The Paine of Measurement—
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two years, you’re probably sick of the word “unprecedented.” The reality is that in 2018 most norms that I, at least, have grown up accustomed to have vanished in a haze of social media, fake news, and radically changing media landscapes.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that most of the norms around marketing, communications, and PR are equally in tumult.
The point of this issue of The Measurement Advisor is to celebrate the upending of norms. Here’s a preview:
View from the Summit: Each year, the Summit on the Future of Communications Measurement envisions the possibilities of our work and our industry. The recent 2018 version emphasized the intense focus on business outcomes as a measure of communications success. Activity metrics, years ago so highly touted at the Summit, were this time around dismissed as irrelevant. In our Summit wrap-up you’ll read about how finance departments are taking over communications marketing and risk management departments are putting their own values on PR and social media. Read more in “2018 Summit on the Future of Communications Measurement Wrap-up: Business Value, Social Responsibility, and Integrated Communications Measurement.” (You will need a subscription to The Measurement Advisor to read this article.)
Dashboard Zero to Hero: One of the best Summit stories was about how Canada’s Department of National Defence (their equivalent of the Pentagon) went from zero objectives to a full measurement dashboard in a year. Who would have thought that the military could be more efficient than your average B2B or B2C corporation? Read the whole exciting tale in our “Interview with Jessica Jones: Her Superpower is Measurement.”
Dashboard Directions: If you are putting together your own dashboard project, then here are several resources that show you how to do it and keep you organized: “So You Want to Build an Integrated Communications Measurement Dashboard? Here’s How to Do It.”
Show the Value of Your Work: And if you want to start drawing a clear line between the work you do and your organization’s success, then start with “6 Quick Steps to Connect Communications Efforts to the Bottom Line.”
Definitely Definitions: It’s tough to run a measurement and evaluation project if you don’t all speak the same measurement lingo. Here’s how to make it happen: “The Importance of Definitions: 5 Steps to Building Your Measurement Project Dictionary.”
Look It Up: And to help you with that, here is your “Sample Measurement Project Dictionary.” (You will need a subscription to The Measurement Advisor to read this article.)
Where Weird Math Meets Measurement: In “Benford’s Law, and Other Intriguing Insights Into Impossible Data” Bill Paarlberg discusses a quirky and surprising mathematical oddity that can be used to check for the validity of data.
Metrics Pirates of the Caribbean: Nowhere on the seven seas are the value of business outcomes shown to be so lacking as in “The Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association Is the Measurement Menace of the Month.”
The Real Jessica Jones: And last but not least, we celebrate someone who taught herself measurement and developed a dashboard for one of the larger organizations in Canada. Of course, “Jessica Jones is Measurement Maven of the Month.”
Happy Measurement,
(Photo illustration by Bill Paarlberg based on an image by stevepb on pixabay.)
