Measurement Demystified Recap

Recently I “attended” a virtual summit hosted by PR Daily’s PR University. This one was “Measurement Demystified: How to prove value and show ROI for communications.” The summit was broken into three parts:

• Measurement Strategy: Creating a stellar measurement plan for PR tactics
  • Presented by David Rockland of Ketchum and Natalia Vaccarezza of UNICEF
• Advanced Social Media Measurement: How to monitor, track and measure social media results
  • Presented by Katie Paine of KD Paine Publishing
• Real World Applications: How an actual organization measures value
  • Presented by Danielle Brigida of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

For those who know me (or at least read my blog posts), know I’m really into social media; most of my posts have something to do with the topic. And one of my goals that I set with Abbie this year was to learn more about social analytics so I can better make recommendations to our clients on their social strategies. This summit seemed like a great way to add to my knowledge.
Some of my key takeaways from the summit were:

• Advertising value equivalency is useless for PR pros. Who cares if an article got 3 million impressions? What matters is if the key messages were present and if the article successfully accomplished its purpose.
• You need good goals. A good goal has a clear KPI or metric, a clear audience and a clear target date that the goal will be accomplished by.
• Carefully choose the moments to deliver key messages. This is something we as PR pros are always doing. For example, your pitch might be great, but don’t send it on inauguration day. The same can be said for social media. Ensure that there’s nothing already scheduled that would prevent a key social media post or campaign from being overshadowed.
• Number of followers and impressions should not be major KPIs. The level of engagement you receive is what really matters and what you want your social media to drive—purchases? Volunteer registration? Conversation about an issue? That being said, you need more than 10 followers to get real, useful engagement numbers but once you’ve reached a follower threshold, the number should become less important.
• Don’t be afraid to fail when it comes to social media. You should rank your results from worst to best so you know what went wrong and how you can improve those posts.

These were just a few of the many takeaways from the summit, but I’m looking forward to using these tips for our clients’ social media. Any other tips you have from other webinars or just pure learning experience on the job?