Measuring the frequency and tone of conversations is the new frontier for PR and marketing, with many solutions launching as we write this book. As you’ll see in the next chapter, conversations are taking place across multiple social networks simultaneously, but maybe they’re not on your radar screen. The safest bet is to manually search every network to augment any automated services you might subscribe to, especially when initially listening to relevant conversations to determine which networks are host to discussions about your brand. This is the only way to specifically map the resulting data to your business and ROI metrics. Many companies are either outsourcing this process or tasking interns to listen and document benchmarks.

You can use these tools to automatically track conversations in addition to searching individual social networks:

You can track almost everything related to your company Web site or blog by using Web site analytics software. By partnering with the Web team, PR can integrate analytics to not only measure traffic and clicking patterns, but also study and process the information to formulate more market-relevant campaigns and tracking criterion.

Web traffic reports tell us how many people visited a particular Web page, where they came from, how long they were there, their click path, their activity, and also where they left. This data can prove highly educational, and it reveals almost everything we need to know about our media, blogger, and influencer relations and engagement programs.

Because success is measured in the form of unique visits and individual actions, consider the following:

Insight about Web activity can help you become more effective in your online marketing efforts. You can also share such information to demonstrate your value to the C-suite.

Tying marketing activity to sales is every executive’s favorite way to evaluate PR effectiveness. For example, what’s the ROI on distributing a news release? How do you justify the hundreds of dollars you spend on issuing your news over the wire?

We know that the likelihood of reporters finding the release on the wire and stopping what they’re doing to write a story about it is a pipe dream, at best. But with the inclusion of Web distribution and hosting, we now know that a news release offers extended reach by appearing in search engines that reach not only reporters and bloggers seeking information, but also potential customers and partners.

We can tie PR 2.0 strategies to lead generation or sales in a number of ways. Listening to related conversations in the Social Web will reveal various opportunities to engage decision makers, which you can then tie to customer development and loyalty building.

ROI is not determined just by sales. Companies can also drive activity, which, in many cases, can prove equally important. Borrowing a page from the books of Web marketing and direct advertising, integrating a “call to action” in our communications programs produces an activity-driven metric that enables us to track response rates while also benefiting from the predefined events. For example, many social marketers are creating dedicated online landing pages to capture momentum as it happens. Landing pages are Web pages designed specifically to capture incoming traffic from a specific promotion, or they can include an area for product registration, access to special discounts or promotions, a corporate blog post, votes, community participation, direct sales, an event RSVP, and so on.

Engagement and relationships are probably among the most difficult to measure and are usually unique to each company. Engagement refers to the amount of time a person either participates within a dedicated or hosted Web community or service related to your brand, or interacts with a representative of your company online. Engagement can also refer to the reach of your story—the process of spreading word-of-mouth referrals and sparking new and related conversation threads.

For example, suppose that your company decides to build a dedicated social network for its brand, and host service or enthusiast conversations on Ning or as part of its corporate Web site using a service such as Leverage Software or KickApps. You can measure engagement through Web site analytics (discussed later in this chapter), such as the amount of time visitors spend interacting with each other and company representatives.

Using Social Media search tools such as Technorati or Google Blogsearch and initiating keyword alerts through Google Alerts, you can track most conversations that relate to your company. You can also research threads related to important conversations through Blogpulse.com. You should maintain records of your results so that you have baselines from which to track and compare results on a daily, monthly, and annual basis.

As PR expands its reach in social marketing, new tools for engagement are continually introduced. Widgets, virtual goods, mini applications, and fan groups in social forums are increasing in their adoption and potency.

Companies such as Coca-Cola are developing widgets for people to grab and embed on their profile pages in social networks. On Facebook, Coca-Cola developed an application that enables people to send a virtual Coke to friends. More than 51,000 people have installed this application, and the page itself currently supports 148,000 fans (and growing).

How do we measure relationships in the real world? We typically value those relationships in which both parties draw fulfillment and inspiration (as opposed to popularity). In the world of Social Media, it’s a fusion of both and always a two-way proposition. In some cases, the number of online friends and followers indicates the relationships you or your team maintains on social networks. Most don’t follow or befriend you and your brand unless they deem it to be of value. It’s your job after that to ensure that anything you do within these networks is based on reinforcing value instead of creating mailing or spam lists.

At the time of this writing, Web-based shoe retailer Zappos.com boasts that it’s following 13,000 people and is followed by 11,000 people on Twitter. Southwest Airlines is following 2,800 people and is followed by 2,700 people. On Facebook, more than 72,000 consumers have joined the Coca-Cola fan page.

Although a company’s participation is not a popularity contest, the number of people befriending these companies, and the people representing the brands, is growing because of value they receive from being part of an active, informative, and value-driven community.

One of the rewards for helping your community and becoming a resource to existing and potential customers is that your credibility, your thought leadership, and, ultimately, your authority rises above parity. Relationships and loyalty aren’t cheap. So how do you define and track authority?

At the very least, corporate blogs should be part of any communications initiative. Those who are a bit more ambitious can also integrate microblogs (tumblr, Twitter, Plurk) or brandstreams (socialthing, lifestream.fm, Swurl), among many other social content–creation and hosting platforms, into their strategy. As you update any of these services with commentary, answers, feedback, and insight, you are publicly inviting others to react and respond. Several indicators will enable you to assess authority, which you can “grow” based on the value of your content and how well you promote it.

Free blog directories and search-engine solutions such as Technorati enable you to “claim” your blog, microblog, or brandstream, which then creates a snapshot of activity. When you first claim your site, your authority is zero. Proactive comments across social networks and the publishing of provocative and stellar content will increase your authority. Technorati and other similar sites and services rank the weight of the links that point back to your content, and each link contributes to a score or ranking. As the number of your inbound links increases, your blog, Web page, profile, and so on will earn a higher position in search engines results pages (SERPs). The higher the number of inbound links, the greater your PageRank, which Google defines as the index by which it weighs and factors the popularity of your site or page.

A side benefit of high authority is the organic SEO that contributes to your position in search-engine results for the keywords that define and represent your industry.

In the blogosphere, comments are used to also measure authority, meaning that the number of comments you receive per post represents your position and stature. We’re not sure this is a viable metric because, although it is important, linkbacks and traffic speak volumes about your true real-world impact.

You can benchmark your authority against competition and time segments. If you enter a URL into Technorati, it will reveal the authority for that particular location and the number of inbound links to that destination.

Another way to measure authority, and also your followers, is to track the number of readers who subscribe to your RSS feeds on your blog, brandstream, newsfeeds, and so on. Everything you create in Social Media offers an RSS feed, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Facebook, and so on. Tools such as FeedBurner and Pheedo enable you to manage your RSS subscriptions and measure the rate of new subscribers and the total number of subscribers. Blog and RSS feed communities such as Bloglines and Google Reader can also give you an idea of your RSS numbers.

Education, participation, and collaboration are also new forms of evaluation and justification.

For example, Deirdre is working with a major food manufacturer to launch an internal innovation community to encourage employees and other groups to collaborate, and to also research and test emerging technology within the organization. In this case, it’s not about measuring the ROI. The new program seeks to spark collaboration and innovation among different business groups. It also attempts to shift the culture to one of innovation and collaboration, as follows:

To determine the success of the Social Media initiative, Deirdre and her team are monitoring the participation on internal Web pages (a viable metric). This participation includes the number of visitors on wikis and participation in wiki forums (such as wiki editing and content publishing). Measurement also consists of blog views, comments and ratings, case study downloads (podcasts and video sharing), participation in virtual tours (unique visitors), and the use of an avatar (the 3D model that answers questions in real time) to track the number of visitors who ask questions on specific topics within the Social Media portal.

Although message control is a priority for many organizations, perception management should be the true quest of most communications initiatives. Sentiment, tone, and message integrity are easily discoverable and documentable online. Measurement is most useful when you have something to benchmark against. Running a current audit of the state of your brand perception helps you create an accurate baseline and also reveals the opportunities for engagement.

The process begins with searching keywords through free services such as blogsearch.google.com, twemes, search.twitter.com, and BackType.com. Build a grid that captures the frequency of the keyword mentions and whether the conversation was positive, negative, or neutral (which we refer to in the industry as raves, rants, or blah).

It’s critical that you identify keywords that will truly capture a majority of relevant conversations. It’s important to select not only words that you think would be used with your brands, but also those your customers might use. For example, don’t forget the popular “suckometer” or “DIEometer” when running a search. You’d be surprised at how many companies use it to gauge perception management. Search “yourcompany+sucks” and “DIE+yourcompany” and chart the results. Also search “competitorname+sucks” and “DIE+competitorname” for comparison.

Over time, the idea is to use this research to serve as a reference point and to dictate the steps required to inject a positive change through strategic participation.

As mentioned previously, PR 2.0 is borrowing pages from the books of Web marketing and advertising. Not only are you extending the brand and building goodwill and trust within the communities where you participate, but you can also tie specific action and activity to your efforts to measure their outcome (and success or failure).

These efforts require PR and the Web team to collaborate in advance of any outbound activity. You want to build a back-end infrastructure to engage those who arrive at the destination to capture some form of participation, information, referrals, or content.

If you’re releasing a new product, consider offering previews to boost interest. Create a registration list or fan base and offer something in return. For example, many companies offer rewards to consumers who take the time to share data (rewards such as extended warranties, T-shirts, discount codes for future purchases, access to exclusive content, and so on). Offer a demo video at a dedicated URL and encourage visitor commentary. Remember that development resources are extremely affordable (as compared to the Web 1.0 era). Many of today’s communities, applications, videos, widgets, networks, and blogs are created for as little as a few hundred dollars.

Consider these examples of programs for engaging your community:

You can measure these activities by Web traffic, engagement time, inbound links, user registrations and installations, and the number of mentions across the Web.

To improve visitor experiences, many companies, whether PR is involved or not, run Web analytics software on their online properties to study online behavior and activity. The software runs behind the scenes and captures important data, such as the following:

Many Web analytics tools are available today. Many companies that we work with use a free service from Google called Google Analytics. Other providers include Ominiture, CoreMetrics, Nielsen NetRatings, and Google Urchin.

You can do more than just track your online properties. Tools and services are available that enable you to analyze “offsite” activity and competitive Web traffic. These tools estimate the amount of traffic, total audience, and trends, providing comparison tools and graphs to help you capture quantifiable progress (or lack of). For example, you can measure the traffic and authority of your competition’s Web sites or blogs in comparison to your visitor levels and activity. You can also track the performance of nonhosted yet relevant communities, such as fan pages, dedicated social networks, or groups within larger networks.

Several free tools are available today that enable us to track offsite services:

Identify the criteria important to business leaders and decision makers within the organization.

Based on those criteria, measure where you are today and compare it against your competition or any other data you want to benchmark against.

Based on that data, collaboratively define realistic goals for the New PR process to justify existing or future budgets (including anticipated ROI), such as the following:

After you establish the goals, you need to reverse-engineer the actions, tools, and programs required to achieve these goals.

For example, instead of measuring the number of hits, you can measure the tonality of your coverage over a period of time, to measure message integrity through the engagement process.

Estimate the cost of that activity and compare it against other branding activities, such as advertising, sponsorships, previous PR initiatives, trade shows, speaking engagements, and so on. To determine which have a greater impact, compare your cost of participation:

Quantifying, calculating, and justifying PR 2.0 strategies requires a new approach. And because of the existence of PR 2.0, traditional PR must also be measured against new standards using new metrics. The Social Web has resulted in an exponential growth of new influencers, widespread (even global) content distribution, shared channels and networks, and dispersed yet authoritative conversations. Therefore, PR practitioners and practices must reform to maintain relevance and ensure brand integrity. And as discussed throughout this chapter, we can now measure the success (or failure) of our PR strategies in ways that were typically absent or elusive in yesterday’s Public Relations.

Through proactive and consistent listening, measurement, and refinement, PR will not only justify its role in social marketing, but also more effectively enhance relationships, build trust, cultivate communities, and increase sales (among many other benefits that will be specific to individual companies). Remember that the benefits are limited only by your level of outbound participation.