â–¶ Companies Best in Community: IBM, Citi and AT&T took top honors in the first ranking of S&P 500 companies that best use their time, talent and resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business. Aetna and Capitol One rounded out the top five.
Companies that made the Civic 50 list, compiled by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and Points of Light in partnership with Bloomberg LP, were evaluated on seven metrics: leadership, measurement and strategy, design, employee civic growth, community partnerships, cause alignment and transparency. Highlights include:
• Winning companies employed increasingly sophisticated tools to measure the impact of community engagement and alignment of these programs with their business’ core competencies.
• More than two thirds of the top 50 companies say they “frequently” or “always” use the professional skills of their workforce to address social issues and real community challenges.
• 65% of the top 50 say they have “mission-level” alignment with the community partners, meaning they work with them on the highest strategic level, not just on individual programs.
• The top five companies provide $1.5 billion in grant support to community organizations, 17.5 million volunteer hours valued at over $375 million and $150 million in matching donations.
Source: National Conference on Citizenship
â–¶ Walmart Tops in Percentage of Engaged Followers: It’s well-established that a brand’s total number of Twitter followers isn’t nearly as important as how many of those followers actually talk about or engage with the brand. That metric is hard to come by, however. Now a study by Sling analyzes the Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter, determining how many of their 19 million total followers talk about the brands they follow. The winner by far: Walmart with more than 40% of active followers. Other study findings include:
• On average, 8.8% of a brand’s followers talk about or engage with them on Twitter.
• The top eight brands with the highest percentage of followers who engage with them and talk about the brand are: 1) Walmart (41%), 2) Comcast (29%), 3) Target (25%), 4) HP (22%), 5) BofA (20%), 6) Microsoft (20%), 7) Ford (20%) 8) Disney (19%).
• Disney is the only Fortune 100 brand with more than 1 million followers to be talked about by more than 10% of those followers.
• Google has more than 5 million followers, but only about 4% of its followers talk about it on Twitter.
Source: Sling
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PR Myth of the Month: ‘CPM’ Does Not Apply to Public Relations
In "Myth of the Month,” Mark Weiner (right), CEO of PRIME Research LLP, dispels some false assumptions about public relations.
Myth: As a common advertising measure, “cost-per-thousand”—like advertising equivalencies—does not apply to public relations.
Truth: According to the measurement mavens of the Institute for Public Relations’ Measurement Commission, cost-per-thousand (also known commonly as “CPM”) can be a useful measure of efficiency. In this case, “cost” means out-of-pocket expenses such as the cost of an event or a press kit; “thousand” can represent “circulation/audience,” “Facebook followers” or “quality messages delivered through target media.” As such, the lower your CPM, the better.
Savvy PR practitioners use CPM as both a key performance indicator to communicate value to the client and as a benchmark against achieving even lower CPMs with every successive reporting period. Advertising values are a controversial if still common measure; while CPMs are an advertising measure, they are useful and informative in public relations (as well as many other fields like manufacturing, quality control and more) where continuous improvement is something to which we should all aspire.
Mark Weiner is CEO of PRIME Research Americas. Contact Mark at [email protected].
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