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

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. 

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee recently published a report on harmful content on the internet.  This once again brought a renewed focus on social networking following the earlier publication of the Byron Report this year and the Home Office best practice document on social networking.

The report was written to address the "increasing anxiety among parents about the use of social networking sites". The Committee's inquiry included evidence from industry, other parliamentarians and the third sector concluding with 29 key recommendations. Recommendation 28 is of particular note; stressing the need for greater parent responsibility in protecting children from harm on the Internet and suggesting that parents should have more knowledge of social networking sites.

This is interesting stuff, but what does this mean in regards to social media consumption?

Leading children's charity in this area Childnet International have this week published a new guide for parents on young people and social networking sites suggesting that one of the easiest ways for parents to become more familiar with social networking sites is to set up their own page to see what the attraction and the appeal is, and to look at the information and advice for parents on these sites.

This view was backed up with advice issued in July by the Internet Safety Advocate, at security provider Symantec, with whom Metrica have been working on the Digital Family Safety campaign: "now that summer is in full swing, chances are your kids are spending more time online than usual. Staying informed about what they're doing in cyberspace is the best way to help ensure they don't do anything foolish".

With social networking sites high on the public agenda, and likely to stay there with the September start of the new UK Council for Child Internet safety, it could well be that more parents go online and set up their own profiles.  As the internet increasingly becomes the marketplace to reach people of all ages, companies may find that reaching parents on sites not necessarily associated with that generation will become increasingly possible and profitable.

I recently got back from China where I witnessed the amazing phenomena that is a total solar eclipse.  Truly amazing.  The breathtaking phase of the eclipse when the moon completely blocks the light from the sun is called totality.   Pondering on this (in true PR measurement geekdom), I got thinking about how important the totality of marketing is.  As evaluators we need to look at all marketing efforts from the eyes of the consumer.  PR is often left out of integrated marketing analysis.  Something that we at Metrica are working hard to overcome by working with econometric experts to model the PR effect into the mix.  Now it seems some in the industry want to evaluate social media separately from traditional channels.  How many more silos do we need?  Let’s get integrated!  Things to think about are:

1. How does your company report on marketing as a whole?
2. Is there any integrated marketing evaluation?
3. If there isn’t, suggest it.
4. If there is and PR isn’t included, change it.

Right now is the time to act, as boardrooms increasingly recognize the link between communications, reputation and business success.  PR must be fully integrated and represented in marketing evaluation. Not least to make sure that PROs are getting all the credit they deserve.

For a corporate organisation a partnership with a charity is expected to bring about many benefits, the main one being more favourable coverage. Looking at some of our own clients this is definitely the case, with charitable partnerships having a very significant impact, and really boosting strongly favourable coverage, and therefore, reputation. Job done!  

But what is in it for the charities themselves? Apart from the huge financial rewards of course…. According to nfpSynergy 61% percent of charities they asked said that raising income is the main reason for corporate partnerships.  In the same nfpSynergy survey, 55% said that they use these partnerships to raise their profile. Here on the Govt/Nfp team we have many charity clients who are lucky enough to have a corporate partner, some even have quite a few. After a bit of good old ‘data interrogation’ it seems that these charities benefit just as much as the ‘corporates’ in terms of positive media coverage. But why I hear you ask?  

For many smaller charities it can get them high-profile pieces in national publications, which they may never reach on their own. These partnerships can also be a great medium to communicate the key aims and messages of the charity, and be endorsed by a big name. Message delivery is often boosted by stronger spokesperson presence, with representatives from both the charity and its partner widely quoted in coverage. PR-led partnership events provide a great opportunity for a partner to explain their choice of charity, another useful means of driving favourability and message delivery. News of a partnership launch can generate attention-grabbing headlines that mention both company and charity.   

So how do you measure this impact? Metrica was lucky enough to evaluate coverage generated by Tesco’s Charity of the Year Partnership with the British Red Cross, which raised £4,428,000 over 2007, the largest amount generated through a corporate partnership in just one year. An examination of volume and tone of event coverage, rates of message delivery, spokesperson presence, prominence and impact revealed a well directed media campaign. Tracking spikes of coverage over time against hits to the partnership website further demonstrated public engagement with a campaign that reached a good proportion of the UK adult population.   

But choose your partner carefully! The charity's reputation may risk being tarnished by association with particular corporate organisations. A charity promoting labour rights would easily be compromised by a relationship with a company whose manufacturing ethics were subject to investigation. Anti-sweatshop activists criticized the Product Red’s links with Gap, despite Product Red's assurance that its products are not manufactured in sweatshops.   

So the moral of the story is gaining a corporate partner can be a fantastic opportunity for a charity, just make sure it’s the right one!

 When it comes to effective communication of messages, it really seems that less is more.  We have just compiled some research that clearly demonstrates that the fewer key messages an organisation has, the better their delivery tends to be.

Although one to three key messages is ideal, the recommendation is to keep the number of tracked messages to six or less.

We brought together data from more than 200 organisations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media.  While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was.  Organisations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more.  For those organisations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages.  It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages.  Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

Gareth’s recent poll on this subject so far shows that PR professionals broadly agree with these findings – 95% voted for between one and six as the optimum number of message deliveries with 58% voting for between one and three.

So if we all know that less is more, how come many of us don’t practice what we preach when it comes to defining our own message set.  Indeed the average number of messages in this study was nine with many organisations measuring more than 30!

One explanation is that it is very tempting to add more messages thinking that we are ‘widening the net’ and will capture more.  However this serves not only to dilute our existing messages, as we have seen it will actually adversely affect their delivery.

Another reason is to do with the size of the organisation.  It could be argued that larger organisations have multiple business areas, products, services and audiences and therefore have a need for more messages.  This is borne out by the data which shows a definite correlation between size of organisation in terms of cutting volumes and number of messages.  In fact, most of the organisations with more than 30 messages were generating more than 500 cuttings a month.

Although I understand the logic that by targeting a particular audience you can then tailor the messages to those people.  However we must bear in mind that it is not easy to isolate an audience in this way.  For example a business audience will also read consumer media, potential employees may well read product reviews and consumers will not be immune to your financial results.  Once we understand it in this way we can see the danger of multifarious messages.

Given that people are bombarded by media communication via an increasing number of channels, focussing on fewer messages makes sense.  Audiences have a short attention span but a journalist's is often shorter.  A small number of messages will not only generate a strong brand image but will also increase the likelihood of being published in the first place .  If you are still unsure, try playing this “word association” game:

In recent times, we have seen the meteoric rise of social media, where chocolate bars have been resurrected, musicians have socially networked their way to chart success and unprecedented levels of hype have opened the door for new marketing methods. The power of social media in a lot of ways boils down to the power of opinion – if enough voices sing the same tune, it’s hard to ignore.

But should there be a limit to the power placed in the hands of the user? NewsCred, a news aggregator that ranks stories by the “credibility of their source”, has recently been launched and sparked a significant amount of online chatter. Users can rate each story, author and publication’s credibility, seeking to establish quality over popularity, unlike other news aggregators.

The site itself claims that NewsCred is all about “the Social Media Revolution” – harnessing the power of community to allow “the discerning news consumer to focus only on credible news content while filtering out the noise”. Interesting concept, yet the premise itself is problematic. Can something be deemed “credible” based on the recommendation of a group of faceless strangers? As Marissa Peacock discusses in her article, “Is it an author’s credentials, a publication’s political endorsement or a penchant for not lying, making up or otherwise hiding the ‘truth’ no matter how messy or uncomfortable it makes us?”

Rory Cellan-Jones also discusses NewsCred in his blog for the BBC Website, taking the debate to an interesting level, by stating his concern that “sites like NewsCred will become playgrounds for lobby groups and obsessives” and asks, “Isn’t it likely that those with passionate views will rush to judge the credibility of news stories according to their own prejudices, while the rest of the internet population just won’t bother?”

My own personal concern is that there is also a level of laziness that results from relying on sites such as NewsCred – since when did it become so difficult to make up your own mind? But perhaps I am missing the point. Either way, if there is one thing that Snakes on a Plane  has taught us (a truly dreadful film – avoid it), it’s that you can’t always trust internet popularity as an endorsement.

Everyone’s going online, newspaper circulation figures and ad-rates are declining and many people are predicting the realisation of Ghostbuster Egon Spengler’s famous quote, “Print is dead!”

And yet something doesn’t seem right.  I remember many years ago buying a PDA that could download my favourite sections of the BBC news site.  “Wow, this is the future!” I thought to myself, “No more newpapers, I can get everything I need from this”.  But, today am I reading news on my iPhone – no I am not.  A quick look around on my commuter train this morning showed the majority of people reading a newspaper with the rest reading books or staring out of the window.  A couple of people were using PDAs but only to check e-mail (and yes I did get a few funny looks for peering over their shoulders!).  So it would seem that print is very much alive on my train at least.  One explanation is the success of free newspapers – by far the majority of papers being read this morning were the London Metro.

Local versions of the Metro are available in urban centres in 23 countries with a total readership of about 23 million.  In London, Metro is joined by other free papers such as London Lite, TheLondonPaper and City AM.  The circulation of these papers has been increasing with many experiencing record levels this summer.  Some people have argued that this is compensated by a corresponding decline in paid-for newpapers.  Indeed as we can see below, the Evening Standard has suffered a fall in circulation while the London free press has grown.  However the combined readership of these titles is more than four times the initial circulation of the Evening Standard which implies that more people are reading print media in London.

Free press is popular because it doesn’t cost anything either in money or in time since the paper is there at the station for you to pick up or as with London Lite or LondonPaper it is literally thrust into your hand.  As MIT professor Dan Ariely explains, we instinctively irrationally overreact to free offers even if it means that quality will be compromised. 

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.