Executive Summary, PR News Measurement Conference, April 20, 2015

Executive Summary

PR News Measurement Conference

April 20, 2015 — The National Press Club, Washington D.C.

Interactive Clinic: Create Measurement Dashboards That Communicate PR’s Business Value

This session demonstrated how to select key performance indicators (KPIs) for your PR programs and shape your measurement presentations to provide the information that will inform company leaders, anticipate many of their questions and guarantee your communications budget.

Inga Starrett, Senior Vice President, Analytics, Weber Shandwick

Define success metrics, not just PR metrics.
View measurement as a strategic tool, not a report card.
Identify the data that will help you tell your story. Think about the organizational flow of your information and the story you are looking to tell.
Create a framework to organize your thinking. The AMEC Valid Metric Framework is an industry-approved tool developed by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) to help practitioners think about how to measure PR value in terms of activities (outputs), interim measures (outtakes) and business results (outcomes).
Using the framework as an organizational tool, you can identify and classify metrics for your organization that will provide strategic and actionable data to show progress against objectives with a greater business focus.
Create a simple template that is simple enough to read in five minutes, but provides a solid view of what’s going on with communications activities.
You don’t have to have a lot of metrics. You have to start somewhere. If senior leaders like them, great. If not, at least they understand you are moving toward a data-based strategy.
The more times you see data, the more comfortable you get.

David Hebert, Internal Communications Chief, U.S. Geological Survey

That which is manageable is measured.
Context is everything. When reporting PR data, keep in mind storytelling, cultural factors and functional factors.
Connect the pieces across platforms or business units, over time and between qualitative and quantitative.
Help your organization respond to measurement by advancing clear statements connected to measurement, give insight on specific audiences and have reasonable expectations at both ends of the transaction.

Katie Paine, Founder and CEO, Paine Publishing, LLC

Define your champagne moment. If you are celebrating a complete success one year from now, what is different about the organization?
Determine and answer key questions before you start measuring. You need to know what keeps senior leaders up at night, where they go for information, what else they’re seeing out there and what makes them act.
Move to industry standards metrics and away from media value and ad value equivalency.
PR is having a positive impact on preference and perceptions.
Tracking down the data and climbing in and out of silos can be hard work, but it’s necessary.
Develop a “standards document” telling everyone, including agencies and foreign offices, how to report metrics.
Pull together a dashboard with the best data you can find and point out the gaps.

Case Study I: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World.

Danielle Brigida, National Social Media Manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

In her case study, Danielle Brigida discussed how the Fish and Wildlife Service developed its social media strategy and how it measured the success of its social media campaigns.

Do your homework: which tools, messages and content work best.
Collect information that will change future behavior.
Collect qualitative data that informs your strategy.
Identify possibilities to engage in a meaningful way—use outside content to build mutual relationships.
A good measurement plan revisits your goals, combines available measurement tactics and combines qualitative and quantitative information.
Build off automated reports whenever possible.
Export data to play with to get comfortable with spreadsheets.
Follow blogs and reports that discuss web and social metrics and techniques.
If the data puts you to sleep, you’re not measuring anything of importance.

Turn Social Media Listening Data & Analytics Into Business Opportunities

Caitlin Mills, Director of PR & Social Media, Planit; Johna Burke, EVP, BurrellesLuce; Michelle Vangel, Insights VP, Cision

Our instructors demonstrated how to make social listening an integral part of your overall communications efforts and how to use the intelligence gathered from what you hear to enhance your brand’s reputation and find new business opportunities.

Ask how can social media support business goals. As a research tool or a marketing/communications customer relationship management tool?
Be realistic about your capabilities and resources.
Social needs to be connected to your larger goals and objectives. From there you and your team can figure out which social tactics fit with the larger plan.
Tie listening objectives to business questions to derive insights that impact results.
Drilling further into areas that peaked through quantitative analysis or based on emerging trends for a category, present an opportunity to explore topics in detail using other analytic tools.
Whether you are working at an organization or agency, social needs to be a part of larger strategic conversations.
Social is fast and inexpensive compared with traditional market research—sample size can be much larger as well. Organic conversation often feeds discovery.
Metadata-based approaches can be coupled with linguistic analysis to define higher-end segmentations.
Using tools like Sysomos and Facebook Insights, audit who your fan base currently is.
Using a keyword-tracking tool, you can listen in on the conversations your audience is having about specific brands, products, events, locations, etc.
Know who your audience is so you can tailor your content to them—everything from their demographics to their purchases to their online behavior—if you want your message to resonate with the right community.
Social can tell us what people think and do. The addition of organic, online consumer conversation provides candid descriptions of an individual’s purchase path and unbiased opinions, delivers in-depth insight into why consumer opinions shift and can fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.
To create content that resonates you have to understand your target’s unmet needs and the way they talk.
A foundational framework for analysis serves as a consistent data set for gauging shifts over time in core KPIs.
Foundational quantitative data views can point to areas of interest for deep dives into segmentations or particular hot topics, emerging themes or business questions.
Leverage scorecards to summarize data points across the competitive set and segments, highlighting notable changes or competitive gains or losses.
Sentiment and share shouldn’t be your only focus. How are perceptions changing?
Where is your traffic coming from? If you’re only driving current audience you’re not growing it. New visitors shows you’re reaching new people.
Measuring data such as conversation, amplification and applause rates will showcase how engaged your audience is and help you identify growth opportunities.

Case Study II: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Beth Perell, Vice President, Communications and Information Management, Goodwill Industries International, Inc.

Beth Perell provided an overview of how Goodwill engages online with shoppers, donors and program participants. She also highlighted how Goodwill measures success from campaigns and uses the data for future planning.

Elements of a creative brief: goal, objectives, target audiences, key messaging, tactics, success measures, timeline, budget and internal stakeholders.
Know your channels—who’s using them broadly and who’s using each of your existing channels.
Map audiences to social media and other channels.
Goals on social media should be to provide prompt, helpful responses to public inquiries and to generate consumer interest and sharing of your mission and business.
Keep it simple, practical and play to people’s egos. This will help your campaigns be intuitive, useful and personal.

Luncheon Keynote Presentation: What’s the Measure of Your Digital Footprint?

Michael Fertik, Author, “The Reputation Economy: How to Optimize Your Digital Footprint in a World Where Your Reputation is Your Most Valuable Asset,” Founder and CEO, Reputation.com.

Michael Fertik showed how to grasp the size and quality of your digital footprint, and how to take steps to improve it.

Remember the Internet 1-9-90 rule: 1% of users create content, 9% repeat it and 90% consume it.
Connection of data from different data sets like personal data, professional data, social and mobile media data and powerful algorithms create scores for everything.
Understand that you have a digital reputation and that people and machines rely on it.
Your reputation is used to make decisions about your business, and you.

Case Study III: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Stephen Payne, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Feld Entertainment

Stephen Payne discussed how he set measurable media relations goals for a major announcement, the metrics favored by senior leadership at Feld and his goals for the news cycle that immediately followed the announcement.

Manage executive expectations when setting evaluation criteria. Don’t guarantee positive coverage—that’s called advertising.
When breaking controversial news, attempt to release it in such a way so you can dominate the news cycle for as long as possible. The hope being another big story comes along before your adversaries (whoever they may be) have a chance to enter the conversation.
The PR team has to have a seat at the table at the early stages—don’t be handed a strategy and expected to implement something you did not design.

How to Tie Social Media Engagement to Business Objectives (Sales, Leads, Volunteers)

This discussion explored how to track user engagement on social media and what you should include in your engagement reports.

Dan Hindin, Vice President, Global Digital Research & Analytics, Ketchum

Start with the big picture of your business before narrowing in on social media metrics.
A measurement framework should assess five steps on the consumer journey: exposure, engagement, influence, impact and advocacy.
Observing the conversation patterns of your audience can lead to selling opportunities.
Measure continuously to make sure you hear everything your audience is saying.

David Geddes, Principal, Geddes Analytics LLC

Select measurable objectives. Specify the audience, desired outcomes (ends for outcomes, not the means) and develop a time frame.
Select your metrics, set quantitative targets and get measuring.
Analyze, index your results and evaluate your findings.
Make recommendations for improvement.
The first step to being an influencer is to understand the market that surrounds you.

Monique Terrell, Director of Digital Strategy, College of American Pathologists

Gain leadership agreement around expectations of social media engagement.
Speak multiple business languages e.g. IT, marketing, strategy and finance.
Find an engagement framework that aligns with your objectives and approach.
Make communications a movement, not a campaign. Campaigns add to awareness and movements add to credibility.
Campaign: has a beginning and end—you talking about yourself; “you vs. us.”
Movement: organic and rooted in passions—others talking about you; “let’s do this together.”
Be clear on your business objectives.
Tell a story with your metrics—numbers alone won’t cut it.

Integrated Measurement: How to Sell PESOs to Senior Leaders & Clients

This session focused on taking an integrated approach to measurement that incorporates PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned channels) and how to sell the value of integrated measurement internally and to clients.

Heidi Mock, Senior Director, Analytics & Insights, Time Warner Cable

When preparing an executive summary of your PR data for senior leaders aggregate the data in one place and prove the value of your work toward the bottom line.
Make an inventory of every tool, program or service to learn how your team or clients get information.
Make connections between what you do and what matters to your C-suite and customers.
Knowing how you performed in the past will tell you how to plan.
Find sources of interaction—whether it’s data, peer interaction or online statistics.
An integrated summary ties your work to the big picture.
Develop a method for tracking your team’s objectives with measurable and reasonable metrics.
Connect your data to company goals so that your executive leadership can see the complete picture. Showcase your data as a collaborative effort, across multiple functioning areas.

KayAnn P. Schoeneman, Vice President, Research, Ketchum Global research and Analytics

Measurement should start with goal setting—across all platforms—to ensure a shared vision for success and successful business or organizational outcomes.
Researchers, analysts and social media gurus are your Rosetta Stone. They should help, teach and inform you how to measure and analyze your program’s results.
Sit down with audiences and really understand what makes them tick. This is the information business leaders want to understand and know.
By 2020, integrated measurement across the PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) spectrum will most likely be the norm and not the exception.
When you apply big data and analytics to understanding channel and message effectiveness, you wind up with transparency.
To move away from ad value equivalencies start by gathering impressions, evaluate your message prominence and how clearly and frequently it came through during a segment and educate your team on the value of solid measurement.
If you’re only analyzing earned media you’re missing three-quarters of the universe and major puzzle pieces to understanding your PR program.

Meredith Stevens, Director of Digital Strategy, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a contractor to The Beef Checkoff

Define your audience—who is your core target audience, non-core target audience and stakeholders.
What does each audience want to understand or what really matters to them?
Reach incorporates quantitative metrics such as impressions, fans, followers and subscribers.
Engagement incorporates qualitative metrics like comments, shares, retweets and click rate.
Measurement helps evaluate a program’s effectiveness to deliver the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.
Outputs are important to understand your overall performance, but without outcomes, you’re missing a part of the measurement puzzle.
Measurement = PESO Ecosystem + Reach (Quantitative) + Engagement (Qualitative) with Consistent Timing (e.g. Quarterly or Annually).

Sandy Malloy, Manager, Licensing & Content Development, Business Wire

Besides the kind of analysis features you might want from any system that costs money—whether a clipping service or a social media monitoring service or a database service like Factiva or LexisNexis—the must-have publications or sites should guide your strategy.
Start monitoring early and establish benchmarks so you will truly know whether your efforts are paying off.
Ongoing monitoring will also give you early warning of developing crises.
Not all sources are created equal. If you have a lot of results, home in on the must-have sources.
Be sure that dazzling charts and graphs don’t substitute for solid metrics, and that statistics actually tell a story.
Include in your reporting how media measurement satisfies campaign goals.
Align campaign goals with business objectives and report on that.

Case Study IV: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Maria Saltz presented case studies in which she and her team used their standard listening practices and tested some emerging technologies to give them a real-time view into audience perception and participation during the events.

Maria Saltz, Senior Manager Social Media Analytics, Adobe

Real-time social listening gives a unique opportunity to gain deep insights into the success of the event. Assessing content quality in real time allows the modification of social content strategy in real time as well.
Social content is usually scored as positive/negative, but this rarely fully captures the complexity of human emotions.
Hourly comparison to a previous year allows contextual following of the conversation while zooming in and out on specific topics.
Real-time social listening can answer questions on which keynotes and topics resonated better with audiences.
Analyize key conversation topics: What is resonating? How far does the message spread? How does it compare to other topics?
Determine what led to a good experience, and quickly work to fix the causes of negative experiences.