So, as promised, the results of our poll... with 80 respondents the results are as follows:

 

Messages	Votes
1 to 3	55%
4 to 6	38%
7 to 9	5%
10 to 12	0%
13 to 15	0%
16 or +	2%

So 93% of our voters believe that between one and six messages is the optimum number to work with if you want to deliver them effectively.  The reality though, we all know, is that many of those voters will most likely be juggling more than six messages at anyone time…

Much like the maligned AVE, multiple messages in PR programmes and campaigns are often a symptom of the industry having to satisfy non-communications professionals. Product managers, for example, who insist on several messages for each of their products or a company director who is convinced that every capability of the organisation needs name checking in its own message…  It is an ongoing frustration for the profession that it continually needs to satisfy the demands of, and demonstrate its value to, stakeholders that do not understand PR. 

Fortunately though, as PR measurement becomes more sophisticated and relevant, there is an increasing bank of evidence available to PR professionals that can be drawn on for the extra credibility often required to defend decisions and results.

For a more indepth analysis of the optimum message debate see Paul's recent post and also comment from Custard PR MD, Stuart Campbell, here. 

It's time for a little interactivity.

As an agency we work for a number of clients large and small, some projects are complex and multifaceted, some simple and very focused. Most studies have the commonality that we track message pickup. The average message pickup varies dependent on a number of factors, not least by industry. Check out the Metrica numbers report for some specifics.

In the meantime...what do you feel the optimum number of messages to clearly communicate for an organization is? Too many and focus is lost, the key messages might not come to the fore, some messages may not get picked up at all. Or, maybe too little and the organisation may be viewed as a one trick pony, or the message simply becomes a tagline?

For the results of this poll please go here.

Pure gold!  Nathan Gilliatt at the Net-Savvy Executive has produced the second version of the Guide to Social Media Analysis

How does it warrant being called THE guide to social media?  Well, it contains a whooping 63 profiles of suppliers in the social media measurement space.  That's twice as many as last year.  It clearly sets out the capabilities of each company and explains each competitors' approach.  It's a steal for any time pressured communicator looking for the right social media supplier.  I guarantee that one hour of flicking through the guide will get you a shortlist of three suitable suppliers.  Better than days spent desk researching only to end up taking a punt on the one with the brashest marketing budget / leaving it to chance.

This year we're joined in the guide by more of the traditional measurement suppliers which is great to see, even if it is competition!  As communicators around the world start integrating social media into their mainstream media programmes they need suppliers (like us) who can reflect that in the measurement of their activity to give an holistic view of the results.  A siloed approach just won't cut it.  Expert measurement agencies that have innovated with new technologies are now (rightly) taking a lead over the technology companies dipping their toes into the vast ocean that is PR measurement.

What do you think? Are social media guides like this helpful? Will you buy it?

We're right in the middle of financial results season, the time where the number crunchers of the UK banking industry come out of their counting houses and tell the stock market how much money they've made.

In recent years, these articles have followed a familiar pattern: Bank X announces profits of a figure that only quantum mathematicians understand, city analysts rejoice as profits beat expectations, everyone goes home happy.

So far, so 2006.  But in the wake of the US subprime crisis, the ongoing drought in interbank lending and the realities of an economic slowdown, results this week look very different. So far HBoS and Lloyds TSB have announced a 70% fall in profits, HSBC has seen a 28% drop and Alliance & Leicester swallowed a massive 99% fall to pave the way for its acquisition by Santander. Northern Rock eschewed profits entirely and posted a £585m loss. The banks are clearly jumpy, and the media (to judge by recent headlines) has followed suit. So where does this leave the ordinary punter?

Metrica's ConsumerPulse data provides some interesting insight on public confidence in their finances.

Whilst the banks are having a tough time of it, there are some winners in the current financial climate. An excellent article on bbc.co.uk today shows that "value providers" like Aldi and Lidl are enjoying increased sales as people tighten their belts. 

Metrica's ConsumerPulse survey runs every six months and, with a new version about to launch (and rebranded UKPulse), it will be interesting to see if consumer attitudes change as the economic slowdown continues.  Watch this space!

Unless, you’ve been on the moon for the last 12 months, you'll be aware that the economy is on something of a slow down at the moment and worse, many people are predicting a recession. 

Here on the Government & NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) team at Metrica we wanted to highlight some research that we found interesting and also to give a few tips for controlling costs and improving time efficiencies that many of our clients are successfully implementing. 

First, the research - published by nfpSynergy earlier this week, it indicates that unsurprisingly, donations are closely linked with GDP, and if that drops, so do donations.  However, the research also concluded that there was an average 17 month delay before a drop on GDP had an impact on a charity’s income. This means there is more than enough time to prepare for the worst and begin to turn the ship so it faces any potential crisis head on. 

In our experience, there are some areas that have proven to be of huge value as clients look to extract more benefit and save costs from their media monitoring and evaluation. Whilst these are particularly relevant to the NGO and charity sectors many of the points will also apply to any business or organisation looking to control costs without diminishing the value of reporting.  

So here are five of our main insights ... 

1. First, and maybe most importantly - making sure you get the right message to the right audience is paramount.  This is particularly the case as the exploding world of media (think online, CGM, social media, TV on demand etc) fragments your target audiences ever wider.  It’s never been more important to have a system in place that allows you to check whether you are reaching your target audiences with the right messages.  If you can’t identify whether you’re reaching your target audiences, why bother measuring at all? 

2.  Once you have identified who your core target audiences are and what they’re watching, reading and listening to, focus your efforts, your media monitoring and your PR measurement on these outlets.   

We see a lot of charities who generate an enormous number of cuttings. When the cuttings books roll in, it’s an impressive sight, until you realise that actually, many of the stories just aren’t relevant -  articles about a local cake sake for example.  The bottom line is that nice though it is, these ‘name checks’ won’t make things happen, they won’t drive fundraising and they won’t raise any awareness of your major issues and campaigns.  

That name check is costing you a lot of money.  I don’t need to tell you how much a cutting costs to be sourced, you will already be painfully aware of that.  Add the cost of getting that piece about the local cake sale analysed, and you’ve already blown a fiver in the time it takes for your monitoring agency’s computer to pick out a keyword.  Getting a few hundred of those a month?  Ouch. 

A specialist media evaluation consultancy will be able to advise you on getting the best from your monitoring brief, focussing in on what really matters.  Is a monitoring company going to offer you advice that will cost them money?   

3. Resist spurious measures like AVEs and other mickey mouse measures – do we really need to go there? You know the arguments against them make sense, now stop paying them lip-service and wave them good bye!  PR, the guardian of an organisation's reputation,  will never be taken seriously at boardroom level while low-end evaluation techniques are still put forward to justify a budget or demonstrate success.

4. Do your reports give you exactly what you need?  Think about what is most important to you, and the different members of your team.  Are you getting the information in a timely fashion? Is the report you receive one long tome with large parts of it irrelevant to your role within the organisation?  If you recognise any of these issues, you should consider utilising online media analysis and evaluation portals like our very own MyMetrica.  Many of our clients find that having the ability to access their data 24/7, in real time, and completely customized to each user’s specific requirements gives them the control over their data that they have been missing. 

5. As previously mentioned, target audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented, making reaching them ever harder.  Proper planning has never been more important.  PR planning when done correctly will allow you to understand your target audiences better, their lifestyles and importantly how best to reach them through the media.  The old familiar PR planning tools don’t help you to get close to your target audiences – instead look to learn from the creditable systems that advertising firms use – you could look into TGI lifestyles or ConsumerPulse for example. 

In conclusion, evaluate your success at reaching your target audiences, not how many cuttings are sitting on your desk every morning.  Control your costs by being ruthless about what is important and what is not; make these decisions based on accurate research rather than gut feel.  Avoid the spurious measures of yesterday in your media evaluation, and ensure that you are using the latest time saving tools.  You will find that your time and your budget will go a lot further!

So we've just been having a discussion here about traditional media monitoring and the fact that we are seeing more and more clients move away from it and towards news aggregation models instead.

It prompts the question, in the 'new media' age (where digital coverage seems almost endless when one takes into account CGM and so forth) isn't it time that PROs finally felt able to switch their focus from quantity to quality? i.e. focus on measures which go beyond a bursting clippings book and pay more attention to delivering the correct content, in the right place, at the right time and engaging the right audience often enough?

What is more, this is a very relevant point given the current economic climate... volumes of coverage (and therefore cost) can easily escalate when the monitoring brief takes in everything even though this very often leads to nothing much more but a pile of meaningless gumph (save the top ten percent or so).

Surely it is far more cost effective and insightful to limit monitoring and evaluation to key media and online sources. This can even negate the need for traditional media monitoring as news aggregation feeds replace them and arguably serve more purpose monitoring reputation and PR activity in a digital world working to a 24 hours news agenda.

It all makes a lot of sense to me with the only real issue being educating internal stakeholders that it is not always volume that constitutes successful PR... but then that is another issue...

Any and all thoughts welcome!

This weekend I’m embarking on the Brit Butt 1200+ mile 36 hour endurance motorcycle ride. It’s somewhat like a treasure hunt. Riders are given a list of destinations, each worth points, just before the start. Each rider must then plan his/her own route around the UK trying to get as many points as possible. The winner is the person with the most points and the highest mileage after getting back to base. 

In order that family and friends can track progress, I’ll be using phonelocator an application developed by my team mate. It links the GPS capability of our phones to send coordinates via the mobile internet to a website which plots our position on Google Maps. We also have intercoms in our helmets to communicate and these are blue-toothed to the SatNav and our phones…you might say that as well as being consummate geeks we’re hyperconnected. 

So what and who is hyperconnected….IDC recently published a white paper on Hyperconnectivity in which they describe the hyperconnected as:  

“Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.” 

The modern business and personal world is full of hyperconnectivity, wireless laptops, web enabled phones, Blackberries, Skype, LinkedIn, Bluetooth, Second Life, online gaming, social networks and blogs. The modern world sees us networking our personal and business lives as well as our gadgets. News is travelling further faster, both simple personal news via updates on Twitter, Facebook and business news, read online, on the move, commented on, Dugg ranked and rated.  

When an issue breaks that effects your corporate reputation the proliferation of publicly available communication may seem scary, but it also provides more avenues to evaluate the situation and guage public opinion which can be used to help refine the right approach. Aren’t us hyperconnected geeks great?

The Friday before a Bank Holiday is often quiet, and today is no exception. So I’ve been filling my time by surfing the web for the latest evaluation news in the financial sector.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the top Google link for “financial media evaluation” (inspired search, I’m sure you’d agree) was an article from 2000 titled “The heresy of MEDIA MEASUREMENT”! Under the rather alarming headline, Wilma K. Mathews of Communication World explained that “Counting clips and calculating (advertising value) equivalences measure your activity, your output. They have no correlation to the changed or desired behavior of the audiences you attempted to reach.” Heady stuff for a pre-dotcom crash PR audience to take in.

Back in the present day, I leaned back on my hoverboard  and reflected on how successfully the output vs. outcome message has spread within financial PR. Or has it? PR managers in the financial services sector now understand evaluation well enough to benchmark their PR activity against all manner of sophisticated metrics. Meanwhile, access to on-demand reporting tools such as our very own MyMetrica gives them the means to disseminate the results across their organization in a variety of formats.

Great news, but what hasn’t happened yet is a shift in the mindset of non-PR stakeholders, especially at board level. All too often financial PR professionals find their efforts to provide actionable evaluation data frustrated by demands for something that puts a £ (or $) sign in front of their results. Senior financial executives work with money, after all, and it can be hard to make them value anything else.

So what’s a PR to do? As we see from Mathews’ article, AVE’s were past their sell-by date before the Enron scandal broke. If your board insists on hard currency as a PR metric, you could try cost per thousand people reached either in the population as a whole or, even better, within your target audience. Present the information in a scorecard alongside some more forward-thinking metrics from your evaluation portal and they might just start to see things a different way.

 Who knows where we’ll be in eight year’s time!