Insight, the one digital metric we don’t measure

I hope that by now most large company execs by now will have heard of the existence of website analytics. Some (especially the more marketing and technology focused) may even have seen dashboard reports from their analytics suites.

These displays of graphs and numeric tables can help the senior team quickly get an idea of the value of their digital channels, with ‘Goals’ (online results such as sign-ups or purchases) and ‘CPA’ (Cost per acquisition) figures being obvious KPI’s to get regular updates on.

These hard and fast numbers can go a long way to dispelling half-truths, rumours and ‘gut feel’ that humans instinctively use when there are gaps in their knowledge.
Note: I still see and hear of execs citing ‘hits’ as a great indicator of online greatness, with no understanding of how this figure is derived nor the understanding that traffic without purpose just creates a burden on IT infrastructure more than anything else.

Receiving and reviewing these dashboards might be one way of checking the digital success of an organisation, but a few pie charts and year-on-year comparisons does not even start to show the key output that needs comes out of these figures… insight. Insight that your digital analytics team (perhaps only made up of one person or even just part of a role somewhere) should be craving to provide

Measuring facts from all your digital touch-points is now possible and relatively easy in the online world. You insert a tag or two into each page (or action) of your website and sit back and watch the numbers scroll before your very eyes. Real-time reporting is now a reality, with even the free packages such as Google Analytics telling you where, when and what your visitors are doing at every step of their connected customer journey. But gaining insight from these figures is a different matter and measuring the value of this insight is exponentially more difficult still. Perhaps that’s why to-date it isn’t measured

But actually, it is...kind of. Insight derived online reports can show up in all sorts of ways, usually when there is a feedback loop from this data back into the business, for example:

• Geographic data about where website or app visitors are coming from can inform business strategy. Imagine the mergers and acquisitions team knowing which counties the biggest increases in valuable business traffic have recently come from
• Significant differences in the search engine keywords entered by users to reach your sites can predict market or investor trends. Data that could be of potential use to many central functions, including finance, proposition and commercial teams
• Site bounce rates can not only inform your User Experience team of potential issues, but can reflect on product price, content quality or site speed (or a possible combination of all three plus other factors

It’s a shame however that this contribution to the organisation can’t be effectively measured. You can’t really put a price on the provision of internal data within a company, without coming up with some sort of mad model that will be more hypothesis than fact… the very thing thatdigital analytics tries to constantly minimise

7 reasons your content marketing is crap

There, I've said it and it's time to admit it. Basically a lot of the current hype around content marketing is crap and so are a load of blog posts about the subject.

Here's my thoughts on why a lot of efforts into the latest online marketing trend are going to be poor, very poor:

1. You have no content plan
Are you publishing content with no editorial calendar and therefore no schedule for seasonal changes? Good content begins with a good plan of what you're going to write and when you're going to publish it,

2. You have based everything around search engine optimisation
On-page optimisation of your content is one of the key focuses of SEO, however just writing content for the search engines (and not really for your readers) isn't the right way to get engaged readers

3. You're not encouraging sharing
So you're making it harder for your readers to post the URL to different social networks or to share content with their peers. Why exactly?

4. You're not linking off to other parts of your site
Part of your reason for writing content should be that it actually drives people around your site and triggers your other site KPI's. Have you got an eCommerce site and yet you're not linking off to products you feature in your blog?

5. You're not reading what you're writing.
The way to create a sustainable audience of any long term value is with the deployment of quality, original and engaging content. Like a chef who doesn't eat what they make, you need to write stuff that you believe in. which ultimately means you have to be the first consumer of your content.

6. You're not properly measuring what you're doing
How are you going to optimise your content if you don't actually collect data about what is working for you and what isn't? Ensure you have the right goals measured and that you get regular feedback on these.

7. You're not learning
Content marketing optimisation is a slow process of test and learn, where you not only have to spend effort producing content... you have to also gain insight into what is actually working. And then you have to actually tell yourself some home truths about what isn't!.

Measuring Social Media activity across your business

If you work for a larger company with multiple divisions (and marketing initiatives) then there is a good chance that you have more than one piece of social media activity going on at once.

There's also a pretty good chance that these different initiatives are not connected and may even be duplicating effort (or worse, working against each other).

So what do you do?

1. Audit all activity
Firstly, do an audit of all activity involving social media across your company.  Create a list of everything from those business Twitter accounts in the USA office, through to those Facebook Pages created by the German Marketing team.

2. Measure reach, impact and engagement
How? Well, for reach, its a numbers game. With services such as Twitter its easy to see the number of followers an account has and its just as easy to record the number of Facebook 'likes'. Counting up the number of people who have 'like'd each clip* or are following your channels on YouTube is obvious. Also most blogging platform now either provide statistics for the number of visitors to your blogs or allow you to integrate Google Analytics or other stats package into each page.
*YouTube also allows users to give each clip a 'thumbs down' plus has basic stats built into it now

However measuring impact and engagement is a different matter and I would therefore suggest you look at these methods as a starter:

• Twitter: 
• Look at the number of re-tweets each account gets, this will give you some idea of how valuable the followers regard the postings.
• Measure clicks on hyperlinks. You can do this either by looking at your referrer information in your site analytics package (assuming the links point back to your own site), or if you use a service like Bit.ly which integrates with Twitter, this will show you the clicks on each Tweet.
  Hayden's tip: Use Google link search to see how many people hyperlink to your Twitter account e.g. http://goo.gl/6hkt
• 
  
   Facebook
• 
  
  Look for the amount of comments and 'likes' on postings. Obviously the more followers you have, the greater the likelihood of having comments and 'likes'...
  Hayden's tip: To get a real measure, work out your average number of responses per posting and divide this by your total number of followers.. and then measure this over time.
• YouTube, Flickr, etc.
• Both these sites allow commenting on each respective file uploaded and YouTube even allows video responses to be posted. Reviewing this feedback over time will give you some idea of the content that people find interesting (in a positive or negative way - so remember to )
  Hayden's tip:
• Blogs
• Comments are the obvious way of measuring engagement with your blog content and because they are easily spider-able by search engines and social tools, you can use a variety of methods to understand the quality of the people contributing to them (e.g. http://socialmention.com/)
  You can also use your analytics package to measure more factors about engagement such as the amount of time spent on each page (paid for analytics applications may even have a specific way of working this out, such as this method from WebTrends)
  Hayden's tip: Again use Google to measure the number of inbound links to each blog: e.g. http://goo.gl/tjTn

There's obviously lots of other social networks to assess and the ones you audit and measure will depend upon the countries your business is active in. But without first taking stock of your entire social media presence, there's no way you decide which efforts are working and which are not.

Budget airlines have falling online reputations

It comes as no real suprise to read that the budget airlines of Easyjet and Ryanair have declining reputations online, given PR own-goals such as ranting on blog that dare criticise their booking process.

The bi-annual Kaizo Advocacy Index (KAI), which is designed to provide a view on leading brands' online reputation and recommendations have the following recent report:

Kaizo Advocacy Index Winter 2009

View more presentations from guest542bc4.

For how long can some companies in the commoditised markets such as air travel continue to have arrogance?

What is PR these days?

In looking at the changing role of PR companies for a prospective business venture, I was reminded of a useful blog posting I'd read some while back
"Would PR Rather Not Be Measured? " by Brian Cavoli of Cymphony.
(Note: Its a real shame to see that Jim Nail and the crew at TNS/Cymfony haven't been updating their blog much recently. Perhaps the WPP takeover has taken up too much of their time)

This recent flurry of PR research has led me to observe that PR companies have changed significantly in the last few years, especially as I realised that Brian's article was written over 2 and a half years ago.

But this does beg the question of "what is the modern role of PR?"

Q: Is it to know a small number of media people who can be easily influenced over a dinner and beer?
A: Perhaps, but that's not the main part of their role. Even modern PR people admit you need results not just influence.

Q: Is it to blanket-bomb the same set of journalists and other market commentators on behalf of your client?
A: Errr.... No! Thanks to the long-tail of knowledge and specialisation, there are often far more industry-specific people to set up a dialogue with than general journo-types.

Q: Is it to monitor blogs and other social media on behalf of their clients?
A: Yes! In fact I am aware of more than one PR company that now watches numerous blog feeds at the same time (Indeed, one forward-thinking one has even built a Yahoo Pipes application to filter keyword and terms from numerous RSS sources). They should then provide honest feedback to their clients to enable them to make more informed decisons and communication plans.

Steve Rubel however mentions in a recent posting that perhaps PR is becoming obsolete, especially in the modern technical world. I disagree, but perhaps in the case of the Yahoo-Piping company above, PR may need to be more technical to survive.

Just how good are social media monitoring tools?

Following some recent investigation into Social Media monitoring tools, I found this interesting article from Daniel Riveong at e-Storm:
http://www.emergence-media.com/2008/04/social-media-monitoring-broken-conversations-broken-tools/

I think he actually has a well made point. Tracking the buzz within the blogosphere and other social media is one thing, but these tools are still growing in their capabilities.

What they current have a particularly difficult with is following the dialogue that takes place over several sites or sevices. These conversations are similar to family members that change and take on new personalities depending upon their environements and influences. All comments and discussions may well be relevant, but they are also getting increasingly complex to follow, especially as new methods appear (e.g. who used http://www.twitter.com, http://www.friendfeed.com or http://www.plurk.com a year ago?)

However, don't over-do the measurement though, as this article from Commetrics highlights.

Before measuring the influence

Before you go out to look for a wonderful technology solution to track all your influencer, chart their progress and measure their input (good luck!), first think about some basics:

1. Find out what will you not be able to measure?
Understand what is beyond your reach, what is hypothesis and when you're throwing good money after bad.

2. Have an idea of what success looks like
This is not to say you try to come up with the answers before you have asked the question, but know what is a good or a bad result (hint: you don't have to sent these too high initially, especially if you're sure you can surpass them)

3. Measure everything
Failing to set an initial benchmark can be fatal. Measure before you start, after something happens and then again as frequently as you can.

If you are looking for ways to measure your traditional PR, then http://www.consulttheguru.com/marketing_ideas/public_relations/measure_value_pr.aspx is usually a good place to start.