Ask any PR or advertising professional about the value of having a story to bring a campaign to life and it’s recommended that you be seated comfortably, ready to listen, with a very sympathetic look on your face.

Whereas authors and journalists have the pleasure of starting with the story and then working towards a conclusion, communications professionals often find themselves with things presented the wrong way around.

The time-old tale of creating a campaign will play to something along the following lines:

Enter client, stage left.

“Here is our latest [project, product, service] and we want it to become the next best thing since… well, our last [project, product, service.]”

The goal is simple and clear-cut, elementary really: “stimulate desire!”; “amplify awareness!”; “change perceptions!!”

As the script inevitably goes, the next question is how?

• What is the compelling hook that will make people want it?
• What is the pitch that will change peoples’ minds?
• What is the story that people will tell for ages to come?

Exit agency, stage right, not to be seen again until act 3.

Fast-forward several months and, ultimately, the campaign does exactly what was intended. Measurement – key performance indicators… numbers – prove exactly how well the campaign delivered. How perceptions were changed and how it all affected the client’s bottom line.

But, what about the story? Unlike authors who can measure the “value” of their story based on book sales, the value of a PR story has only ever been indirectly measured by the global success of the campaign. If the campaign was a success, then the story must have been great.  The fact is, though, calculating the unique value of a story was simply never done before.  Until now.

Joshua Glenn, Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, and Rob Walker, author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, have been able to measure the value of a story through a quasi-anthropological experiment, based on the hypothesis – “Narrative transforms insignificant objects into significant ones.”  The experiment is called Significant Objects and their conclusion is quite astounding:

The value of a story is 2,776%. Why percent and not Dollars or Euros? The answer is in the experiment itself:

• They bought objects considered to be of little to no value from garage sales, thrift stores and eBay.
• They then asked a selection of writers to bring each object to life create in the form of a fictional story about the object’s past.
• The object is then put back up for sale on eBay with the fictional story written out instead of a factual description.
• The lucky purchaser is shipped the object and a hard copy of the story that sold the object and the proceeds go to the author.

With a story by Susannah Breslin, the Necking Team Button went from 50 cents to $36.88

How did they reach 2,776%? SO v1 – the first batch of 100 objects – were bought by Significant Objects for $120.  Through a complex price adjustment scheme over 19 weeks to neutralise Duration Factors, the final profit on all objects sold came to $3,612… for a total mark-up of 2,776%.

As far as quasi-experimental experiments go, this is an incredibly heart-warming example. And it may also go a long way to helping communications professionals in recognising, if not calculating, the value of their own stories.

Taking a look at the evolution of social media as a communications tool over the past year, it is clear that one thing in particular has changed, businesses now take it seriously and include in their communications strategy.

Brands now automatically lose their shine with customers if they do not allow for direct communication between customer and company. This shift in expectation has lead to the growth in the number of managing directors asking where the company’s Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and YouTube channels are and why can’t we have thousands of fans tomorrow?

With a view to providing a glimpse under the hood at some of these changes over the last twelve months, we have put together our Social Media Lens. The document launches today at Marketing Week Live! For your own copy just click here, all we ask are a few details about you.

We have been very lucky to have some of the UK’s leading practitioners in the social media space support us with the production of Social Media Lens; presenting real world examples instead of last year’s theories. The collection of articles provides a unique view on what has changed, what works, what doesn’t and a variety of tips and tricks for getting social media activity up and running.

Articles in the ebook cover a whole raft of different insights, advice, trends, what is new and coming up in social media as well as some secrets from marketing professionals from major brands including: Sony, Paddy Power, Oracle, Santander and more.

Once you have had a chance to take a read do come back and let us know what you think.

Sitting through a number of presentations from social media monitoring companies recently, I was struck by how these tools all look very similar. I am sure there is a significant difference in what goes on under the hood, specifically in the algorithms and search spiders that each have, but when it comes to the output from these tools they all seem to provide much the same.

This is kinda scary and only adds to the current confusion. How do these guys manage to differentiate to their prospects? Are they milking ignorance? Well yes and no. For sure there are some very clever products out there and a huge range in cost, but none will be worth a bean if they are set up badly and the person interpreting the information the system delivers is not up to the job.

Also presenting on the same day was Nathan Gilliatt, one of the world’s leading experts on social media analysis. He set out how important it is to invest in the person, or people, interpreting the information generated by your chosen monitoring tool. Absolutely!

So, how do you know that you have the right consultant? I suggest there are five must haves:

1. An understanding of your business
2. A broad knowledge of your market
3. Insight into the target customer
4. Experience in a wide variety of social media platforms
5. Experience in using the monitoring tools themselves

So it seems the clue is in the name, social media monitoring tools are just that, applications or platforms that provide raw data. Interpreting that information is a skill that demands a broad range of insights and a clear understanding of a business’ expectations as well as the demands from its social media programme.

Only with this breadth of knowledge will an ongoing social media campaign continue to gain the interaction it needs. This will lead to an audience that will continue to positively influence perceptions of the company or product; easy to say, not so easy to do. There are a huge number of dots to join here and we must remember that monitoring is just part of the picture. It is reassuring to find that the human element is as essential as it always has been.

Yesterday, I attended a WOM UK espresso breakfast briefing with Professor of Consumer Behaviour Dr Robert East from our very own Kingston University.

Dr East and his MBA students have been researching consumer behaviour and word for mouth for 10 years.

Without serious funding they don’t have the data to prove the validity of their model conclusively, but their research indicates that the well accepted Net Promoter Score word of mouth measure for predicting growth is flawed.

NPS asks the question ‘would you recommend this brand’. Respondents are then rated 0 – 10, with 0-6 ranking as detractors, 7 and 8 passives and 9 and 10 as promoters. The NPS score is then calculated by subtracting the average of the detractors from the average of the promoters.

Dr East contends that in only measuring the volume of given word of mouth, positive versus negative without measuring received word of mouth or the impact of WOM in general, NPS misses a trick. Not to mention the fact that the people most likely to offer negative word of mouth are ex-customers who are not surveyed.

The resources of Kingston University don’t lend themselves to the level of data crunching research required to prove the validity of Dr East’s methodology. This is a shame as I think the results could be rather interesting. I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes open for a potential research partner for his department.

I’m also keen to see more thinking done around the customer experience in relation to professional services. With such a complicated purchasing relationship, can a measure as simple as NPS be effective in measuring a client/agency relationship? Can we ever hope to achieve the kind of high NPS scores enjoyed by companies such as online retailers or supermarkets that have traditionally invested heavily in how they shape their customers’ experience?

Dr East argues that there is far more positive word of mouth than negative and that negative word of mouth doesn’t necessarily have the most impact. But if I’ve taken one thing away from the talk it is that we need to be addressing past clients in addition to existing when it comes to assessing our own performance.

At the end of the day NPS may be an imperfect tool for measurement. And it may be better suited to consumer retail. But we have to start somewhere because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Related articles

• Dr Robert East: Net Promoter Score – is there a better alternative? (slideshare.net)

On the surface, URL shortening services such as http://bit.ly are a great idea, because they can turn long, messy web addresses like this:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6788774.ece

Into nice tidy addresses like this:

http://bit.ly/g4ol9

This is especially useful for posting to Twitter, since it saves valuable space, but a lot of people have got into the habit of using URL shortening services all the time.

There’s an obvious problem with this from an SEO point of view. For a start, the shortened URL contains no anchor text, and secondly they do not pass on PageRank.  Since these two things are fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithm, any links to your company website that use a URL shortening service are practically worthless in terms of SEO value. They will do nothing to improve your site’s ranking for the relevant keywords.

[EDIT] As pointed out in the comments, it seems bit.ly and other URL shortening services do pass on PageRank (a few of these services do not) but the anchor text issue is still a problem, links without embedded keywords don’t provide much value.

But that’s not all. As the recent closure of http://tr.im has illustrated, sometimes URL shortening services go out of business and that means that all those millions of links on the internet which use that service will suddenly stop working.

So the long and short of it is: for online PR purposes URL shortening services are best avoided where possible, but sometimes they’re necessary, like on Twitter.

Here’s the really interesting bit

But there’s more to this story. They may have certain disadvantages and risks, but as long as Twitter is going strong, it’s fairly certain that bit.ly will be doing quite nicely too (did somebody say buyout?) and that creates an interesting situation.

Twitter is a hotbed of viral activity, with news and trends being retweeted backwards and forwards, spreading across the web faster than ever before. Given that bit.ly is rapidly becoming the de-facto URL shortening service, it is an amazing and unprecedented position in that it has access to a live, detailed view of these trends as they are developing.

Before anybody else knows what’s making an impact on the web on any given day, the people who run bit.ly will already have a clear picture of what people are looking at, what is spreading around the web, and how it’s spreading. If they’re smart, they will already be analysing that in all sorts of clever and interesting ways to figure out how they can extract value from it.

For most web users, bit.ly is just a handy way to make unwieldy URLs a bit more manageable, but for businesses it’s a goldmine of up to the minute data on consumer trends and behaviour, on an amazing scale. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see bit.ly selling customised dashboards to provide businesses with snapshots of that data in the future.

Twitter’s business model may still be a bit hazy, but it’s certainly created fertile ground for bit.ly to develop into what could be one of the most powerful and valuable business tools on the web.

[UPDATE] It seems tr.im has decided to stick around after all – although the service’s owners have a few things to say about the relationship between Twitter and bit.ly

One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures that attempted to pin a quantifiable return on investment to PR activity, such as Advertising Value Equivalent were woolly at best.

But that’s all changing and it seems that PR isn’t getting a free ride any more. All of a sudden, acronyms like ROI and KPI are being applied to an industry that has long been used to justifying its budget with a ring-binder full of shiny, laminated press-clippings. There is now a far greater expectation that PR should provide hard evidence of its impact on the bottom line.

There are two things PR agencies can do about this:

• Keep banging on about how the qualitative nature of PR makes it impossible to measure in the same way as other disciplines

• Figure out how we can use all of these new metrics which are available in the online world to put together some kind of robust and repeatable framework for measuring the value of PR activity with some degree of consistency

You might like to take a guess at which of those approaches is likely to win the most new business.

Of course, there’s already a lot of healthy debate and discussion about PR measurement in the blogosphere, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the big names in PR have their own ideas about the most effective approach.

On the one hand, it’s good that there’s so much interest in solving the problem, but on the other hand, it looks unlikely that an industry-wide consensus will be reached any time soon. Obviously, everybody wants to implement a measurement standard that best represents their own strengths, and it doesn’t help that any discussion on the subject invariably gets sidetracked into an esoteric debate about the nature of influence.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go before this is anywhere close to being solved, but at least there now seems to be broad acceptance that rigorous measurement will be key to the PR industry’s future.

However the measurement debate unfolds, I think it’s absolutely key to ensure that the metrics used are properly aligned with the client’s business goals.  All too often, arbitrary KPIs are chosen simply to provide a tick-box for PR staff to show that they’ve done some work, with little consideration into how exactly they help the business achieve its ultimate aims. And that’s a far worse situation to be in than the old days where we relied solely on qualitative reporting, which at least had some kind of value.