Friday, August 01, 2008

The Triad of Measurement: What Is Measurable in PR and Social Media Campaigns

 

Marc van Bree, who blogs at The Dutch Perspective about cultural perspectives and public relations, has penned a new series of posts for orchestras who want to participate in new media. Marc is the public relations coordinator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The series, while obviously a good fit for orchestras, also has a a much broader appeal. In the series, he included a post on measurement that I found helpful for anyone interested in how to make all this social media stuff make sense. And conveniently, it fits together with a series of posts I have been intending to put up about what and how to measure social media campaigns.

Triad of Measurement

Sticking with things that are musical, when I talk about which things are measurable I break out my Triad of Measurement analogy (which is adapted from Avinash Kaushik's strategic concept of Trinity and Katie Paine's idea of measuring Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes).

 

Triad of Measurement Kami copy

  • Interest: How interested are people in [insert name, thing, company]
  • Attitude: What attitudes do people hold about [insert name, thing, company]
  • Action: What actions, that matter from a business perspective do people take as a result of your campaign.

So with my advance apologies to Marc, I am going to take his suggested ideas for measuring and fit them into my own framework.  He does a pretty good job of listing many of the things that belong under each category:

INTEREST

Activity (page views, unique site visitors)

Community (who is your community) My note: While this is not really measurement, this research will give you some insight into the potential interest of your stakeholders

  • Demographics (age, location, income etc.);
  • Psychographics (lifestyle, behavior, values etc.)

ATTITUDES

Conversation (what is the community talking about)

  • Conversation Index (ratio between blog posts and comments-plus-trackbacks);
  • Influential Ideas (memes; how long does a message remain in the arena of public opinion and interaction)

Connectedness (what is your relationship with the community)

  • Relationships and Connections (influence within a specific community)

Content (what is the focus of the community)

  • Relevance (how relevant to my company is a particular blog post);
  • Tone (what is the sentiment associated with the response, positive, negative or neutral)

ACTIONS

Participation (what is the community doing; what are its actions)

  • Engagement (the recipient not only responds to a message but acts on it as well);
  • Community Activation (specific actions; are recipients reacting to the message)

Hopefully that gives some good insight into what to measure. I will cover how to measure each part of the Triad over the next week or so.