Proving PR Works

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The Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms (CCPRF) is holding a series of thought leader breakfasts to explore topics of importance to organizational communications and public relations. (disclosure: I’m currently the Chair of the CCPRF.)

This morning, the CCPRF brought togetherin Toronto a group of top level corporate communications executives to discuss best practices in communications measurement. The discussion was led off by a panel of measurement experts: David Alston from Radian6, David Scholz from Leger Marketing, Jacqueline Taggart from Watson Wyatt and Alan Chumley from the CPRS Measurement Committee.

What follows is the highlights of the Twitter coverage (hashtag #CCPRF) of the discussion that I captured using CoverItLive. Enjoy.

Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms: Measurement

Katie Paine removes the mystery from measurement

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Katie PaineKatie Paine earned her reputation as one of the foremost experts in public relations measurement. So, when social media emerged, it was a natural step for Katie to begin to explore the best ways to measure social media. And she has emerged as a sought after speaker on how to measure the right things in the right way.

Katie will be sharing her expertise at the next Third Tuesday Ottawa #TTO. I asked Katie to give me a preview of what she’ll be talking about. She replied:

Social media measurement doesn’t require new standards or new methods, just a new mindset. How the best measurement tools today are some of the oldest. Relationship surveys, content analysis, correlations and statistical analysis have all been around for decades, and we really don’ t need much more than those.

What we do need is a new way of looking at measurement – from a functional perspective, not a tactical perspective. It’s not about measuring what you do – those individual campaigns, or tactics, or gimmicks you happen to be using. But rather about measuring why you exist. What’ is your function within the organization, and how are you contributing to the success of your organizations objectives.

Each communicator must face the fundamental fork in the road. Are you doing social media for sales? For reputation? For cost avoidance? For crisis management?  Once you’ve decided the reason, then measurement becomes quite simple.

Third Tuesday OttawaThis sounds like an interesting perspective on measurement. I’m definitely looking forward to attending to hear Katie elaborate on it. And, of course, we’ll keep at least half the time available for Third Tuesday attendees to ask questions and discuss Katie’s ideas.

We’ll also have a bonus at this month’s Third Tuesday: a demo of Google Wave. A lot of us have heard about Google Wave, but relatively few of us have had a chance to use it yet. Come and see what all the fuss is about.

One other thing is special about this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa: the time. We’ll be holding the event at 7:30 AM on October 23. We’ve been able to book Katie on her return from speaking at the MeshMarketing conference in Toronto on October 22. And a Friday evening event just didn’t seem like it would work. So, for this one time only, we’re making Third Tuesday Ottawa a Social Media Breakfast (Hat tip to @bryanperson and the real SMB Ottawa organizers, @sylc, @ryanAnderson and @roblane).

If you’re interested in attending, you can register online for this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa.

Thank you to our sponsors

Of course, we wouldn’t be able to book a great speaker like Katie Paine to come to Ottawa without the support of our sponsors: CNW Group, Molson Coors Canada, Rogers Communications, Radian6, and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. You make it possible to bring smart speakers together with Third Tuesday participants across Canada.

Third Tuesday Toronto Tweetup with Katie Paine

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Katie PaineMeasurement expert Katie Paine will be in Toronto speaking at the EMetrics Summit this week. But she’s also said that she’d like to get together with Toronto’s social media community in a less formal setting.

So, we’re organizing a special Third Tuesday Tweetup with Katie Paine.

How is this different from a regular Third Tuesday?

Well, we’ll have dinner in addition to our usual mixing and mingling. And instead of a presentation, Katie will suggest one or more topics that we can discuss as a group. For example, she’s already suggested we take a look at David Philips proposal for an online Advertising Potential Value.

So, this session will be for those who want to dive deep into social media measurement.

ThirdTuesdayTorontoIf you’d like to attend, you can register to attend on the Third Tuesday Toronto site. Please note that an admission of $20 must be prepaid to reserve and hold a spot at this event. We have only 40 seats. And I’m sure that we’ll be sold out. Our past experience has shown that an admission fee reduces the number of no shows to near zero. And that will make sure that no seat goes unfilled while others are on the waiting list.

A Third Tuesday Toronto dinner with David Alston

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David Alston, Vice President of Marketing from Radian6, will be in Toronto Monday evening prior to a speaking commitment at a Canadian Institute Conference on Social Media.

Radian6Based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Radian6 has broken through as one of the best, possibly THE best, social media monitoring and analysis solutions. It has been adopted by social media consultants and organizations like Dell Computer. It’s truly a great Canadian success story.

If you’re curious about how Radian6 has managed to conquer the social media measurement world from its base on the East Coast of Canada, then plan to attend this dinner with David Alston, one of the driving forces behind Radian6’s success.

We have only a limited number of seats for dinner. So, if you’re interested in spending an evening with David Alston and others who share an interest in social media monitoring and measurement, click over to the Third Tuesday Toronto Website to reserve a place.

Meet the AideRSS team at Third Tuesday Toronto

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AideRSSSince launching in July 2007, Waterloo-based AideRSS has been generating positive buzz among bloggers and analysts.

AideRSS’ PostRank algorithm provides bloggers and readers with a means to identify the content with which others have become most engaged. This saves readers time, enabling them to filter for only the most engaging content. It also helps content authors to focus on content that their readers want to have.

Now, Third Tuesday Toronto participants have a chance to meet and hear from the people behind AideRSS. Ilya Grigorik, Co-founder and Chief Technology Office, Jim Murphy, VP Development, and Melanie Baker, AideRSS’ Community Manager,  will speak at Third Tuesday Toronto on September 16.

Third TuesdayIlya, Jim and Melanie will talk about how they are building a company around Ilya’s PostRank concept. Melanie will talk with us about the approach she has taken to building and sustaining a community of users. And Jim and Ilya will give us insight into their plans for future growth and innovation.

I’m very big on AideRSS. I think that PostRank could well supply a significant piece of the social media measurement puzzle. And I’m looking forward to this session.

If you happen to be in Toronto on September 16, register online to attend Third Tuesday with AideRSS. Third Tuesdays are always a great place to meet and talk with others who are interested in new developments in social media. And the session with AideRSS will give us a chance to talk with the people behind one of the most promising Canadian social media startups.

Thanks to our Sponsor, CNW

As they have for the past year, CNW Group is once again underwriting the cost of the sound system. This is our largest cost item and CNW’s support enables us to keep Third Tuesday a free community-based event. Thank you CNW!

Read these posts for more background on AideRSS

Melanie Baker talks about the role of community manager at AideRSS

AideRSS’ Journey from Founders’ Dream to Professional Leadership

Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

AideRSS' Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

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AideRSSI visited the AideRSS team the week before the launch of PostRank.com. CEO Carol Leaman, co-founder and chief technologist Ilya Grigorik and Community Manager Melanie Baker took the time to sit down with me to chat.

In today’s interview, Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank and AideRSS’ approach to measuring engagement. Among the highlights:

  • Ilya defines engagement as “any interaction a user can have with a post or an article.” To measure engagement, AideRSS aggregates all the metadata it can find about each post: number of views, the number of times the page has been clicked, how many people have bookmarked the story, how many people people have blogged, twittered, shared it on Pownce or Ma.gnolia.
  • AideRSS uses the metadata it collects to compute an Engagement Score. In doing this, they assign different weights to different types of actions. Viewing a page would be considered a “lightweight” action. A click would be assigned greater weight. A comment requires a greater investment of time and thought. It would be assigned yet greater weight. AideRSS assigns less weight to a Twitter comment. An Engagement Score for a post is calculated using the weighted instances of all of the actions detected for that post. A higher Engagement Score signifies more attention from the community.
  • PostRank is an indicator of the relative Engagement Score of each post on a blog. Thematic PostRank is an indicator of the relative engagement score of a series of posts across a collection of content sources.
  • PostRank is dependent on context. Ranking articles against other articles in a specific blog will yield a different PostRank than ranking articles across a collection of blogs.
  • PostRank scores are computed based on a post’s performance compared to the previous performance of a blog. Thematic PostRank does the same thing for a collection of content from different sources.
  • AideRSS is continually tweaking its algorithms by adding sources like Twitter and Pownce and adjusting the weight assigned to various sources.

More on AideRSS:

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

What social media topics do you want to hear about at the conferences you attend this year?

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I try never to give the same presentation twice. The real world of social media is changing and developing rapidly. And my presentations should reflect those changes. So, what was new last year may be old this year.

If you’re like me, I’m sure that you scrutinize conference agendas closely so that you can pick the topics and sessions that will offer you the greatest opportunity to learn about and discuss issues that matter to you.

I should be shaping my conference presentations to cover the issues that interest the participants. So, I thought I’d ask you, the readers of my blog, what social media topics you’d like to hear about at the conferences you attend this year.

To prime the discussion, here’s a topic for a presentation that I submitted to a conference organizer earlier this week:

Measuring Social Media : Social media gives individuals the power to switch instantly from reader to author. And this has transformed the Internet into a web of communities of interest. Organizations are changing their communications to be part of the communities that matter to their customers, clients and stakeholders. But how do they measure what they are achieving through this effort?

In this session you will learn:

What to measure in social media;

What tools will help you measure social media;

The basic building blocks of a measurement dashboard for community managers.

Would you find a session on this topic useful?

What are the social media topics that you would to hear about at the next conference you attend?

Measuring the ROI of Word of Mouth Marketing

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The final panel at the CMA Word of Mouth Conference deals with measurement.

The panellists:

  • Dan Hunter, Partner at IMI International
  • Malcolm Faulds, VP Media Services, BzzAgent
  • Andrea Wojnicki, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Session Moderator)

I’m live blogging the session using CoverItLive. My notes are below:

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Measurement – ROI of WOM Marketing (06/12/2008) 
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3:15
 Wojnicki: What are the quick and inexpensive measurement tools that everyone should implement tomorrow?
3:17
 Faulds: Google trends; Google Analytics; Twitter tracking
3:18
 Hunter: Conduct surveys to test awareness and perceptions of WOM campaigns.
3:20
 Wojnicki: Should Word of Mouth be campaign or something longer term? What are we measuring? Campaign results? Or longer term reputation?
3:20
 Faulds: Include both organic and accelerated word of mouth.
3:22
 Faulds: BzzAgent recruits consumers to try and discussion products. They measure reach: how many people can be reached?
insights: what are people talking about and what are they saying?
impact: Are we able to move people’s perceptions fo the brand. And more importantly, can we move sales?
It’s easier to measure online WOM. But offline makes up 80-90% of WOM. So, we have to find ways to measure that effectively.
3:23
 Hunter: Impact is the key net measure that should be measured across all programs. The impact I can make measured agains the dollars that were spent. This will enable us to compare campaigns against one another.
3:25
 Wojnicki: Everybody’s jumping on the WOM bandwagon because it’s so pervasive and easily measured online. How do we measure the offline WOM.
3:26
 Hunter; Consumer research will provide the answers for offline WOM. You have to invest in order to learn.
3:32
 Faulds: Whenever there is a new medium out there, people have to measure it with old metrics. It takes some time for new metrics to be developed that fit the new medium. So, with Word of Mouth and “viral,” it will take some time to develop new better metrics.
3:47


The Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics continues at Third Tuesday Toronto

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Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and MetricsHow do I measure the effects of social media on me and my organization?

At every conference I attend, most speakers present examples of the “successful” use of social media by individuals or companies. Most of these success stories are primarily anecdotal. Measurable results that can be compared to benchmarks and across other cases are much harder to come by.

This places social media at a distinct disadvantage in the C-suite, where executives are used to being presented with Web analytics, market data, conversion data and other metrics that show them that progress was made against an objective. In the absence of some types of replicable and comparable measurements and metrics, how can the case be made that there are benefits to social media that justify any risk and expense of adopting them?

Third Tuesday TorontoThis month`s Third Tuesday Toronto has a panel of measurement experts who will lead us in a discussion of how we can move beyond social media as a faith-based initiative to measure its effects and contributions to the achievement of organizational objectives.

Leading our panelists will be Katie Paine, President of KD Paine and Partners and author of Measuring Public Relationships. Joining Katie will be Marshall Sponder, the Chair of the Web Analytics Association`s Community and Social Media committee, and Marcel Lebrun, President of Radian6.

Our panelists will be arriving at Third Tuesday straight from the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics. So, this will extend the conversation beyond the roundtable into the broader social media community in Toronto. And we`ll be recording this session so that we can pick up quotes and snippets of the discussion for inclusion in the White Paper that we will be writing following the Roundtable.

So, if you’re interested in a good discussion with some smart people who know a lot about measurement and, like us, are looking for ways to measure the impact of social media, sign up to attend Third Tuesday Toronto.

As always, this event will be free to anyone who wants to participate. Thanks to CNW Group who have sponsored us throughout the year and wherever Third Tuesdays are held. You keep the community in social media.

Social Media Measurement Roundtable

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We’re just one week away from the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics .

We’ve assembled a great group of participants who represent measurement experts, developers of social media metrics applications, corporate communicators and marketers and social media thought leaders. (I’ll publish a list of the participants in a separate post.)

We’ll be picking up the discussion from the previous roundtables that yielded the Tracking the Influence of Conversations and Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media White Papers.

It is our intention to produce a White Paper that advances the discussion begun in these previous roundtables and White Papers.

For my part, I’m hoping that we be able to develop suggested guidelines for a social media measurement dashboard. As a minimum, we could suggest what components should be part of the ideal social media measurement dashboard and how should each should be weighted. Of course, this will vary by specific objectives and context. So, I think a good start would be to produce two model dashboards for two common scenarios:

  • a dashboard that could be applied to social influence marketing and
  • a dashboard to measure community building and engagement.

What do you think? If we produce this, would it be a useful next step? Are there other things we should be aiming for?

Other related posts by Roundtable participants :

Katie Paine on the concept of Engagement in Social Media