Measurement on Philip Sheldrake

Q&A with CIPR Influence magazine

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was interviewed by Rob Smith, Editor, Influence magazine . Published in two parts , May 2016.

What does Influence mean to the public relations business currently? Is it more important since the rise of digital or has it always been at the heart of what it is to be a public relations professional?

You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done. Unfortunately, the English language also has us using the word ‘influence’ in terms of something someone might possess.

I always prefer to work with the first meaning here for two reasons: first, the changing of hearts, minds and deeds is the actual object of interest to public relations professionals (reciprocally of course, more on which later); second, we might quantify the former better than the latter, and indeed many of the better attempts to score influence as something someone might possess rely to a certain extent on that capacity being demonstrated (ie, the former again).

What does this mean to PR practice right now? Well that depends on your flavour of practice, characterised rather usefully at this juncture by Andy Green as simply old school and new school.

"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 .

The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in.

The quantified self

The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).”

And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.

That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :

We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.

The quantified organization

Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ :

… a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.

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.

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:

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.

Too good

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

The headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid ‘ghost town’ claims .

For the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

Does Facebook Matter? Find out in the second edition of Marketing To The Social Web

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Weber releases the 2nd edition of Marketing to the Social Web today. After the first edition sold out, the publisher (Wiley) asked my chairman to update the book for a second run.

With a foreword by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the second edition includes new chapters on Facebook (entitled “Does Facebook Matter?”… he believes it does and moreover will surpass Google), measurement and marketing to mobile social media.

Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I posted about hosting a meeting on the Influence Scorecard . The post was testing the water to determine the level of interest such an event might generate, and I was answered by dozens of emails, direct twitters, comments and even some direct editing of the post itself, as I’d hoped! (MarCom Professional allows an author to permit others to edit a post, wiki-style.)

I even received tentative enquiries about sponsorship, so it looks like we are on to something here…

Moreover, the interest was split almost 50:50 between Europe and North America, and it was spread fairly evenly amongst each of the required participant groups.

What is clear from all the queries and interest is that we now need to put some meat on the bones. Here are a few top line thoughts on ‘influence’, ‘scorecard’ and what we hope to achieve. Your thoughts are welcome.

Influence

Organisations want to influence the opinion and behaviour of their stakeholders. They do this via the various marketing and communications disciplines and approaches - PR, advertising, branding, community building, conversational marketing, direct marketing, events, product placement, public affairs, sponsorship etc..

Of course, stakeholders also influence each other and some will want to influence an organisation - how ready an organisation is for this dialogue is another matter.

Scorecard

The ‘scorecard’ is inspired by the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most widely adopted organisational performance management methodologies (generally known as “business performance management ” or just plain BPM). According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute :

Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performance management

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 , I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:

Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to 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.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it .

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.