Philip Sheldrake

Tag: amec (page 2 of 2)

10 January 2012 / 0 Comments

Social media measurement – AMEC’s ‘Big Ask’ European consultation

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.

AMEC aims to develop global social media measurement standards by June 2012, and I'm also contributing to / hanging on to the coat tails of a similar initiative driven by I-COM – the International Conference on Online Media Measurement.

It's probably not too much of a generalisation to say that AMEC has grown out of the 'unpaid media' community, and I-COM from the 'paid media' community. While I've argued here that this distinction is now pointless, it is responsible for incredibly different perspectives and attitudes; in fact sometimes laughably so. I'll know when we're making progress on social media measurement when this division recedes and my amazement dissolves. It's noteworthy that both efforts have begun earnestly to engage the other 'media types'.

Hope you like the video.

21 September 2011 / 1 Comment

How many Tweets make a Like?

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". Read more

17 June 2011 / 0 Comments

The ROI of Public Relations – Friday Roundup

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. <sarcasm>Apart from that, it works just fine!</sarcasm>

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. Read more

15 October 2010 / 2 Comments

Friday Roundup – Goodbye AVEs

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. Read more

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