in a 22% increase in new visitors to their site. Not a bad thing at all.
Step 4: Add in the costs
I realize that the actual dollars and cents spent on a given campaign or effort might be hard to calculate, but everything a communications department does has a cost. If not in hard currency, then it for sure takes time, effort, and energy—i.e., resources.
If you don’t have exact cost numbers, you can still use a quadrant chart to investigate the data. For instance, we looked at a series of activities that a client had undertaken in the course of a quarter and ranked them in terms of the amount of effort they took, basically assigning each a PITA (Pain In The Ass) factor. We then took the engagement data from each one and created a quadrant chart, like the one below. The size of the boxes reflects the reach of each activity—i.e., the more potential touch points, attendance, or engagements, the bigger the box. The colors reflect resources required—i.e. direct costs + personnel time. Red means high or very high costs; green means medium or low costs. (In Excel these are called a bubble charts, but any chart that can show three variables—resources, touchpoints/engagement/attendance, and quality or engagement level—will probably work.)
From here the insight practically leaps off the page: Stop doing things in that lower right quadrant that take a lot of effort and get few results, and do more of the things in the upper left quadrant. ∞
