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You’re Not a Strategist – You’re a Punk

11.10.20

I’m constantly astonished at how many people looking to get into agencies describe themselves as a “strategist” and think that by doing so, they can now avoid all of the work they don’t want to do. Whether it’s planning and budgeting, client project execution or measuring the outcomes, some people seem to think that by calling yourself something different, you can avoid learning about critical elements of a communications function.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s by doing that that you learn how good programs and strategies work.

I know I’m going to piss a lot of people off here, but in my opinion you can’t be an effective strategist until you’ve got some experience to rest behind it.

Mashable recently published a post that nicely explains my frustration. It’s entitled “What Does It Take To Be a Social Strategist?” Key points:

  1. About a third of companies look for at least six years of experience when looking for a social strategist
  2. 92% of social strategists are manager-level or higher
  3. Key success factors:
    1. Rallying stakeholders across the organization
    2. Leading multi-faceted, cross-departmental efforts
    3. Having a long-term, customer-centric vision
    4. Being multi-disciplinary and wearing “many hats”

Sounds pretty intense, right? So then why do I encounter so many inexperienced people giving themselves that title?

Here’s where I’m coming from: When I started working in communications, after doing a few internships during school I spent four years, analyzing quality assessments of communications plans in the public sector.

Sounds mind-bogglingly boring, right? On the contrary, I think that experience set me up fabulously to succeed later. I looked at poor plans and learned to spot the holes and what doesn’t work. I looked at good plans and learned how they effectively fit together. I did the same for tactical materials, too.

Later I moved jobs, began executing things myself, and learned from my mistakes. I organized a media event that I thought was near-perfect but that had ZERO media show up (sob!). I had drafts returned to me by editors with so much red ink on them, you could barely read the original draft.

On the flip side, I also wrote a release that got verbatim pick-up on the front page of tier-one media (I still have a copy of that paper!), and led programs that delivered great results for clients. In short: I learned.

You can’t just flip a switch and consider yourself a strategist without gaining experience in these other areas. You need to get in the trenches, get your head down and learn.

What’s more – sorry to say it – but there’s a lot more to strategy than just idea creation.

You might be great at putting the pieces together, and have a really great mind for integrating different elements to solve problems, but until you’ve gained enough experience to know (the majority of the time, at least – communications isn’t a science) what is likely to work and what isn’t, be quiet and continue to learn.

If you think you just flip a switch and become a master strategist overnight without gaining the experience needed first, you’re not a strategist. You’re just a punk.

(photo credit: Flickr)

Posted in: strategy

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Content Is King At BlogWorld

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.

Posted in: blogger relations, BlogWorld, events

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Return On Influence Can Return From Whence It Came

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…

1. Measuring a return requires that you compare outcomes to the input

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).

2. ROI is ROI, not Return on Imaginary Numbers

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…

3. Return on Influence has nothing to do with business objectives

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”.

 4. Measurement should be activity-specific

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.

5. Followers and fans don’t define influence

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.

6. Please – PLEASE – stop creating fake numbers

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?

Posted in: measurement, social media

19Comments

Three Ways To Wag The Long Tail Of Content

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:

 

1. Useful content

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.

2. Evergreen content

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.

3. Optimize for search

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?

 

 

 

 

Posted in: social media, statistics

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7 Tips For Getting Legal Approval on Social Media Programs

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:

  1. Tie back to organizational objectives: Show how the program you’re trying to implement ties-in to business objectives, and help to educate the legal team on the strategy behind your proposal.
  2. Educate your legal team: Don’t just throw something new and uncertain like social media at them “cold”; walk them through what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and show them best practices that have been established.
  3. Show them how you’re reducing risk: Walk the legal team through the ways you’re working to reduce risk on the project. If you’re looking to leverage user-generated content, show how you’re going to moderate it; if you’re empowering employees to engage online, show them the policy and guidelines you’ve created to frame it; etc.
  4. Loop them in early: No-one likes to be blind-sided last minute. Loop your legal team in early, to ensure you’re aware of potential concerns and are able to manage around them (the same goes for IT, HR and any other stakeholders).
  5. Give them case studies: The legal system revolves around precedents. Your lawyers are likely to respond well to examples of how other organizations have done similar things successfully (and trouble-free) in the past. If other people have blazed the trail ahead of you, show them.
  6. Draw lines around roles: Clearly frame the role that stakeholders have in your program, ahead of time. Your legal team doesn’t need to be editing your text for style; they need to be working to minimize risk for the organization. Make sure everyone is aware of that role, and reinforce it if necessary.
  7. Be their friend: This pointer came from Eliot Johnson – one of the other panelists: become friends with your legal team. Many people wrongly treat “legal” as the opposition, when they’re just trying to do their jobs. Work with them, not against them, and you’ll find that things go much more smoothly.
What do you think?

Posted in: social media

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9Comments

Lies, Damned Lies and Mis-understood Statistics

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):

  • The brand was no longer of interest to me (49 percent);
  • The information available was not interesting (46 percent);
  • Information was published too often (36 percent);
  • The brand published information I did not appreciate (27 percent)
  • Information was not published often enough (14 percent).

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.

Posted in: statistics

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Two Ways To Quickly Improve Your Communications Plans

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:

  • Objectives
  • Strategy

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:

1. People don’t understand the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics.

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.

2. People focus on shiny.

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.

Posted in: communications, communications planning, pr, public relations, strategy

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7Comments

You Never Know

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:

  • Who might be your boss one day
  • Who might interview you, or review your resume, one day
  • Who might be a colleague one day
  • Who might be a client one day
  • Who might be a key supplier one day
  • Who might be a potential recruit one day
It’s easy to pass judgement… but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Posted in: career

4Comments

Video: Thoughts on Social CRM for Small Businesses

11.09.14

Social CRM is a hot topic right now. As companies’ use of social media tools begins to mature from a pure marketing focus to more of a social business focus, the various use cases of social CRM are gaining more attention from practitioners. In fact, I’m in the middle of reading a book on social CRM right now (The Social Customer, by Adam Metz).

So, when Lauren Carlson drew my attention to a video interview she conducted with Marshall Lager from Third Idea Consulting - a well-known name in the field – at the CRM Evolution conference, it caught my attention.

A few interesting notes from the interview:

  • Unlike most other business tools, social CRM is largely derived from consumer-related tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs etc., which weren’t originally designed for business uses. People are using these tools to share experiences they have. Businesses have finally caught on to the potential benefits of being involved, and are starting to monetize their relationships.
  • You can get started with social CRM by simply signing up for a free or trial account on a service, and starting to listen. Trick number one is to find out where your customers are and what they’re saying. Once you have that, you can begin to craft a strategy (I would add that before you do that, you need to figure out what business objectives you want to accomplish).
  • Lager says small businesses especially can benefit from social media – the closer to start-up, the better – because the people there are extremely passionate, focused on where the next sale will come from and are likely to have a direct relationship with their customers.  He argues that the benefits of social media to small business can outstrip those for large businesses, who already have an established brand and established expectations, very quickly. Small businesses can touch every one of their customers, and have a significant effect in doing so.
  • Strategy is important. You can build it as you go to a certain extent (I would argue that while this may be the case for some companies, for most it would be far better to figure out your strategy first), but at a certain point you need to figure out what you’re trying to do with social media. You need to figure out your company’s voice; your rules of engagement (and several companies have published their verisons; here are 57 sets of social media guidelines and resources to get you started).
  • One of the most important things that companies can do online is tell the truth. If people trust you, they will do business with you. If they don’t trust you, they want nothing to do with you.
I found the interview interesting; while there are a few comments I would respectfully disagree with, there’s  some interesting stuff here – especially for small business owners who might be curious on how & why to get started.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Posted in: social media

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6Comments

A Simple, Effective Way To Boost Your Creativity

11.09.08

Want a quick way to improve your creative output, at work and at home?

Carry a notebook with you at all times.

Carrying a notebook is a habit I’ve fallen into and out of over the years, but I’ve noticed that when I do, my creative output soars. Right now I’m rocking a Moleskine notebook, and I love it. Frankly, you could use scraps of paper instead, but having a notebook makes it way easier to refer back to later.

Why?

Because having a notebook means you can capture ideas as they occur to you, without the risk of forgetting them before capturing them. When you first start this, you’ll be astonished at how many ideas you

Yesterday, on the way to work I jotted down three ideas for blog posts that I had on my 30-minute commute. Today, I took notes on a book I’m currently reading (The Social Customer by Adam Metz).

Cheap, easy to establish and effortless to maintain, but the payoffs are huge.

Posted in: miscellaneous

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