In the past week I reviewed an opinion piece by Tudor Williams that compares customized to standardized employee surveys. Tudor’s conclusions are consistent with the need to customize surveys to meet individual situations. He may be biased as I am, we both design customized research strategies. We come by our bias naturally, after creating a standardized employee retention survey in the late 90’s.

In partnership with some wonderful professionals we developed our own employee retention tool. We never marketed it. Every time we met with a client, they had unique challenges: labour markets, professional demand, competencies, financial resources, size, locations, etc. Each situation needed a customized approach. While people do have some universal needs, we all have unique circumstances.

We start our research assignments by asking about our client’s strategic plans, priorities and what their big challenges are. To design our research/measurement strategies we seek to inform challenges and evaluate theories about client communication practices.

The nature of measurement informs this process.
“In research, measurement takes on a somewhat different meaning: Measurement is limiting the data of any phenomenon - substantial or insubstantial - so that those data may be interpreted and, ultimately, compared to an acceptable qualitative or quantitative standard.”
Paul D.Leedy and Jeanne Ellis Ormrod

In the market today we see,
Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for (By State)
In Canada, the Macleans 100 best companies to work for
In my home province of British Columbia, the BC Business 50 best to work for

Why do companies participate in these studies? As communicators we run the risk of having our organizations building incentives to score high on a survey to move up a list and not address our organizational issues.

Do these generalized measurements really offer a competitive advantage? Or do these assessments build apathy with our employees?

Respond with your experiences. Did you use an off the shelf tool or customized approach? What have been the positives or negatives of your approach?

Here’s something really new: measuring the ABSENCE of core messages to gauge the effect of public relations! Let me share some highlights from a new white paper, “A New Model For Media Content Analysis,” by David Michaelson, David Michaelson & Company, LLC, and Toni Griffin of MetLife, that is available on the IPR Commission for PR Measurement and Evaluation website. While it isn’t necessarily a practical approach for every-day use, it is very compelling intellectually, and should be seriously considered - especially for complex subject matter.

David’s and Toni’s hypothesis is that measurement isn’t funded because of a “lack of interest, lack of knowledge, lack of budget or a generalized fear of measurement; rather, it is a lack of usefulness of these basic research measures.”

To prove their hypothesis, they first analyze the eight commonly-used methods for media measurement today, which include clip counting, circulation and readership analysis, AVE, simple content analysis, message analysis, tonality analysis, prominence anlaysis, quality analysis (single-score indices) and competitive analysis, showing inherent weaknesses in every approach. Most interesting to me is that even scoring messages for tonality fails to offer a “proper situation diagnosis or prescription for a solution that is tied directly to communications objectives.”

Why? They cite two fatal flaws: 1) the absence of an analytic structure that determines the accuracy of coverage overall and the messages contained; and 2) the failure to link analysis to communications objectives and PR messages.

“Message accuracy” is:

” … based on an analysis of four basic elements: the inclusion of basic facts, the inclusion of misstatements about these basic facts, the inclusion of incomplete, deceptive or misleading information that biases the interpretation about basic facts and the ommission of basic facts.”

So, to analyze a story for these factors, you have to study the context of the article, and see if anything critical is missing that may have rendered the story a non-starter.

As for not linking messages to communications objectives, they challenge us to figure out where, exactly, in the Communications Lifecycle our target audience (and the media) may be. You all know this Cycle includes awareness, knowledge, interest and intent. If we shoot messages out there without knowing this, we will miss the target entirely … and thus, our objectives.

Finally, David and Toni share a couple mind-blowing case studies for MetLife that proved their hypothesis … and that lead to a revamping of PR strategy and tactics at MetLife that included in-depth education of the media (which didn’t understand half of MetLife’s subject matter) and a much better targeting of messages. In one of the cases, they found:

” … between 60 and 85% of the articles on the key issues of concern to MetLife included an error in reporting, a misrepresentation of key information or an omission of basic information that should have appeared in the contexts of the articles in question. By concentrating media relations efforts on those reporters and publications where these errors and ommission in reporting occurred, the eventual result was a significant decline in the proportion of articles with either errors or omissions, as well as an overall increase in the number of articles by 45% on the issue at hand.”

Of course, the problem with all of this is you need really smart people to analyze your coverage this way … and therefore, it is more expensive. However, David and Toni challenge this by saying that the return on such an investment is a significantly improved quality of media relations, and greater chance of success against objectives.

Yeah, baby!

In a recent BtoB article by Kate Maddox, “Measurement calls for more resources,” she cites a study that indicates marketers place a high priority on marketing measurement and analytics.

And last week the Association of National Advertisers released a study that found accountability is the No. 1 priority for senior marketing executives.

But if measurement is so important, then who can explain these astonishing stats in Maddox’s article:

In a recent survey of marketing executives, 47% said increasing brand value is a priority, but only 19% have a process in place to track this.

In the same survey, 48% of respondents are expected to measure ROI on individual campaigns but don’t have a process for doing this, compared with only 9% of companies that are expected to measure ROI on individual campaigns and have a process to do this. The remaining 43% are not expected to measure ROI on campaigns.

There may be a lot of resources available for those who want to measure, as Angie Jeffrey said in an earlier blog, but there’s a big gap between those who say they want to use them and those who actually do.

What’s up with that?

The extent that we benefit from measurement has a strong correlation to defining what our problems are. When structuring your measurement plan ask what are the emerging challenges. Your goal for measurement should address the premise of your challenge. To create a goal restates your challenge into a solution statement. Then define the issues that are measurable. The issues become your objectives.

The next steps in the research process:
Develop a methodology that will deliver evidence for your decision making.
Gather your data.
Analysis your data.
Contextualize the data.
Make recommendations for action.

Now test your assumptions and enjoy finding solutions.

Corporate reputation

A good corporate reputation is a challenge that many organizations expect communicators to manage. Ipsos has just released a series of articles on the global practice of corporate reputation.