Unjournalism

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Katie Paine gave a good but seemingly basic session on social media measurement. Basic isn’t bad, and I certainly did take away some good ideas. A quick little catchphrase on measurement: The three things to measure are outputs, outtakes and outcomes.

-Outputs: Your communication efforts. Your pitches made, your posts written, your comments left, your videos shared, etc.
-Outtakes: Were your communications “taken”? Messages received, brand seen or experienced?
-Outcomes: Did behavior change? Did the message recipient take an action based on your outputs and his or her outtakes?

She emphasized two key ideas: Don’t collect data if you’re not going to use it; it’s a waste of time and money. Similarly, “data without insight is just trivia.” How true. Also, “you become what you measure.” Regardless of what the true measure of your marketing success is, if you’re measuring clips, you’re going to work myopically toward drumming up clips. If you’re measuring new sales, you’re going to find a way to make new sales and directly prove it was your doing. That last part is my extrapolation of Katie’s idea, but I’m it’s what she was getting at.

Katie’s most significant point is one I whole-heartedly agree with: People think that if they’re forced to measure and report results, they’ll appear to have little value and they’ll get fired. Katie believes quite strongly that the opposite is true. It might be rocky at first, but the only way to show value (or get a sweet job and a $2 million house) is to measure and work toward intelligently established goals. Amen, but in the real world, it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

My boss and personal favorite new-media mogul (“…the same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!”) Albert Maruggi spoke about using new media and the Web in general as “the key to buyers’ hearts,” particularly through the interaction and engagement the Web enables. In the next couple of days, that presentation and all the video interviews in it (with execs and marketers from Sigler Music, Bawls Energy Drinks, Best Buy) will be available at www.providentpartners.net/forum.

As the guy who does the majority of the media relations and other PR work for our clients, I love the idea of, as Albert put it, thinking of your company as a media outlet. Every company has some sort of expertise, information or “edutainment” to share, and things like blogs and podcasts make that sharing easy and powerful.

Plus, this is a fun time to be in PR. Printed publications, even seemingly old-school farming magazines, are putting sound bites on their Web sites. Blogs and podcasts, with their RSS feeds and quick syndication, work like homegrown newswires that boost search engine rankings like nothing you’ve ever seen. News releases are less for “the press” (notice I called it a news release, not a press release – always have) and more for anyone who wants information about what you’re talking about, often the consumers and shoppers themselves.

The last session of the first day was a panel discussion/debate/occasional bark-fest on social media news releases. That gets its own post, as there was a lot of material there.

Tags: social media //