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.

Surely it can’t just be about the products. There are many other consumer electronics companies with great design and rich features. So what makes hundreds of people – probably take a day holiday from work – stand in a queue for hours just for a new phone?

I have been a vocal advocate of all things Apple for a number of years. That said, I don’t buy into this “must have day it is released” philosophy that keeps Apple on the front pages.

I think we are all still a bit in awe of the company, its products and its success. All since it simplified personal music players at a time when every other tech company was talking up more and more formats, features, memory, processor speed etc. This must be where the attraction lies, technology for the technophobe and geek alike, only in limited numbers (at least on launch).

Accessibility to the internet, to information, entertainment and the people who are important to us has never been easier. The iPad and the iPhone put this power in our pockets, or a small bag. The combination of design and simple, reliable technology that provides non-stop access to the services we now demand has been the secret sauce behind the company’s success. It is the epitome of less is more.

As a gently cynical PR person, I can’t help but also think that the introverted, highly controlled communications strategy has also been important, kind of a real world Willy Wonka for the consumer electronics market. Yet there are chinks that seem to be appearing in this particular piece of armour.

Apple needs to be careful not to get too big for its boots. It is still just one of many technology companies out there offering these types of product. The left hand gaff is a potential landmine for what has been an impenetrable tank rolling over its competitors as it sees fit, given the power of social networking platforms today.

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone 4 is just a wobble. iPad has been hugely successful and the phones will sort themselves out over the coming few months. Having said that, right now the company needs to work hard to ensure its mystique remains. Prototype products being sold to bloggers, fundamental usability issues appearing on day of launch and a change in tone to one of arrogance will leave a lingering uncertainty in the mouth of later adopters and could build to a sense that Apple rotten to the core.

Image via Wikipedia

Sentiment around a brand online is held up as one of the key cornerstones of any social media measurement framework. Just driving up the volume of chatter around your brand is no good – if that chatter is all about what a terrible organisation you are.

But, one of the biggest challenges facing the industry has been how to capture the full range of that positive and negative feeling. The online world is a large and sprawling place. There are 100s of comments posted every day about a company’s products, services and public image.
There are a huge number of tools out there that attempt sentiment analysis in one form or another – Radian 6 being one of the more commonly used ones. Its creators are pretty transparent about its limitations on the sentiment front (allowing you to manually override the ‘score’ given by the tool’s algorithm).

Industry experts estimate that machine analysis is right about 60% of the time (love and hate are easy, but anything in between is not). Most of us end up conducting manual analysis, sampling multiple posts, instead. However, in New Scientist’s latest edition, there’s a shining beacon of hope for all those spending hours pouring over the 500th blog post of the day. A team from Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created a program that achieved an 80% (give or take a few percent) success rate when it came to measuring sarcasm on Amazon and Twitter.

You can read the article in more detail here, and we’ll be following the progress of Ari Rappoport and co. with great interest over the coming months…

This ash cloud has been quite a strain, my wife and baby are still stuck in Dubai five days after they were due to fly home. The good thing is that they are staying with friends and have a great support network.

What it has shown me is how great the internet really is. Searching for information on Twitter, airline websites with the latest information (sometimes), news sites with real time video and Skype to stay in touch and more has provided real peace of mind.

Let’s talk specifically about use of social media platforms to help deal with the crisis. Twitter has become the web user’s right hand. The way the platform is set up allows a number of really useful things. You can choose to follow everything from airports to sports personalities, each wrestling with the problem of the lack of air travel in their own way. I have put together a targeted list of some of my key sources for keeping up to date. It just takes a little time to search on the site.

With a mix of journalists and news sites as well as the likes of Jake Humhprey and the Formula1 teams struggling to get home from last weekend’s race in China, there is a lot of information out there to wade through. It gives real world insight into what might work for getting the family home and is building camaraderie online.

The next key feature of Twitter is the hash tag, a really useful way to gather conversations on the same topic together. You just need to make sure that you include the right one. It is also proving a great platform for people to help each other out. The #getmehome tag has been widely used and is enabling people to share rides across Europe. I have even seen organisations and companies – one is a car share organisation called Roadshare – that are using these tags to communicate out their services to people with a specific problem; clever.

What will be interesting is to see if there is any direct increase in Twitter users as a result of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter does see a European surge on the back of Iceland’s latest contribution to the global economy – I know, an act of God.

These two disciplines may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but bear with me, the analogy works out in the end.

I was recently reading a book called Pixarpedia, a behind-the-scenes look at Disney Pixar’s film studio. Almost as soon as I’d opened the first page, the foreword from their CEO, Andrew Stanton, struck a chord:

“When it comes to making our own movies we’re obsessed with figuring out the details that will make our stories real. The first step of that process is ‘city planning’ – figuring out how the world works and what the rules are. From there we work out the particulars of personality and setting.”

‘City planning’, as Stanton puts it, should be fundamental to any PR campaign- and never more so than with social media. Brands that ignore the rules and skip straight to the execution will inevitably end up getting burnt. I won’t go into the well documented social media failures of the past few months, but it is clear that they didn’t take enough time to understand the online landscape before jumping in feet first.

But brands shouldn’t be afraid of social media rules. It’s not a secret doctrine you can’t read about online; just one that requires attention, adaptation and intelligence. Taking time to city plan may seem like a daunting task, but once you’ve figured out the rules, campaigns can go to infinity and beyond…

A recent campaign on Twitter, so-called “twitterbombarding”, introduced us to a new level of interaction with the microblogging site. Comedian Ross Noble (@realrossnoble) started the campaign in December 2009, targeting both individuals as well as corporations. There was no specific logic in selecting the targets; someone could suggest a target to Noble (as they did with Nick Griffin) or Noble came up with the target himself. The intention wasn’t to cause any animosity or aggravation toward the targets. The idea behind twitterbombarding wasn’t for Ross Noble to be the focus point. He was looking to do something fun, see how to master a practical joke online, if you like.

Having encouraged his followers to bombard a selected target with ridiculous questions, it would then be a waiting game to see how the target would react. Would there be direct replies, would a company provide a holding statement or would there be silence. Targets varied from Kerry McCarthy (Labour MP Bristol East) and Doritos, to BNP and Nick Griffin.

Ms McCarthy took the campaign in her stride: in the space of six hours, she answered more than 100 questions. The BNP responded with silence, posting general tweets but ignoring the commotion on their pages. This was like throwing fuel into the fire as the tweets got more and more provoking, looking for a reaction from the BNP.

Are campaigns like twitterbombarding likely to become a norm? I don’t think so. Random twitterbombarding is meant to be a form of amusement, keeping us occupied online. A coordinated PR campaign would very quickly become spam which would undermine the campaign completely. If the audience is seeing a campaign as spam, it is very easy to block users on social media sites, such as Twitter. Quirky brands that look to flirt with danger with their PR activity might pull a campaign like this off; fans of more traditional approaches should steer clear.

If a client is targeted by a guerilla campaign similar to the twitterbombarding, the response has to be reviewed on a client-by-client basis. Brands such as Doritos are perfect for some online banter; would more traditional/conformed brands benefit from taking part? The good thing about campaigns of this nature is the possibility of answering selected questions. No one is expecting all questions to be answered. I see the campaign as a great opportunity to communicate directly with the end users. By showing the brand is listening to them, this can only be a good thing, surely?

You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently more hype than reality, it seems likely we’ll see the technology being used a lot more over the next 12-18 months, so online PR and marketing people should be paying attention.

What is real-time search?

In conventional web search, results are influenced by the authority of a page – well established websites with a high number of links from other trusted sites tend to rank highly. Real-time search is much more focused on what’s hot right now – what are people currently talking about on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

If you searched on the word “Pie” using a conventional search engine, you would expect to see some websites of big pie manufacturers, pie recipes from big cookery sites, the Wikipedia page about pies, and so on.

Real-time search, would be more likely to show you a current news story about the Prime Minister being hit in the face with a custard pie, a popular viral video of puppy stealing a pie, or some reviews of a new American Pie movie -anything related to pies that is currently generating a lot of buzz.

This is all very exciting, so it’s led a few people to declare that old-search is dead and real-time search is the future. This is nonsense. While real-time search is certainly going to get bigger, conventional search isn’t going away – if anything, the two will simply merge to provide blended results of high authority content alongside real-time results.

What does this mean for brands?

We know what we want from conventional search – our clients should be at the top of the page for relevant keywords, and the rest of the page should be filled with authoritative third party recommendations. This is what SEO and online PR is all about.

But what’s the goal with real-time search? If you want to consistently appear at the top of real-time search results, your brand is going to have to consistently be interesting enough to get people talking. This, I would suggest, requires a kick-ass online PR strategy.

What should you do about it?

Brands need to get a lot better at monitoring what’s happening online, to stay informed about what the rising trends are in their key markets and what subjects are generating online buzz. Forget monthly or even weekly reports – too slow, you lose.

Second, reaction times need to improve. If it takes you a week to get anything approved, you’re wasting your time. As real-time search becomes more important, comms teams will need the flexibility to respond to issues quickly, while the public is still interested. When one of those funny complaint letters about your company goes viral, nobody will care that you responded brilliantly if it doesn’t happen until a week or two later.

Take a look at your crisis comms plan and consider updating it for the real-time comms environment.

It’s not just about responding quickly to the bad stuff. Keeping on top of trending topics will help you to spot opportunities for positive conversations that your brand can be a part of, although this doesn’t mean you have to pounce on every new meme and beat it to death with corporate messaging.

The essence of all this is reaction time. If your brand wants to be involved in fast moving online conversations, you will have to find ways of keeping up or risk being left behind.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion about how Twitter can be used most effectively for online PR and marketing, and there’s no shortage of interest in the subject since the mainstream media became obsessed with the platform. The only problem is that most of the current analysis is either lofty strategic level stuff, or is based on the assumption that you already know a lot about Twitter, neither of which are much use to the majority of people who just want to know where to start.

This prompted us to produce a practical guide to help PR and marketing professionals get some real value from Twitter, without assuming that they already have a deep understanding of the service.  You can get hold of a free copy of the Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals guide on our website – we put a lot of work into it, so I hope you find it useful.

If you haven’t got time to read the whole thing, the following diagram outlines the basic steps you should follow to incorporate Twitter into your comms activities. It’s a very brief overview, and the full guide goes into a lot more detail about how you can accomplish each of these steps:

Simply put, you first need to monitor Twitter to find out what people are saying about the issues that matter to your organisation, then learn how to participate in the Twitter ecosystem appropriately in order to gain acceptance, and then you will be in a strong position to instigate the kind of conversations that are important to you.

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.