11.10.20
I’ll be speaking at BlogWorld LA in a couple of weeks, along with my good friend Jeremy Wright, on the topic of blogger relations – how to identify people, how to approach them and how to avoid the mistakes of others.
I had a chance recently to chat with DJ Waldow, who recorded this video about our session and about why I keep coming back to BlogWorld.
If you’re interested in attending BlogWorld LA, you can use the code BWEVIP20 to get 20% off the registration price.
11.10.05
The Harvard Business Review recently published a post entitled “Return on Influence, the New ROI“. In it, the author suggested that marketers consider the use of “Return on Influence” as a metric for measuring social media activity.
What is this metric, you ask? To quote the post:
“Divide the total revenue generated via social efforts by the number of social media fans and followers, and you get a per-fan/follower value.”
There you have it – your “new” ROI – return on influence.
Really? Looks to me like that’s “Revenue Per Fan/Follower”.
Sorry, but this kind of black-hat math just doesn’t cut it. There are so many holes in the post, it’s hard to know where to begin (fortunately, Olivier Blanchard and Katie Paine did, in the comments). Still, I’ll take a stab, because I think it’s important that you, me and everyone in this space stop using BS metrics to justify social media activities and start to tie them back to business objectives.
I’ve written on this before (check out this post from two years ago) but here we go again…
How can you calculate a return on something without knowing what you put into it? My head hurts. This isn’t a true “return” metric; this is a poor attempt to calculate the value of a fan (without considering many of the factors in play even in that instance).
ROI has a formula. It goes like this:
(Gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment
This isn’t up for negotiation. It’s a business staple. Please – if you value your job – don’t walk into a boardroom and try to sell your CFO on your fan numbers. Don’t try to sell them on retweets, or replies, or anything like that (they’re useful, but not in that context or for that audience). Show them the return that you’re able to generate for the business.
It might be hard to tie social media activities directly back to ROI, as there’s rarely a direct, solid line to be drawn (it’s extremely hard to say what, beyond the final trigger, influenced a decision to purchase, for example, but it doesn’t mean those things weren’t worthwhile). However, solid business objectives do tie back.
Which leads me to the next point…
This is something I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently – ensuring that the social media activities we plan tie back to business objectives for our clients. Sometimes that’s sales. Sometimes that’s reduced customer churn. Sometimes it’s lowered costs.
It’s never “increasing the revenue per follower” or the “return on influence”.
Imagine going pitching a metric like “return on PR”. The conversation might go something like:
You: “We calculate Return on PR by looking at the revenue generated from PR against the volume of releases we put out…”
Boss: “Get out.”
This idea is similarly ridiculous. Measure an activity, not a medium. You want to measure the ROI of a tweet? Fine. Figure out what it cost to draft/approve/publish it (time is money) and how much revenue it generated (assuming it was sales-focused). There you go – you can calculate the ROI of the tweet, and you haven’t broken a sweat yet.
Don’t try to measure the ROI of social media, or of “influence”… please.
Every time someone uses reach metrics to try to define influence, a great hue and cry goes up. “It’s not reach, it’s context!” they cry. It’s true. Plus it’s a bunch of other things.
Folks like the team at Traackr have realized this, as have those at PeerIndex. Klout has cottoned-on, too, with its topic pages (although I’d still like to see them go much further down that road).
If you measure your results based on fans and followers, don’t expect senior leadership to buy into your plans for long.
Like Ad Value Equivalency (AVE), this number tries to force a square peg through a round hole.
AVE aimed to show the value of media coverage if that same coverage had been a paid ad rather than earned media. It was bullshit, plain and simple, as it didn’t account for sentiment, credibility or any other measurement that fit around it.
There are plenty of other metrics thrown around that apply arbitrary (and, often, opaque) formulae to generate meaningless values for social media activities. I can’t stand them (plus, they violate the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, which the world’s biggest PR firms (ours included) have endorsed.
Please – let’s stop creating fake numbers and take a long, hard look instead at how we can tie our activities back to business objectives, and measure against that.
Fair?
11.10.04
I was glancing at my blog traffic stats the other day, and noticed something that made me sit up and take notice – after three years, the most-viewed post on this site continues to be the opening post in my good communications planning series, with over 125,000 views.
What’s more, the traffic to this post is continuing to rise over time. Here’s a chart of the daily traffic to the post:
Doesn’t look much like the typical ‘long tail’ image of traffic over time, does it?
I got to wondering why this is happening. Here are my ideas:
The 13-part series of posts I wrote on communications planning walk through the process of creating a communications plan, from start to finish. It (I hope) is useful stuff; content that people find applicable and helpful.
These posts are as helpful today as they were when I wrote them. While best practices around plan development will, I’m sure, evolve over time, this series should remain helpful for a long time.
As someone pointed out to me on Twitter, Google “good communications plan” and this post is the top result. “Communications plan” continues to be one of the top search terms used to reach this site. I thought-through the titles of the posts, and the cross-linking between them, when first writing them, and it worked well.
I’d love to hear your take – have you experienced this kind of effect before? What caused it then?
11.09.27
I don’t think it matters which form of communications you work in; “legal” often seems to be a pain point. It’s not surprising — their job is to manage risk for the organization, and public-facing communications activities (especially two-way ones) naturally offer an element of uncertainty. There’s a natural tension between the two.
Last night I spoke on a panel for the American Marketing Association on the topic of “How to launch and implement a social media initiative.” One of the questions revolved around whether panelists had encountered problems with legal departments when introducing social media initiatives. I thought I’d share some tips I offered the audience there for working with your (or clients’) legal departments, to make the process smoother.
Here are seven tips for working with your legal team:
11.09.21
Earlier this week, All Facebook featured a post on a report by DDB and OpinionWay examining the reasons that Facebook users “unlike” brand pages.
The key findings, as reported by All Facebook (the report appears to have been taken down from SlideShare, so I can’t link to it):
Interesting, useful data.
This follow-up chart in the post, however, is next to useless.
Why is this chart useless?
Because the sample size is too small for this kind of segmentation.
The original data is useful because the analysis is conducted at an aggregate level, over 630 respondents. At that sample size, we’re looking at a 3.9% margin of error at a 95% confidence level. That means, while there may be some variation among the top results, they’re useful at a high level.
Dig down to a country level like the chart above, though, and things start to fall apart. With a sample size of 78, given the number of Facebook users in the United States (155,746,780 according to Facebook), the margin of error for the US numbers is over 11% at that same confidence level. It’s not just the US, either – the margin of error for the France numbers is over 8.5%. Despite this, there’s no mention of these details on the post or comments; just an assumption that the numbers are correct.
This is a great example of why I think math is a critical skill for PR professionals.
PR pros need to understand the difference between valid statistics and invalid ones, so they can take advantage of useful information (like that at the top of this post) and disregard the non-useful stuff (like the regional breakdown above). What’s more, they need to know what’s news and what’s non-news too, so they can make an informed decision on what to pitch as the former and what to advise their clients to pass on promoting.
Are you comfortable reading between the lines when it comes to statistics? If not, it might be time to brush up.
11.09.19
I’ve worked in communications for a while now, and one thing I’ve noticed — consistently — is that the same two elements of communications plan get overlooked time and time again:
These almost always get sacrificed in favour of the bright, shiny part of the plan: tactics.
What’s more, your objectives and strategy are the most important part of the plan. They’re the part that frames the ultimate goal that you’re trying to achieve, and provides a focus for the tactics that should aim to achieve that goal.
That means that, sadly, most communications programs fail to live up to their true purpose.
I think this failure stems from two primary misunderstandings:
Simply put, your objective should state what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to sell 30,000 units of something? Increase customer loyalty? Reduce employee turnover? Remember, too, that there are business objectives and communications objectives, and the latter should flow up to the former.
Your strategy defines how you will achieve the objective you just outlined. If you’re looking to sell product, for example, one strategy might look to raise awareness of the product among a key audience. Another option might be to improve its visibility among key purchase-driven search terms.
Your tactics provide the final level of detail in your plan – the granular activities that will drive towards your strategies, and which ultimately fuel the accomplishment of your objective.
Too few people understand the difference between these three areas. If they’re on the client side, they’re the ones who, despite the great program delivered, still ask “but how many media impressions did we get” even if the business results are there for all to see. On the agency side, well, they’re the ones who risk those same clients never having the business results to ignore in the first place.
It’s CRITICAL that people get their heads around this, as these parts of your plan ensure you’re driving at the right result.
Lots of people, especially in the communications industry, are highly creative and really enjoy the creative side of things. Let’s face it, brainstorms are fun. Blue sky thinking, a “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” mindset and no consideration of limitations is a nice mindset to have. Unfortunately, I’ve found that that often comes at the expense of strategy – of putting boundaries around creativity to ensure it is pointed in the right direction.
I had a great discussion with a colleague last week after a brainstorm. I commented that we had some great ideas coming out of the session, but that at that point most of them totally diverged from our strategy for the program. Her response (paraphrasing) was: “Agreed. It’s our job to take those ideas, filter them and tweak them so they fit.”
The perfect team combines people with creative strength alongside those with a strategic mindset, so you get the best of both worlds.
Want to improve your planning? Educate your team and your client about the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics, and make sure they’re taken into account when developing your plan.
11.09.16
It’s all too easy to shoot your mouth off sometimes – to pass judgement and get a quick dose of attention and reaction from others - without thinking carefully of the consequences.
Just remember – you never know:
11.08.22
Despite all of the books out there about social media, most of them are pretty generic or focus on end-user 101s. So, when I heard about Social Marketing to the Business Customer (by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman)
The bottom line: I’ve already recommended this book to several colleagues looking to learn more about social media from a B2B perspective. Even if you’ve worked in the social media space for a while, this book offers useful pointers and case studies that will help you to think differently about how you approach B2B social marketing.
For me, three key things stand out about this book:
1. It acknowledges that social media isn’t the second coming. While, per the title, the book is totally about social marketing, the authors frequently remind the reader that there are other promotional tactics available to business owners, and points out that social media isn’t always the best set of tools to use. A little dash of reality is essential to a book on this topic, when everyone else sometimes seem to have the blinkers on.
2. It brings new case studies to the table. We’ve all heard about the obvious case studies a hundred times. Dell, Starbucks, and so on (disclosure: Starbucks is an Edelman client). If you’ve read a social media book, you’ve heard their stories and you’ve learned all you will from them at this point. They’re in this book too, but so are organizations like InnoCentive, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute and the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts. In fact, along with the examples spread liberally throughout the book, there’s a whole chapter consisting purely of case studies of eight diverse organizations using social media in diverse ways.
Why does this matter?
Because you’re much more likely to be able to relate to one of these companies than you are to the giant first movers.
What’s more, this book doesn’t just talk inputs, it talks outcomes – it lets you know the results of those companies’ social media activities. In doing so it provides the substance that you need to take those case studies to your management to help convince them that your ideas are good ones.
3. It’s written for the average B2B marketer. You don’t need to be a social media expert; you don’t even need to be a digital marketer. You just need to have a good marketing head on your shoulders to understand and get value from this book, as it starts you at the beginning of the planning process and takes you through to tool selection and measurement. That’s why I’ve recommended it to colleagues who are looking to learn more about this topic — because it will help them go from 0 to 30 in B2B social media marketing. Our digital team can help them along the rest of the way.
Of course, there are things I would change. The chapter on ROI makes a LOT of assumptions, and I noticed more grammar errors in the book than in most others that I’ve read recently. They didn’t detract from the value in the book, though — and the fact that there IS a chapter on ROI made me happy.
Who should read this: People looking to gain a basic understanding of B2B social media. If you’re in this boat, Social Marketing to the Business Customer
Who should avoid this: Purely B2C marketers (although you may still learn some useful pointers) and people at an advanced level of knowledge in the B2B social media space.
What you’ll learn:
11.08.16
As I continue to work towards my challenge of reading 26 books in 2011 (an aside: I’m up to 18 right now – two ahead of schedule), I recently finished reading Michael Crichton’s book State Of Fear
For context, the following excerpt reflects a discussion on the media relations surrounding a new environmental conference, four days ahead of the first day of the conference (emphasis in the excerpt is mine):
“What’s the time-line of the campaign?”
“It’s a standard starburst launch to bring public awareness to abrupt climate change [...] we have our initial press break on Sunday-morning talk shows and in the Sunday newspaper supplements. They’ll be talking about the start of the conference Wednesday and interviewing major photogenic principals [...] we’ve given enough lead time to get into all the major weekly newsbooks around the world, Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Paris Match, Oggi, The Economist. All together, fifty news magazines to inform lead opinion makers. We’ve asked for cover stories, accepting banner folds with a graphic. Anything less and they didn’t get us. We expect covers on at least twenty.”
WHAT???
Yes, it’s just a novel (not a particularly good one, frankly) but things like this shape peoples’ perceptions of the PR industry, so I feel compelled to point out a few things for the record:
pun here somewhere…11.08.12
Ragan’s PR Daily published a post yesterday listing their top 10 words often misused in press releases.
Their list:
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