Intro: Deirdre, kudos on PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, it’s an important milestone in the industry’s understanding of PR 2.0 strategy and tactics; and it’s a fast and enjoyable read. Great job! Being a measurement guy, I wanted to get your insights on the measurement of social media and all things PR 2.0.
PR Measurist: Most of the online monitoring tools I’ve seen don’t live up to their promise (hype) mainly because we still require a smart, well-trained human to evaluate the context, the messages and the tonality. It’s easy to get a giant vacuum to suck up every bit of content in the blogosphere, but the real challenge remains making sense of it and reporting it back to the business in a meaningful way. Do you think we’ll ever solve that problem? Can Natural Language Processing do the job? Is it ready for prime time? What other tools might emerge?
DB: First, I’m glad that you enjoyed PR 2.0 and we share similar thoughts about monitoring. I do think that great strides have been made to gather up content in the Blogosphere, so that brands know that conversations are taking place daily. However, it’s up to those brands to decide if they want to do something with the information and what resources they will designate to the monitoring process. I interviewed so many professionals for my book and feel that Natural Language Process sets us in the right direction. I do believe it’s ready for prime time. I discussed in my book how most blog monitoring is done electronically through advanced artificial intelligence and the key term here is Natural Language Process. All that really means is that the computer is reading the story more like a human being than like a computer. As a result, you can move beyond just gross impressions and a reading service that provides you with a bunch of editorial clips.
Today, through the Natural Language Process you can evaluate the tonality of a story, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral. The computer is going to be scoring the same way day in and day out. It’s going to be doing it in an unbiased fashion. And, the computer will do it more quickly than we could do it as human beings. No more waiting two weeks for the reading service to send your clips by mail. With the Natural Language Process, you can differentiate between a negative subject and a negative tone which really allows you to analyze how the market perceives your brand. The best part of advanced 2.0 monitoring is that you react quickly to the intelligence and focus your communications on squashing any negative comments that can be damaging to a brand.
PR Measurist: Have you come across any new metrics that communicators should be considering when monitoring Social Media/UGC?
DB: I came across an extremely interesting company called Fas-Research that does a fantastic job analyzing social networks. Fas-Research helps leaders to understand social networking from a social science perspective using metrics and visualizations. In my book, I discussed how the company’s proprietary analytical techniques, social network visualization technologies, and data mining algorithms help clients see their markets as systems where people and institutions are connected and influence each other. Their techniques allow clients to harness the potential for change latent in the underlying social structure of markets, win new customers from existing ones, and systematically find a path to the tipping point for their ideas, products, or people. These types of monitoring metrics are so advanced; it makes the days of the clip books completely antiquated.
PR Measurist: Thanks for driving another stake through the heart of the clip book. It’s a relic from a soon-to-be forgotten era. In your opinion, what reporting format do you suggest should replace it?
DB: I guess the traditional clip book served a purpose for quite a long time. Believe it or not, I still have clients who want their monthly or quarterly clips. I guess we are creatures of habit. However, now many want digital books. There are many service providers who monitor and compile information for brands. For instance, I interviewed PR Newswire in my book and its service eWatch is a system of tracking key words that the company provides on hundreds of thousands of articles each and every day. Key words usually are the company’s name, a product name or service and key spokespeople. Of course, the tracking goes well beyond gross impressions, which was as in-depth as the interest went pre-Web 2.0. The Web universe is so sophisticated now that it requires you to go beyond the pure number or mentions. As a result, PR Newswire signed a deal with Technorati, one of the leaders in blog tracking, to provide more complete monitoring for the company’s clients. Technorati provides PR Newswire’s customers with the ability to track online conversations triggered by news releases. Today, both B2C and B2B companies are realizing the importance of monitoring conversations and rely on blog monitoring to know how their brands are being perceived in the market.
PR Measurist: Do you have any thoughts about how to score a blog’s influence or impact? Do you think a natural Darwinian order will emerge in the Blogosphere making the top-tier blogger the prized targets of PR people? What do you advise clients about targeting the long-tail bloggers who have no reach, no relevance and no influence?
DB: I usually check out Technorati and Blogpulse to score a blog’s influence. In my opinion, as much as the A-List bloggers are important, they are inundated with product and service pitches that they only have a small amount of time to cover a topic and then they need to move on. However, there are some really important long tail bloggers. These bloggers are in the magic middle and they can be extremely influential with followers. Their followers tend to trust and rely on their information. These long tail bloggers have tremendous influence and allow brands to get to the people who will buy their products or services; people who they could never reach before. I think it’s really important to develop a strategy so that you can engage with the A-Listers (after all they are influencing the traditional media), but at the same time make sure you look for those other bloggers who can make a difference and get right to the people who want to buy your product.
PR Measurist: You’re a master of Twitter, have you had to summarize a client’s brand reputation, or buzz in the Twitosphere? Any advice/counsel?
DB: If you’re going to summarize a client’s brand on Twitter, then it has to be your best elevator pitch ever. Today, this has been the subject of many conversations. That’s the beauty of the micro blog, like Twitter, a brief, concise statement to communicate information with meaning or value, in 140 characters or less. I just mentioned in a blog post how happy I feel when I’m able to communicate in brief, succinct statements on Twitter. This is the tool that PR people dream of…not the traditional news release riddled with hype, spin and jargon, made up executive quotes and ultimately, too many words.
For me the best elevator pitch gets right to the essence of the company. In Twitterland, I would advise that a statement about a brand shouldn’t tell me about the 10 great things that the brand can do for me or my company (there wouldn’t be enough characters available for this description). Rather, it should focus on the one thing that the brand does best, and why it will benefit me (how it will this help me in some meaningful way). After all, whether it’s a micro blog or another social networking platform, you are sharing information to assist people in their decision-making.
I don't know what drugs Dierdre is on, but if she can show me a NLP program that can consistently and accurately differentiate between sarcasm and irony on a blog posting or twitter, I'll eat my shorts. NLP companies teach computers how to read like humans. That doesn't mean they read like your customers. What you're talking about is automated scanning not measurement. To really understand the impact of what is being said, you need a system like Radian6 or BuzzLogic that looks at the comments, frequency and relevancy of the post, to judge its relative import and then you need a human QA check to make sure that its relevant. In our work we find that only about 20% of all the stuff that firms like e-Watch deliver are relevant to our clients.
Posted by: kdpaine | July 10, 2008 at 02:38 AM
great post
Posted by: Jocuri | September 22, 2008 at 08:05 AM