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?    

Measurement Standards 2 Emerge from “Commitment Conference” (again?)

(Hat tip to Jack O’Dwyer’s June 2 newsletter article from which pieces of this post were culled)

Communications and measurement industry heavyweights will using next weeks’ European Measurement Summit in Barcelona (June 16-18), as a back drop against which to talk about “establishing standard metrics and measurement techniques for adoption throughout the industry” in what is apparently being called the “Barcelona Declaration of Research Principles.”

Apparently, this will be the first time that the leaders of the global (I’m not sure they all truly are global) professional bodies–AMEC, Global Alliance, ICCO, IPR’s Measurement Commission, and the PRSA–will share the stage.

I’d like to be a fly on that conference room wall but I’ll settle for cat-like state of readiness on the live tweetstream hashtag.  HINT.

Looking forward to reading what comes out of those sessions.

I’ve always thought we need to be really careful with what, precisely, we mean by standards.

Standard metrics? in some cases, sure, but doesn’t that depend on objectives?

Standard methods? I thought we had those.  Content analysis for media content.  Surveying / polling for, well, you get the idea…and so on.

Standard set of best practices and guiding principles? OK, but I thought we already had those, too.  Didn’t the IPR Measurement Commission and PRSA do that last year?

Could this be measurement’s watershed moment?  Fingers and toes.

In any event, a dialogue like this, at a conference like this, among those organization can, I hope, only be the start of a good thing in the long run.



European Measurement Summit Looks Strong

The second annual European Measurement Summit organized jointly by AMEC (The International Association for Measurement & Evaluation of Communications) & the Institute for PR (and it’s thought leading measurement commission of which I am disciple and booster) is gearing up.  It’s in Barcelona this year; June 16-18.  (Wish I was attending but I’m looking forward to following the twit stream via hastag). 

If it’s anything like the quality of the U.S. Measurement Summit in New Hampshire (looking at the lineup of speakers there’s every indication that it will be) it’s a must attend for the measurement-curious through to the measurement thought leaders and all points between.