Tag: Uncategorized

Thanks to Geoff Livingston at Buzz Bin, you can find all the posts related to the measurement thread that both Tiffany Derville and I participated in last month.

Brilliant! I’ll be using these.

From Arrive Alive, a South African road safety organization. These adhesives could be found on the floors and walls of bathroom bars. I think they are pretty remarkable. My partner said, “I don’t get it. What does that have to do with drinking and driving?”

I wonder how effective these are?

The PR blogosphere hosts many ranking services. Top 150 this, top 100 that. These are excellent places to start when you’re new to the blogosphere or looking for something new to read and I check them out on a regular basis.

One I had not heard of before, PRVoices, has it’s own ranking which is a “social ranking.” According to PR Voices, I’m #39. I’m not sure what this means, but it’s still pretty cool.

PRVoices’ list is a good one. Lots of good bloggers, and regardless of the methods used to compile the list, I’m in good company. So we’ll see if PRVoices launches me into PR blogging superstardom.

Image: Corbis

This is the last week of classes for Fall Term. A few finals to grade and then off to Winter break. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to blogging about some interesting issues in public relations when classes wrap up. Stay tuned!

This weeks posts:

Done Anything for Your Personal Brand Lately? As my students in Adv. Writing get ready to hit the real world, I’ve been editing resumes, giving advice and generally providing support (and connections when possible). This blog from Marci Alboher talks about going beyond the cover letter and creating your personal brand. Who are you? And what do you want to be known for? Do your actions support your aspirations?

Universities Finding Text Messaging Not the Panacea They Thought. After the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April, universities were abuzz about how to best notify students. And text messaging was seen as a good way to reach students quickly. What do you think? What would your recommendation be for administrators wanting to reach, say the population of the University of Oregon simultaneously?

TIA Wages Aggressive Initiative on Toy Safety. With the recent rash of toy recalls, safety is at the top of every parent’s mind during the holiday shopping season. What do you think about this industry initiative?

Edelman Ups Social Impact in Latest Unit. A recent Edelman survey says 85% of consumers would be willing to change brands or their consumption habits to contribute to a better society and the environment.

Eye Tracking Rules. Eye tracking studies help designers understand what people look at when they view anything visual – like a Web site. Do you find these rules to be true about how you see a Web site?

Millennials: Clued In or Clueless. What do you think, you millennials, you?

Well, well, well. It’s Friday again, so time to dig around in my Bloglines account and find the best of the posts from the last week. This has been a crazy week, professionally. I’ve been a busy bee. But it looks like there’s been a lot going on and, as always, people talking about interesting things.

Brendan Cooper’s PowerPR list: A top 100 list that includes some of my favorite bloggers, so it must be valid.

Media Guerilla – Online Response Tactics 101: How do you know when to respond to buzz, positive or negative online? Mike Manuel has three simple questions that can help you decide if it’s worth the time and energy.

Stop Worrying that Your Twentysomething is Lost: From Penelope Trunk (The Brazen Careerist). Penelope always has great posts related to the job search and mostly for young pros. You might want to forward this post to your parents.

Memory Almost Full… Of Junk – All that Web Surfing Could Hurt Your Work: Bart Cleveland contributes to Advertising Age on small agency life. It’s specifically about small agencies, but I find lots of useful things for students and for public relations. This post talks about his concern that younger employees’ work is suffering because they just aren’t paying attention.

Spam One-Liners: Art created from one-liner subject lines in the artists’ in box.

When Candidates Give Up: A political ad from a bottom of the barrel candidate… can you smell the desperation?

Teachers Should Blog, Tweet and Flirt Online Like the Rest of Us: In Ohio, the public school teachers’ union strongly recommends that teachers not participate in social media sites. What do you think?

My Advanced PR Writing students are just three weeks from wrapping up their academic careers. What a perfect time for some self-reflection… and fortunately, they’re blogging about it!

Balance from Believing is Art
Live to Work or Work to Live from Diane
Help Me Help You from Alyssa
Brain vs. Heart from Chris

I want to laugh… I want to cry… I definitely want to forward to my W-E friends and see if PR Lady is “on message.”

Kami Huyse recently gave a presentation on social media measurement and talks about it here. And, along with Geoff Livingston, they have started a wider conversation on measurement and asked some very very smart people (and me) to answer some questions.

So here goes! (and it’s a long post… enjoy!)

DISCUSS: Do you think measurement of social media is important, and why.

I don’t think the importance of measurement can be understated. It’s taken me about a year or so to figure out the whole social media sphere – and I’m still a novice in comparison to some of the other folks responding to these questions. In between classes, and my agency and my toddler, social media has really been a hobby.

But, the more I’m immersed, the more I’m able to turn my attention beyond the technology basics and “1st level” understanding, I am focusing more on issues like measurement and ethics of social media and understanding how these tools are changing the way we communicate (and how the way we communicate is changing the tools we use).

Let me back up a second. I often create my own lingo for concepts I use in my classes. By “1st level,” I mean understanding the tools, their functions and their fit into public relations. In Kami’s presentation she calls this level “analytics.” My classes are still at this “1st level” of understanding.

I look forward to the day when we can move to “2nd level” understanding. And I suppose by that I mean how to measure the quality of conversation and dialogue – the relationships.

RESOURCES: What are your favorite resources for social media measurement? Do you recommend any methodologies? For those of you that have them, can you point to posts about measurement you have written in the past?

My favorites are Google Analytics and Google Blogsearch right now. My students and my clients are still beginners and this is where we start. I’ve had some great success helping both understand the importance of measurement and demonstrating results with these two tools.

I also use Technorati, Delicious and Flickr.

I have not written much about measurement…yet! I rely on Kami’s posts and KD Paine’s posts, particularly to help me establish a solid grounding in this area.

EXAMPLES: Do you have any examples of measurement you have used in a social media campaign. Did these campaigns have any positive business outcomes (ROI) and/or relationships)?

I have one very very rudimentary example, but it’s gone a long way to convincing a client that they need to blog, specifically.

I was pitching a new client recently. As part of that conversation, we talked a lot about blogging and how it worked, why she should pay attention and how it might help her in all the ways that blogging can help organizations communicate with their stakeholders.

That evening, I set up a Google Blogsearch alert on the organization. The next morning – I kid you not… the very next morning – there was a post including the name of the company. It was a very positive post, with the blogger talking about how much she loved the company’s product. (Whew!) I forwarded that post to the company’s owner and told her this could be a great opportunity to comment on the post and create an even better relationship with this customer.

Long story short, she did. The blogger was shocked that the owner found her and commented and proceeded to write another post showcasing all of her products from this company with photos and commentary about how much she loved them. The whole thing took about 48 hours and now the client is a big fan of blogging. She had fun participating and saw the results of that interaction.

Like I said, pretty rudimentary, but it was a ton of fun and made a indelible impression on this client.

I’m going to expand the conversation circle a bit. I’d love to hear what Robert French thinks (particularly how he’s talking to students about measurement) and I’m also going to tag Dr. Tiffany Derville, our newest addition to the PR faculty at the University of Oregon. Tiffany doesn’t blog, so I’ll solicit her feedback and include it here as a guest post. Tiffany’s area of interest is relationship management and I imagine she can add to this discussion!

Kami’s presentation:

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Consumers International (CI), the international federation of consumer advocacy groups, has announced the winners of its annual International Bad Product Awards.

Member organizations submit nominations for awards that aim to “highlight failings of corporate responsibility and the abuse of consumer trust by internationally recognised brands.”

This year’s winners:

Coca-Cola – for continuing the international marketing of its bottled water, Dasani, despite admitting it comes from the same sources as local tap water.

Kellogg’s – for the worldwide use of cartoon-type characters and product tie-ins aimed at children, despite high levels of sugar and salt in their food products.

Mattel – for stonewalling US congressional investigations and avoiding overall responsibility for the global recall of 21 million products.

With the overall prize going to:

Takeda Pharmaceuticals – for taking advantage of poor US regulation and advertising sleeping pills to children, despite health warnings about pediatric use.

From Richard Lloyd, Director General of CI:

“These multi-billion dollar companies are global brands with a responsibility to be honest, accountable and responsible. In highlighting their short-comings Consumers International and its 220 member organisations are holding corporations to account and demanding businesses take social responsibility seriously.”