The Paine of Measurement
Lots of agencies and especially social media teams seem to believe that it’s a good thing if they continuously report success. It isn’t. It’s a practice that lessens trust, devalues the profession, and may well get you fired.
I used to ask my clients how they defined failure, until I realized that the answer was always, “We don’t let anything fail.” Right. Either you haven’t lived long enough, or you don’t understand the meaning of FAIL.
Instead, I now ask them to rank their campaigns and programs from best to worst, based on an agreed upon definition of “success.” Amazing how quickly some programs fall to the bottom, especially when you factor in the cost and resources required to get them done.
Recently, I asked a member of my client’s senior leadership team what he thought were the obstacles to good measurement. The response was:
“Why is it that every campaign is wildly successful, garners lots of hits, likes, etc., and nothing ever fails? After a while we just ignore those reports.”
This is the source of the fundamental skepticism with which many senior leaders view PR and social media: Nothing ever fails. And—no offense gentle reader—but it’s PR’s own damn fault.
Let’s be honest and admit that not everything we do is created equal.
Sometimes our Tweets are terrible, our Facebook posts fall flat, or our You Tube videos are a yawn. Some events are wildly successful because we have big news, great research, or a shocking announcement. Some events flop because we haven’t had the time or resources to do them right. Or because we were at the right place with the wrong product.
Leadership wants and needs to know what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve been in dozens of leadership meetings in the last few years. If there was a word cloud of those conversations, it would lead with: “What works and what doesn’t?” That’s what they want to know, and that’s the purpose of good measurement.
I sit on a board of directors and listen to dozens of presentations from all different departments. The ones from strategy and communications that we pay attention to are those in which we are told the bad things and the good, and what the team is doing to repair the organization’s reputation.
Leadership scoffs at your unending stream of reports touting success.
Leadership suspects that some or all of that glowing report you just presented is BS. They’re just not calling you on it because they don’t see the function as worth the time effort or energy to get into it. As a result, they stop trusting you. Your reports get shuffled off to the side, and few people take them seriously. Then, when the budgets get tight, the things that no one sees or understands are the first to go. So much for never failing.
If PR and social would only give up the big silly metrics like AVEs (and, god help us, G-AVEs) and gigantic inflated impressions counts, then we could spend our time defining metrics and indices that relate to the actual business. And then leadership might take us all more seriously.
The solution is to develop success metrics that connect to company goals and objectives. Make sure everyone, or at least most of senior leadership, agrees to them. (See this article for an example of how to build consensus, in the section entitled “Getting organized: Determining strategy, goals, and metrics.”) Report success based on those metrics. Factor in a cost/resource number. And produce a chart that maybe looks like this:
And yes, those campaigns in the lower right hand corner did fail. Face up to it. By acknowledging your failures you will learn and redeploy resources more effectively. Senior leadership will appreciate it a lot more than if you always report that everything is wonderful. ∞
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