Archive for the ‘PR Measurement’ Category

PRSA International Conference Recap: Discussing Audience Fragmentation

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Last month, Laura Chavoen, our senior vice president of digital strategy, spoke at the 2011 PRSA International Conference in Orlando. Her topic was “A Tailored Approach to Audience Fragmentation.”

In her session, Laura discussed how social media is causing many marketing companies to adopt a PR planning model to ensure that programs and campaigns are tailored to the right target audience. She also shared her thoughts on using new tools that public relations practitioners can use for monitoring and pinpointing audiences. Below is a video of a segment of her presentation.

Thanks to the PRSA for inviting MSL Chicago to particpate in the 2011 International Conference!

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Posted in Events, PR Industry, PR Measurement, Social Media, Video | No Comments »

Higher Education and Social Influence: Where Does Your School Rank?

Friday, October 28th, 2011

In the face of budget cuts, lower endowments and a fiercely competitive market for talent, colleges and universities are coming to terms with the need to be creative in their efforts to attract the best and brightest in students and faculty. At the same time, they know they’ve got to focus on building stronger relationships with virtually anyone who can positively impact their balance sheet — alumni, philanthropists, government, etc. So what’s the new metric for marketing success that everyone is focused on? “Engagement.”

Many schools (and major brands) are still trying to navigate social engagement and influence online—especially as these communications continue to evolve. At MSL, we’re constantly using new tools and techniques to help our higher education clients listen and analyze the conversation.

The team at MSL Chicago took a quick look at which universities and colleges are doing the best job of engagement online. The metric we used was the institution’s overall online influence, as measured by a Klout score. (Klout uses data from social networks to measure the influence of the institution by looking at how often and how broadly the content created drives action). The results are interesting:

What’s most interesting to us is the mix of schools with top scores — you’ve got top Big Ten universities with huge and passionate alumni bases focused on athletics and there are also prestige academic powers like Harvard mixed in the group. The schools are located in virtually every geographic area and they feature different areas of academic strength— they attract entirely different student bodies.

As a marketer, my big takeaway is that there isn’t a “winning” formula that helps spark engagement. It goes back to defining your brand — finding the differentiators and making that brand come to life for all those you want to reach.

What do you see in the results?

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Posted in Digital, Higher Education, Influencer Marketing, PR Industry, PR Measurement, Reputation, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Exploring Audience Fragmentation in a Digital Age

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

We live a fragmented existence. Gone are the days when across the United States, we all tuned into the same TV channel at the same time to watch the M*A*S*H finale. Even the Super Bowl isn’t what it used to be.

As a marketer and communication professional, it’s difficult to connect with a broad swath of consumers. Digital channels provide both solutions and new challenges for getting the message out – but delivering any message to the masses in a meaningful way still takes skill.

By trying to speak to everyone, we often risk not connecting with anyone. Aggregating audiences online through social, behavioral and content targeting is all well and good, but if we just deliver single brand message to them, in many cases it may not be worth the effort.

Exploring this topic and creating innovative solutions for clients has been a focus of mine for the past several years. I’m excited at the opportunity to host a presentation and discussion at SXSW Interactive next year where I plan to share real-world examples of how to connect with large cross sections of demographics and divulge some tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

Clients often ask me for my advice on designing campaigns for different audiences and demographics. Some of the questions I aim to answer in my session include:

• What are the challenges to marketing the same digital campaign to different audiences?
• How can marketers tailor messages and campaigns to these audiences?
• What kind of audience data can be aggregated and leveraged from social media campaigns?
• What are the effective tools to reaching fragmented consumer groups?
• What are the benefits and ROI that companies have seen from tailoring campaigns to specific audiences?

But before that happens, the public has to vote for my panel via the SXSW Panel Picker. So please, vote thumbs-up for me today and everyday until Aug. 27th. And feel free to add your suggestions or questions to the comments section—I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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Posted in Digital, Events, PR Measurement, Social Media | No Comments »

Balancing the equation: Media math is hard to reconcile if you’re speaking a different language

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Every digital strategist with dreams of running big high-awareness-front-page-of-Yahoo!-with-full-social-integration promotions is gunning for “TV money.” By TV money, I mean the kind of money that 30-second TV spots traditionally cost to both create and run — hundreds of thousands of US dollars for the creative, and several million for the prime time spots it will fill.

The fact is, TV isn’t what it used to be—which means the dream of snagging TV’s abundance of wealth is more alive than ever. TV dollars are finally transforming into digital dollars, but there’s still a ways to go.

One of the barriers digital had to overcome to unlock TV dollars was making sure that CMOs were comfortable speaking the language of TV: rating points and reach. When trying to build awareness for a brand or a product, and getting a piece of the marketing budget, these metrics were (and still are) the keys to the castle.

Digital strategists traditionally talked about impressions, clicks and engagement. This made it very hard to evaluate the marketing mix across channels. Do TV households equate to impressions? For that matter, what is an “impression?” A “cookie?” A “visitor?” What is the value of a click compared to an eyeball? CMOs had to educate themselves on these questions before shifting the dollars around.

Fortunately, these questions have largely been settled. Over the past several years, digital marketers raised (or lowered, depending on your perspective) the level of its discourse and began speaking in the same language as traditional channels. Thus, the language barrier was removed. The net result? Banner ads for every awareness campaign.

Today, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s all about social media. And as a result of public relations firms taking the lead in the social media space, a fresh marketing discipline is now sitting at the table during the creation process of awareness campaigns.

PR is no longer relegated to only issuing press releases and launching events – social media has thrust us into the spotlight. But PR metrics differ from other marketing channels such as TV, print and traditional online campaigns.

As a result, digital public relations practitioners are going through a similar transformation that digital did several years ago as it tries to reconcile its metrics with the other big marketing channels – TV, print, online, and radio (out-of-home has its own measurement issues to contend with). At the heart of the issue are the definitions of “reach” and “impressions.”

In traditional media math, an ad impression is a single instance of an advertisement being displayed. In order to compare ads across mediums, impressions are measured by their CPM, or cost per thousand. (The ‘m’ comes from mille, Latin for thousand.) “Reach” is the total number of unique people (or households in the case of TV) exposed to an advertisement during a set period of time.

In public relations, we do things a little differently. ”Impressions” represent an opportunity to see an inclusion or mention of a brand or product – this is what other channels would call as “reach,” or “circulation.” This does not account for the percentage of the audience that actually viewed content. Compounding the issue, many PR practitioners use a multiplier on impression numbers to account for pass-along readership or to quantify the credibility PR has over advertising.

This practice can lead CMOs to discount or dismiss PRs effectiveness, as they simply can’t compare PR CPMs apples-to-apples against other mediums when it comes time to allocate dollars.

To command larger marketing dollars, PR as an industry will need to reconcile its media accounting practices with the larger marketing community. This will be challenging and will require education. But it will help unlock more of those “TV dollars” and will ultimately be worth the effort.

Got some war stories about translating media metrics from one discipline to another? Let us know in the comments section.

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Posted in Digital, PR Measurement, Reputation, Social Media | No Comments »

Tweet it. Re-Tweet it. Digg it. Fark it…What?

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Although some people haven’t quite been able to wrap their heads around the social media lingo just yet, the fact is that social media is here to stay. Not only has social media fundamentally changed the way we as individuals communicate, it has without a doubt altered the way brands must communicate with their consumers, and in turn, monitor consumers’ reactions to their brands.

With user-generated content at our fingertips, consumers have more power than ever to influence a brand and leave a lasting impact on the reputation of a brand. Gone are the days when you had to be in one place to listen to, watch or read about breaking news or search for a product to purchase. Now, the news, and the product reviews and the conversations find us… No matter where we are and regardless of whether we were actually searching.

Case in point, news just “found” me via the Mashable application on my iPhone, which told me that Facebook traffic levels have hit another record high with more than 141 million unique visitors last month. That’s up 11 million from the previous month! This means that brands not only need to break into the realm of social media with things like ads and Facebook fan pages of their own, but they also must be alert as to what consumers are saying about their brand on these social media sites. In the amount of time it takes to read one newspaper article or watch the nightly news, abundant amounts of information are passed along via social media to millions of consumers. It’s as simple as this – one person posts something to his Facebook page; another person notices it and tweets it; then someone else re-tweets that to her followers who then have the opportunity to re-tweet it again, and again, and again… get it? Okay maybe not, but the point is that within minutes, I mean seconds, one comment from one person spreads virally to thousands of people all over the country and potentially across the globe.

Erick Qualman, author of Socialnomics said it perfectly, “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media; the question is how well we do it.”

This couldn’t be truer. As a summer intern at MS&L Chicago, I’ve seen the importance of social media from an entirely different perspective – the consumer brand’s perspective. Before this summer, I only had the perspective of a consumer sharing my pleasant (and sometimes not so pleasant) experience with brands via my social media profiles.

Now, I see the true impact one person’s comments can make on a brand, and I understand how important it is that brands effectively listen and appropriately interact in social media.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that ready or not, brands have no choice but to get social media savvy, and pay attention to how their brands are being talked about in the world of social media.

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Posted in Brand Recognition, PR Measurement, Reputation, Social Media | No Comments »

ROI! TRANSFORMATIONAL GAME-CHANGERS! VALUE ADD! (And Other Clichés When it Comes to Measurement)

Friday, May 28th, 2010

I’m sure you’re familiar with slaving away to create a brilliant campaign for a client and painstakingly worked individual tactics to ladder up to the client- mandated business goal … but then what? How did you justify your allotment of the marketing budget?

Bueller?… Bueller?… Buuuuueller?

So much time and energy is placed into campaign creation and execution that we are running on fumes (and caffeine, but that’s par for the course) by measurement time and fall back to the same old, same old.

“And here, on slide 157 out of 245, we can see the share of voice increase related to frequency of media mentions within the competitive landscape…”

Now, before the lynch mob comes for me, torch in hand, this is NOT an attack on the measures of reach (impressions) or number of “hits.” No, I wouldn’t dare attack the metrics themselves – I just want you to ask yourself if those metrics are best representing your impact.

Example time.

Fact: Baseball experts love to tout batting average as the all-telling statistic of how a team is doing.

Makes sense, more players with who hit more frequently should equal a better record, right?

Let’s put it to the test: The 2010 Chicago Cubs currently have 10 players batting above .250, generally considered the Mendoza line for this stat, so they must have an overwhelming win percentage.

Not so fast – last time I checked, their record sits at 22-25, third in the NL Central.

In our example, we should be looking at something like batting average with runners in scoring position. Why, you ask – what makes this a better area to measure?

First, throw out the arbitrary word “better.” Statistics or metrics are neither good, nor bad, but there is a fundamental need to look at the completeness of the story or we run the risk of drastic misrepresentation.

Now to answer your question, while a batting average shows a great amount of activity, runs are the metric that measure of impact of the players on a game.

Don’t agree?

Then explain to me how the winning team doesn’t necessarily have more hits but ALWAYS has more runs.

No argument that activity is needed for impact to occur, after all, your campaign is comprised of individual tactics and there will always be a need for supporting details to provide context and help tell the story of your work. However, no client ever wants to stare dead on at an Excel sheet that is supposed to explain where their budget went, so impact needs to be shown a more than just the collective results of individual activity.

Social media, traditional media (or my personal favorite, the “tradigital” media), cause-initiatives, word of mouth – doesn’t matter – each campaign is designed to align against certain business goals. You already identified these goals long ago, so time to reach back into the original deck you created and ask:

What did we say we will do, what cog in the machine did we get moving, what is the measurement that represents it?

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