Chapter 5. Better Monitoring for PR 2.0

With the responsibility of communicating to your customers comes the tedious and very time-consuming job of monitoring to evaluate the effects of this communication in the market. However, once you select the right monitoring and measurement tools, it's a lot less difficult of a job. Once again, the Internet is there to help you effectively accomplish what could be a daunting task. Can monitoring be arduous? Sure, but only when you haphazardly gather information, don't organize it properly, and don't know how to evaluate it against your communication efforts. Similar to a research program, you can't let an overabundance of data paralyze you. There are proven ways to gather, analyze, and report on your data. Allow the experts to help you.

When you add to the mix your customers' involvement with social media, there's a whole new dimension to monitoring. Social media encompasses all the online technologies that people collaborate on, including their opinions and experiences as well as sharing different perspectives. Various social media applications include blogs, podcasts, wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology, streaming video, and video blogs (vlogs). As a result, social media now enables your customers to drive the communication. They feel empowered as a part of a larger community that shares information and interacts with one another. Compared to the past, several more groups are communicating now. As a result, these groups band together and are able to react to the community ideas and concepts and communication spreads further. The Internet is no longer thousands of separate Web sites but now larger populations all connected. They're all talking! This is the greatest chance to have more conversations, spread positive information or news, and obtain great exposure for your brand—or it's the worst possible scenario when it comes to monitoring and controlling sensitive communication.

Social Media and What/Who to Monitor

A strong focus needs to be placed on your influencers—these very important people who help to frame your information. Unfortunately, when you communicate to the influencers, you can easily lose control of the communication. Communicating with the media is one of the best examples of how this might occur. From your mouth to the journalist ears, you might think you stated your communication clearly. From the journalist's ears to what he or she writes could be entirely different. Why? Because with communication comes perception, preconceived notions, miscommunications, and the like. There's no guarantee that what you do, say, or distribute on behalf of your brand will surface the way you want it to appear in the eyes of your customer. Another demanding and extremely challenging part of the monitoring task is keeping your eyes on every communication, perception, preconceived notion, and miscommunication out there in the market about your brand. The citizen journalists are also talking in their communities (social media is fueling their conversations) and the Internet; as much as it helps you to obtain tremendous exposure and valuable information about your brand, it creates new complexities to prevent you from tighter control of your communication on a daily basis.

Similar to monitoring the communication, measurement is rewarding, but challenging. One easy solution to PR measurement has never existed in all the days of PR. The largest global agencies work on their own proprietary monitoring and measurement methods. Not everyone's company can work with the largest global agencies. You might have experienced clipping services, which now have advanced beyond reading services (yes, there are hundreds of people paid to read magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and other niche publications) to Internet-based programs that scan by keywords for news on your brand. Back in the day, a cut-and-pasted clip book was handed over to the client. "Here's your quarterly clip book." Big and bulky yet valuable, the clip book was tangible proof of the PR person's performance—a measurement that can be judged. However, clients now want digital clip books that take up less space, that don't sit on a shelf gathering dust, and are easier to share with executives, customers, and prospects.

The logical approach for measurement in years past was to provide the client with reports on gross impressions (how many eyes see the coverage, which differs depending upon the type of print or broadcast medium) and how these measurements turn into advertising dollars. For example, an editorial clip that is two columns of a newspaper could cost several thousand dollars if you paid for the advertising space. At least with the conversion to advertising dollars, you can see how the PR is less expensive and that several good pieces of editorial in top-tier publications such as Time, Business Week, or Forbes, could be half a million dollars in advertising dollars. But, this still isn't enough for brands to truly reap the benefits of monitoring and measurement in a Web 2.0 world and to justify the dollars they spend on public relations and marketing programs. It's critical to approach monitoring and measurement from several levels. Brands want to see the tangible clips, but they also want to know other types of key information, including

• How are they perceived in the market?
• Are their key messages appearing in stories?
• Are key messages prominently placed in story headlines?
• What is the depth of their coverage?
• How many times do they penetrate a particular vertical market?
• How many articles quote the executives as experts?

The same approach must be applied to today's social media forums, blogs, message boards, and news groups. You might be among the many people who have searched for years to find the best methods to show a measurement that reveals a Return on Investment (ROI) for your communications programs. The nature of the game has changed so drastically from the way you monitor to the manner in which you measure because the Internet has altered our mode of communication. With the broadest reach and a vehicle whose engine continues to run 24/7, old monitoring and measuring will give you only a portion of what's really being said (good, bad, or indifferent) about your brand. Do you only want to know a portion of how your communication or the communication of others is affecting the way your customer feels about your brand? It's time for you to adapt to the new ways that are more 2.0 practical for monitoring and measurement.

Your Advanced Tools for Monitoring

There are many Web resources to help you monitor your messaging and editorial coverage in a Web 2.0 world. The tools are advanced, far beyond the days of the clipping service. Service providers realize they need to add new services to assist with online monitoring. For instance, PR Newswire's eWatch, which historically monitored Internet content, now has thousands of blogs (these are the most influential bloggers) that it monitors. eWatch tracks a client's keywords and provides regularly scheduled reports of where these keywords can be found. Clients can select to receive these reports via e-mail or by visiting the eWatch Web site.

The eWatch reports provide links to recent editorials or mentions in social media forums. According to Ted Skinner (Vice President of Public Relations Products at PR Newswire), "Our service is under constant review depending on what medium needs to be tracked. Now, companies and their representative PR firms or IR firms are very interested in tracking what's being said out there in more than the traditional areas." For instance, tracking blogs is different. Within the eWatch system, the reporting is tracking keywords the company provides on hundreds of thousands of articles each and every day. Keywords usually are the company's name, a product name or service, and key spokespeople. However, the tracking goes well beyond gross impressions, which was as in-depth as the interest, pre-Web 2.0. The Web universe is now so sophisticated that it requires you to go beyond the pure number of mentions or gross impressions. So PR Newswire signed a deal with Technorati, one of the leaders in blog tracking, to provide more complete monitoring for the company's clients. Technorati provides PR Newswire's customers with the ability to track online conversations triggered by news releases. "One thing PR Newswire has always done is we've delivered the news to the media who can best take advantage of it and write stories and provide the publicity our clients are looking for," Skinner said. "With the blogosphere, our clients are now very interested in saying, 'Okay, what has the information in these news releases triggered? We've just launched a new product, we've sent out a news release. Who's talking about it and what are they saying? Is our message resonating or do we need to modify it?'"

For example, PR Newswire sent out a news release about a company's new CEO. The company expressed its interest in seeing how some of the top-tier media outlets viewed the news, specifically how CNBC viewed it and how The New York Times reported on it. Because it's a 2.0 world, PR Newswire was able to provide this brand with a service that not only distributed news releases, but also linked the readers to the results hosted by Technorati. "You're then able to see a list of blogs that are discussing that particular news release. It really gives the company or PR firm a very quick read on how the message is being perceived in that particular environment and make the requisite changes," explained Skinner.

With all new technologies consumers are experiencing, whether it's the Internet and social networking, Bluetooth technology, or High Definition (HD), there are always the Early Adopters. There are also those who will lag behind and wait for the technology to be more mainstream. As a group, PR practitioners have not historically been the most advanced at embracing new media tools. However, there is a greater understanding about the impact of blogs, which has caused a quicker adoption than in years past. It's a clear indication of the importance of monitoring blogs when you see companies such as PR Newswire teaming up with Technorati, you know that the leaders in PR media resources are responding to a greater need in the market. The worst thing for you, as a communications professional, is to have your executives find out about communication in the market before you do. You want to be the first to know what's being said and then share it with them. For this reason, you need to consider the importance of tracking new media sooner, rather than later.

You might have noticed that with all the conversation emanating from the Web, a great deal revolves around the consumer area. The Web is the vehicle with the largest audience and the greatest interest. Skinner said that most brands are realizing that this channel has the most targeted "sound-byte," or word-of-mouth value, with respect to "this product doesn't work properly or my car doesn't start, and whatever that open discussion might be." The wider the consumer area the greater the conversation's going to be. But, that doesn't mean that Web 2.0 excludes general business and B2B audiences. He says, "More business transactions are being done over the Web every day, whether it's a large multinational like IBM, or a consulting company or a trucking company. I think the B2B world has taken to the Web for many concrete business uses, and has been surprisingly comfortable in viewing the Web 2.0 progress as a part of their world and not just belonging to someone else."

More and more brands on both the consumer and B2B side are involved in blog monitoring and measurement. Companies are looking for measurement reports in a two-week timeframe that evaluates whether blog conversations on a topic are increasing or decreasing, and if there are more participants in a particular conversation. Most companies want to see the conversation lessen if it's a negative story. As they monitor, they wait to see the attitude of the conversation's participants in those first couple weeks before they want to respond. Reports that monitor blogs can tell you if the conversation on the negative side increases, which might be the signal to propel damage control into action. Conversely, if it's a positive story, you might want to fuel it. When there is positive buzz around your brand, it's the best time to send out more communication to keep the chatter going. You might want to take the opportunity to send out some news releases and make your brand spokesperson(s) or company officers available for interviews. You can use real-time monitoring of blogs to keep the momentum of a particular story going.

PR Newswire provides a service that measures blogs—MediaSense Blog Measurement—so you can also tell who is part of the conversation. Linguistic models can, with a fair amount of accuracy, tell you whether the speaker is going to be a male or female, and some of the models are going so far as trying to divide the bloggers, and their commentators—who of course are anonymous—into different age groups. Blog measurement is in the infancy stage but will continue to progress and grow to become more and more important. No matter what phase of the Web—1.0, 2.0, or maybe the next significant phase—the more information you can get, the more you want. It's similar to the way you might have started out with clipping services and print measurements. Knowing the number of editorial clips was fine at one time, but if you were like thousands of other PR pros, you wanted to know more, including a deeper analysis of what the print medium was actually saying and how that impacts your brand.

Evaluating the Conversations

You are no different from your peers if you're nervous about controlling brand communication. Luckily, the new 2.0 monitoring tools allow more flexibility to capture messaging as it's being shared about your company and using linguistic models to analyze the content of the story. For example, an electronic company launching a new product might have received 200 mentions in post launch. In years past, the mentions alone might have pleased the CEO of the company. Today, because you can analyze every article, if you found that 190 of them focused on the competitor's technology with only a brief mention of your own product, then your monitoring and measurement mission was successful. However, your mission to create positive exposure as a call to action for customers to purchase your product might not have proved as successful.

New media monitoring tools enable you to evaluate whether the coverage promotes the right information. For instance, are the messages in the market from your CEO's speeches at conferences or his seminars or quotes in news releases? You will be able to answer the question, "Is that message resonating with the media? Are they not only writing about my company, but are they writing about my company in the context I want them to be writing about my company?" Most blog monitoring is done electronically through advanced artificial intelligence, and the key term here is "natural language process." All this really means is that the computer is reading the story more like a human being than a computer. For example, you or I could read a story that talks about the high quality of an airline, but it might never use the words "high quality." If you're using a keyword search for that story, you're going to miss matching the airline name with that. But you can come away from that article saying, "Boy, that's a really high quality airline," or "That's a really innovative airline." So, what natural language process is able to do is place a wide range of words and terms under that high quality umbrella.

Also, measuring the tonality of a story, whether it's positive, negative, or neutral, is important. The computer is going to be scoring the same way day in and day out. It's going to be doing it in an unbiased fashion. It's going to be doing it more quickly than we can do it as human beings. With the natural language process, it can differentiate between a negative subject and a negative tone. For example, there could be a story about an airline strike, and we'll assume it's going to be a negative story. But if we read the story, it might talk about how the strike is going to be three weeks instead of three months, or perhaps how well the CEO is handling the strike. So the actual tone of the story—the way the journalist treats it, which is what you are looking for—might be neutral or even positive, while the subject is negative. Monitoring and measuring the story for tonality is very important and can be accomplished by utilizing the natural language process.

An Expert's Perspective on Blog Monitoring and Measurement

Another well-known analytics service provider for monitoring and measurement is Delahaye, a subsidiary company of Cision. Mark Vangel has been a research manager at Delahaye for more than 15 years. An interview with Vangel shares some of the many challenges and solutions with 2.0 monitoring and measurement.

Q: How do you help a company to determine what they should monitor and measure?

A: It always starts with the company's objectives for the analysis. Some companies want to monitor as much as possible; to evaluate the entries about them on as many blogs as possible, even though it might be very difficult for them to follow up on all this blog activity. And many of the entries that appear might be very peripheral. I call this the shotgun approach, when clients want to monitor as much as possible. Some other clients we've worked with have in mind a very select group of places, both blogs and discussion forums, that are important. They have a specific list already identified that includes the places where the most conversations are taking place. It's almost like a key publication list when you're working with traditional media.

In some cases, it's an investigation from the onset because the client really doesn't know what's out there. In this case, it's an opportunity for us to look at the universe of client mentions and determine which blogs are the most prolific and influential. Prolific blogs and influential blogs are two different things—blogs that write about you the most often might not be the most influential. We investigate whether blogs are highly trafficked, how often they are being linked to and by whom, and whether the media links to the blogs. We start by conducting a search of where the company or where certain brands or products are mentioned. We see which blogs come to the top in terms of number of mentions, and then, after we derive a list of the most prolific blogs, we begin looking at who's linking to whom, and who's linked to the most often. You quickly get a sense of who's most influential.

Using a blog search tool like Technorati, IceRocket, or Blogpulse, you can get a sense of how many other blogs link to a blog in question. A useful feature on Blogpulse, for example, is called Blog Profile, where you'll find a rank for top blogs and some information on who's linking to the blog or how many posts have been written. As far as influence, another indicator is how many people are commenting on the blog. It's one indication of how many people are going to the blog and the blog's level of interactivity. The blog's traffic, how many articles are on the blog, comments, and how frequently other blogs link to the blog, all help answer the question of how influential the blog is and whether it needs to be monitored.

Q: Are you seeing more blog tracking by consumer brands? Are the B2B companies also looking at blogs?

A: We're seeing a bit less with B2B and more with consumer-oriented products. However, even with B2B, whether tracking developers or engineers, we're seeing more interest from clients. I think there's kind of a sweet spot where certain types of products are talked about most often—software, technology, gadgets, and automobiles—but basically there are niche industry blogs to discuss virtually any topic. Many of the most prominent blogs talk about whatever is in the news, and a lot of bloggers talk about blogging. Politics is obviously a hot topic, but we don't see many political candidates or parties as clients. Blogs are different in orientation from discussion forums, but I also see some similarities in that blogs are a means of interaction for enthusiast communities. They are a place where individuals can talk about particular products or topics of interest. Remember, too, that there are many different types of blogs—for example, individuals' personal blogs might mention Starbucks tens of thousands of times per month, some of which contain useful feedback about the company's service and reputation.

Q: Do you think blogs are just one step in a new direction that stems from the forum?

A: I think blogs and discussion forums are in the same ballpark. Discussion forums obviously have more two-way communication than blogs, with which an owner directs the conversation. But they both allow interaction between people who have similar interests. Interaction takes place not only in the form of comments, but also in linking between blogs. Blogs represent more of a wide ranging net of discussions, where individuals might be exposed to information on many different blogs through links, whereas forum discussion typically takes place right there on the site. Early on at Delahaye, in the mid-1990s when we deliberated how and what to measure on the Web, I remember seeing personal Web sites—Web sites where people described themselves and their interests. In some ways the personal journal type of blog is really similar to those personal Web sites. However, a major difference is the new technology behind it; technologies to better facilitate quick and easy communication. You don't have to program your Web site—you just post a new blog entry.

With blogs, you're connecting many separate sites, whether individuals' sites or businesses' sites. Suddenly, there are scores of new communities that can all become connected. Blogs make connecting easier than in the past. This is a big component of blogs and the whole Web 2.0 world—the linking and collaboration. Transparency is so critical, as well—in the Web 2.0 world you're not holding onto the information, you're putting everything out there not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because someone is going to find out if you don't.

Q: As far as Delahaye's products or services, how has your company made it easier for PR professionals to monitor communication?

A: My short answer is that we do it for them, in terms of cutting through all the information out there and making it more easily digestible. If you're Starbucks, good luck trying to measure all the references to Starbucks on the Internet. There are tens of thousands of posts every month, some of which are more important than others.

So, does a company like Starbucks care about every single post, or just the key influencers? I think a little bit of both. We don't typically do this here, but one way to get around the incredible volume of information available is to take a sample of what's out there. It would have to be the right type of company, where there are many discussions and many references to their company or brand. For example, Starbucks customers discussing their experiences on personal "journal" type blogs is a good application of sampling. Let's say someone went to Starbucks and had to wait a really long time in line or had a similar problem. Maybe 25 people are going to see that personal blog entry; but if a similar sentiment appears on blog after blog after blog, that makes it more important and it creates an urgency for Starbucks to reconsider the way it is operating. Perhaps there are regional differences, and Starbucks needs to send in employees to evaluate what's taking so long. The blog research would be placed back into the development cycle to make a more pleasant experience for a customer. If it's appearing on all those micro-areas, in aggregation, it becomes a serious issue.

These are the real customers. If you're a prominent journalist-type blogger and you're talking about how there's a long wait at Starbucks, maybe more people will see that entry because more people come to your blog. But in terms of who you're measuring, as much as I want to know about the more high-profile references to certain issues, I also want to know about the individual customer experiences. We've found that some clients know about issues beforehand and want to quantify it, whereas others are completely unaware of what we will find. In both cases, clients typically want to watch the level of activity to see that it declines.

Q: Do most companies act on things quickly when they get information in real time?

A: It depends. There were times when we did daily reports. We've analyzed blogs or discussion forums for certain issues and for tone, and we've produced a report every day. That's not always the case. In fact, that's more for a crisis situation. In one instance, there was a rumor spreading about one of our clients, so they wanted daily information about where it appeared. For something like the long wait at Starbucks, it's definitely communication they'd want to keep on the radar—weekly or monthly anyway. As far as how frequently we provide reports, for traditional media reports we often provide quarterly reports. That obviously would be much too long a time to wait for customers who are monitoring blogs. We have self-service portals, as well, where clients can scan information themselves.

We have had clients who have acted online to clear up misinformation or point individuals to some background data. Offline changes, such as changing product features or company processes, often take longer. With the Starbucks example, the company can dispatch people to stores, to key locations, and monitor the wait times. They can also survey the public, or place comment cards in their stores, although those might take a little too long to yield answers. If they're wondering, "Is what I'm seeing in the blogs representative of what the public feels?" they can conduct a survey or other research methods. With awareness, there's an opportunity for a company to fix the problem or to change a product or service to make it better. Without it, you might be blindsided as criticism grows.

Big questions still loom. How is monitoring and measurement going to change? What are we going to see in the next ten years? How will a service provider meet the needs of the PR industry? It's definitely a growing industry. As companies become more involved in monitoring and measurement (we see this already with smaller companies outsourcing these tasks as a result of low cost, effective options), they will want more complex, technologically advanced products; products that can deliver the data instantaneously. In addition, the accountability model in PR has changed over the years. Having 25 clips in a clip book isn't good enough. Because money in a slow economy is tight and professionals are battling for budgets, you need to have monitoring and measurement tools that prove PR's worth to upper management. There's always this old argument that PR people don't get the recognition that marketing people or advertising people receive. Fortunately, over time this notion is changing and PR practitioners are now viewed as much more valuable assets within most organizations. You, as a PR professional, can contribute significantly not only to the branding or messaging/positioning of the company, but also directly or indirectly affect sales as well. With the greater accountability through new uses of Web 2.0 monitoring and measuring, there will be an increasing need for PR professional services.

Bear in mind the following key concepts to keep your PR 2.0 brands and their executives aware of today's fast-paced market communication:

• Take the time to find out how your brand communication is received in the market. It's imperative to monitor your communication, especially if your customers are a part of the Web 2.0 social networking community.
• Keep an eye on the influencers who help to drive your communication, whether it's positive, negative, or indifferent.
• Prepare your monitoring and measurement program to tackle the Web 2.0 complexities that might prevent you from tighter control of your communication on a daily basis.
• Realize that the Web universe is so sophisticated now it requires you to go beyond the pure number of mentions or gross impressions and measure new media with tools that enable you to evaluate whether the coverage promotes the right messages.
• Begin a monitoring and measurement program with the company's objective for the analysis. Ask the question, "Does the company want to monitor as much as possible to evaluate every comment on a blog?"
• Understand that less B2B service companies and more consumer-oriented companies are monitored on blogs and social forums. However, this soon will change as more B2B companies conduct business online.
• Use the information from social media monitoring to inject communication into the market. If you monitor a negative perception that does not subside after a period of time, damage control measures might be necessary.
• Keep positive social media chatter going by launching new campaigns or communications initiatives around what your customers like and find pleasing. They will continue to show loyal brand enthusiasm by sharing and spreading information on your brand.
• Change with the times. Put your old clip books away and let technology guide you into new monitoring and measurement forums. Your executives will truly appreciate analysis that provides more than just gross impressions.