by Katie Paine
This is the second part of a two-part article that began with, “It’s a Good Thing Coming Down: The State of the World of Measurement, Part 1.” In Part 1 we saw that the new world of “all media, all the time” has forced five major differences in the way we think about measurement:
- It’s not about the media, it’s about the business and the customer.
- It’s not about Big Data, but about how you use it.
- You need to be data informed, not data-driven.
- It’s not how loud you’re shouting, it’s about relationships.
- Standards are a reality, not an excuse to hide behind.
Now we are discussing #2 of that list…
2. It’s not how big your data is. It’s how you use it.
Future PR pros will no longer be able to hide their collective heads in the sand to avoid numbers and data. Chances are pretty good that your board or senior leadership has bought into the myth of Big Data and told you that, “Of course the data is there, you just need to pull it into a dashboard.” In reality, there is so much data available today that it is even more important than ever to know the difference between good data and bad data. What is meaningful and what isn’t. Business professionals need to know more than just how much; they need to know why.
Between Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and 250+ monitoring and measurement companies in the marketplace, numbers are easily available. However, having access to 100 different metrics is not particularly helpful. What is very helpful is knowing which of those specific metrics will help improve your organizational effectiveness.
The future of measurement will require new skill sets. Tomorrow’s successful PR pro should not only be able to run an ANOVA test, but more importantly, he or she will certainly need to know how to interpret the data and draw conclusions. Analytics alone is not enough. If you’re going to put your data to work for you, then you need to understand the business and the marketplace as well as the new rules of social media. Future PR pros will need analytical skills in equal measure to those they traditionally have in writing and relationship building.
Benchmarking will be a competitive advantage. Right now Big Data is giving the companies that use it effectively a first-mover advantage. That’s because they can quickly compare business outcomes between programs and understand how their performance stacks up against their peers. PR pros need to be able to look at their metrics and easily identify the best and worst programs so they can move resources from the ones that aren’t working to the ones that are. Without that context, all those pretty charts and data points are meaningless.
The most frequently asked question: So what’s the best tool to get me the metrics I need?
My answer is always the same: Focus on the metrics, not the tool. 20 years ago when I started in this business there were half a dozen other small companies doing PR measurement. Now there are more than 200 that bill themselves as media measurers. Debates about which tools are best are as numerous as the tools themselves.
The reality is that tools are the last thing you should be thinking about. First you need to understand your marketplace and your customer. Then you need to agree upon measurable goals and benchmarks. Only after all those decisions are made can you even think about which tool might be the right one.
Here’s a tragic tool-before-the-metric lesson that actually happened with one of my clients: After a 6-hour-long workshop, we finally agreed upon a set of clear metrics to drive their business. The metrics were built around messaging, and building engagement and relationships. Just as I was packing up my things, the client said, “By the way, we just signed a €40,000 contract with XYZ Company, are you familiar with their platform?” I said that yes, in fact I had seen a demo of it at a recent conference. “Will it produce the metrics we just agreed upon?” they asked. “No, it cannot measure engagement, relationships, or messaging.” They had wasted 20% of their entire budget on a tool that wouldn’t measure their KPIs.
Sadly, this sort of thing is all too frequent. Clients get caught up in the shiny new technology and think that it will provide all the answers. In reality the answers don’t come from tools, they come from the experience and expertise of the people using them.
3. Be data informed, not data driven.
Data is wonderful, but like anything else, it is best taken in moderation and with a great deal of insight. That is called being “data informed.”
We are all, in some manner and at some point, data-informed. When a mother puts a thermometer in her sick child’s mouth instead of just feeling his forehead, she’s being data-informed. We all use data to make better decisions every day.
Data-informed organizations use data on a regular basis to determine what is helping (or impeding) their efforts to achieve their missions. From leadership, to strategy, to decision making, to meetings, to job descriptions, a data-informed culture has continuous improvement embedded in the way it functions. It defines and uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as mileposts to determine whether they are making progress toward their goals. So having the right KPIs is critical.
Too often, however, organizations chose KPIs that simply reflect activity. KPIs are milestones, metrics that indicate progress. Measurement is the road that leads to those milestones. Measurement can be used for many things, and some of them are undesirable, like justifying your existence, getting someone fired, or proving a point. But data-informed cultures use measurement to continuously improve.
4. It’s not about how many likes but how much love.
Public relations has always been about relationships. Whether the relationships were with the media, with fans, or with voters, PR people were the ones whose primary responsibility was to build, strengthen, and improve relationships with an organization’s stakeholders. Today, more than ever, organizations are waking up to the fact that relationships are key to their success. Or, as my colleague Fadl Al Tarzi in Dubai says, “If you make people angry enough, you will be replaced.” His team at Social Eyez accurately predicted every recent fall and/or demise of a Middle East dictator by analyzing social media.
In his wonderful book, Can’t Buy Me Like, Bob Garfield calls today “The Relationship Era.” Gone, he says, is the marketing era, when the goal was to shout louder than the next guy at an audience that doesn’t care. A decade ago, marketers thought that they could somehow manage their messages and control their brand. Today the customer is in control, and your only hope for success, says Garfield, is to develop deep and committed relationships with them. That means having two-way conversations, being honest, transparent, authentic, and, most importantly, listening to their needs and responding with information and products that are relevant to them.
So forget spewing out press releases, get to know reporters via their social networks. Listen to customer complaints or requests, make your employees your ambassadors, and stop trying to control the conversation. It is happening whether you like it or not, you might was well participate in it and learn something.
And if you’re wondering whether it’s worth it, think about this. In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, using traditional mass marketing techniques, Hilary Clinton spent $147,058 per Electoral College vote and lost. Barack Obama spent just $6,024 per Electoral College vote. Four years later, Mitt Romney spent $2.4 million using the same mass marketing techniques, outspending Obama 2:1. And lost. The secret to Obama’s success in both cases was the individual volunteers knocking on doors, calling friends, reaching out with Facebook, and in general using their relationships on behalf of their candidate.
Direct mail used to be a reasonably inexpensive way to generate donations for non-profits. Now it yields about $.25 for every $1 spent. Contrast that to a recent project by the Humane Society of the United States that generated new donors for about $.03 per donor via a social media photo contest.
Brands and organizations that don’t pay attention to their relationships will simply die off, because it is too expensive to do business any other way. As a result, brands that don’t measure their relationships are at considerable risk. The good news is that techniques for measuring relationships were developed two decades ago by Jim and Laurie Grunig. They are well tested and effective, and available here . ∞
(image: charansinghdotcom)
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