Every year, CustomScoop surveys its clients, to see what we’re doing right and where we can improve. We’ve recently sent out our annual survey, and the results thus far have yielded some interesting information. I won’t get too specific as the survey is ongoing (if you’re a CustomScoop client, it’s open until June 30th for you to send us your thoughts), but a few key items do stand out.
Not surprisingly, our strongest results and best numbers come from responses to questions about our customer care. We love our clients and know our company is only as strong as our relationship with our customers. Anyone who has worked with our customer care team knows that they do whatever is possible within their powers to get what our clients need. In some cases, that has meant pulling one (or more!) of our developers into the mix to figure out a solution for a client.
Regarding the system itself, thus far, there’s about a 50/50 split between people who primarily access their content through the automated email delivery versus logging into the system dashboard. Again, this is unsurprising as we know that for a significant portion of our clientele, committing the time to work within a dashboard doesn’t work for their day–they are on the move, so our results are too. And also not a surprise, the vast majority–more than 70 percent so far–use the system daily.
What was surprising–to me at least–were a handful of questions about including Ad Value Equivalency (AVE) or something similar. While this was suggested by a very, very small number of respondents, I’m surprised it was requested at all. Yes, I know that for some this is what they know and understand. But I don’t think we’ll be providing anything like that in the future for a few reasons:
- First, the Institute for Public Relations does not recognize AVE as a measurement tool, for all of the standard reasons: earned media is not the same as paid media, multipliers put in place to try and make them the same are also questionable, and it’s just bad math and bad logic.
- Second, to calculate AVE, CustomScoop would have to collect the advertising rates from the thousands of publications we monitor. Advertising rates can vary widely, and the published rate is usually different than the negotiated rate.
- Building a measurement standard we don’t believe in that shifts constantly into our tool would not be wise.
Trust me–I do sympathize with anyone who is being asked for this information. It can be tough or darn near impossible to wean off of this number, but it’s important to start. The PRSA website has some alternatives to suggest. Weighted Media Cost (WMC), while presenting some of the same issues, at least has some research behind it and might be a place to start.
I’ve written before about how our internal team of analysts uses CustomScoop’s ClipIQ service, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain a bit more about what the team does for clients on a daily basis. The shortest description of how to view ClipIQ: it can either be a DIY program where the end client sorts through the data themselves, or our internal team of analysts does the work and then provides the end client with the analyzed results of the data collected.
Anyone who has set up a monitoring program, whether it is focused on blogs or mainstream media (or both), knows that the key to finding good content is setting up keywords that are tight enough to screen out much of the irrelevant content, but not so tight that a story or blog post is missed by constructing keywords that are too specific. By casting the net a bit wider, sometimes volume will increase significantly. For a single keyword, or just a handful, the significant increase in volume that occasionally happens might be challenging, but it can be managed.
But if a monitoring program tracks a variety of topics in several areas, resulting in hundreds or thousands of blog posts, Tweets, and clips a day–and that content needs to be read, rated (I’ll address why we don’t use automated sentiment analysis in a post at a later date), and then analyzed–it’s a significant time commitment, often hours a day. For some organizations, dedicating an employee to spend hours a day reviewing content isn’t a cost-effective solution, especially as it requires someone with sufficient experience to understand the nuances of the client account. CustomScoop’s Professional Services Division does this work for our clients, providing a finished product that contains the “actionable intelligence” clients can then use for briefings, reports, or to incorporate into communications strategies. This is particularly valuable for clients unable to dedicate part of every day to reviewing content. Reviewing daily is a must, due to the speed of online conversations.
Our analysts also spot things that machines can’t–posts that are relevant to a client’s interests that don’t match any of the account keywords exactly, for example. Or, they can spot trends in the client’s space that might be of interest. They have also, on a number of occasions, highlighted particularly damaging posts that could have been overlooked in a sea of hundreds of daily results–either lost in volume or because they weren’t on large blogs (yet).
Choosing to engage with the Professional Services Division typically revolves around two primary areas: one, if the volume for the client is substantial enough that it’s more cost-effective to have us do the work; or two, if the client doesn’t have the internal flexibility to dedicate time or personnel to reviewing content every day.
CustomScoop’s Professional Services Division acts as an extension of our clients, doing the monitoring, rating, and analysis so that they can focus on acting on the intelligence we’ve gathered.
