DummySpit

David Phillips has just posted a podcast on his site about ROI and the measurement of online PR. It follows on from earlier discussion on DummySpit about “pullability” as a measurement of the associative referencing of online communication. From this discussion, the concept of “out-pull” as a measure was proposed. It has received a very positive reception from practitioners and academics.

Is ROI a relevant measure? Listen to David’s views. As he says, analysis shows that the measurement of online PR and communications is not an easy task and not given to financially-based measures.

Writing negative comments about your organisation on a personal blog is seen as ‘ethical’ by almost 50% of PR people. That’s one of the results of an international survey by Prof Don Wright and Michelle Hinson reported in the proceedings of the International Public Relations Research Conference, which have just been posted online.

The survey of PR practitioners found that 45% the respondents are aware that employees of their company or a client’s organization have communicated on weblogs, and that the outcomes have been mostly positive. As to whether it is ethical to monitor employee postings and to discipline staff, there was a strongly positive view. Some 79% said that monitoring staff was “ethical” and 59% backed discipline for staff who write negative statements, unless the staff were representing a labor organisation or trade union.

Despite these strongly held views, only 3% actually undertook research or measured “information their employees are blogging”, although 46% expect to do so in the future. Wright and Hinson also point out there is little research into the impact of blogs and other social media on the theory and best practice of communication. Obviously, there is a debate to be had on the ethics and legal issues that surround employee blogging.

Following on from my posting of March 23 (Online PR Evaluation – do we need new models?), there has been a wide range of comments. Some agreed with my point that Walter Lindenmann’s “out-take” descriptor was the most likely zone of measurement that could be achieved in measuring online public relations activity. Others said that was all wrong as the online community didn’t want to be “messaged” and that organisations had to lay in wait to be discovered by searches (i.e., it is a passive presence). Katie Paine illustrates this in her posting on May 9, “you need to be there when people are trying to find you …”

Going back to Lindenmann, it’s worth reviewing what he wrote about out-takes, even if it was conceived in the pre-online era (that is, about 15 years ago). To quote from Watson & Noble (2005: 83), out-take measures “judge whether or not the target audience actually received the messages and so evaluates retention, comprehension and awareness.” In the online era, the problem is that it is difficult to know whether the audience is reached because it is amorphous and ever-changing. The point I was making was that we may only be able to measure the manner in which the audience uses the “messages”, information or resources in blog, news media or corporate form to pass it on to others. This is equivalent to the out-take judgements.

In an email to me, David Phillips argues that “pullability” is key factor to measure. His draft definition is, “it is the result of activity by the online community combined with technologies to aid a process of pulling information that is “out there” for use by an actor.” He adds that evaluating and assessing the reach of an organisation’s online presence isn’t possible because there’s no way of identifying the total readership of online content. “At best one can monitor a handful of web sites and access research data about online traffic.”

He goes on to argue that “there is evidence that content evokes behaviours online”. And it is by measuring when someone refers to a press release, web page, video, keyword, concept, tag, blog associated with an organisation in an online technology such as a blog¸ podcast, video, wiki or other channel, that evidence can be found that content is being “pulled” by the online community.

Comparing the two notions of “out-take” and “pullability”, I would argue that they are similar but not the same. Out-take is concerned with message recognition and the interim responses before there is any decision to act (or reject). Pullability refers to recognition of information which is found and then passed to others, without action necessarily resulting. Both terms recognise a mid-way stage in handling of messages and/or information.

So my proposal is that “Out-pull” may be the appropriate term to describe the process of handling information and messages. It fits into the Lindenmann model which is a neat and compressed way to explain the stages of PR measurement and evaluation.
 

The recent report - Media Myths and Realities - from the Ketchum public relations consultancy about media trends in the US made for interesting reading, as it sought to allay what it sees are myths. The most interesting of them was the continued importance of local media, which in the US means the major metropolitan dailies and television (and not the dire local freesheets that we suffer from in many other countries).

For me, the most surprising piece of data was that at least half (52.3%) of 18 to 24 year olds read newspapers, especially those reporting on their home patch. The percentage of the population to “take a paper” steadily rises to 83.4% of grey panthers (65 and older), but there must be a major behavioural different in media consumption from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

As a PR educator, I find it difficult to get our ‘communicators of tomorrow’ to get away from the headlines offered online and pick up a newspaper. And my daily commuting on trains and buses in England shows little evidence of young people reading newspapers. Most are permanently plugged into MP3 players.

Other headlines from the research were the importance of family and friends in making decisions. Around 43.7% of Americans rely on word-of-mouth recommendation when making product or service decisions, but only 13.8% take note of celebrity endorsement. Ketchum sees a strong future for “amplified word of mouth” as a marketing communication method.

Part of Ketchum’s aim in conducting the survey was to allay what it sees as a “myth” that media communication was all online now but there are some impressive results in the adoption of social media across all age groups and, specially, amongst influencers. A multi-media online-offline mix is the way forward.

Following on from my post on SimplyCity, it is notable that the latest edition of The Economist reports on buzz marketing which is the close cousin of WOM sites like SimplyCity. In the article “Building buzz” (p.76 of the UK edition), it points to the problems of control and ethics that are implicit in buzz marketing. “The difficulty for marketers is creating the right kind of buzz and learning to control it. Negative views spread just as quickly as positive ones, so if a product has flaws people will soon find out”.

The example of Microsoft sending laptops loaded with Vista to key bloggers was an example of misjudgement that boomeranged on the software company. They (and the blogging community) responded negatively to what could have been seen as a bribe or at least an unduly large gift. But there was no doubt as to which company had sent the laptop and software to the bloggers, whereas buzz marketing in some forms uses so-called “volunteers”, recruited with offers of free product or a loyalty rewards programme, to promote a product or service to friends and relatives.

In this case there may be no disclosure of interest by the “volunteer” who is speaking about product. That is a practised deception and so is, in my view, unethical. It’s bad enough to be ambushed by people selling pyramid schemes like Amway or inviting you to product evenings, but at least you know what their interest is within a few moments. For someone to be either promoting a product (whisper marketing) or getting feedback for product development (buzz marketing) without telling you of their interest is dangerous for the reputation of organisation using this strategy and potentially deceptive.  We all have heard recommendations from friends about products, but you expect them to be based on their genuine experience and not a set of messages that have been sent to them in exchange for reward.

Already, many PR professional bodies have set out policies on ethical communication and I hope that these will be operationalised in public relations and the other below-the-line disciplines. If not, who can we trust?

The concept of a marketing-led community has moved on a stage in the UK with the launch of SimplyCity by the London PR consultancy Kaizo, led by Crispin Manners. You can find it at www.simplycity.me.uk. Developed for the non-cosmetics cosmetics brand, Simple, it aims to recruit participants - called “advisers” - who will comment on advertising and new packaging, get special offers, read a chatty blog (and respond to it) and read Top Tips on lifestyle matters. The intent is to build a relationship between the brand and its customers and aid the “word-of-mouth” process of support for the products. Kaizo says it is a world first in WOM generation.Crispin says “The beauty of our approach is that it applies just as well with B2B audiences as it does for consumers. It is all about involvement, empowerment and active listening.”

The challenge for Kaizo and its client is to create the ease of comment and debate that characterises social media. The Simplycity approach looks very lean in features at present and there may be developments to come which bring the client-side people to life. The use of RSS and video feeds would give some humanity to it.

The focus for public relations evaluators has long been on message delivery.  One of the key trends over the last 25 years has been an increasing focus on quality of coverage, not just on the volume.  And the prime indicator of that quality has been the presence or absence, strength or weakness, positive or negative reporting of key corporate messages.  That was easy enough when messages took a straight (and signposted) path via traditional media to their intended audience.   Now, the message can be changed, developed, added to, hijacked and contradicted along the way.  This provides peculiar challenges to communicators that can be met by the technology that begat them.  The tests for public relations evaluators in the 21st century are these. The first is that formative monitoring of “who is saying what about you” will become essential in order to enable the rapid intervention and rebuttal necessary to influence the online conversation before it is set in stone.  The Kryptonite bike lock in 2004 or the recent Dell Hell examples shows how control over online messaging is lost forever without rapid and early intervention. The second is how to divine the nature of relationships (planned and unplanned) that exist through social media. Despite the sound and fury around both Kryptonite and Dell Hell, which were badly handled, the two brands continue to operate and prosper. Was the damage to reputation as severe as it might have been in a traditional offline media “storm”? How do organisations The credibility of offline media is well documented. Many would argue that (in its media relations guise) the supposed “killer benefit” of public relations is the credibility afforded by the media’s third part endorsement. But with many bypassing the journalist/media interface and transmitting messages direct, how can “credibility” be weighted from online media coverage and social media commentary. The answer at this stage is a very indirect one. By tracking traffic, tonality of comments and responses, use of unique links and weighting of blog responses and cross-links, a very loose correlation of quality factors can be created. But without a precise “call to action”, this evaluation is about output measurement (message distribution) rather than outcome.  That’s the state of play on a lot of supposed online PR measurement at present. It’s just an online variation of the media measurement that has been delivered for decades now. 

Do we need new models of communication for online media and social media that use “out-takes” – the audience reaction to and processing of messages – as the ultimate valid measurement of effectiveness? For both formative monitoring and relationship measurement, out-takes may be the most effective route ahead.