In his early autobiography, one of Stephen Fry’s schoolboy tormentors responds to a witty quip with, “Well you can prove anything with facts!” Turns out there’s more than a small parallel here with PR2.0 measurability.
A lot of conversations I’ve had around the subject of measurability in PR concern the fact that thanks to wündertools like Google Analytics and Technorati it is now possible to blanket every online campaign in numbers. The common consensus is that this is a good thing, I’d quite vehemently disagree.
The problem isn’t the numbers themselves, I take great pleasure in trawling through the stats on my campaigns, it’s the perception that I take great umbrage with. The fact is that numbers are meaningless without context and understanding. Numbers are like facts; unless you use them properly, you can come to any conclusion – something demonstrated on a regular basis by The Daily Mail.
In online especially, clients will respond to a campaign results presentation with the retort, “is that good?” Our job is not to push numbers at them – let’s be honest there are still plenty of things that we can’t measure – but to educate them on why what we’re doing is good for their business.
In a world where we still work with marketers who are comfortable with results delivered in column inches and advertising value equivalency we need to educate the value that we bring not try to blind with big numbers and scary acronyms.
Instead of replicating the bad practice of old and relying on meaningless, but seemingly useful, statistics like readership and OTSs – let’s be honest about the things we can’t measure and only use numbers where they actually add value. Now there’s an idea huh?
Now I’d love to know your thoughts on this……
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Why does PR2.0 blind itself with numbers?
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4 comments:
Totally agree no point pushing stats fro sake of stats, but equally they are our biggest strength. Contextualising and agreeing useful measures to begin with is the single most important measurement conversation, with an equal emphasis on the contextualise as the agree.
What an interesting point.
I do suspect that there are two dots in your piece that require some joinage. The number thing is handy to whip out when explaining the benefits of such campaigns to a client. Have you found a way to explain the benefits of PR2.0 without the numbers?
@alexp - The point is mate, that marketers typically don't understand what measures they need or that we can provide and so the onus is on us to educate them about the measures that matter. This provides ample scope for hoodwinking, if you're that immoral, and it devalues the point of measuring anything in the first place.
@lea - The numbers thing is handy but context is all. I could pull numbers out of my backside that look big and impressive but that really demonstrate no engagement or conversion and I could pull out tiney, wee stats that are actually demonstrative of amazing conversion and consumer loyalty. The problem is that all too often without context the client doesn't dee the value in 'small' numbers. I guess my point reallu boils down to the fact that we can't measure offline activity and this is the greatest insight into the impact of any campaign. To determine the real ROI of any PR or marketing campaign we need to tag every member of scoiety and follow them aroudn to determine their purchasing habits - which I'm all in favour of - but really without this information all we can say is that our numbers 'suggest' something. They're not proof, they're trends. We just need to stop lying to our clients and ourselves.
The best way that I've found to demonstrate the value of PR2.0 has been through user feedback. You cam't argue with that and it provides far more insight than a list of unconnected uncontextualised statistics.
(BTW - I'm hamming this argument up a little but I think the ethos of it holds pretty true.)
You make a point about context is all important - but even context needs the numbers to back it up.
Given that a lot of the time we work with corporate companies who rely on number to show their worth, you'll have a hard time arguing that numbers don't matter. Well you can, but probably less likely to be raking in the budget come review time!
Corporates rely on numbers to reassure themselves they do the right thing - we have to help them reassure themselves that they are doing the right thing by investing is what we do!
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