Another Way To Use Media Evaluation For Planning

MetLife and Echo Research won the 2009 Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award for excellence in public relations measurement and evaluation. This award identifies great examples of research and measurement integrated into public relations practice. IPR publishes winners as case studies on the Institute's website (www.instituteforpr.org).
This entry, "The Media Reality Check: A New Approach to Content Analysis" is somewhat unlike past entries in that it used media analysis as a starting- rather than an end-point. You can find the entry at: http://www.instituteforpr.org/files/uploads/JFGRAMetLifeandEchoResearch.pdf.

CHALLENGE
MetLife believed its messages about Annuities, Long-Term Care Insurance and Life Insurance were not being accurately and completely reported. This concerned the company because it felt that without complete and accurate information, consumers were less able to make informed decisions about these products.

SOLUTION
To determine whether or not MetLife was correct in this perception, it commissioned Echo to analyze the "message accuracy" of MetLife coverage of these three topics. Echo assessed message accuracy by quantifing:

1. The accuracy of basic facts,
2. The number of misstatements
3. Omissions of basic facts

Echo calls this approach "The Media Reality Check." They limited the media analysis to a set of publications MetLife considers to be particularly influential.

METLIFE POSITION SUPPORTED
Echo found the overwhelming majority of articles on the three topics of interest omitted a number of basic facts and included a number of misstatements. For example, 94% of the articles they examined on life insurance had at least one error or omission in their reporting on the topic. And omissions of facts were present more than errors. While 32% of the articles contained a misstatement of fact, 88% omitted a basic fact.

SOLUTION BASED ON RESEARCH RESULTS
MetLife has communicated this information to editors and reporters who follow these topics for key media. In followup measurement studies, not only has MetLife's coverage gone up, but also the accuracy of reporting. To me, this is a great case, because it focuses on how an organization can use research and measurement not just to evaluate, but to understand and assess (and in this case even quantify) a situation and use this information to develop a solution. Congratulations to MetLife and Echo Research for an innovative use of research to manage a communications challenge.

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Thanks very much for reading. If you have questions you'd like me to address, or other topics you'd like me to write about, please let me know.

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I work with organizations going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program, etc.) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me, my clients have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

I also work as a PR and communications research director for hire for agencies and other organizations.

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The Institute for Public Relations, (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation

Primer on Social Media Evaluation

Excellent primer on social media evaluation from Don Bartholomew: http://www.iabc.com/cwb/archive/2009/1009/Bartholomew.htm.

Evaluation -- Finding the Path

All too often I see client evaluation programs that do little more than present a count of the number of times the client's name is mentioned in media. The media might include print, broadcast, radio and online, but all that is "measured" is the number of mentions.

For me it is difficult to understand why anyone would consider this to be reasonable measurement of communications success and why any CEO would accept it as such.

As many of you know, I'm on the Institute for PR's Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation. Those of us on the Commission share the point of view that the best measurement gets at business outcomes -- behaviors such as, for example, increased sales or not selling a company's stock in response to a crisis. (For more on the Commission and evaluation, please check out this Institute for PR link.)

Of course the argument against this is that it is difficult to directly link communications activities to these kinds of behaviors. Increased sales might be a response to increased distribution, repackaging, a lower price, or some other promotion. Communications may have helped, but how much?

We don't always have solutions to these issues. Frequently, we really cannot tease out the effect of communications on a sale. It is even more difficult to get at the role of communication in restraint, such as not selling stock. So we often must measure by proxy.

Counting media mentions of one's organization is a proxy, but a very poor one. To create a good proxy, we need to think through what has to happen for the behavior to occur and then measure one or more of these "happenings."

Suppose, for example, your management wants your organization to be recognized as the leader in a specific field of technology. You would want to come to agreement with management regarding which stakeholders were most important for this effort and what "leader" means. And, in the end, you would want to measure stakeholder awareness and attitudes toward your company, because that is where recognition as a leader would lie.

Unfortunately, achieving this perception might take more than a year. It might be a five- or even a ten-year goal. So you would need some interim proxy goals.

The next question is what is the communications strategy that will help the organization get there? From a media perspective, you might argue that you want key editors and reporters to not only perceive your organization as the leader, but also to report it as such. What would that reporting look like? If you observe all the coverage of your competitive set in this technology, you likely will see a number of topics in that coverage. If you understand your organization's business strategy, you can identify topics that will be important for your organization to dominate.

Once you've identified these topics, you then can look at the overall discussion of the technology and assess what your share of that discussion is vs. that of the other members of your competitive set. You also would want to determine how much of your coverage is positive, neutral or negative and how that compares to your competitors.

When you do this, you demonstrate:

• An understanding of your organization's business goals
• That you've made considered judgments regarding how media coverage can help your organization achieve those goals
• That you are measuring how well your company is doing in the media against its competitors

In addition, you can use this information to help you position your company's activities so they will get more of the kind of coverage you and your management wants.

This, again, is a proxy for being recognized as the leader in your field. But it has a very solid strategic basis, which you can present to your management.

I have been involved in evaluation programs like this for Fortune 500 companies, and in every case, the CEOs of those companies have become engaged in and commented on these results. They accept this proxy, because it is well reasoned. There is a path of logic linking the organization's business goal to the media strategy, and a way to periodically measure the success of that media strategy.

So, the next time you consider evaluation, think about the chain of communications occurrences likely to lead to the desired behavior and determine which of these you can measure and how.

To see another example of this logic, see my earlier Blog post on Projecting the Value of a Marketing PR Program.

The conversational medium

About a week ago I enjoyed a very stimulating discussion with some of my colleagues from the Institute for PR's Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation. We were talking about social media and how it is challenging to comment on in a way that is useful to the PR practitioner community, because it morphs so rapidly.

It occurred to me that what morphs rapidly in social media is technology, but the technology is not what makes social media important to us.

The history of the communications industry, as we know it, has been primarily one-sided. Yes, the PR masters of old all recommended research and understanding publics before communicating with them, and advertising agencies have done this kind of research for years. But we in public relations, for the most part, have ignored the advice and the practice. We've considered communications to be one way. We send to our target audiences the information we want them to have. Generally there has not been, nor have we actively sought, a feedback loop.

What is new about social media is our target audiences have found their voices. We can, and many do, use social media for one-way messaging. But that's the same thing advertisers did in the 1950s when they sponsored a television show. What is new is we now can listen and, what is more, engage in conversations. Even if we did research in the past, we couldn't really engage in conversations the way we can now through social media. The research became a static document that told us something about a group of people at the time we did the research. Social media gives us a window into what our stakeholders want and need today, and it will give us a window into any changes in these wants and needs tomorrow.

So, in my mind, the real change engendered by social media is this ability to engage in conversations. We're still learning how to use these conversations, but they are what's new. Certainly, the technology is enabling, but it is not the big story, the conversation and what we can make of them is.

Still, the conversations our employers and corporate clients have with interested parties is not the whole story. These people talk to each other as well, and, if they think they need a community, they develop one, and these have their own lives and live by their own rules. They are not like the old media in any way except that they can be widely read by anyone who has access to a computer. Still, it's the conversation that's new, and in my mind, that's what we must learn to manage.

Multiplier Claim Fraudulent

I just read a paper by David Michaelson and Don Stacks, colleagues of mine at the Institute for PR's Commission on Measurement and Evaluation.

They have done a series of experiments to determine whether there is any basis for the claimed "multiplier" effect of editorial coverage over advertising. The argument being that the third-party endorsement of editorial coverage generated by PR is more believable and valuable than advertising. Then, those who make this argument make up a number and say, for example, PR-induced editorial coverage is three times or five times as valuable as equivalent advertising.

Michaelson and Stack's most recent study supports their earlier work. They state in their discussion: "We found no major differences between public relations and advertising on overall communications impact."

What's really important about all this is two qualified researchers are objectively reviewing the claim PR practitioners have made about the value of editorial content being higher than advertising. We now have real experimental data that says it just is not so.

We cannot project their findings to all cases; there may be some circumstances in which there is some multiplier effect, but we have no experimental evidence to support that, just the assertions of people who do not question their assumptions.

I suggest you review the paper at http://bit.ly/2WFazS. It is pretty good reading for an academic paper, and certainly worth skimming at the very least.

And bravo to Don and David!

Social Media Applications in B2B

A colleague on LinkedIn asked "how social media sites could benefit a B2B corporation, and could putting your B2B organization out there also open up potential for damaging info?"

One commenter asked that the poster "describe what you mean by 'potential for damaging info.'" In addition, I would ask: What are your business goals? Without the answer to these questions, social media becomes a tactic in search of a strategy. Practitioners will have no way to determine whether the social media program is doing what they want it to do, because they have not articulated what they want it to do. Social media programs should be designed with an end in sight and knowledge of the stakeholder group's social media habits to determine which techniques, if any, are likely to succeed.

As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff note in their book "Groundswell," social media can enhance engagement and magnify the influence of advocates in a company's customer base.

Many companies created product or service user groups long before social media was available. I worked with a company that sponsored annual user-group meetings as a service to customers and to learn how they could improve the company's product. What would happen naturally in those face-to-face meetings now happens virtually via social media. Users can share applications and solutions to challenges, and those who are extremely positive (and prone to blogging and commenting) can become very real assets to the company. Moreover, it gives the company the opportunity to enlist its users in the design process, which can lead to better products and higher user engagement and advocacy. However, this only works if your company listens and responds.

Is there a potential for damaging info? Probably. Social media is not a controlled medium.

Then the question becomes: Do you have something to hide? If your organization is authentic and transparent, then chances are good you will be okay. If not, you should encourage management to guide your organization to authenticity and transparency, because with the world as it is today, the transparency likely will come, whether you like it or not, especially if you are publicly held. When the opaque wall turns transparent, you want your house to be in order.

# # #

Thanks very much for reading. If you have questions you'd like me to address, or other topics you'd like me to write about, please let me know.

# # #

I work with organizations going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program, etc.) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me, my clients have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

I also work as a PR and communications research director for hire for agencies and other organizations.

# # #

The Institute for Public Relations, (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation

Article on Demos and Recovering from Recession

The following article is an interesting analysis of the potential effect of current demographics on recovery from the recession. It's a great example of how communications people should be thinking as they do their work. If Mr. MacKinley is correct, it represents a specific challenge most communicators need to think about overcoming as they support their clients.

Regardless, thinking about what is going on in the world is a critical part of what we do, because what goes on affects our stakeholders and audiences.

http://tinyurl.com/kruoww