Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Outputs and Outtakes and Outcomes -- Oh My!

In my experience, the terms outputs, outtakes and outcomes are not well understood among PR professionals. And if they are not well understood, building a PR measurement program will get derailed by using incorrect approaches and flawed reporting. Therefore, I propose an alternate framework of Media Influence, Audience Influence, and Business Influence.

Since the Institue for PR published the paper "Guidelines for Measuring the Effectiveness of PR Programs and Activities" in 2002, these terms have gained currency in the industry. Almost every presentation I see includes the terms "outcomes" and "outputs". But I continue to see what I consider to be misclassifications of  what I consider outputs and PR activities as outcomes.

Perhaps because the terms are somewhat mysterious. And while I like the alliteration and parallelism in the "out-" triad, it may be too confusing. So I'd like to propose an alternative framework:

• Media Influence -- this is essentially the outputs: clips, impressions, quality of coverage. In other words: did our PR activities cause the media to respond to our messages and report on them?
• Audience Influence -- this is essentially outtakes, though I differ a bit in Prof. Lindenmann's definition which is "determining if those to whom the activity was directed received, paid attention to, comprehended, and retained particular messages." I would go the next step to measure if these messages change audience perception, attitudes, and intentions, which the paper categorizes as "outcomes". Thus, this category of measurement answers the question: did our PR activities cause the intended audience to respond to our messages? The main approaches here are likely to be based on market research surveys.
• Business Influence -- These outcomes I define  very strictly as a financial impact on the business which can be measured in one of three ways: sales, stock price, or brand equity valuation. This category of metrics answers the question: did our PR activities positively influence the business? I use this strict definition because 1) we know that at the end of the day, this is all the C-suite really cares about and 2) it is the most complicated, expensive, and difficult metrics to create and link to PR activities. The main approaches are likely to be sophisticated modeling techniques, like market mix modeling.

While I don't want to get the industry hung up in changing terms for change's sake, I think the distinction is important. It will make it much clearer what measurements and methdologies address which aspect of measurement and clear away some of the fog surrounding the purpose and usefulness of different approaches.

(I also think we need to rethink the Audience Influence approach in light of the idea of "engagement", but I'll save that for another post.)

Thoughts?

Two Awesome Keynotes at WOMMA

The WOMMA Summit is going to be great....it kicks off with Jeff Bell of Microsoft and Lionel Menchaca of Dell.

Disclosure: as many of you know I am on the Board of Directors of WOMMA.

So here are the facts about the summit that I think support my statement that it is going to be great:

1. Jeff Bell of Microsoft will present a case study of the Halo 3 launch.
2. Lionel Menchaca of Dell will describe Dell's journey from Dell Hell to being a company now recognized as one that has embraced the social media world.
3. Cases studies from other great companies: Southwest Airlines, Petco, Toyota, and more.
4. An agenda addressing the latest changes and opportunities in WOM: social networks, measurement, best practices.
5. Tackling the tough questions: Who should own WOM in the corporate organization? Is the Influencer model or the Network model a more effective approach to WOM planning? How to implement ethical WOM campaigns (disclosure: I'm plugging my session here ;-) ) What's the next big thing?

Clear your calendar for November 14 - 15 (and if you are a numbers junkie, November 13 as well for the Research Symposium to see all the presentation in the soon-to-be-released WOM Measurement Volume 3) and come to Las Vegas.

PS. If you ping me I'll send you the secret code to save $75 on your registration.

Has the Web 2.0 Hype Cycle Kicked In?

I'm as bullish as anybody about the growth of social media and the impact it will have on the relationship between brands and consumers. But this study makes me think "Bubble 2.0" with its conclusion that 81% of marketers will spend as much or more on Conversational Marketing than traditional marketing by 2012. This suggests an order-of-magnitude faster growth than Interactive marketing and TV advertising has seen in the last decade...

Let me start by saying Cymfony is a member of SNCR and fully support their work. And I'm friends with Joseph Jaffe and think he is one of the leading thinkers in the dramatic changes marketing is experiencing.

That said, this study smacks of the hype cycle "peak of inflated expectations". I use these as reference points:

• Interactive marketing has been around for over 13 years, and it is $18.4 billion this year, according to Forrester's latest interactive marketing sizing report and will be only $61 billion by 2012. (I say "only" because Bob Coen at Universal McCann pegs 2006 advertising spending at $285 billion.)
• If you date DVR's to TiVo's launch in 1999, they have been around 8 years, and the penetration is only 17%, with only about 5% of viewing is on DVR (don't remember where I saw that stat...). Sure, the TV business is quaking in their boots but the 2007 Upfront was stronger than ever -- about a 5% overall increase and CPM increases up to 8 - 9%, despite repeated predictions that it must collapse in the face of declining audiences and rising CPMs.

In other words, if after 13 years, interactive marketing is less than 10% of total marketing, how is conversational marketing going to get to 50% in 5 years? Same question if DVRs haven't demolished the TV advertising business after 7 years?

As an ex-analyst, I sympathize with anyone trying to predict the future of radical changes like this. I've had my share of "irrational exuberance" reports like the December 1998 "1999 will be the year of rich media ads" and my wish-to-be-forgotten January 2001 classic "Online Advertising Eclipsed" (which predicted rapid growth for online ads but even more rapid growth for a broader definition of interactive marketing just as we entered the collapse of Bubble 1.0; I quickly revised it in October 2001 with "Online Advertising Retrenches"). I fear Joseph may have fallen into the trap I fell into of 1) believing what the marketers he interviewed told him and that 2) he only spoke to early adopter conversational/social media/Web 2.0 marketers who have all good intentions that haven't yet hit the reality of corporate conservatism.

The one thing I learned is that no matter how fast technology changes, consumers and marketers don't change nearly as quickly.

My fear is that numbers like this strain the credibility of the industry such that they may do more to reinforce reluctant execs' view that this is another bubble than they do to galvanize them to change.

Is there an irreversible change that will shift money out of traditional, one-way, broadcast marketing? Yes.

Is the future of marketing conversing with customers, listening to their needs/complaints/suggestions and adapting products and messages to align with them? Absolutely.

Will marketers learn to love giving control to their brand advocates and increase their use of widgets and allow consumers to take and spread an array of brand assets as they see fit? No doubt in my mind.

But none of this will happen overnight. Living through one "Trough of Disillusionment" is enough for my career. Let's all try to skip it and keep the marketing world climbing the "Slope of Enlightenment".

Blu-Ray vs HD DVD Update: And the winner is....

Just about a year ago, we published a report on the social media discussions surrounding these next generation video formats, concluding that HD DVD had an edge. Much has changed. Now, the leader is....

...indifference. Media Magazine recently published our analysis, but here is a quick summary.

In the analysis we classified authors by their prevailing attitude: advocates for one or the other format, simply observing that one or the other is likely to win (but without any strong endorsement), or simply indifferent to the outcome.

The Indifferent segment is larger than the advocates for both formats combined. As we dug deeper, Blu-ray has a slight edge in technical features and movies available on the format, but HD DVD has a huge price advantage. It wouldn't take much to nudge the advantage back to HD DVD.

But the article didn't have enough space for two interesting, though less frequently expressed viewpoints:

1. A number of authors didn't see much advantage of these formats over the current generation of DVD's.
2. Others stated that in a few years we'll all be downloading all our content on demand in HD, so they were going to sit out this format war entirely.

Consumers are telling both formats that they have failed to provide a compelling reason for consumers to upgrade. Will they listen and change their strategies before technology moves on and these technologies follow digital audio tape recorders as too little, too late?

Our Corporate Blog Survey is Back

We’ve teamed up with Porter Novelli once again to offer our survey of corporate blogging practices. This survey looks behind the scenes to benchmark how much time, effort, and resources companies devote to managing corporate blogs and monitoring social media.

In our first report last year, we found that most companies believed that the initial goals of their blogs had been met, but many were just discovering the benefits and risks associated with their blog initiatives.  This year we are measuring how these blog initiatives have evolved and determining how blogs and social media are influencing business results.

Please take a few minutes to take our survey at: http://www.rmrsurveys2.com/t708266

We’ll follow this up with a webinar next month to discuss the findings.  I hope you can join us. 

Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences.