Category Archives: measurement

I Want it Now! The Long Path to Overnight Success

“Your Name in Lights” by Almond Butterscotch

“I’ve been working with you for a couple of months, why am I not famous?”

A client once said that to me. Well, more than one client. The fact is, he wasn’t famous because these things take time.

Very often prospects come to us and say “we’re launching in two weeks and we want big media, can you do it?”

Our answer is always, “no, we can’t.” Getting attention takes time, not just for the initial launch, which is a good start, but for long-term growth. No one story or one blog post or one tweet will set the world on fire. You need a plan, a full program, aimed at an ultimate goal. Any PR program, whether it is focused on media or social, takes consistent, sustained effort to truly develop and grow.

While I’m writing about PR programs, this is also true of careers. In a great blog post on the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Gulati points out that fast-tracking your career isn’t always the best move. Whether it’s pop music stars or Amazon, time matters. Spending the time to build means long-term success, but rushing to get things done can lead to failure.

As an example, let’s take a look at two recent viral video examples, both of which took a lot of time to become “overnight sensations.” The first is the “47 Percent” video that is credited with helping paint Governor Mitt Romney as out of touch with the electorate.

Scott Prouty, the man behind the video, discussed taking it and making it public this week, but what’s most interesting to me is the work he put in to getting publicity.

According to a Buzzfeed timeline, the video first surfaced online on May 31. Then on June 10, Prouty worked to get some buzz on it. According to the Huffington Post, Prouty spent the next few months going into comments sections of various sites and writing about it, sending it to journalists and even sending it to the Romney campaign.

Finally he reached out to James Carter using tried and true media relations techniques: research and outreach. The Huffington Post started chasing the story in late August, but it wasn’t until early September that the story finally hit anything resembling a mainstream media target. The same day Mother Jones posted the video and it took off from there.

So from the moment the video was first posted online to the moment it began its true rise took about four months.

Now let’s look at a more recent video, one that graphically and clearly demonstrates wealth inequality in America. It’s a great video, I first saw it on Facebook and many of my (liberal) friends are sharing it.

Marketplace points out that the video had a long road from production to mass viewership. It first went live in November, but as you can see from the stats, its viewership didn’t take off until the very end of February, nearly three months. And most of that came thanks to mentions by both Mashable and uber-meme-leader George Takei.

The viewership stats for the Wealth Inequity in America video show a long time of inactivity before virality.

Now to be fair, three to six months isn’t a lot of time. But to many tech companies who expect results immediately, it can seem like an eternity.

However, hidden in both of these examples are the stories you didn’t see and the luck involved in creating viral success. What videos of politicians did we not see because the people posting weren’t as committed to getting the word out? What if Mashable just didn’t find the inequities video all that interesting? Or if they weren’t searching YouTube in the first place?

Also to consider: what defines “success” for these videos? In the first case it was about broad exposure, but for the second I’m not sure the producer ever had much of a goal in mind. For other videos, if the goal is to reach a small audience or explain something to a specific group, then the measurement is much different.

The bottom line is that true fame (and any fortune ensuing from that) takes time and effort. Overnight successes are rarely overnight successes, even in the fast-paced world of social media.

How are you measuring your PR?

Throughout my career companies have asked for coverage. They know what they want to say, they know what they want to promote, they know the sales figures they want to meet. They know they need PR.

They just aren’t sure why.

Todd likes to say that the best thing about social media and modern PR is that you can measure everything. Oh, and the worst thing about social media and PR is that you can measure everything.

His point is that you may not be measuring the right thing.

Many of our clients focus on a single but very important measurement: website traffic. That is, does a media hit (online or offline) result in website traffic? There are multiple ways to measure this, whether it’s looking at referrals, measuring traffic from a geographic location, looking at traffic numbers from a day with coverage versus a similar time period, or including twitter traffic generated by a particular piece of coverage. It can all go into that measurement.

But not every piece of media will drive traffic. For example, we’ve put clients in the big city publications that used to make clients drool, only to see little or no discernible traffic spike. The reason is simple: some big publications just don’t provide links. No links, no traffic. Asking people to take an action (searching on a company name or finding a website) is a barrier to results.

So the question becomes, if a piece of coverage doesn’t drive traffic, is it effective?

The answer isn’t so simple.

Let’s take the work we did for TeraDiode, a laser manufacturer in Littleton, Mass. As part of our outreach Xconomy’s Greg Huang wrote a great piece. Thanks to some great writing that piece got “slashdotted.”

If you just look at the traffic numbers, SlashDot drove quite a bit of traffic, though it tended to be low quality. Most of the users bounced and few knew anything about the type of lasers TeraDiode is in the business of building.

But that SlashDot hit helped the story get picked up by a number of other publications, like PhysOrg and R&D Magazine. The traffic from those sites had low bounce rates, high pages per visit and resulted in whitepaper downloads. It also caught the eye of a reporter at Jane’s Defence Weekly, a primary target. It should be noted that Jane’s doesn’t include links in its coverage.

So, was SlashDot worth it? Yes, if you measure its broad impact, not just its direct impact.

Of course, most media programs won’t have that kind of turnaround. A mention in a broad publication like the Boston Globe or Newsweek may not result in immediate impact. But its ancillary benefits include third-party validation and helping build credibility so you can gain bigger or more relevant coverage.

To get there, you need to plan for the long-run.

So what are the takeaways here?

Know what you’re measuring — Yes, you can easily measure site visits, but that may not be your only goals. You may also be looking for venture funding or doing some recruiting. You may simply be looking to build awareness. Different hits have different purposes and need to be measured with a different yardstick.
Have realistic expectations – A single “hit” in a widely read publication isn’t going to bring you thousands of new users. You need to keep your information flowing, both through your own content and by sharing others. Your primary goal is to build an audience, not just gain a short-term bump.
Know where PR Fits In – Influencer relations is a part of the traffic-driving puzzle, but if you don’t have a way to capture that traffic, then it’s like going fishing with a hoop instead of a net. People should come to your site and know what to do next. Don’t let them bounce, keep them warm.
Plan for the long haul — It’s tempting to measure PR on a week-by-week basis, but a program takes time to develop. A hit today in a small online publication may be what you need to move up to the bigger, more impressive and more traffic-driving publications down the road.
Understand where you belong — While the Boston Globe may not yield major results for technology companies who want site traffic, I’ve spoken with consumer-goods companies that say a single piece their made their year. They needed awareness that later turned into sales. It’s a very different measure. Another company may find that CMSWire drives the most relevant traffic. Success depends a long list of factors.

Just a Number: Measuring Influence is Personal

Mention “Klout” in a social media conversation and you’ll hear groans, frustrations and grumbling.

But all those folks know their Klout score.

I don’t need to rehash how Klout recently changed its algorithm and sent Twitter ablaze with vitriol. You can read a great piece on the impact and find the alternatives here. But what has always been frustrating about Klout is how it tries to apply a number to something rather arbitrary. We’ve trod this ground before, but it came up again today during an online event called “Relevant Influence – Discovering and Engaging with Influencers for Effective Social Marketing“ moderated by Chris Selland of Terametric. Mike Maney, who is an incredibly intelligent marketer, pointed out how he does most of his work by hand. He becomes an influencer, he learns the influencers he needs to know and just talks to them. Sure, there are tools out there to help him do that, but sometimes it comes down to something simple.

Like collecting the top influencers on a given topic at a Mexican restaurant at SXSW, pouring Margaritas and having a conversation.

But if you’re looking at a number like a Klout score you need to ask yourself “what are you truly measuring?” Even accepted measurements have flaws. For evidence of that look no further than a great Freakonomics video on Football stats. They point out how seemingly simple metrics like a QB’s passing yards never tell the whole story. The video points out that last season, quarterbacks who threw for 300 or more yards a game went 47-49. When you look at those QBs with 400+ passing games, that record drops to 3-11. (I’d like to note here that Joe Namath was the MVP of Superbowl III without throwing a single touchdown pass. He didn’t throw any passes in the 4th quarter. Yet the Jets still won.)

I like what Klout is attempting to do: trying to provide everyone with a simple way to measure influence. The problem is, it means different things to different people and has a dozen different contexts.

In other words, “influence” isn’t so simple to measure.

Influence: The Big Picture

A client called B.S. on me today. I was asked to judge the potential influence of a blogger and twitterer who had posted a detailed response to some claims that my client had made about his company’s product. I came back with an answer which was informed not by our usual in-depth analysis, but by a quick scan of Google, Klout, Twinfluence, Technorati, LinkedIn and several other social media tools and networks — and one which completely missed the boat when it came to that person’s actual influence.

Was my research wrong? No. It accurately reflected the person’s reach on social networks. But it didn’t capture his real reputation. Someone with little social capital online had a lot of social capital in real life, and without a comprehensive insider’s perspective that comes with spending years in an industry (as opposed to a couple months), my characterization was challenged by the Big Boss at my client.

The funny thing is that Chuck and I talk about this all the time — but I was asked to quickly come up with an assessment so I did, without the usual caveats that I usually attach. Don’t fall victim to this: social media influence does not reflect real life influence.

The Four Rs of Influence
In identifying and prioritizing reporters, bloggers, editors, analysts, etc., we measure influence through a proprietary mix of four primary factors, what we call The Four Rs:

Reach. How many people see this person’s content, not just directly, but through other influencers and sharing?
Relevance. How relevant is the person to your organization’s community?
Reputation. What’s this person’s reputation with your community?
Receptivity. The counterbalance that affects how much energy we expend to influence any particular influencer: how receptive will this person be to our outreach and key messages?

In my haste, I ignored the broader aspect of reputation when I whipped together my research, probably costing me a few reputation points myself. While I stand by the internal validity of my conclusions, the external validity, taking into consideration the bigger context, brought me a little embarassment when I referred to an apparent industry bigwig as someone of relatively little influence. A lesson learned.

How are you measuring influence broadly, across both online and offline social networks? Don’t forget this important lesson when you do!

Updating Mad Men: The Focus Group

This week Mad Men featured a staple of the media world: the focus group. Whether it’s a telephone survey, like the call I received from Nielsen this weekend, or grabbing a group of people off the street, the focus group is a key part of any media outreach campaign. Before understanding the messaging and positioning that world work for the whole, you must first undersand what will work for a small, carefully selected group.

The women of the Mad Men focus group

But today the focus group is open to everyone with a search window. You can open up Twitter and be greeted by a flood of information or check out the LinkedIn groups to find out what business folks are truly feeling. You can even enter traditional forums and hear the complaints and concerns of thousands of people. However, like the PhD who is running the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce focus groups, people need a guide to understand what they’re reading. It’s very easy to get lost in the “Rats Nest” of social media.

In fact, sometimes you need to entirely dismiss what you’re reading or, in other cases, provide additional emphasis. I was quoted in Mashable saying that the social media realm offers imperfect data. The point is, just a few numbers will never tell you enough of a story, you need to understand the context of the person conveying the information, online and off.

Coming back to focus groups for a moment, how they are compiled affects the information you glean from them. In Mad Men the group was made up of young, unmarried women. In fact, just before grabbing the last unmarried secretary an older secretary commented that she wasn’t wanted in the room because she was, in fact, older and married.

The results of the session were that women want to be beautiful to attract a man, according to the doctor who ran it, but it could have turned out differently with the older women in the mix. Of course, this is where Pond’s finds itself today, with an older, more mature demographic. The eventual conclusion that women are simply looking to be married and that’s why they use beauty products was rejected by top Mad Man Don Draper, who noted that putting out a year’s worth of messaging would change the conversation.

In the social media world, people put out information for a reason. When looking at social media for market intelligence you must ask yourself “why did this person say what they’re saying.” Otherwise you’re only getting half a story. Social search tools can help you find information and many social CRM tools exist to help you get graphs, charts and numbers to show certain trends, but there is so much more available within the social stream.

Over here at Fresh Ground we have started working with customers on a social intelligence service. That is, we look at interesting pieces of information, put them in context and then distribute that information to the appropriate internal audiences. This is how we help our clients dig up everything from sales leads to competitive intelligence.

So what would Pond’s do differently today? Well, first they’d have a lot more information about their target demographic. Then they would use that information to understand the individuals who visit their site. If they wanted to try out new messages they’d probably do a bit of A/B testing on their site to see what works. They may also test certain messages in certain demographic areas, either through online advertising, carefully located display ads or buying air time in specific programs. They’d also dig into the social media intelligence to find out what people in their targeted demographics are discussing, then find ways into those conversations.

And hopefully, when they’re done, no one ends up crying or throwing heavy objects at Don Draper.