For leaders who understand that distinction, the data Communications generates can be enough to make the connection between what we do and productivity.

Just one example. Our leader shares EVERYTHING about our business performance, strategic direction, risks, opportunities and expectations with his management team each quarter so that they have all the information they need about the business to lead in their respective areas. He also talks about the importance of sharing the information with their teams so that everyone understands the strategic direction, performance, business goals and objectives, and expectations. To faciliate those discussions, we send the presentation and a link to a video replay available to every manager.

Despite those efforts, our recent information-flow survey showed nearly 40% of our employees had received NO information flowdown. Subsequent focus groups confirmed the data; not one participant was familiar with the information shared at the most recent meeting and could not recall seeing similar information from previous meetings.

Providing the raw data to our leader was, in his mind, a hugely significant contribution by Communications to productivity, because it provided him an opportunity to focus on a new priority - holding managers accountable for flowing critical information to their teams. He wants it reflected in performance evaluations, raises and job retention rankings.

If our leader succeeds, even if Communications did nothing further to facilitate information flowdown, he’ll credit Communications for providing the data that contributed to the productivity boost. If he fails, it won’t be Communications that he holds accountable.

It is based on how uncertainty reduction affects decisions. In most important decisions there is uncertainty and because of uncertainty, there is a chance that the chosen path will be wrong. And for important decisions, there is usually a significant cost of being wrong. The cost of being wrong times the chance of being wrong is called the Expected Opportunity Loss (EOL) of a decision. The value of a measurement comes down to how it reduces the EOL of a decision. The EOL after the measurement is subtracted from the EOL before the measurement.

There are many special cases of this calculation. The above calculation only works for discrete deciisions (eg. the yes/no question of buying a new pharmacutical business based on the yes/no question of whether the FDA approves a particular drug, etc.). But there are more elaborate calculations when you are estimating a continuous value like the size of a market for a new business. For example, if you are trying to estimate a range like the 90% confidince interval of the size of a market, there is a cost of overestimating and a cost of underestimating. The narrower the range, the lower the average cost of estimating incorrectly.

Douglas W. Hubbard
http://www.hubbardresearch.com

People experience a company or a brand in two ways: directly and indirectly. Direct experience comes in the forms of employment, stock-ownership, living in the same community as the company, etc. Indirect experience comes in a variety of forms but I would suggest that media coverage is among the most pervasive and most influential.

So let’s bring these two themes together: is there anyone reading this board who wouldn’t recognize a symbol consisting of a capital letter “E” positioned on the diagonal (yes, Enron). Now ask the people who recognize that symbol actually trade energy futures or worked for the company: relatively few given the company’s notoriety via the media. The symbol appeared in every broadcast and on every front page for months…all of it negative and all of it irreparably harmful. Smart companies know how to manage high visibility by having a strategy in place…Enron wasn’t one of them.

But beyond “volume,” there are other predictors of influence: the messages which are present and the attributes of the news item itself matter. So Wilma’s one news item might have been an informative article with her name in the headline, a photo, and all the necessary information to suggest that her lecture was the place to be.

Plain and simple: volume matters. It is not a stand-alone factor but it is important. What is more, “volume” cuts both ways — good and bad — and it can be managed.

Wilma also makes a good point above. I’ve experienced some wonderful success through single story placements, too, that were in excellent locations reaching my target audience! But who is to say two stories of similar quality/target wouldn’t have had even more impact? The study simply suggests that ‘more is better’ or worse (depending upon tone) if placements are reasonably on target message-wise … (and, to Wilma’s point, all the more so if they are on target audience-wise.)

The problem comes when people “count things,” like clips, which really have no relevance to a business outcome. It doesn’t matter how many times a story ran, so let’s not count that as a measure. It matters how you achieved your objectives, and in your study, volume helped achieve them.

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Jerome Alexander

My favorite example: a colleague sent a short release to a particular reporter at the Arizona Republic (major daily) as well as to other reporters. The release described an upcoming lecture to be held at Arizona State University, an event that usually brings in about 25 people.

Only one story (clip) appeared. But about 200 people showed up for the lecture!!

The key: the colleague pitched the story to the right journalist who would be interested in a local attorney/amateur Egyptologist who was the second person to enter an unearthed tomb. The story was on the front page of the Sunday “Living” section and included two color photos.
Volume? No! Outcome? YES!