Why Can’t We Measure Simple Things Simply?

by Michael Whitlow

The age-old challenge of the public relations business is measurement. First, we want to measure impact – stuff that means something important to our organizations (we all know that most “followers” aren’t really following, right?), rather than just activity. Second, we want to be assured that the measurements we take are accurate. But, measurement in the age of the expanding media universe is tricky.

Increasingly, PR people are being asked to track the myriad conversations taking place in social media, and several tools are in the market attempting to be the one-stop shop for social media analytics.

Unfortunately, the the tools we have available aren’t yet up to the task for the most fundamental of measures.

We’re taking a new look at Radian6, Buzz Metrics, Squidoo (news about this business model here) and others in hopes of finding a better way to do a very basic task – analyze the conversation about our clients, assess the content and report it in a form that reflects its real importance. The options, as the shortened list would indicate, range from very specific to broad and brand focused. Here are some key issues for us in one of the services, and we’d like to start a movement among the PR community to build more ability from the measurement/lenscrafting services:

1. Often clients want to see enough of each post to understand what’s going on. In one service, the HTML export method only displays 1-2 lines, and the .pdf view can’t be embedded into an e-mail – converting to make it useful takes lots of time.
2. Sometimes, after deleting several irrelevant posts out of the limited stream of 25, the service freezes and users are unable to go to the next group of blogs. To fix, the user must log out and log back in, losing changes made previously.
3. The tools for associating a single clip with more than one category in charts are hard to use and must be unduly manipulated to give an accurate picture of the conversation.

If you were in charge, what would you require from these increasingly important tools?  Is there one that answers our basic questions and others (more ambitious, perhaps) you might have?

This may for now just be a case of the technical tale wagging the management/counseling dog, but in order for us to continue to do our jobs in the brave new world, measurement must improve, and we have to ask as much from social analytics as any client asks of SAP or Oracle (Seibel; PeopleSoft).

For more on the subject, see KD Paine, Chuck Hemann at Dix & Eaton and Alston, et al at Radian6.