Unjournalism

Bill Sledzik, associate professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University, writes a guest post at PR Conversations about social media measurement and ROI.

He doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers, but he does a good job of raising and putting into perspective the all-important question: “How effectively does our work generate leads, drive sales, reduce costs? All are bottom-line outcomes, and often difficult to tie back to PR activity—online or off.”

There’s a good discussion over on Bill’s post, so check it out. I’m using it as a launch pad for this post.

Bill poses the challenge of measuring relationships, as opposed to simply measuring outcomes such as “blog mentions” or “press clips” if you’re nasty. The first step toward successful measurement (perhaps obviously) would be to measure toward your objectives. This is especially true for something as complicated and important as relationship measurement.

Don’t simply “measure the relationship” to come up with something like a Relationship Value Index, for example, that is supposed to show how important a particular person or group is to your organization. Instead, if you’re (at the time) concerned with crisis management, it makes sense to judge the people or publics with whom you’ve developed relationships on, say, their ability to pacify a riotous blogosphere. That would include factors like favorability toward your organization, credibility, reach (quality and quantity), ability to generate other posts in response (influence), frequency of activity beyond the post (conversing in comments), etc.

In a different context — such as a product launch — you could judge those same relationships with more emphasis on reach and influence but perhaps less on credibility and conversation.

This brings to back to the headline: Let’s start somewhere. With all this talk of social media tools, tips and tricks, measurement often draws the short straw. It’s easy to get caught up in the complexity of properly, intelligently implementing strategies that put the power of social media to good use. To make measurement possible, we need to begin these strategies with tangible metrics and objectives in mind, another element of many social media efforts that is often lacking.

Anecdotal, case-study measurement is a good start, but it rarely is based in the mindset of comparing results to objectives stated at the outset. It’s one thing to be able to say you’ve earned your keep, but it’s a whole new world to try to measure, analyze, repeat and improve.

What do we want to accomplish with our “social media efforts”? Why are we social-media-fying our news releases? Why am I helping clients podcast their thoughts and insights? What could I ever stand to gain from Facebook? Can I possibly find a meaningful way to measure relationships and connect them to business objectives?

Or can we just keep blogging because it’s cool?

(For the record, there are plenty of folks far smarter than me on the subject of PR measurement. Katie Paine is one. Part of the reason I’m writing is to “think out loud,” as they say. Also, Geoff Livingston has a good collection of social media case studies; some certainly fall into the anecdotal style of “measurement,” but some are more, well, sophisticated, I guess.)

“Measurement” courtesy of thespacesuitcatalyst via Flickr

Tags: Bill Sledzik, measurement, metrics, social media by Mike Keliher
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The past week has brought two great posts on the power of Twitter. At the same time, my love and respect for Twitter and the people within my Twitter universe is growing like never before.

My Twitter consumption habits are continually evolving, and I think I’ve finally hit on something that works pretty well. First step: I follow anyone who seems even remotely interesting or who follows me first. If he or she is entirely uninteresting or completely annoying, I can always “unfollow.”

Until recently, I received all incoming tweets (not direct messages, but everything from anyone I follow) as Google Talk instant messages. There’s no way I’d opt to have every tweet sent to my cell phone as a text message, and instant message style was way more convenient than only interacting with twitter.com.

And I read every single tweet. Seriously. It wasn’t a Scoble-esque following of 6,000 people, but with 60 or so followees (at the time), it was a damn lot to read. People “in my crowd,” like Robert Scoble, BL Ochman, Todd Defren and Jeremiah Owyang, tend to tweet a ton. (Hooray for alliteration!)

Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve shifted course. I now use the desktop app Snitter for reading, writing and interacting with the Twitter world. I’ve also resolved to continue to grow my Twitter crowd, but not for popularity reasons. The way I use Twitter, the more smart, active people, the better. With that resolution, I’ve given up on my commitment to read it all. I now am smart enough to just keep the window open and watch the brilliance, humor, wit, observations, inanity and riff-raff fly by all day long. It’s a wonderful thing.

Part of the power of Twitter is that, among all of these social tools we use to communicate on the Web, this is the one that truly feels social. For me, blogs, podcasts and wikis are only “social” in comparison to, say, newspapers and network television. But with Twitter, I truly feel as though I’ve established some sense of a relationship with certain people.

One of the more insightful folks in my Twitter crowd is Garrick Van Buren, and he hits the nail on the head:

It’s my water cooler. It’s light, small, flexible, and I don’t mind the instability.

(By the way, he’s funny, too.)

What’s the point? I’ve spent a lot of time recently hashing out with colleagues the ins and outs of Twitter, why a person would use this vs. that, what it can and can’t do (technically and professionally), and the like. For me, it always boils down to this: Twitter, like many other things in life, online or off, is what you make of it.

The beauty is that I don’t have to work hard to make a lot of it. I rarely find the time to write meaningful blog posts, and when I finally think I’m going to, I never dig in because the writing I would like to accomplish is daunting. But Twitter’s 140-character limit is the polar opposite; it’s downright inviting. I’m sure my Twitter stream is far more valuable on a regular basis than this blog.

So there’s my brain dump on Twitter. I don’t think it’s what I had in mind when I started writing, but part of my goal was to think through my own usage and habits and see them in a new light. How about you: What are your Twitter habits, and how do they fit into your day?

Tags: Twitter, new media by Mike Keliher
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