Monday 24 October 2011

The Growing Significance of Transparency

Richard Edelman declared that "continuous, transparent - and even passionate - communications is central to success." (Edelman, R. 2007)

If we consider that transparency, according to David Phillips and Philip Young, can be defined as "openness, communication and accountability," (Phillips, D. and Young, P. 2009) then it leads that the radical change in the digital landscape means there are infinite channels with which to deliver the advantages of transparency. Indeed, Don Tapscott talks about the idea of 'corporate nakedness', with the advent of the Internet making it harder for companies to keep secrets from its consumers and its 'shareholder web'. The benefits of being a company with integrity is becoming unquestionable; treat employees well, and costs of transactions will drop; better trust environments bring better collaboration, more loyalty and less office politics.
And it's happening externally too - companies are showing integrity and transparency not because they believe it is ethical, but because it pays off - we as consumers want to engage with a company that has our best interests at heart, and is candid about its efforts and its competitors.

We have moved from a one-size-fits-all medium of broadcast and traditional print, to a one-to-many medium available at your disposal, forcing companies to become 'naked' in the process.

Friday 14 October 2011

Why no news is not always good news

Image: via Blackberry phone

It's a journalists' dream headline: Apple and Blackberry Crumble (for another hilarious take on this marketing gimmick, see The Two Ronnie's sketch)

So in a week that has been a PR headache for the brains behind Blackberry, Research In Motion (RIM), it appears rivals Apple have become a victim of their own success after news of the iOS 5 update lead to it trending on Twitter, causing the company's servers to crash as millions rushed to download the service. Ironic considering the spawn of the smartphone has been attributed to the surge in social networking in the past two years.

More irony elsewhere as Blackberry, the epitome of communication in this highly connected age, fails to communicate with its customers, or rather not quickly enough. The fiasco has been compared to the slow response by Toyota's CEO during its 2010 recall of 8 million cars. It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to speculate what RIM should have done - taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book, who, after its cloud services crashed following a lightening strike earlier this year, stuck to the Golden Rule: communicate, communicate and communicate some more, preferably via Twitter.

"It's a haughtiness born of the age when internet companies often no longer even have phone numbers - it's not an attitude the public seem minded to forgive" (Rob Waugh, 2011)

No news is not always good news, as Blackberry users soon realised as hours of disruption turned into days without so much as a peep from RIM. And as three million iPhone 4S are expected to sell this weekend alone, this PR blunder couldn't have come at a worse time for the communications giant. No irony there.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Monitoring & Measuring the Social Landscape


"To ignore blogs, videos and social network contributions is not sensible for any organisation and not a few individuals." (Phillips and Young, 2009)

We've come to acknowledge that PR needs to be measured - indeed, the crude debate of AVE, where advertising value is used as a measure for print media, is a recent example of measurement in practice, as despite its controversy it is a technique used by many organisations worldwide.

Levine at el told us in The Cluetrain Manifesto that markets are conversations, and in an increasingly connected age, organisations have the ability to hear what is being said about them, no matter what platform it appears on. It is this dialogue that needs to be monitored and measured, and there are a number of tools, both free and paid-for, that can help an organisation understand the value of its online presence.

Ideally, such resources should give the time and date of publication, the type of website, its reach, content, analysis, and value to the organisation.

There is a vast array of resources available (shown in the World diagram above, though this is by no means exhaustive) but here's a quick low down of the most popular tools.

Klout
Klout's mission, according to their website, is to identify those who influence on the Web, on what topics and how much influence they have. This is done by tracking the activity of over 80 million users across popular social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram and Last.fm. They use a number of parameters to award you a Klout score, between 1 and 100, which is a measure of your brands influence. Klout's USP is perhaps its Klout Perks scheme, where top influencers get perks including tickets, Amazon goodies and laptops.

Peer Index - 'understand your social capital'
Similar to Klout in that it uses a scoring system based on a number of factors - authority, activity and audience. It determines a score when the content you share is retweeted or commented on, by someone else that is an authority on the subject. It uses data from Twitter, Facebook and your blog.

Alexa
Owned by Amazon, Alexa uses a toolbar to collect data on browsing behaviour. It provides lots of stats, most notably on traffic and traffic sources, however, a common complaint is that it takes lots of clicking to get to the end product.

WooRank
WooRank gives the user a comprehensive check-sheet style list and, like Klout and Peer Index, gives a rank out of 100. Using a report-style format, it highlights the areas you could improve on and finishes giving a score.

Google Analytics
Free and easy to setup, Google Analytics is a highly popular resource that measures traffic, traffic sources, visitors and content evaluation using cross channel and multimedia tracking. Aesthetically pleasing interface makes it popular and Google's presence as a household name helps.

Of course, whilst all these tools are useful in revealing trends and understanding the reach of your site, we must consider that an online audience is almost impossible to measure - those that view and consume but do not comment cannot always be accounted for as well as those who land on the page by accident. But these tools are a good place to start, and organisations ignore them at their peril.