Measurement-Analysis on Philip Sheldrake

"A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications" – a critique

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just been pointed to a recent post by Tim Marklein on The Measurement Standard, A New Balanced Scorecard for Communications . I can’t endorse it as it stands, as I understand it, and this post explains why.

For a bit of background, this summary of the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps is based on the one in my book, The Business of Influence , and is one of my post popular webpages attracting thousands of visitors every month ;-) Do check it out if the Scorecard is new to you.

Having been frustrated by the very narrow practice of public relations, by the plain wrong approaches to alignment and performance measurement, and by the seeming isolation of the PR function from the rest of the business at a time when its best qualities are more vital than ever, I sought in 2009 to crystallise my ideas to help organisations transition to a more relevant and mutually valuable model. Knowing that organisational change is hard, I focused on the dominant way some of the world’s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to tap into the monster’s own strengths, jujitsu style .

I called the resultant framework the Influence Scorecard , and I was delighted that Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned the foreword .

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

Learning to measure and measuring to learn

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR is in the process of updating its research, measurement and evaluation guidelines (PDF) . The current edition is dated March 2011 and harks back to when I used to chair the CIPR’s measurement deliberations; the current initiative is being led by Matt McKay and Martin Turner .

Here’s a short but important extract from the current guidance:

Every organisation should have a mission (why we exist), values (guiding behaviour), a vision (what do we want to be), objectives (breaking down the vision) and strategy (how we intend to get there / achieve the objectives). Given that measurement isn’t just the detached collection, analysis and presentation of data but a powerful management tool in itself, a powerful way to align each employee’s day-to-day activities with the strategy, this cascade must continue robustly, transparently and visibly.

People perform as they are measured, so the measures must drive strategically important behaviour.

And as each marketplace is unique and as your organisation is unique, your strategy will be unique. And so, therefore, will be the suite of measures you design, deploy and manage by.

Deliberate and emergent, by design

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it’s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.

Defining deliberate and emergent strategy

The deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R&D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.

Emergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It’s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we’re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.

Measuring communications and reconciling models, after Amsterdam

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The AMEC International Summit on Measurement played out in Amsterdam last week, and I tuned in from afar. On 18th June 2013 I published my thoughts on last year’s events in Madrid , and I’ll do the same now exactly one year on. Gladly. Gladly because I love the direction the AMEC community is going.

I don’t intend to repeat any of the substance and lengthy and valuable commentary to my post last year – which I just enjoyed rereading, thank you. But I have taken the opportunity to append here the Slideshare that accompanied my assertions and that has accrued over three thousand views would you believe.

Perhaps one of my responses to the comments on last year’s post is worth noting quickly, a response to Don Bartholomew:

I don’t think of myself as a member of the measurement industry for the simple reason that I’m not! Rather, my company is a management consultancy helping organisations benefit from social media and related technologies. Our purview is very much about business performance, about organisational alignment for brilliant execution.

It’s not about media

I believe the focus on outcomes in recent years is getting people to look up from media. AMEC is the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, not “of Media”, and I’d go further than that. Here are some of my core assertions of recent years:

Doing the triple loop – profound leadership

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Drucker

Peter F. Drucker asserted: “What’s measured improves.” I’m a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from the posts tagged as such here – perhaps it’s something to do with my engineering training.

I advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (on this blog , on briansolis.com , on stoweboyd.com , in the Balanced Scorecard Report ), and that means getting to grips with the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches.

The lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the Future of Work , Responsive Org and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I’d post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops.

"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?"

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:

Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?

This post addresses two problems integral to this statement.

A means not an end

Social business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, I describe social business by way of the following challenge:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

Shared values

Some pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to Stowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. In his words :

Measuring Public Relations – a presentation

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited to kick off the CharityComms “Made to Measure Communications” event today. Being a fan of measurement, or business performance management more widely, I’m always excited about meeting new people and sharing ideas and insights, but given that many find the topic a little dry to say the least, I’m grateful for any and all interaction and enthusiasm event attendees might muster. And today’s audience didn’t let me down, so thank you for that.

Social media measurement, after Madrid

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What, exactly, is the value of social? This was the question I sought to help answer in my slidestack ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid earlier this month. And it was the overarching question that informed much of the three days of debate, discussion and deliberation.

This post is about two related developments – the latest from “The Conclave ” (aka the #SMMStandards Coalition), and “A New Framework for Social Media Metrics and Measurement”.

Measurement standards

“Perhaps the most important Social Media launch of the year ” is how Katie Delahaye Paine portrays it. This is so-Katie that I can actually hear her saying it right now (as she might hear me cry “the most exciting development in PR since the Cluetrain ”!)

Katie refers to a suite of social media measurement standards that represents the work of a collection of organisations (including AMEC, a full list is appended here ) informally referred to as The Conclave. Following 18 months of long conference-calls, meetings, slidestacks and email threads, we have posted standards for:

What, exactly, is the value of social?

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The past several months have been hectic for the steering teams at AMEC and The Conclave ahead of the AMEC European Summit in Madrid, 5th - 7th June. We’ve been trying to pull together a cohesive and cogent set of definitions for social media measurement, and my last post described just one such workstream, on defining influence .

It’s gone very well so far I think, not least due to the earnest leadership from people like Barry Leggetter, Katie Delahaye Paine, Richard Bagnall and David Rockland. So well in fact that we’re now left training our attention on perhaps the biggest question of them all: What’s the value to my organization of doing all this stuff?

Influence – request for comments

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m chairing a session at midday today at the Social Media Measurement & Monitoring conference on selecting social media metrics. Joining me on the panel are Katie Delahaye Paine, Andrew Smith, Matt Owen, and Jacqui Taylor.

See you there?

To coincide with this event, I’m calling for comments regarding the standards setting process for the concept of influence ahead of the AMEC European Summit in June. Please take a look at this stack, and influence proceedings :-)

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

A Measure Of Influence – IABC Communication World magazine

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World , the IABC ’s member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it’s a publication for members’ eyes only, I can’t add a link here.

Are you a professional or a user?

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never been fond of the word ‘user’? It lacks the caring qualities of a much more appropriate word, customer, and even evokes images of substance abuse.

On making this point, I’m asked what I’d call people benefitting from a service or application without handing over their hard-earned. Well, customers of course. In such situations they’re simply paying with a different currency, such as their personal data and/or attention, which the supplier of the service does its utmost to monetize.

But in one instance, I like that evocation of substance abuse. Of addiction. Of misuse.

Do allow me to explain and let’s see if I’ve just been critical of you or a colleague. Please go easy on me if I have, my intentions are honourable.

I had the privilege of speaking with 150 Masters students at Imperial College London yesterday, taking their Technology in Marketing module. All marketing activity in 2012 is underpinned or impacted by technology, and thousands of tech vendors tempt us with thousands of marketing and PR applications, tools and services. And we buy them. Lots of them. The question is, are you a professional or a user?

What’s the difference?

Planning. Love it.

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s September already. How did that happen?!

As we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh.

But while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings.

First up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January?

Who knows! Let’s face it, we live in uncertain times.

So having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway?

The hunt for a new universal measure – we will never find it

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The title of this post is one of my contributions to the recent PR Week video podcast on measurement where I was a guest alongside SpectrumInsight ’s Mark Westaby. PR Week’s Sara Luker was in the chair, and it was fifteen minutes of good conversation.

As I say upfront, I’m a bit more optimistic than Mark about the future of the measurement and accountability of public relations, if only because I have faith in the Influence Scorecard approach.

Influence - the use and abuse of the word in social media

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.slideshare.net/Sheldrake/amec-2012-dublin-european-summit

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

The AMEC European Summit is taking place this week in Dublin. It’s a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC’s Barry Leggetter and the delegates’ enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it’s a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)

I’m here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I’m speaking in my own capacity… my slidestack is embedded above.

Q&A with Influencer Marketing Review

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally published by Influencer Marketing Review .]

This is the third installment of our ‘Q&A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence_, is joining us for our third Q&A._

IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.

****Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)

IMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.

You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.

Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.

Finally, Google adds social analytics to GA

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2009, at that year’s Monitoring Social Media conference, I forecast Google’s entry into social analytics in Q1 2010 . Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!

So here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:

The complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for The Guardian Media Network .]

If media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn’t think it now that influence is the hot word.

The capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn’t be a good use of the communicator’s time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.

The focus on making sure you’re influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.

Influence is complex, and I mean that in the full “complexity science” sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic.

Social media measurement – AMEC's 'Big Ask' European consultation

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The PR industry view and ‘Big Ask’ - Philip Sheldrake , uploaded by Gorkana Group on Vimeo .

AMEC – the international Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication – launched its social measurement consultation exercise with European members and in-house and agency PR professionals on November 17th 2011 at the ‘Big Ask’ conference. I spoke at the conference and the videos of the day have just been posted to Vimeo. In the egocentric nature that is personal blogging, I’ve embedded the video of me above, and videos of the other speakers can all be found here .

Public Relations, today and by 2020

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m typing this post sitting on the front row at the CIPR’s PR 2020 event at Russell Square HQ. To my left, Stephen Waddington . To my right, Julio Romo . On stage we have CIPR CEO, Jane Wilson , Dr. Jon White , and ComRes Marketing Manager, Simon Thwaites.

ComRes annual survey

ComRes conducts an annual review of key market stats for the UK PR industry, and Simon is running through that right now. Interestingly, in light of the PRSA’s current Defining PR initiative, which the CIPR supports, only 44% of ComRes poll respondents agreed with the statement “My friends and family understand what I do for a living.”

What our publics are telling us

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Public relations is about influencing and being influenced, right? You know, the two-way symmetric model to affect mutual understanding . Right?

Well, from my experience, the vast majority of practitioners are looking to exert influence but invest considerably less time divining insight from stakeholders and feeding that back into the organisation to improve decision-making.

For the best part of this week I’ve been in Miami hanging out with the members of ESOMAR who invest their entire time trying to work out what’s going on in the minds of customers and prospects.

ESOMAR describes itself as “the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide”. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR emphasises its members’ contribution to effective decision-making.

This particular conference series is focused on how social media has transformed market research. There have been two main thrusts so far…

Firstly, consumers have become increasingly reluctant to participate in ’traditional’ marketing research approaches. Seriously, why should they bother? And if we’re all egged on with the promise of some kind of reward or prize, how interested are we in responding accurately, diligently?

ESOMAR 3D Presentation – The Business of Influence

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Miami today at the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference. For those of you unfamiliar with ESOMAR, it’s “the essential organisation for encouraging, advancing and elevating market research worldwide. With more than 4,800 members from over 120 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research in illuminating real issues and bringing about effective decision-making.”

The Business of Influence – ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions Conference 2011

Measuring Online – CIPR Freshly Squeezed training session

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting start to the day today… over to CIPR HQ in Russell Square to deliver a training course on social measurement in the Freshly Squeezed series.

I had just 45 minutes with 15 minutes Q&A, and this time constraint combined with the state of best practice in the profession meant I was aiming simply to leave attendees knowing the right questions if not the right answers per se. After all, as the slidestack below teases out, if your organisation, marketplace, stakeholders, marketing and PR objectives, marketing and PR strategy and execution are unique, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that your metrics will be unique too.

Social Media Analytics

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Are you savvy when it comes to social analytics? If you’re a PR practitioner, the answer to this question must be YES.

Marshall Sponder visited London last week as part of his tour promoting his new book, Social Media Analytics – Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics (ISBN 978-0-07-176829-0). Having read a draft manuscript of the book, a quote of mine appears on the front cover: “Ignoring this book is akin to ignoring your market.”

There is no better independent authority on the tools and techniques than Marshall. Whilst some pundits simply maintain lists of social analytics vendors with some basic feature comparison tables, Marshall has actually used many of them for real. Moreover, he has a peculiar ability to prod the vendors and the engineers that build these services, to get under the hood and separate the actual capabilities from the marketing claims.

Marshall is not, however, a public relations practitioner or management consultant. This book does not provide a strategic framework for the integration of social analytics into your organisation. It does not address important issues such as privacy (of customers, employees and the wider public) or ethics. It doesn’t attempt to define a detailed taxonomy of the analytics services out there, or make this a comprehensive market review.

How many Tweets make a Like?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking for an acid test as to whether an organisation is centred in this social world, as to whether they have a marketing and communications strategy that integrates social media cogently and coherently rather than bolts it on, listen out for questions like this:

How much is a tweet / retweet / follower / friend / like / +1 / comment / whatevermetickle worth?

If this is the kind of question they’re asking then, in my opinion, they simply don’t yet ‘get it’. If you’re feeling particularly wicked, take your pick of one of these to respond to their question and see if they take you seriously:

$0.23 per hundred
A ’like’ is definitely worth somewhere between 2 and 3 tweets; sort of around 2.42
A comment has an engagement quotient nine times that of a ‘friend’
If you’re in tech, then a +1 is currently five times more potent than a RT, but the reverse is true for other markets
That depends if you’re B2B or B2C
Well, can I ask, is there any yellow in your logo?

In The Business of Influence (Chapter 5) I include the following table, titled “Maturity of influence approach”.

Social media measurement and the Influence Scorecard – HWZ Social Media Conference

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today’s Social Media Conference. I’m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here’s my presentation.

I know… it’s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide.

How data is transforming digital marketing

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms?

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone’s lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. Apart from that, it works just fine!

This summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC’s top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another.

Why? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps:

“Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…”

What does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment.

My book, The Business of Influence, is out today

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s the day!

It’s ready for delivery in the UK today, and pre-order in other parts of the world. For those of you tweeting about availability in the US, currently listed as mid-June by some bookstores, Wiley tells me it should actually be with you mid-May. Thank you for your interest and patience.

What’s it about?

The Business of Influence is a rethink.

It’s about improving the capabilities of organisations to design and attend to the way in which all aspects of its operations influence stakeholders, about making sure stakeholders influence it, systematically, and about how well competitors are attempting the same. It focuses on influence as the common denominator of marketing and public relations and related activities such as customer service, sales, product development and HR, and therefore the basis for redesigning these and interconnecting them.

The book introduces the Influence Scorecard, named in homage to the dominant framework for business performance management, the Balanced Scorecard. The Influence Scorecard then is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard containing all the influence-related key performance indicators (KPIs) stripped of functional silo, and it may extend beyond the Balanced Scorecard should a greater operational granularity of metrics be demanded by the influence strategy.

The Influence Scorecard is a new framework for the 21st-century designed to help organisations focus on what matters rather than continue to carry the baggage and inefficiencies that come part and parcel of the typical 20th-century marketing and PR structure and approach. It’s a reframing in the context of 21st-century media and disintermediation, 21st-century technology, and 21st-century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.

Social analytics on CIPR TV – with Connie Bensen, Emily Dent and Marcel LeBrun

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Regular readers know that social analytics is a subject close to my heart. And would you believe it, my ebook on the matter, The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, still gets downloaded a thousand times a month. I also made sure to include a section on social analytics in my book of course (out this month in the UK and shortly in the US), listing twelve primary characteristics of the services to assist in your organisation’s tool selection and procurement.

CIPR social media measurement guidance

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The AVE (advertising value equivalence) approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple. And utterly wrong.

It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.

Measurement and evaluation is essential, but requires real strategic understanding, diligence and perseverance. For me, it represents yet another distinction between the 21st Century PR professional and the 20th Century practitioner.

Money

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about money.

Michael Porter describes strategy as defining and attending to those activities at which an organisation must excel in order to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace, and thereby create sustained value for its shareholders (or sustainable value in the case of non-profits).

Once you’ve articulated why your organisation exists (the mission), and what you want it to be (the vision), the strategy describes the what, who, how, when and where needed to pursue the vision, and specifically how these differ from the competition. How these help beat your competition.

However, as hard as strategy formulation is, the really hard part is putting it into action. The Balanced Scorecard Institute finds that 70% of organisations with a strategy simply fail to execute it. And this becomes the more obvious the further away from the sale / the product / the service you get; the more you get into the intangible assets pivotal to your success.

Marketing and PR are intangible assets. They are intangible investments. We all know that the right mix of the panoply of marketing and PR activities is essential to organisational success – to the successful definition of organisational strategy and its execution – but too often we’re not quite sure how so. This is most apparent when, particularly in harder times, marketing and PR are considered cost centres first and foremost, and cost centres that can be cut.

Social media measurement – easy once you recognise it's not

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The CIPR ’s social media and measurement group is committed to providing updated guidance to members by the end of January. As the group’s chair, I’d better get my skates on. Here’s a quick look at the main thrust of our report.

Social media measurement, like business performance management and measurement in general, must measure what’s important to your organisation. Sounds simple for a moment doesn’t it, except that the view of what’s important and what’s trivial is pretty much muddied when it comes to marketing and PR measurement and evaluation in my experience.

Take the announcement this week from Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s top supermarkets:

Real-Time Marketing & PR

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

David Meerman Scott’s new book is out, Real-Time Marketing & PR – How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

I’ve been gearing a client up for real-time marketing and PR recently. I’m in the midst of helping them prepare for the launch of a gorgeous new app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android in November. (Ping me if you’re interested in social news readers and I’ll make sure you get your hands on it as soon as.) And part of that preparation has focused on the active listening capabilities and the workflow management needed to keep on top of the conversation and in the conversation. Thanks to the team at Nielsen Buzzmetrics , we have prepared all the search terms and we’ve made use of existing infrastructure to make sure the team understands who needs to respond and by when, as efficiently as possible without headache!

In conversation with Robert Phillips, CEO Edelman UK

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed having the opportunity to ask Robert Phillips (@citizenrobert ), CEO Edelman UK, his opinion on the state of the PR profession. Robert believes that public relations is at a pivotal moment when, confronted by the brutal transparency of social media, the profession has the opportunity to embrace the public information and two-way symmetric models as the default rather than the exception, ditching the spin and persuasion attitudes and connotations. Resigning them to history, or at least to publicists.

Friday Roundup – Goodbye AVEs

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Following establishment of the Barcelona principles in June this year and the annihilation of any idea that AVEs (advertising value equivalents) represent the value of public relations, AMEC (the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has moved on to ask two questions:

What are the “validated metrics” to replace AVEs?
How do you get started in measuring social media, and what are the definitions of relevant metrics?

This work is being led by the US Agency Research Leaders Group chaired by Ketchum’s David Rockland, and formed a significant chunk of the conversation at last week’s IPR 8th Annual Measurement Summit .

If you’re looking for one slidestack that walks you through the principles and explores the progress made to date in answering the questions above, check out this presentation: “Validated Metrics - Social Media Measurement”, delivered during the summit by Mike Daniels (Director, Report International and Chair, AMEC) and Tim Marklein (Executive Vice President, Measurement & Strategy, Weber Shandwick), and moderated by Peter Wengryn, CEO, VMS.

IPR Measurement Summit – Barcelona Principles Taskforce Recommendations

View more presentations from Institute for PR Measurement Commission .

I think the work to date is most definitely going the right way; seeking to identify the desired outcomes of a public relations programme and working backwards so to speak to establish metrics that belie the programme’s success accordingly. And I was particularly pleased with slide 25 on influence rating / ranking which corroborates my recent contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, “the fallacy of the influentials ”.

This jigsaw is coming together. We will have some operationally sound frameworks available next year, and I’m hoping my own book, “The Influence Professional”, might make some useful contribution when it emerges from the publishing process in Spring. Whatever the timeline, you should have begun winding down any remaining reliance you have on AVEs by now. It’s not a case of waiting to transition from mediocity to good; AVEs don’t even make the cut as mediocre, they are specious, misleading and unprofessional. Period.

Contribute to the Influence Professional book

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a book, provisionally titled Influence Professional. And the reading, the planning, the structuring and first few chunks of copy have been enjoyable in a hard work kinda way.

It’s 27 months since I was engrossed in writing the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , and I’d forgotten how intense writing more than 140 characters or a blog post at a go can be. It’s cathartic to structure your thoughts tightly. And whereas one can say things off the cuff in conversation, when you’re committing to the page you find yourself having to source liberal references to support your assertions, which is thoroughly rewarding as you can’t help but learn more as you do it.

Friday Roundup: I'd like to quote you

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to quote you.

Without doubt, the marketing and PR professions are in revolutionary flux right now. I reckon that if we didn’t have these disciplines to date but just realised here and now that we actually wanted to influence what people think and do, and ensure we’re influenced straight back, that we’d design things very much differently to the status quo we’ve inherited.

I’m delighted that Wiley has invited me to write a book on just this topic. It’s going to focus on the much needed transformation of marketing and PR strategies, and the related disciplines in the influence mix, for the current and future digital age.

The book explains what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming up. It points to the changes of direction organisations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant.

And in the spirit of a marketer honing a product’s positioning, I’ll tell you what this book is not. This book is not a social media ‘how to’. Rather, it’s about your organisation, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organisation and personal careers, whilst the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.

I’d like to quote you. Please do get in touch if you’d like to share your viewpoint and experiences… the book will only be improved by your contributions. Seriously, do it!

And if you’re interested in the bit about what’s coming up, I’m running a session this coming Thursday in London at the CIPR on the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things if you’d like to join us.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

Ethics in PR Measurement

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post “Influence: From BS to Best Practice ” set the scene nicely.

At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS .

In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman’s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:

RT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? <– Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what’s acceptable to them!? #measurepr

At Shonali’s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today…

My browser history is my own, so back off with your unethical social media metrics

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg ! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit.

It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It’s this list you might visit when you’re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. It’s this list that allows your browser to try to render unvisited links one way, underlined blue by default, and previously visited links another way, underlined purple by default (even though individual webpages and associated styling information may actually override these defaults).

My browser history is mine. My wife’s browser history is hers. Your browser history is yours.

But whilst the Internet turned 40 last year, the World Wide Web is still a teenager, and that relative immaturity places irresistible temptations in the path of the less ethical. And being able to read your browser history is just one of those.

Has your browser history been “sniffed” recently

You wouldn’t know.

Making sense of social analytics

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is my article as it was published in New Media Age yesterday:

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Panel launched a Measurement Group last month to help practitioners navigate what is a rapidly developing and increasingly confusing area, writes Philip Sheldrake.

As I commented in the Social Web Analytics eBook in 2008:

If you could go back to the mid-1990s and offer a marketer a little box that would sit on their desk, let them listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so far-fetched that they’d probably call security.

And yet here we are, with somewhere upward of 200 services vying to be our eyes and ears on the social web. Social analytics is a growth market reminiscent of web analytics ten years ago, with all the potential and confusion that comparison implies. The market is just beginning to demand that some order, consistency and semblance of maturity is brought to bear, and the three big asks are:

Social analytics, Katie Delahaye Paine and the CIPR Social Summer

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a bit of a ‘first’ going on at the CIPR… yesterday we had the first CIPR Social Summer meeting at CIPR HQ, which is the first of a series designed openly on a wiki by members for members and non-members. The sessions run most Thursdays, 5pm-7pm, over the summer months.

So I was in nirvana!.. Central London, the coolest city in the world, in a lovely building with a cold beer in hand discussing one of my favourite topics, social analytics, with some very nice and equally excited people. Ah, life’s hard.

Best practice guidance and policy for social media measurement from the CIPR

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations announced this week one of the first actions to come out of its newly formed Social Media Panel … the Social Media Measurement Group.

Some time back in the early days of media relations some bright spark came up with the idea of using a ruler to measure ‘column inches’, a considerably less than perfect approach to assessing PR campaign success only compounded in its inability to drive performance and measure success appropriately by advertising value equivalence (AVE).

My disgust for column inches and AVE has nearly lost me business on more than one occasion, but being prepared to work with prospects on improved approaches can end up contributing to the reasons for going on to convert their business.

Without a doubt, the simplest and shortest response to someone’s defense of such amateur approaches is to ask how they would measure a campaign’s success if a primary objective of a campaign was to keep brand X out of the press? “Oh, errr, well, I mean, that would be, ermm….”.

Your "Awesome Analytics Advantage" starts today

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the “Awesome Analytics Advantage”, making those organisations achieving this advantage “Triple A”!

Fundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases….

retail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!

Well, I’ve just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine , during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma ). My conclusion…

Influence - The bullshit, best practice and promise

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the presentation I just delivered to Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp .

It seems to have gone down well from the Tweetstream (some Tweets cut and paste below). Thanks so much to the panellists, particularly as you had approximately zero seconds to prepare!

UPDATE 2nd April 2010: I’m delighted that my presentation on slideshare.net has, according to emails I received from slideshare, been their most discussed document on Twitter and Facebook, globally! That means the presentation was promoted to their homepage too. How cool is that?

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake .

How the Influence Scorecard radically transforms marketing and PR

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that we ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we’ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com .

This is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.

That’s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.

The first meeting on the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was delighted to host the first meeting of the Influence Scorecard initiative in New York this week with a fine group of people :

Kate Delahaye Paine , the Queen of Measurement and Evaluation :-) (twitter , linkedin )
Marshall Sponder , the Web Metrics Guru (twitter , linkedin )
Ted Shelton , Co-founder and Partner, The Conversation Group (twitter , linkedin )
Jay Krall, Global Product Management, Cision (twitter , linkedin )
Aubrey Podolsky, Sysomos (twitter , linkedin )
Harish Rao, network science at The Rao Group
Diane Meier , Founder and CEO, Meier Brand
Connie Bensen , Director of Social Media and Community Strategy, Alterian (twitter , linkedin )

The task at hand is wide and deep, but we cracked on regardless. For those of you unaware of the Influence Scorecard project, you may want to flick through the presentation at the end of this post, or perhaps read my last post on the matter .

One of our first tasks was to get some definitions agreed. For example:

Friday Roundup - Monitoring Social Media 09

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I thought I’d highlight some great contributions on the subject of mobile in today’s MarCom Professional Friday Roundup, and then point you to an event covering a topic close to my heart, social Web analytics (my ebook on the topic is here ).

So, first up, the ever vigilant Andrew Grill always points his readers to useful stuff. This time it’s the latest publication from Bena Roberts at GoMo News , a collection of insightful essays on all things mobile.

And David Knowles aims to inject a dose of realism into the iPhone app craze. If you’re intent on getting an app out there, here’s what you should know about what’s working and what isn’t .

Monitoring Social Media 09 is bringing together social media monitoring experts and suppliers with PR and marketing professionals for a one-day conference in London on 17th November 2009. Speakers from Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Market Sentinel, Brandwatch, Edelman, The Conversation Group, and the UK’s #1 PR blogger, Neville Hobson, will be discussing issues such as ROI, sentiment analysis, reputation management, infuence detection and data quality. (There’s an early bird ticket until 17th Oct.)

I’ll see you there.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

An outline of the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a busy year for me with my departure from Racepoint Group following my so-called “transition period” and my setting up a new consultancy. So apologies for the delay in getting back on the topic of the Influence Scorecard.

It hasn’t been far from my mind, particularly following the oodles of positive feedback in January and February, and believe you me, I’m intent on taking up your expressions of interest to meet before the year is out to take this forward. I want to collaborate with you. I want to find the most forward thinking social Web analytics vendors and forward thinking CMOs to put this into action, and commence the empirical fine tuning of the approach.

Most encouragingly, I have had fourteen companies in the social Web analytics space express their intent to get involved.

So I’m leaping back into it with a SlideShare presentation. It’s concise. It’s an outline, and focuses on the what rather than the how.

Tell us about an ad you've come across and loved today

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening.

Deloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker , their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey ”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. Not an inconsequential finding for the advertising industry.

Which begged a second question “What is TV?”, and this garnered more responses than my first question of the evening, which went uncomfortably unanswered. How could such a simple question about describing a great ad, particularly when we have hundreds every day to chose from, draw such a blank response? (I’ve posted here one of a series of ads from Lloyds TSB that I loved because they tell a story rather than simply hit me over the head with a product.)

Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ’traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.

For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy ’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.

I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.

We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.

Data visualisation

Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.

Friday Roundup - AVE v SWA

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

AVE. Three little letters I thought had been dragged and dropped into the PR waste basket some years back. Right next to “column inches”, you know what I mean. Yet I have come across Advertising Value Equivalent no fewer than four times this week, coincidentally and oddly.

The first definition returned by a Google search is provided courtesy of SourceWatch : “…to ‘measure’ the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign”. The description goes on to describe how you ask yourself the question “Mmmm, how much would this space have cost me to buy advertising stylee?” and then you multiply that by, oooh I don’t know, 3, or 4, or 10?

Public Relations is about exerting influence and being influenced. We do this by sparking debate. Creating stimulating content, and demonstrating insight, passion and leadership by finding and starting conversations about the issues that matter to the marketplace, to our customers and prospects, and to our customers’ customers.

What’s the AVE of that conversation exactly?

Giving your PR a work out; exercising your PR in tough times

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I received three emails on the back of my post last week “When the going gets tough, the tough get communicating - or why the tough need muscles ”. I guess getting emails rather than comments underlines the more private nature of such discussions. The post finished by promising to come back with “ways to get your marketing communications to the gym”, and that’s the subject here.

If you have a good personal trainer, what do they do for you? They bring discipline. They set targets and encourage you to meet them. They don’t waste your time with activity that doesn’t contribute to hitting those targets. They keep track of progress and get to know your strengths and weaknesses, literally, and often better than you.

In many ways, this is analogous to your public relations consultancy. As I said in my last post, your marketing communications is muscle and not fat. If you work with a great consultancy, this muscle will be toned and responsive to current market conditions and challenges (if it’s not, change it today).

Summize - Twitter sentiment analytics

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m currently into Social Web Analytics. Here’s my last post on the topic . So some interesting news from Summize’s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.

Simply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you’re interested. Here’s one I did earlier…

Social Web Analytics - my upcoming ebook and a case of cobblers' shoes

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I posted about the fast paced field of Social Web Analytics . I presented a definition of these tools, expressed my intent to write an ebook on the technology and the main vendors, and listed the vendors I intend to cover…

I also invited anyone with experience of wielding these tools to get in touch so I can include comment and insight from them. This invitation is still open.

Listen. The Science of Social.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to no less than a dozen seminars, training courses and conferences about social media in the last month or so. In case you didn’t know, social media marketing is quite hot at the moment! Having presented on blogging for business since 2002, before this stuff got its own shows, and even mooted the death of market research in 2006 , it’s fascinating to see how quickly people cut and paste together their own position on this stuff.

One glaring betrayal of the ‘social media practices’ that have only recently assembled their facade is their ignorance of the power of listening. They will tell you just how they will be your voice on the social Web, but too rarely do they volunteer to proxy your ears.

Listening to one person isn’t easy; active listening is a discipline. Imagine then trying to find, tap into and track one hundred conversations, a thousand, ten thousand; and interpretting this information… turning it into knowledge that informs your marketing strategy and tactics.

This forms a large part of what we call social Web analytics. We define this as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking (listening) and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.

Engagement Mapping: the what but not the how

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When does advertising pay? Apparently, we’re getting closer to knowing courtesy of Microsoft.

The advancement from paying for eyeballs (CPM – cost per thousand times an ad is shown) to paying for click-throughs (CPC – cost per click), appeared at the time to be the ad industry’s nirvana. And then came click-fraud and CPA.

Now if only ‘A’ stood for Acquisition, then we could all go home. Pay £1 ad cost every time you acquire a new customer for your new £50 gizmo (ie, a sale), and advertising becomes a predictable and precisely quantified cost of sale. In this instance, 2% exactly; not 1.9% nor 2.1%.

But that ‘A’ means Action, and that Action may be an acquisition, but more generally it refers to getting a prospect to fill out a form, leave their contact details, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Mmmm, still as much an art as a science then.

Does your campaign measure up to search?

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you’re left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.

Return on investment

The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia’s Best of Broadband Advertising awards , yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia’s selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client’s bottom line. “Creative” and “ROI” are not synonymous.

Continuous engagement... the death of market research

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

ESPN pulled the plug on their cell-phone product after investing $150m including $40m in advertising. This is precisely the failure market research is intended to prevent. How can business harness customers and prospective customers to improve their hit rate and time to market?

The following simple figures demonstrate the difference between traditional market research and continuous engagement.

There are dozens of differences between the two approaches. Research is ad-hoc or at regular intervals whereas continuous engagement is, well, continuous. Research is one-way, and engagement is two-way. Research is devoid of any direct brand benefit (and research purists will claim this is beneficial) whereas continuous engagement inculcates brand loyalty. Here’s a list of the primary differences: