With marketing budgets and traditional journalism shrinking,  it’s no surprise that the value of brands taking an editorial approach to building a content strategy – becoming both a publisher of original content and curator of news and stories across the Web – is hotly discussed. Is curation counterfeiting? Can consumers distinguish branded content from true “objective” journalism? All themes that got pulses racing today.

But ultimately, for me, the debate comes down to this basic fact: thanks to technology, ANYONE can tell a good story that captivates consumers’ attention and inspires action. Brands shouldn’t ignore the tools at their disposal, but they also should not apply the same approach they have to their traditional marketing efforts and content development.

There is room for both traditional journalism and brand publishing – the latter is still in the experimental phase and (in the vast majority of cases) is being done poorly today. I agree with TechCrunch’s Lora Kolodny (who was great on the panel, providing the contrarian point of view) that best practices and standards need to be developed to make sure that we are creating content that provides value – not contributes to “info pollution.”

So where should brands start?

• Turn your real-time conversation monitoring into context for conversations. Break free of your schedule and let the insights and pain points gleaned from listening to your customers drive your content strategy.
• Don’t rely on one form of branded journalism – content creation or owned media. Weave together a complete evolved media experience for your customers that brings together the best third-party content, original content created by your brand and content/opinions from peers – provide value to your customers by making it easier than ever to find the information they need – but be transparent and clear about your company’s role in each.
• Involve external parties – people with journalism backgrounds and agencies with a pulse on your audience’s conversations and motivators – to help you craft your story and avoid creating “non-fiction advertising.” But be sure that your partners are steeped in you brand values or your content will be disingenuous.

And to close with another brand journalism concern raised by the panel: when it comes to consumption of this content, as discussed by Scott Friedman here on Hypertext, we need to give consumers more credit. Brands have a responsibility to be authentic and transparent, but let’s acknowledge that today’s readers are so much more informed and sophisticated than ever before. People are more savvy about where they get their information and savvy enough to understand when content loses its objectivity. It’s the same technology that’s enabling brands to create and distribute original content that’s enabling people to call out those who cross the line.

What’s your take on brand journalism? What role does/could it play in your marketing mix? What best practices or standards would you want to see put in place to guide brand journalism efforts – to strengthen the value provided to consumers and to unlock greater ROI for companies?

Let’s continue the debate.

Yfrog photo via Tim

All three brands have realized, in Kris Narayanan’s words, that “social media isn’t a playground; it’s a viable option for brands to communicate” and they’ve made it a priority. General Mills now spends about five percent of its marketing/communications budget on social and PepsiCo has increased its social spend to 30 percent across all brands, with some brands entirely devoting their budget to social (not surprisingly, Julie shared that the Pepsi Refresh budget was 60  percent social).

Surely these brands must have nailed ROI to secure this type of funding in their organization’s finite budgets, right? They must have created a set of KPIs that  received buy-in from across company? Not so fast.

All agreed that regardless of their budget growth they ALL still struggle when connecting metrics with ROI. To increase support for social within their organization and unlock budgets, the panelists all recommended finding and promoting “business value” anecdotes combined with metric progress overtime.

So what does this look approach look like? Here are examples from each brand:

• General Mills – When the company launched their Fiber One bars they relied heavily on influencer placements like getting the products into the hands of Hungry Girl. Her comment that the bars “were better than Snickers” to her community of one million readers sparked online conversation and General Mills mapped the pulse and sentiment of conversation with the pulse of sales – finding that social conversations were the #2 driver of purchases. David Witt was able to take this anecdote combine it with cost deflection metrics for paid media and show that YES, social media is working.
• Samsung – A majority of Samsung’s social media metrics are based on conversation and sentiment within the conversations. When Samsung.com relaunched last year with more social features it was able to show that engagement increased by 200 percent, while online conversations about the brand increased and sentiment improved over the same time.
• PepsiCo – Try to ignore this anecdote – more people voted in Pepsi’s Refresh project than the presidential election. But the Pepsi Refresh project unlocked business value through more than votes – the positive brand sentiment ignited through word of mouth discussions was where the real payoff came. In another story from Julie Hamp, Brisk and Hess teamed with Foursquare to have buy one get one @Brisk for check-ins at point-of-sale. The test showed that sales increased 141 percent. Yes, social is working.

What I loved about these anecdotes is that these companies aren’t measuring by number of followers on Twitter or number of fans on Facebook. They’ve found quantifiable ways to link their activities to business results through correlations to sales and cost deflection – albeit not a perfect science, but it’s on its way. Most importantly they also look beyond the numbers to find qualitative examples of how they’re changing customer perceptions and building relationships.

What anecdotes have you uncovered through your social media program? What impresses your executives? What falls flat? Would love to discuss this in the comments.

The Council of PR firms will be sharing a podcast of the session – we’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.

Twitpic via @MusaTariq

People care more about how their social network views products and services than how they’re ranked by Google or portrayed in an advertisement – according to the Neilsen Company, 90 percent of consumers say they trust peer recommendations over anything else. As peer influence becomes more important, a handful of companies are trying to come up with a formula which would accurately measure the social reach and influence of users.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Research recently took a deeper look at Klout – arguably the most-heavily used for obtaining social media influence metrics. Klout looks at a user’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and, using a specific algorithm, comes up with a score from 1-100 that explains how effective a user is in his or her network. Many brands are using these companies to “prioritize the elite,” as Owyang explains, but warns that relying on a single metric is dangerous.

For example, following the Kenneth Cole debacle, the company’s Klout Score increased nearly 30 points. This indicates that the Klout score takes into consideration reactions such as @ replies and the overall growth of a network, rather than measuring sentiment of the tweets being generated. This makes it relatively simple for users to cheat the system by posting an excessive number of tweets to raise their Klout scores.

While Klout and other influence measurement tools can be useful, brands should keep in mind that influence is all relative. A well-known technology journalist may have a high Klout score and seem influential, but may not be relevant for a brand focused on fashion or food, for example. Consider the end audience for your client’s product or service – are the “influencers” you’re working with reaching those communities – or something else? Brands should not rely on one single measure of influence, but instead come up with their own algorithm for determining influence in their markets.

To which I would say, don’t get too hung up on so-called hard ROI.

Of course, it would be great if such a correlation is eventually shown. But in this case, the community of passionate fans that has formed around this ad is its own return on investment. Volkswagen has indelibly imprinted in the minds of consumers associations with fun and youth and family. You can practically close your eyes and feel the good will, kind of like a, um, force, permeating everything. It will pay off in many ways, over time. VW doesn’t have to see that ROI in a spreadsheet to know it’s there.

It’s easy to make the assumption that your blog is failing when you’re receiving few comments. But don’t forget, Forrester classifies social media users into six “profiles” based on their behaviors online, and the vast majority fall into the “spectator profile,” where they are consuming social media content, but not yet commenting or creating their own content.

This data tells us measuring the number of comments may not be the best metric for determining the success of your blog. Don’t assume no one is reading your blog just because there isn’t a steady stream of comments. It could simply mean you could have more readers who fall into the spectators’ profile.

Still unsure whether you should continue to blog? Before you throw in the towel:

Revisit your goals

What were your objectives when you built your blogging strategy? It probably wasn’t to get a boatload of comments. For example:

• Was it to start a conversation with potential customers? Look beyond the comments. Are sales and marketing teams sharing posts with their prospects and having subsequent discussions via e-mail or in person?
• Was it to drive traffic to other corporate Web sites or content? Look at your site’s Web analytics. How much traffic is being driven from the blog?
• Was it to establish your executive or company as a thought leader on a specific topic? Look for message resonance. Are other blogs or media linking to your posts or including your commentary? Is sales or marketing receiving more customer inquiries on this specific issue?

Remember: the numbers are just part of the story

While Google Analytics data for your blog is just one element you should consider, there are some key figures to weigh more heavily in your decision:

• Is there steady growth? While overall visitor numbers are important, track your traffic over time and look for steady improvements. Steady growth is obviously an indication of your blog building a readership.
• Who’s reading? By taking a close look at IP data for your visitors, you may be able to get a better picture of who’s reading your blog. For example, the majority of readers are from a specific region or country that is important to your business or the blog is being read by someone at a specific prospect’s location.
• Are people coming back? When looking at traffic numbers, unique visitors is usually the first place your eye is drawn, but don’t overlook returning visitors. How many people like the content enough to come back? Map that to their IP address and you have an even better picture of who finds your blog appealing.
• What posts are getting the most traffic? Data on the posts that are getting the most readers should be used as a tool to create future content. What about this post made it the most read? Was it multimedia post? Did it have more links to relevant content? Was it about a controversial topic?
• What keywords are driving people to the blog? This data helps you understand how people are finding your blog. If the majority of people are coming to your blog because they searched for health care reform as opposed to digital records management, be sure you’re creating more content focused on the larger reform topic or strategically using that keyword to keep people coming back.

Analyze your content/activities

After a refresher on your goals, spend some time looking at your posts, SEO and promotional activities to ensure your execution matches your intent:

• Have all your posts been about company news or products? If you wanted to create a platform for thought leadership, you may want to adjust your approach and see if you get a stronger response.
• Have you used SEO tactics in your posts? Strategic placement of keywords, metatags and links make your content more discoverable and help point readers to specific sites.

Don’t forget to promote it

Unfortunately the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy doesn’t apply to blogging. To generate awareness of your blog you should be putting just as much effort into promoting it as you are building your pipeline of content.

For each post you write, try to incorporate links to posts from other relevant and influential bloggers. They will see your posts in their trackbacks and will likely investigate your blog further and possibly link to it – making their readership aware of your blog. Also, be sure to identify other posts on your topic where you can make an interesting comment linking back to your blog for more on your perspective. Lastly, don’t forget the power of making your network on other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, familiar with your blog. By teasing your posts in status updates on your Fan Page or tweets from your corporate account, you are putting the link to your blog in the hands of people you know are interested in your perspective. Facebook and Twitter also serve as an excellent platform for link sharing.

Ask your target audience/readers

Consider going straight to your target to get their opinion on the progress of your blog. This insight can help you tailor your approach if you decide to continue or help you understand why it may be time to quit blogging:

• Publish a post on your blog that asks your readers for their feedback. What do they like about the site? What do they want to see more or less of? What are some of their other favorite blogs?
• Outreach to someone you’re targeting who might not have seen the blog before. What do they think? Do they find it interesting, entertaining or useful?

Before you quit, I recommend applying some of the insight you learned in your analysis for another month. Ideally, you will have a stronger set of metrics to benchmark against and will see a marked improvement in the progress toward the goals you established when you started blogging.

This exercise will ensure you don’t make a hasty decision to shut down your blog. However, a corporate blog even with the best execution is not going to be the solution for every PR challenge. Know that it’s ok to move on if you continue to find that this tactic is not helping you meet your objective or your priorities or resources change.

Have you thought about abandoning your corporate blog? What did you do? What was the deciding factor?

]]> http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/12/measuring-success-is-it-time-to-quit-your-corporate-blog/feed/ 3 http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/11/what-pr-professionals-need-to-know-about-web-analytics/ http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/11/what-pr-professionals-need-to-know-about-web-analytics/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:29:17 +0000 Nils Mork-Ulnes http://text100.com/hypertext/?p=616 If your reaction to the headline was, “what on earth does Web analytics have to do with my job?” you probably weren’t alone. Web analytics might be thought of as the realm of SEO pros and online marketing teams, but it can be an incredibly valuable tool for PR teams too. In fact, Web analytics can give you insight into the value of PR and the types of business outcomes it helps drive in a way that hasn’t been possible without expensive primary research. In much the same way, online advertising has revolutionized how advertisers can measure and optimize outcomes, PR can leverage exactly the same tools and techniques. As communications becomes increasingly more digital, it also becomes increasingly important to measure actual user behavior and optimize campaigns to get the best outcomes.

Here are some examples of questions that Web analytics can help you answer:

• Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
• Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
• Is Key Message A more effective at driving sales than Key Message B?
• Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
• Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?

While some of these questions require advanced analysis and statistics, there are many straightforward questions you can ask your internal Web analytics team for data on:

• For starters, get some data on what unpaid sites drive the most traffic to your Web site. Unpaid traffic includes any Web sites that provide a link to you for which you have not paid (i.e., not ads or paid search). Many of these sites are influential publications that publish content about your brand, so you should know who is most effective at driving awareness and demand.
• Next, ask questions about what the traffic that these sites refer looks like. Do they tend to sign up for information or buy things on the Web site (or to put in Web analytics speak: “how well do they convert?”). Where are they located geographically? What keywords did they use to find the information, if any (this is great input into determining how you should write copy about your company)?
• Then you may want to do some benchmarking. How does earned media compare to paid media? How does Twitter compare to blogs?

Your internal Web analytics team should be able to provide you some of these reports out of the system or provide you or your analyst of choice access to the application. You can also talk to your agency or research vendor who can help answer your questions on how to get started. We frequently get asked by clients to do this and also help answer complex questions such as: what messaging results in more sales? Where are the untapped audiences with the most potential? Which audience segments should you target with various messages to get optimal business outcomes? There are many ways you can use the data to give you campaign insights, and if you combine it with other data sources, the possibilities are vast.

For more information on the subject of how to get started using Web analytics for PR, you should also take a look at this presentation, which Context Analytic’s Seth Duncan gave at IPR’s Measurement Summit recently:

94% of touch points in today’s “last click model” are thrown away and not given any credit for a sale.

- Esco Strong, Director, Microsoft Advertising Institute

Rob Birgfeld over at SmartBlog on Social Media has a good post on why ROI as measured by the last click – the last click before a sale – is a fundamentally flawed model. (See Live from Ad:Tech — The Myth of the “Last Click”).

Citing findings presented at Ad:Tech by Esco Strong, Rob goes on to note that “social media engagement — done the right way — can and will continue to affect customer perceptions of your brand.”

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s expand on that. Assigning nearly all monetary value to the last click basically assumes that nothing else influenced a purchase except that last action. In short, that’s absurd.

Microsoft Advertising Institute’s study notes that “users interact with an average of 2.2 other ads from the same brand over two days before the conversion.”

Let’s take that a step further and imagine that the same people eventually clicking on ads and purchasing are also consuming lots of information from their own peers and others through social networks, blogs, forums and even (gasp) traditional media.

So while people might be interacting with 2.2 other ads before the last click, there’s a great deal of opinion-sharing and perception-shaping that happens completely independent of those ads. An ad might be the digital channel that eventually takes me to the point of sale but in most cases I wouldn’t even be clicking on that ad unless I’d first gotten an opinion from someone I trust.

Pure visibility still matters a lot – this isn’t a diss to advertising. But consider “high-involvement” purchasing decisions – say, buying a cell phone – and the amount of thought people put into those decisions. A single interactive ad isn’t going to just whisk you through the entire thought process to the point of sale. If you’re spending any time online these days, odds are that someone else (an actual human being) influenced your purchase in some way.

For example, we’ve done some work with clients that points to notably higher conversion rates for traffic referred by social media and blogs compared to paid search. As the ability to better connect social media to metrics like conversion rates continues to evolve, I think we’ll begin to have a much more sophisticated and measurable view of influence over the purchasing decision…certainly more than the last click.

Joseph Kingsbury

twitter.com/jkingsbury

For now, table the higher level discussion about relationship-building and brand engagement and just look objectively at the other data points in the same report. The “conversational” and “pass-along value” categories respectively comprised 37.55% and 8.7% of all posts captured in the study. If you consider dialogue between people valuable (or at least not totally pointless) and “pass-along value” by definition means people found something interesting enough to share with other people, then more than 46% of all tweets were “not pointless babble.”

Twitter: useful or pointless babble?

Admittedly, that doesn’t make for a snarky, attention grabbing headline. Or maybe this is a sign that Twitter really is slipping into the “trough of disillusionment” according to Gartner.

Either way, the debate over Twitter’s value isn’t black and white. It makes sense for some organizations and not others. Depending on who you are, who’s important to you and what you want to accomplish that answer will vary. Media headlines can make for interesting discussion but do yourself a favor and look closer at answering some of those questions. That way you’ll have something thoughtful to say the next time someone spouts off about Twitter being nothing more than pointless babble…

Does Twitter make sense for your company or do you think it’s just gibberish? What’s your take?

1) Which blogs are driving mainstream media content?

2) When are blogs cited?

3) Why do journalists cite blogs?

We chose to answer the “which blogs are driving mainstream media content” question by creating a ranking system based on the number of citations each blog received in mainstream media over the past two years. We chose this method, as it parallels one of the key indicators of influence in social media (linking relationships), and the results of this research can be found in the full Power 50 report.

There are a few surprises in the rankings (who expected that icanhascheezburger would be cited by mainstream media more often than GigaOm?). But, I think that the rankings will probably confirm what many have suspected all along—“influence” in the blogosphere is mostly concentrated among a handful of well-known political and technology blogs. Perhaps the most surprising result of the rankings is just how concentrated that influence is. The top three blogs, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Politico, alone account for 44% of all traditional media citations among the top 50 influential blogs.

 Readers of the final report will find that the answer to the “when and why do journalists cite blogs” questions depend on the blog type. Political, gossip and business blogs are usually cited as primary sources. News breaks on the blog and the blog is cited as a source of information, but the blogger is rarely mentioned and hardly ever quoted. Technology and Lifestyle blogs, however, are often cited as secondary sources.  News rarely breaks on these blogs and instead of being cited for content; the bloggers are quoted and treated as industry experts. We think this finding is particularly useful for PR professionals, because it suggests that political and gossip blogs should be thought of as “newswires” while technology and lifestyle bloggers resemble industry analysts in the way they add opinion and/or insight.

On a final note, it’s important to remember that, although the Power 50 blogs appear to be gaining influence in mainstream media (45% year-over-year increase in citations from 2007 to 2008), these blogs are not cited nearly as frequently as mainstream media sources. In fact, even relatively small regional papers, such as the Arizona Republic and San Jose Mercury are cited more often than the Huffington Post. Interestingly, even other blogs are far more likely to cite mainstream media sources. A quick search in Technorati reveals, for example, that the New York Times is cited twice as often in blogs as the most cited blog, Engadget. So, while it’s true that blogs are increasingly becoming trusted sources of news and analysis among journalists and bloggers, one should not forget that conversations in social media most often are sparked by mainstream media. While social media helps amplify, drive and add color to those discussions, any communications strategy needs to think about all media as a whole. Ultimately, the key to unlocking this is to understand key influencers – be they in mainstream or social media. This report provides one viewpoint on influence and data can be interpreted many ways. I’d love to hear your opinions on influence in the blogosphere.

Go here for the full report.

- Seth Duncan, Context Analytics