pr-media-blog.co.uk

At the heady summit of social media marketing lies the promise of effective measurement and evaluation.   There is no doubt that twitter is the flavour of the month and a new application called Twittersheep provides a fascinating measurement tool which helps us take a few more steps towards this objective.

I decided to start with the most followed twitter account; that of US president Barack Obama who has close to 300,000 followers.  What Twittersheep does is to make a word cloud from the profiles of all of a user’s followers. Whilst Obama’s following is far from a random sample it is a big number so we might draw some broad conclusions.  Twitter has a high student following. It appears that the male female split is roughly equal with husband and wife evenly weighted in Obama’s cloud.  It also looks like the marketing industry is providing a good proportion of the social networks’ early adopters.

Potentially Twittersheep and similar apps could provide brands that use twitter and build large follower groups with highly valuable insights into both the demographic and psychographic profiles of consumers with an interest in their brand. 

Don Bartholomew’s blog offers a refreshing take on the measurement and evaluation of PR, both for the old and new media worlds. He offers terminology and techniques that could be grasped by, well, anyone - which should be the sign of good public relations, right?

The received wisdom of “with advertising you pay, with PR you pray” used to floor me everytime I heard it. I mean, would a client really accept divine intervention as the only route to campaign success (and justification of the monthly fee)?

Being more or less agnostic, I’m happy to add to the debate about measuring PR which Ed Moed has eloquently summed up on his Measuring Up blog.

I agree that with the right tools in place, PR is eminently measurable. The trick is getting companies to articulate and commit to measurable objectives. For if they’re not understood and agreed by everyone involved up front, who knows what’s being measured or why?

Just going in search of “press coverage” or “raising awareness” is not enough - and businesses shouldn’t accept that from their PR advisers. If it was my money, I certainly wouldn’t.