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 AVE’s 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!

I had a brilliant Business Strategy lecturer at Greenwich Uni.  He used to stride up and down the lecture hall booming: “PROFIT... IS NOT A DIRTY WORD!”  And this is what I’m being reminded of as I digest a veritable feast of online pieces, blogs, webinars, Plurkshops, discussion groups and the such about social media measurement.

Here at the Metrica ranch, we’re running a PR campaign that involves both social and traditional media aspects.  It seems when we get a mainstream piece out there (say, in The Independent) a good few direct calls come off the back of it.  When we interact with online communities, however, nothing seems to happen.  Or does it?

At the latest Plurkshop, David Alston of Radian6 plurked on about how social media is a long term strategy.  Damn right it is; but do you know why?  It’s because you need a load of past social media conversations out and about for people to Google and judge whether they ultimately want to interact with your business.  And that’s the beauty of social media conversations; they are pretty much there forever.  Which is great when consumer decision making is sporadic, and you need to reach a global audience.

There are ongoing (and going, and going…) discussions about the ROI of social media.  Social media measurement will need to jump the same hoops that traditional media did to tie results to the bottom line.  It seems people want to go over the same ponderings PR measurement firms like Metrica did all those years ago… how do we isolate the PR effect?  What about the other marketing tactics?  What about the seasonality etc etc?  This is where econometrics comes in and will always be needed.  We just have another piece of PR data to tie into the marketing model and assess why people are buying things.

I’ve also seen folks making up wooly metrics around social media (see aforementioned Plurkshop) that still are only outputs, with fancier hats.  Outcomes will always be king and social media just needs to join the party to help us figure out what is driving those outcomes, be it changes of attitude or actions.  That, after all, is why we’re here.  Thanks to Katie Paine for pointing me to this great piece from Metzmash about how people are getting it wrong. Lot’s of good points.

And here’s a spot on piece from Marketer’s Lab about social media and ROI that I couldn’t have written better in a million years.  And I love that film!

Integration’s what you need

The whole debate about how to treat and measure CGM and MSM really does take me back to my uni days.  I studied Integrated Marketing Communications and had it drummed into me that PR, advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing were just all mix-and-match toys we could use to fulfill differing marketing aims.  The same is true of CGM and MSM -- they do different things.  It's not a case of either / or, it’s just another channel to add to the mix.

David’s point about the ‘listening’ side of social media is spot on.  But this takes it outside the realms of PR.  It’s about feeding into customer support, product development and other such stuff throughout the business – which is exactly what good marketing should do.  And now we have these feedback tools at our disposal, it puts PR firmly in the middle of business decision making.  And may be just what we need to swing the balance of power in the boardroom our way.

I've talked occasionally about the fact that the lines between mainstream media (MSM) and consumer generated media (CGM) are blurring. Recent news shows that sometimes the two are not always good bedfellows.

The Associated Press recently sent take-down notices to a few influential blogs such as the Drudge Report stating that content which included more than four words of original AP copy be removed from the site as it was in breach of their ‘fair use’ clause and of copyright. When four or more words are used the AP requested that bloggers pay $2.50 per word.

Bloggers fought back, suggesting that use of headline and linking to an article on the AP was driving readership for the company and that the AP was foolishly biting the hand that feeds.

Bloggers pushed for a boycott of news content from the AP, others suggested removing links to AP pieces, reducing AP site traffic, others listed AP pieces that had used their content and suggested billing the AP for the content.

The fracas drove great publicity for the blogging community and bad publicity for the AP. See a great roundup by the Washington post here “AP, bloggers clash over wire content use”. The AP also posted a release suggesting that an agreement had been reached. Unfortunately, the headline includes more than four words so I won’t be referencing or linking to it...oh, ok here it is. And that it is clarifying guidelines for permissible use of its coverage.

It’s clear to see that not only does CGM content challenge copyright issues and business models which can’t keep up with the pace of the online environment, but that bloggers do have a voice, the kind of voice that can effect reputation and affect change.

So we had a meeting with the FT the other week only to be informed that we are to be charged a significant amount of money for the privilege of measuring any articles from their newspaper and website.  This is just for analysis mind, not for supplying content to our clients.  Although it feels like we are being picked on, the FT is attempting to do the same with all media analysis companies as well as press cutting agencies, news aggregators and all of our clients.  Given this will be done on a ‘number of users’ basis, it is likely that a big corporate could be charged tens of thousands of pounds for their FT license.

Titles such as the FT and Wall Street Journal have tried to offer subscription-only content a number of times with limited success.  However, going after the corporates themselves rather than the consumer represents a significant shift in strategy.  It could be a potentially large revenue stream for the FT but it also poses a massive risk.  Not surprisingly, many organisations are up in arms about it and there is a likelihood that it will drive users away from the FT's website.

Given that most revenue for online newspapers comes from advertising which in turn is related to website traffic, this may not be smart thinking.  Indeed a quick look at Alexa.com shows an 18% fall in site traffic since the FT started rolling out their content licensing in April.  Our contact at the FT said that they weren’t interested in raw numbers because it’s the ‘quality of readers that counts: while our content is read by CEO’s, companies will want to advertise with us’.  I am not sure that this view is necessarily true.  FT ad rates are already twice the national newspaper average (£50 compared to £25 per thousand views, source: Mediatel).  If website traffic falls, then ad rates will have to increase by a similar margin just to maintain the same revenue.  At some stage it becomes unsustainable and a marketer will be driven to use other channels even if their target audience is the CEO.

I hear that the FT wants a “fair and transparent means” of delivering content but all this reminds me about the PR industry’s arguments with the NLA over copywrite licensing.  The newspaper owners are trying to protect ‘their’ content but we all have to understand where the content comes from.  We are seeing more and more evidence of how important the PR industry is in supplying content to journalists, who are under increasing pressure to get their articles published under ever tighter deadlines.  Cost cutting and the growth of online means that there are fewer journalists writing more stories.  Nick Jones in Flat Earth News observes where you used to have a journalist writing one story a day, today they will have to write ten – hence the frequent practice of using content from newswires and press releases.  Indeed researchers at the university of Cardiff showed that about 80% of home news content in broadsheet newspapers had originated from agency or PR copy.

What happens if other media owners follow suit and start charging significantly for access to content to the very people who helped supply it in the first place.  Isn’t there the danger that the whole news production line could grind to a halt?

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!

In the past week, Wimbledon and Euro 2008 have provided us with dramatic moments in sport.  While staring at Nike logos on Nadal’s forehead and Federer’s more subdued logos, I began thinking about new ways to measure the presence of various brands at such sporting events.  What does a logo screaming past at 200 mph at the British Grand Prix deliver for a client?  What do Wimbledon sponsors see in terms of real gains in sales, foot traffic and awareness?   We have been helping clients get a better understanding of the impact and value of their sponsorship programmes but the media terrain (and measurement tools) have evolved.  

There is no question that global media events such as the Olympics and Super Bowl offer considerable gravitational pull for advertisers and viewers, and have spawned many memorable (measurable) ads.  Brand equity is built through association and awareness.  These ads also have, to a degree, transcended their marketing function and have become cultural signposts, reflections and barometers.  (They also cost a lot of money; 2009 ads are estimated to cost almost $3 million for a 30-second commercial).

This summer of 2008, things seem different in terms of event sponsorship.  Over the years, the raising of the money stakes in sponsorship also has amplified the political elements of such media partnerships.  This year, the 2008 Beijing Olympics is gaining attention for the committee’s heightened efforts to block advertising from non-sponsors.  This is nothing new, in protecting sponsors to give their brands room to breathe.   

But the political stakes seem raised with the Olympics hosted in China.  Global brands such as Coca Cola, have found themselves in hot water from Chinese consumers. Even the Dalai Lama has been forewarned not to use this global attention on Beijing as a pulpit for Tibetan independence.  Still others have already been reprimanded for profiting from unauthorized marketing activities.  And even the ‘Great Firewall of China’ has been thwarted.  On a more basic level, even Olympic spectators are being targeted for monitoring what foods people can (not) bring in to eat in the events, their attire and other efforts. Phrases such as "ambush marketing" and "managing intellectual property" are interwoven with the event like the intertwined olive leaves perched on the winner's head.  Media, messages and events involving different cultures can quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. 

So, what can a brand do?  As we eagerly await more global sporting events (in an already busy sporting summer), here are some questions to ponder:

How, as an advertiser can you best protect the integrity of your marketing campaign from being spoofed?  Will the Beijing Olympics authorities be able to block unwelcome marketing efforts across traditional and new media?   What does this mean for the future shape of events marketing and media measurement?

Metrica couldn't help having a chuckle this week with our new PR measurement client James Wood of Seafish (the Seafish Industry Authority) when we presented their inaugural media analysis and evaluation report.

For those of you who don't know them, Seafish look after the UK sea fishing industry.  They work promoting sustainability and efficiency across all aspects of the industry.  More information on them - and some fantastic recipes (no joke!) are available from their website.

Amongst the analysis that we presented was this fine looking share of voice chart:

It's always a pleasure to get out and about and meet Metrica's clients.  It's particularly so when we get to see the great work that so many of them perform up close and personally. 

Metrica has been working with the RNLI (The Lifeboats) for over ten years.  The RNLI is the British and Irish charity that saves lives at sea through lifeboating, lifeguards and safety and prevention.  We had a full day of meetings with their PR team yesterday working on their exciting communications plans for the coming year as they embrace new media technologies and opportunities.  It's great to work with a team that really understand the importance of strategic planning and evaluation to help them achieve their PR and business objectives particularly so in a media environment that is diversifying so rapidly.  Of course this all means that core target audiences are becoming ever more fragmented so reaching them in new ways is more important than ever.  For the RNLI this is totally mission critical as they rely entirely on voluntary donations to support their work. 

Once the hard work was done, we were treated to a tour of the main boatyard and incredible new Lifeboat College where so many of the volunteer crews are trained. 

Spencer Gammond, Julia Sylvester of the RNLI and Lisa McKiddie of Metrica with one of the RNLI's five Hovercraft

While at the Lifeboat College, we watched as a crew of an inshore B Class boat were put through their paces in the training tank.  Their boat was capsized while a wave machine created a massive swell replicating the stormy conditions that the crew so often have to face.  The crew regrouped under the upturned hull, then, once all safe, activated the self righting mechanism which flipped the boat back the correct way up.  They re-boarded and restarted the engines, both of which have had RNLI modifications to ensure that in the event of a capsize, they first cut out immediately, and then remain watertight so that they are able to restart faultlessly.  It was a very impressive demonstration of the skills that this organisation contains - both human and mechanical.

The crew are briefed by the instructor prior to capsize

 As the tank swirls, the rib is flipped...

And she's over!  The crew are regrouping underneath the upturned hull...

 Once they are all safe and accounted for, they activate the self-righting mechanism...

And re-board the boat and restart the engines ready to continue with the rescue. 

Later, we stopped for a drink on the journey back to London in a bar overlooking Poole harbour.  As we sipped our drinks in the evening sun, we had a graphic reminder of the necessity of this amazing organisation.  The tide was running out of the harbour at an incredible speed and suddenly we were aware in the middle of the channel was an upturned sailing boat with a family of three clinging desperately to its hull as they were swept out to sea.  In front of our eyes we watched as the Poole B Class lifeboat 'The Friendly Forrester II' sped to the rescue, plucking the exhausted sailors from the water, righting their boat, making it safe and then towing it back to the safety of the harbour.

With the casualties safely on-board the lifeboat,  the stricken sailing boat is towed back to harbour by the RNLI  Apologies for the quality of the photo, taken at dusk from a distance with my mobile phone!

25th June 2008 - Update: The Poole Lifeboat website now carries a report of this incident.  To quote:

"In a slight westerly breeze, a Wayfarer dinghy, with four people onboard, had been sailing in the harbour. As the wind dropped the fast flowing ebbing tide had caused the dinghy to hit the end of the chain ferry and the boat capsized and threw the people into the water. As they were in the Swash Channel just outside the harbour’s entrance, with the tide ebbing rapidly and the Barfleur ferry due out, it was important that the people were picked up quickly. Fortunately a passing yacht was able to pick up two of the people and the ILB was on scene within 5 minutes and retrieved the other two. The ILB crew then managed to tow the inverted and dismasted dinghy out of the channel before Crew Members Simon Mumford and Jack Belcher entered the water to help right the boat. The two people onboard the yacht were then transferred to the ILB and the four casualties were taken, with their dinghy, to Parkstone Yacht Club. One of the men had a laceration above the right knee and this was cleaned and dressed while onboard the lifeboat. Once safely ashore no further medical treatment was required. "

Running the Lifeboat service is a very costly exercise. 

If you feel you would like to donate to this great charity, please do so by clicking here.

Over the years, marketeers have found more and more sophisticated ways of targeting individuals out of a broad base of customers.

In the excellent book ‘Super Crunchers’, Yale Professor Ian Ayres shows how advances in technology and statistical techniques have allowed organisations to number-crunch massive data sets to identify trends, to target customers in ever more clever ways and even to predict their behaviour.

For example, back in 2000 some Amazon customers noticed that they were being charged different amounts for the same products.  The company was accused of ‘price targeting’, an economic technique to leverage more money from certain types of people based on their shopping habits.  It was thought that established customers would be likely to pay more than new ones and were being targeting accordingly.  This was denied by the company who claimed that they were doing “random” price tests.  However a 2005 study from the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylavia showed a number of similar cases of internet price targeting.  The same study showed that 87% of people strongly object to this practice, so it is clearly a contentious issue.

Google’s entire business model is based on keeping people coming to its site because it is the best place to search the internet.  Remember how quickly we all switched from Yahoo! or AltaVista simply because Google was simpler and quicker.  As such it spends a huge amount of money on improving the relevance of its searches.  Since 2005 it has included ‘personalised search’ technology which remembers where you have searched in the past and uses this to rank the search results by ‘predicting’ which ones are more relevant to you.  So Steve Jobs will get different results when he searches for ‘Apple’ than an orchard owner would. 

Online news providers are using similar technologies to target the news to their readers.  In 2005 MSNBC.com launched a personalised news section which would contain headlines selected according to the types of stories you read most often.  Findory, launched in 2004, was a similar concept expanded to be a personalised online newspaper.  Unfortunately it was not successful and folded in 2007

More recently sites such as DailyMe and Feedly are offering personalised news and with the latter integrated with social networking (including Twitter) so that your friends and contacts can recommend stories to you.  Sites such as Digg.com provide news stories recommended by potentially millions of people.  iGoogle and MyYahoo allow you to customise your home page with relevant RSS feeds and there are numerous 3^rd party RSS readers and aggregators.

All of these innovations are leading news to be consumed in a different way and so many of the metrics that have traditionally worked in mainstream media now fall down.  Kristin posted earlier this week about the massive discrepancies between online readership data from the various auditing bodies.  Ultimately what does it mean if we have got the number of visitors for the Guardian.co.uk if a load of people are reading Guardian stories without visiting the website (or indeed buying the newspaper)?   As measurement guru Katie Paine points out its “yet another reason why we should be focussing not just on eyeballs but on outcomes”.

And that is the final irony - the same technological advances that have brought the new media environment can help us to measure it.  Advances in databases and data collection as well as the statistical advances in econometrics have enabled us to be able to link PR efforts with business outcomes be they, sales, customer behaviour or website traffic and to be able to disaggregate other factors such as contemporaneous marketing activity, seasonal effects, pricing and competitor activity.  We can build systems that allow us to analyse coverage more or less in 'real time' and can create online portals and e-mail alerts to feed tailored measurement dashboards to the stakeholders that need them.  How does that suit you, sir?!

We all know that online readership is a nigh impossible nut to crack.  Why? You ask.  Well, where do I start?  There’s the fact there’s no one authoritative source for data.  Nielsen NetRatings is a well respected name and self proclaimed, “global standard for Internet audience measurement.”  They use country-specific panel based research to statistically model monthly user figures for websites.  All well and good but this involves primary research, which makes the data cost prohibitive.  It's fine when you're only dealing with the UK market but for an agency like ours that operates on a global basis, serving more than 48 countries, it just gets ridiculous.  The other big kid on the block is ABCe who is, “independent, not-for-profit and a subsidiary of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC)” which by its very nature makes them very proper, like.  They basically log unique monthly users for each site.  It’s very accurate but doesn’t take into account the fact that one person can log in from many computers and essentially counts people twice (a bit like stacked opportunities to see compared to our cross-readership reach research).  In fact, remember the dingdong earlier this year between the major UK papers about their online readerships? If not, have a read here.

So they are the two gorillas in the room.  Other options include: Alexa (biased sample because it relies on the Alexa toolbar but can give pretty accurate international data); comScore (self-selected sample using software download); and Compete (browser toolbar dependent, primarily US only).  And the list goes on.

So, nothing really comes close.  Then there’s the next challenge… mainstream media measures audiences per issue, so a daily paper uses daily readers, a weekly its weekly audience and so on.  Online media is different.  Once it’s up there it pretty much stays there.  More sophisticated business gurus might call it the ‘long tail’ effect.  So do you take daily, weekly, monthly or infinity and beyond readers?

How about the fact that, like mainstream media uses a figure for the whole paper, you get a readership of the whole site.  Hands up who has read a paper cover to cover *I’ve got my hand up*.  Now hands up who has read an internet site in its entirety?  Didn’t think so.

The answer is that ABCe is as close as we can get to accurately measuring online readership today. It uses the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) industry agreed metrics.  However because it looks at it globally, on a monthly basis and looks at the whole site, the figures are huge.  Literally massive.  So we end up with figures that we, and the rest of the industry, just don’t trust.  For example, a piece buried deep inside BBC Online ends up with a figure based on anyone in the whole world who reads any one page on the BBC site within a whole month.  Ludicrous.   What’s important though is what we, as PR people, do with this data.

Following a consultation period, we are in the process of changing the way we output online readership figures.  Based primarily on the ABCe data, but using other sources where they are accurate, we are going to model the long tail of an article into the readership.  The piece has most impact once it’s put up on a site and that fades away, so monthly is too much.  We are also factoring in where people in the worlds are viewing the article.  Finally, we are taking into account that one person may log on to the site multiple times, from different computers.  What it means for our clients is that the once very impactful online coverage that boosted their reach figures is going to drop down to something far more realistic.  But realistic is good if it’s more credible.  

So, we’re not there yet, I’m afraid nobody is.  But as long as we can supply our clients with better data to help them communicate their successes we’re winning in my eyes.

OK, admit it.  The headline got your attention didn't it.  What's this?  Metrica measuring its own performance with AVEs! Read on though and all will be revealed...

Everyone at Metrica was delighted with the article in yesterday's Independent Newspaper (Monday, 16th June 2008) "Measuring PR success by column inches is old hat - welcome to a new analysis." The Indie, picking up on Metrica's latest industry benchmarking report Metrica Numbers (available for download here), discusses how different media titles tend to cover industry sectors.  It also comments on the success the PR industry has in helping its clients to convey their key messages. 

But you can rest assured that we won't be working out whether the article was beneficial to our business by using its AVE figure (£15,426 allegedly) or its column inch size (37 column inches, or 94 column centimeters for the metrically minded amongst us.)  Rather we will be looking to a selection of key metrics including how favourable it was, whether it conveyed our key messages, how many actual people in our target audiences read it, and then tying this back to actual outcomes which include the new business enquiries that the article has already generated.

And we will also be attributing some of our recent spate of coverage to the direct contribution of Metrica's very own PR specialist Claire O'Sullivan.  Recently The Guardian and the Evening Standard amongst many online media have been writing about our new report.  Must be creating quite a stir this coverage, all 94 column inches and £62,498 of it....  ;-)