Effective web teams cannot live within a single traditional department such as marketing or IT, writes Andrew Eklund of Ciceron Marketing in Minneapolis. “In my mind, a new Department of the Customer needs to be established where marketing, product development, and IT work side by side to achieve new levels of customer satisfaction and market intelligence.”
He argues that the engine of this new department is a metrics and analytics platform that prevents internal departmental fiefdoms and puts attention squarely on what the customer is actually doing, what she wants, when she wants attention, and why she’s buying or not buying your products and services.”
The Department of the Customer
July 19, 2006
Leave a Comment » | 
Uncategorized | Tagged: measurement, public relations | 
Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Proving your worth
July 11, 2006The marketing and corporate communication we’ve known in the past is going the way of the dinosaur, says Mark Weiner of Delahaye Medialink Worldwide. Anecdotal observations about PR’s contribution to company objectives don’t cut it, and having no way to measure PR’s contributions is professional suicide.
In an article written for IABC’s Communication World, Weiner reports that only half of 100 professional communicators surveyed agreed with the statement, “My communications program objectives are measurable.”
Year after year, respondents agree that generating press clippings volume is the most common and most meaningful goal for a successful PR campaign. And year after year, PR’s internal clients say that press clipping volume is the least important measure of all, and that top management’s being aware of communication objectives doesn’t mean that they support them. Senior executives would much prefer to see programs that deliver messages to target audiences, raise awareness, change attitudes and, finally, affect behavior. (Communication World, April-May 2003, pp. 24-27)
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: measurement, public relations, reading list | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Book review: Unleashing the power of PR
July 6, 2006“I believe that PR is as much a science as it is art and I further believe that the science upon which effective public relations can be based actually enhances the creative process, by focusing creative resources on the most compelling and credible messages as proven through research,” says Mark Weiner in his new book “Unleashing the Power of PR: A contrarian’s guide to marketing and communication (IABC/Jossey Bass, 2006).
Weiner is president of Delahaye, a provider of PR research, analysis, and consulting.
The difference between unenlightened and enlightened PR program evaluation, he says, is the difference between a report card and a tutor. Evaluation helps decision makers link PR results to objectives. Evaluation provides opportunities for continual improvement. Evaluation constructs a framework around which future PR plans can be built.
A successful evaluation will tell you how your PR program performed against objectives and in light of your strategy and tactics. But better still is the type of evaluation that tells you more than just what happened: it tells you why it happened, if it will continue, and what should be done about it.
In Part One Weiner provides an overview of the changing landscape of marketing and corporate communication. Part Two discusses using research to strengthen public relations. Part Three walks you through the steps to transforming a PR program.
“I would argue that refusal to set specific goals is a form of malpractice,” he says, “especially when you consider the affordable new tools at hand, the newfound recognition and still huge upside for PR, and the increasing scope of activities for which PR people are now held responsible.”
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: book review, measurement, public relations, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Tips on measurement
July 3, 2006Joel Strasser of PRSA’s Technology Section offers six things to consider when trying to measure the results or your PR activities. PR should work hand-in-hand with advertising, he says, but no single company could afford to advertise in the number of publications reached through public relations.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: measurement, public relations | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
PRism special issue on measurement
June 27, 2006The current issue of the online journal PRism features articles on PR evaluation and measurement. Article titles include Measuring the immeasurable; Evaluation in use: The practitioner view of effective evaluation; and Blogs, mash-ups and wikis – new tools for evaluating event objectives. The issue also includes book reviews and a conference reports.
PRism is a service of PRaxis, a public relations and communication site designed as a combined resource and meeting space for academics, students, and industry practitioners.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: measurement, public relations, reading list, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Evaluating your PR *outcomes*
June 23, 2006Here’s a guide to evaluting a project based on its outcomes. I see lots of applications for public relations, marketing, and outreach.
Outcomes evaluation looks at programs as systems that have inputs, activities or processes, outputs and outcomes. Among the several myths this paper addresses and debunks are:
Evaluation is an event to get over with and then move on!
and,
Evaluation is a whole new set of activities – we don’t have the resources!
(via Intelligent Measurement)
Leave a Comment » | how-to | Tagged: measurement, public relations, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Using WordPress search stats
June 16, 2006WordPress tracks how people get to your blog. Beyond listing the sites that refer readers to you, it maintains a 7-day list of search terms people used, that landed them on your blog. It looks like this:
Don't ignore that valuable information. You can use it to help choose the content of future posts. You can use it to optimize your blog. You can do your own searches using these terms to see what comes up. The will let you see your blog in the context your users see it.
I have begun filing the search terms in Excel and sorting through them:
This data dump will prove increasingly valuable.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: blogging, measurement | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
PubSub offers alerts and measurement tool
June 14, 2006
PubSub offers a number of ways to automatically track subjects of particular interest to you. For some time I have used the RSS-based alert service which tracks a 'stack' of terms I created:
The alerts show up in my RSS news aggregator (I use SAGE) and appear in bold face when there's news.
I've more recently started using PubSub's 'link ranks' tool that tracks your blog every day and measures the number of your posts (entries), outlinks, and inlinks. You're then presented with your blog's rank, based on PubSub's measurement of "the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in over 23 million sources that PubSub monitors."
Here's my link rank. It's quite modest. . .
. . . but it's useful information, and helps inspire me to keep posting. To track your blog's link rank, go to this page and enter your URL.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: blogging, measurement, resources, RSS | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Is your site readable?
May 26, 2006Is your prose easy to read? Go to this site, enter the URL of your website or blog, and find out how readable you are, as measured by the standard Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid reading level algorithms. Here's how EducationPR scored. . .
Yes, this is fun. But it's also important. Readers should not have to fight to understand what you're trying to communicate.
I have to continually resist being sucked in to the academic jargon that's used in my work place.
The Gunning-Fog index measures roughly how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors.
The Flesch Reading Ease scale rates text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.
Flesch-Kincaid grade level measures how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content.
Thanks to Stuart Bruce for the pointer.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: blogging, measurement, resources | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
Measuring your page rank
April 26, 2006There are several ways to measure how many people view your blog. You can install the free Sitemeter utility and register your site with Technorati and Bloglines, for starters. Another way is to download the Google Toolbar and use its PageRank utility, which is a measure of the importance of the page on a scale of 0 to 10. According to Google, PageRank "uses the web's vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"
I also like the utility because it provides a list of sites that link to yours. I have had some pleasant surprises.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: blogging, measurement | Permalink
Posted by paul baker
