It seems impossible to watch or read the news these days without hearing about another natural disaster, here in the United States and abroad. Just days ago, my family was riveted to the TV watching live coverage of tornadoes in Massachusetts, just 90 minutes from our own home.
The destruction and suffering defy common understanding.
Fortunately, relief workers and tireless volunteers contribute their time, effort, and energy to help make things better for those who find themselves in the path of these tragic events. Organizations like the Red Cross provide local services to those in need of a helping hand as they seek to rebuild.
At CustomScoop, our hearts go out to the victims of these natural disasters. Like most Americans, we also want to do something to help. We know that we can’t make the same kind of difference as aid workers and volunteers on the ground in the affected areas, but we do believe we can help make their jobs easier.
In recognition of the efforts of all of those individuals and groups who help recover from natural disasters, we want to give back to the types of organizations who have put their trust in CustomScoop over the years.
Therefore, CustomScoop will provide free accounts for one year to the first 100 local chapters of the Red Cross or other bona fide relief organizations that qualify after filling out a short online form. We hope that these services, valued at approximately $600,000, will help these groups that face enormous financial challenges and find their human resources stretched thin.
Disasters create enormous demands for information for responders. Media coverage, offers of help, press releases, government statements and even helpful blog posts all cascade in, but can be overlooked when managing a crisis. CustomScoop captures critical information and arranges it in a way so disaster responders can focus on the most important information they need – and can do so 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We know that in the whole scheme of things, this contribution is but a small part of the overall effort needed to help those suffering from tornadoes, flooding, tsunamis, and other disasters. Nevertheless, we want to do our own unique part in attempting to make a difference.
It is important to note that these free accounts are not limited to specific geographic areas. We know that the next disaster may take place tomorrow in a location nobody would predict. By making the CustomScoop service available at no cost to the local communicators who must act quickly in the midst of a crisis, we hope to make their jobs just a little bit easier.
This is how we can – and will – help those who help others.
To apply for a free account under the CustomScoop Disaster Relief Program, please visit www.customscoop.com/relief
For many years, some public relations professionals (and their bosses) have been enamored with measuring success through the use of Ad Value Equivalency (AVE). In a desperate attempt to quantify the ROI of communications programs, these well-intentioned individuals attempt to compare earned media coverage with paid media placements.
Countless thoughtful people have spent many years explaining why AVE as a measurement construct is at best highly flawed and at worst actually damaging to the public relations profession. Nevertheless, it is a topic that comes up frequently. In today’s world where computers automate so many things and spit large volumes of numbers out at people, AVE has a certain appeal.
The topic of AVE came up in this week’s #solopr chat on Twitter, so I thought it appropriate to revisit the issue here because too often the discussion is about why the AVE methodology does not work. But that’s not the most important part of the story.
The fundamental premise of AVE is flawed. It assumes that advertising spending in itself is a victory. The C-suite would not judge the marketing department to be successful because it spent a lot of money on advertising. To measure the public relations folks on the equivalent metric (literally), makes no more sense.
It has been famously said, “I know 10% of my advertising works, I just don’t know which 10%.” It is repeated so often because there is an element of truth to it. Measuring the impact of specific messages is hard. And that’s the rub. Even if we were to accept the AVE methodology to be an accurate way of translating earned media into paid media, it fails because it doesn’t measure something useful.
Assessing the success of public relations and marketing programs are both matters of equal parts art and science. Tracking measurable outcomes provides a degree of useful quantitative data, but there’s still part of the analysis that relies more on gut feel. Or as Justice Potter Stewart might have said, “I know good PR when I see it.”
The next time your CEO or client asks you to do an AVE analysis of your work, ask her if she would judge the marketing team based on how much money they spent on advertising – or instead on what those ads accomplished.
The most recent SoloPR Twitter Chat was, as I referred to it on Twitter, an epic convergence of my two favorite chats. The featured guest on the chat was Shonali Burke, who is the driving force behind the #MeasurePR chat.
It was a lively and active discussion. If you’d like to see what you missed, or if you participated and want to relive your favorite comments, here’s the chat transcript.
I had a great time guest-moderating the #MeasurePR Twitter chat on Tuesday, subbing in for the Blog World-bound Shonali Burke.
I used CustomScoop’s system to generate the transcript, which is available at this link: Measure PR Transcript, May 24 2011.
We’ll be doing more of these, and posting them here!
Why not, right? Using CustomScoop’s proprietary search technology, we decided to track mentions of several categories of Easter candy, beginning on March 8—“Fat Tuesday,” aka, the day before Lent kicks in. Yes, my Catholic upbringing did provide the bias in search dates, but it made sense to me. Particularly as someone who had tried one or two years to give up chocolate for Lent, only to fail miserably by around days three or four. Seriously, I don’t think I ever made it a week without failing *cue Catholic guilt,* so after those spectacular failures I just stopped trying. (I gave soda one year, and haven’t had more than a sip or two since. Can’t stand the stuff now.)
Anyway, back to our little study. We tracked mainstream media, blog, Twitter, and Facebook mentions of the following treats: Cadbury Eggs (Crème and Mini), Chocolate Bunnies, Jelly Beans, Peeps, and Reese’s Chocolate Eggs. Here are the results.
Overall, Chocolate Bunnies dominated, garnering 48 percent of total mentions. Jelly Beans came in second at 28 percent, with Cadbury Eggs showing strong with 17 percent. My beloved Reese Peanut Butter Eggs, which to me taste better than the product-standard cups, had such a poor showing their total volume rounded down to zero percent.
So, where did all of this information come from? Well, it looks like users on Twitter LOVE to talk about candy. Mentions of the five categories listed above came predominantly from Twitter, which represented 69 percent of the discussion:
Facebook was the second-most productive source type—it should be noted here that like other monitoring firms, CustomScoop only captures publicly available status updates, so if your account has its privacy settings set to “Friends Only,” CustomScoop won’t know that you’ve confessed to eating your kid’s chocolate rabbit for breakfast. And even if we did, we wouldn’t tell, promise.
Taking a deeper look at the Twitter discussion, content rather unsurprisingly peaked yesterday:
There were more than 11,000 mentions of chocolate bunnies on Twitter yesterday. That is a lot of chocolate rabbit mentions! Still not much love for my chocolate-peanut butter eggs though.
Chocolate bunnies were just as dominant on Facebook, garnering more than 5,000 mentions:
Discussion of all candy types jumped during the last two weeks:
Although social media has produced most of the discussion on the candy topic, what is Mainstream Media content talking about? This chart shows discussion on each type of candy discussed in daily newspapers, radio, and TV:
It appears that chocolate bunnies are in the lead here too, and the results are fairly close to the social media breakdown, but Peeps have a stronger showing in MSM than in social media.
Peeps had some of the highest profile mentions, including a report on CNN, and a post on the very large Consumerist blog. The annual Peeps Show, run by the Washington Post, also bolstered volume for the sugary treat. There’s also an entire blog dedicated to ways to destruct Peeps, mentioned in the comments of the Consumerist post: http://100waystokillapeep.com/ .
So there you have it, a breakdown of all things sweet for Easter, mentioned in Mainstream Media sources and in social media. You’ll excuse me now while I head out to pick up a case or two of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, which should be on sale right about now…
