Communications & New Media Nov 2015 Vol 29 No 11

FEATURE
Measure early and often, and don’t fear recalibration
Setting measurement objectives for your tech client is something
that should occur at the very beginning of a campaign, not as an
afterthought. Gathering insights, recognizing trends and adjusting
the program accordingly is paramount in any B2B campaign.
By Gene Carozza
To paraphrase the poet Robert Burns:
Oftentimes even the best laid plans
need course correction. Maybe,
while working through a plan, you see results
coming that aren’t what you intended.
But often it’s because you’ve determined
you hit the right chord while in the midst
of your plans, and something is working
well and you need more of it. It’s positively
impacting the business goals you’ve set
in advance of the campaign. And you’ve
been able to demonstrate its effectiveness
through the use of proper goals and measurement
methodologies that key stakeholders
agreed to from the start.
Here’s a quick anecdote. A startup company
in the application development space
had high aspirations for its product. The
company’s executives were convinced that
once developers had a chance to use their
platform, they would love it. The executives
set a goal to increase the number of
downloads of its product 3X over the previous
quarter. They hoped to do this with a
marketing campaign driven by PR and targeted
to a specific “app dev” audience. The
whole campaign focused on the 3X metric
to determine impact and effectiveness.
The company’s PR team was armed with
the usual arsenal of news releases, pitch
ideas and assorted tactics, and things
looked like they were going swimmingly.
The downloads were increasing, and the
company was well on its way to achieving
the 3X metric.
But then a funny thing happened. The PR
team discovered halfway through the effort
that a growing number of traffic referrals
to the download page were being driven by
the company’s own employees posting on
their LinkedIn profile pages and through
Twitter.
Utilizing data that was gleaned simply
through Google Analytics, the PR team
quickly pivoted to creating more social
content in the form of memes and visual
elements that could then be shared
through these channels. The team kept it
light and fun, letting the personality of the
company shine through while taking into
account the geeky side of the personas they
were attempting to engage.
The PR team asked: What would this audience
of app developers like even more
than visiting the product landing page and
sharing with their followers or contacts?
A deep dive on the business use of social
media. (LinkedIn and Twitter, specifically,
were offered for all employees, particularly
those in sales and marketing, to add exponentially
more shares.) And PR did its part
by making sure that when new elements
were developed, there was minimal work
needed by employees to post and share.
(People are busy, so make it easy for them
to participate).
The point of this story is that, had the
PR team stuck to its original approach, it
would have never achieved the 3X objective.
The team was willing to recognize a
trend and change its approach to promoting
the app development accordingly. Realizing
there are many different paths to
achieve an objective is the lesson learned.
Social media’s impact on buying patterns
is forcing companies to be more nimble in
their campaign execution. IT buyers aren’t
relying just on tried-and-true tactics,
but also on research, testing, and friends’
recommendations. Research shows that
97% of IT buyers are influenced by feedback
from peer networks like Twitter and
LinkedIn, so companies should prepare to
course-correct if the data steers them in a
new direction.
Setting measurement objectives should
come in the beginning of a campaign, not
as an afterthought. And the trick is to determine
which results will truly define the
success of a communications campaign.
I am a strong advocate for using the Barcelona
Principles, a methodology that encourages
companies to quantitatively and
qualitatively measure the impact of communications,
not the number of “hits,”
which is essentially recognized now by
savvy communications practitioners as a
useless metric.
It’s disappointing to see companies continuing
to rely on a quantitative measure
of hits to gauge the success of their programs.
How many times have you been
told, “We received 25 placements for this
effort last year, so this year we set 30 as the
goal”? Even better, reading an RFP from a
tech company that has an aim of X (pick a
number) placements during the course of
the year. But aside from the obvious desire
to count clips, the traditional media side of
the communications activity is only half —
sometimes not even — of what should be
measured.
The social and traditional program elements
can be measured in a variety of ways
that will demonstrate
organizational impact
and alleviate you from
having to count clips.
Message pull through,
spokesperson inclusion,
standalone appearances,
traffic activity
and tone weighing
are some most commonly
used, but this
will change based on the
objectives and desired outcomes.
Gene Carozza
To summarize, use the Barcelona Principles
methodology as the standard way to
measure your program. If you are unfamiliar
with it, PRSA has some great resources
and conferences available that spell out
how it works. In short, it requires that you
periodically measure progress throughout
the course of a communications program
to glean what’s working and what’s not;
don’t wait until the end to measure effectiveness
or impact. Use the many tools
available, such as Google Analytics, Trendkite,
Netbase, and others to pull the data.
Be sure to include both the social and
traditional components as part of the
measurement objectives. One cannot exist
without the other. And be creative! Make
sure it reflects the company image and is
welcomed by the audience. Enlist the help
of employees to aid in the communications
effort when possible, particularly with social
efforts. It’s been said that we all work
for sales, but remember that we’re also all
brand ambassadors for the company.
Use a balance of quantifiable data —
here’s the change in activity — and quantifiable
insight — what caused the numbers
to change? — to measure effectively. And
lastly, build a dashboard that can be used
and shared at the board level to report your
findings.
Keep it simple and understandable: assume
that your work will be passed along
without you there to explain all the details
on the page.
Gene Carozza is Vice President at PAN
Communications.
12 NOVEMBER 2015 | www.ODwyERPR.COM