Cutting Through the Noise

By Elizabeth Ballard, Director

The media landscape has changed dramatically since CARMA was founded in 1984, when print media ruled and the phrase "online news aggregator" had yet to be spoken. As one would expect, over the past few years, we have received a major uptick in requests for social media measurement and analysis. The social media universe is a difficult beast to conquer, primarily because of the massive amount of content produced daily on social media platforms. However, it is an important slice of the media landscape, and it should be taken seriously.  

Photo Credit: Jose Mourinho / centroacademicoAs CARMA began to research and analyze social media, we noticed that a large portion of the content out there was spam and useless for analytical purposes. Blog posts made up of random lists of words were pulled into content sets that search engines considered relevant. Twitter posts were coming from accounts with no human behind the tweets.  (Indeed, a recent ZDNet article concluded that “in some anecdotal cases, the number of [Facebook, Twitter, Google] users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.”)  CARMA analysts, able to quickly recognize spam from real human generated content, easily can weed out the junk and instead focus on the blog posts and tweets that provide relevant and measureable substance. 

You can settle for a completely automated offering, but know that much of the data coming from such tools is spam and results in inaccurate and flawed metrics. For a quick snapshot or daily updates about what is going in the blogosphere or Twitterverse, automated engines are effective. But to gain true actionable insights from social media content, investing in a process that utilizes human expertise to recognize and distinguish substantive and relevant content is the best and most reliable way to go. Furthermore, to get a real understanding of the media landscape, you need an analytical methodology that reflects how media is consumed. Consumers in the information age filter their content and tailor their online experiences and your media analysts should do the same. 

CARMA at the PRSA NCC Measurement Panel

Thanks to PRSA's National Capital Chapter for hosting yesterday's panel discussion on the latest measurement trends and practices, with a focus on how PR professionals can better analyze, interpret, and understand their media performances in the increasingly blurred social media landscape. Featured panelists included Barbara Coons of Edelman/StrategyOne (@StrategyOne), Johna Burke of BurrellesLuce (@GoJohnaB), Scott Arenson of Golin Harris (@scottarenson), and CARMA's own Alan Chumley (@alanchumley). A couple of key takeaways from the panel:

- Don't go into media measurement blind: As Coons said in her piece focused on public affairs "craft metrics specific to the end objectives." Burke had another great insight that "until 'busy' is a metric, we need to go by our organizational objectives."

- Go beyond the data and numbers: Per Coons, this is necessary to "see the insights the data presented."

- Related to the above, make sure humans stay involved: Burke stressed that "you still need the human approach to figure out what it [the data] means," while Arenson characterized the person who evaluates the data as "the opinion leader."

Alan also emphasized thinking about ROI vs. roi in his presentation, "Think Bigger, Integrate, Correlate," which focused on the quickly eroding dividing lines between PR, marketing, and advertising. Theorizing that because these fields are becoming a cross-discipline, cross-disciplined measurement is necessary. The takeaway here was considering analytics in terms of value, integrating multiple disciplines into PR strategies, and using a broader range of methods for analysis (topics also discussed in CARMA's white paper, "The 7Cs of Social Media Measurement").

Some of the panelists' presentations are already available online. Find Barbara Coons' slides here and Alan Chumley's slides here (or the video of his presentation).

So how did discussion of the media measurement panel fare on Twitter? Here's our look at some graphics speaking to the nature of the conversation during the event:  

Aside from the obvious attention on the panel itself, StrategyOne's Beltway Barometer (a research product that targets the most politically elite, influential, and engaged citizens living in Washington, DC and the immediate suburbs) displayed a decidedly strong showing in the Twittersphere. Below, the word cloud hits on speaker topics with quite a few links to photos/presentations thrown in there for good measure.

 

These word clouds of Extracted Entities and Popular Phrases reflect general information on yesterday's panel as well as the overarching theme of social media measurement strategies.

The full Twitter analysis on the #prsa_ncc hashtag from this morning is available here.

CARMA USA's Paper on Social Media Measurement

We've blogged before--though in brief only--about the 7Cs of social media measurement and the 5Ps of influence. 

Here is an expanded piece that we've been tinkering with and we'd welcome feedback on. 

It articulates the 7Cs, the 5Ps, UPPERCASE ROI vs. lowercase roi, the need for a multi-method aproach, and some high level for now thinking on layers of an 'index' of sorts.     

Book Bag for Social Media Measurement

Looking to school up on social media measurement?  There are so many fantastic blogs on the topic and so many smart folks (and so many great hastags and lists) to follow on Twitter.  There are even some great (and some horrible) presentations on the topic in LinkedIn / Slideshare.  So many of each of these, in fact, that a blog post citing many of the best would be impracticle.

So this post offers up a few key hard copy (OK, e-reader if you prefer) books on the topic:

• @jimsterne's Social Media Metrics:  How To Measure & Optimize Your Marketing Investment
• @avinash's Web Analytics 2.0:  The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity
• @kdpaine's Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships 
• @wemetricsguru (Marshal Sponder's) Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Intrepreting, and Using Metrics
• @thebrandbuilder (Olivier Blanchard's) Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization

What's in your social media measurement book bag?    

What's YOUR definition of an 'influencer?'

In advance of the June 3 conference on PR Measurement in Washington DC, PR News Online is asking for definitions of an 'influencer' in social media.  

PR News will 'feature' the top 10 answers at the conference and on prnewsonline.com

Here's my answer:

Influencer=5 P's

• Popular:  visible, vocal, has a substantial following, reach.  In-bound links, trackbacks, subscribers, bookmarks, followers, friends, views, listens, saves, downloads, etc. 
• Polarized in tone:  neutrality does little to drive influence way or the other.  A clearly positive or negative  view will polarize readers/followers and is more likely to drive cohesion and mobilize advocates and have those advocates coalesce around a core theme, idea, or call to action.    
• Prolific / Relevant / Frequent:  raw author contribution and # of on-topic, related posts
• Prominent / Authoritative:  are they an idea starter or spreader; source or spider?  They may be prolific but are they prominent?  Are they highly inter-related, inter-connected, and centrally located in the network?  How engaged is this person’s following in a dialogue?  How much dialogue is there and what is its nature?   Here we need to reconize, though, that authority is contextual and topical.  One might be an authority on PR measurement but not on 18th century Russian literature. 
• Promoter / Advocate:  how many of the followers/commentators active contributors advocating, endorsing, advancing (or the opposite) your position?  Are they adding links, tags.  Is the nature of the language they are using inter-connective, expanded, clarifying, reinterpreting?  RTs, digs, fans, votes, buzzups, up/downloads, shares, likes, invites, favorites, embeds.  (More active than the metrics in popularity)

Of course, measuring influence (or potential to, really) is only part of a more systems, network analysis, social capital-informed approach to social media measurement.  For that, we need to consider the:

The 7 C's of Social Media Measurement

What's YOUR definition?