1. AMEC Measurement Summit - The essence

The conference is over. It was great! I had a blast. I met people from so many different countries doing the same thing I am: 180 people from 27 countries were attending. Great!
So what was the essence of these three days:

Everybody is just "cooking with water" (as we say in Germany).

There are the same problems with evaluation all over the world. At the same time, we all are facing the challenges of the social media wave that is rolling over us at the moment. So here is what the experts found important:

• There is a great gap between reality and the own professional demand of measurement specialists. The ideal world of PR measurement would measure reputation and relationships and trust continuously and in a standardized way. The realistic world measures AVEs because they're easy to understand and clients demand for them.
• Where are quality standards? Neil Martinson asked five different agencies for PR measurement to evaluate a campaign - he got five different results. Great idea to evaluate the evaluators. Poor picture is drawn.
• Reputation measurement influences strategic company organization - ECHO Research measured reputation of SeverStal. Impressively shows how important evaluation is for planning and how tightly connected communication is with company action itself. This also explains the discussion we had at the conference about PR evaluators becoming PR consultants, because we not only are asked to count eyeballs but also are asked to interprete and give advice.
• Social media evaluation basically is communication flow and content analysis. The important point is, what to analyze: Who and what is important? Measuring needs to be individually constructed (for example, A/B/C-Blog classification is different for every topic). Then, of course, you cannot easily compare results.
• We should focus on qualitative analysis, because this really shows you the trend of opinions and values and the results directly offer recommendations for improvement. Thus, pr measurement is linked to improving company's success.

So there still is a lot to do. For all of us evaluators.

Thank you for the great Summit, AMEC! And thank you, Katie Paine, for initiating this kind of conference back in 2002 in the first place!

We need a new way of thinking - yes!

Marshall Manson pointed out the challenge of social media: "We need a new way of thinking!" AVE is yesterday, honesty, transparency and interaction are the important factors of social media - compared to meeting the people personally in a bar - would you give a person next to you at the bar a press information? No! Cause its not appropiate. Social media implement direct communication with your stakeholders, so act just like you would communicate directly with them!
A great presentation at the 1. AMEC Measurement Summit in Berlin! http://www.ameceuropeansummit.org/summit/

Live from 1. AMEC European Measurement Summit in Berlin

The first day of the Measurement Summit is almost over. It is thrilling to be here with so many measurement experts. I met people from Croatia, Australia, South Africa, London, USA and Italy so far. The presentations started with Tom Watson, one of the living legends of scientific pr measurement. The next highlight was Katie Paine - the goddess of pr measurement. She explained why metrics will change with the rising of social media. Eyeballs counting belongs to yesterday, now we evaluate real people and their relationships and opinions. Social media is the biggest challenge around the world. Everybody is searching for a way to measure social media. While first-time-twittering along the day, I must admit, I still don't really understand the deaper sense of twitter. But, you can only judge if you tried it. You find the conference tweets searching for the hatchback #BMS09
The final question that aroused was the role of measurement in recession. A debate around the sense of measurement in times where pr itself is cut down to minimum staff evolved. Will pr measurement experts more and more become pr consultants? Does it make sense to try to sell yourself as well as measurement expert than as consultant? Or is it more crudent to stay where your competencies lay and concentrate on what you really know?
There are no easy answers. Still, evaluation needs to be focussed on strategy goals with measureable obejctives, in this point everybody agreed.

Packing my suitcase...

for the First European PR Measurement Conference in Berlin, Germany!

I am very excited and looking forward to meeting a lot of interesting people who are doing similar things as I am! One big question I have is how is the AVE of internet articles is being calculated in other countries? Of course, I am no friend of simple monetary equivalents, but the reality in companies still requests this easy to understand and very demonstrating figure. Our clients are always asking for an online media equivalent and we so far always took the highest ad type cost. In some cases, there are so many categories on one page that we had to divide the total and very high amount through the number of estimated categories. This is very simplifying, but searching all detailled figures would make a lot of work and would not be an acceptable relation between effort and effect... I don't know a better way, but I hope the measurement gurus in Berlin can help me!

ALIVE AGAIN!

I am alive again, after evaluating the UN Millennium Campaign in Germany during the past three months. I just finished an eighty-pages-report describing the campaign with all its features. The report is based on 39 intensive 30-minutes narrative interviews with all stakeholders, partners and members of target groups. In addition we prosecuted a quantitative and qualitative media analysis, we did desk research and collected all information about target group resonance. 

It was thrilling!

It really made fun: You get to talk with people, to listen to what they think. A whole new world opened up to me - as for I never had heard "MDG" before. Putting all these information together was like building a giant 3-d-puzzle. At the end, of, course, there had to be some judgment, too. So I worked out the strengths and weaknesses of the whole project and brought them in connection with the specialties of the campaign - recognizing that you always need to judge something in relation to its context. On the basis of this information I drew conclusions on what could be improved and how. These recommendations were differentiated for all levels of the campaign work: direct operational advices, potentials for strategic improvement and ways to raise the efficiency of the campaign on organizational level. Now the challenge is, to communicate and use this report.

For me, this project offered the chance to look over the fence of evaluating PR: The evaluation report was initiated by the German minister for development. They have a well structured and standardized system of evaluating development projects, which of course is focused on evaluating development, but nevertheless can be transferred into evaluating communication processes. This is the chance of learning from others without trying to invent the wheel again and again.

Reputation is the key driver of CSR

Ansgar Zerfaß has published the results of the "European Communication Monitor 2008". This study was first conducted in 2007. 1,524 European communication professionals from 37 countries  took part in the online survey. The average respondent works for a company, is 40 years old and has more than ten years pr experience. 

The results in short: Corporate Social Responsibility becomes increasingly important. Reputation is seen as the key driver of CSR. Thus, systematic reputation management is essential for good CSR-work. 

Online and social media are very important and innovative communication channels - still, the first hype seems to have passed, as the strategic relevance of the digital revolution was rated less important than last year. In contrast to the relevance of CSR, which was rated higher in 2008 than in 2007. 

The interest in new evaluation instruments decreased from 2007 to 2008. Evaluation takes place mostly in the output dimension of direct media and public resonance. The joint stock companies evaluate and control their communication with the highest degree. A fact which can be explained by the obligatory publishing demands those companies have to fulfil.

The study has an own website: http://www.communicationmonitor.eu/

PR Measurement in Germany

In Germany there are two main streams of approaching the topic of pr measurement: top-down communication controlling versus bottom-up pr-evaluation. Both streams want to prove the effects of communication, but from a different point of view. In best case, these approaches shake hands on the mid-way: they meet when top-down controlling breaks down the company goals into realistic communication objectives, after continuous pr-evaluation has identified and measured standardized key performance indicators of organizational communication. So it is not a question of either or, but more the question of where to start. I am convinces that in practice it makes more sense to start bottom-up - because pr is very often done quite spontaneously and strategy is often neglected. So you better first see what is to be measured - what criteria has influence on your success - and then decide what can be measured (what is realistic to be measured continuously). If you have identified you success indicators, then you can start measuring. As soon as you have enough data, then you can decide what information can be used a performance indicator. And then finally, you are at the point where you can shake hands with the controlling team: as soon as they come your way from the top breaking down company goals, you can offer them proven standardized indicators as measures of you success.

Just always be sure you choose the right indicators - the ones you can steer. Otherwise, if company profits go down, you will be put on regress for something which you do not have influence on. 

So communication controlling makes sense, of course. But first, you should start measuring and standardizing by a bottom-up evaluation approach.