Making Messaging Practical

Everyone knows about communications challenges faced by larger organisations but few people talk about simple, practical solutions. A recent discussion triggered three very fundamental answers which aim to work individually or collectively:

Most messaging counts – Larger organisations have evolved to a function-specialist comms model. This coupled with the sheer amount of activity tends to compartmentalise efforts: PR is separate from Social Media is separate from Advertising and DM. Each area understandably feels theirs is the most important to the business. But the analytical evidence suggests all areas interact and relate in some way. This US Telco case study is a perfect example of PR and advertising interacting. It suggests in times of PR crisis, advertising should be pulled or risk amplifying the damage to brand health.

Single point of review – Rather than reviewing each comms area separately, some effort to integrate analysis can return big benefits. This approach amplifies the meaning by allowing context for deeper interpretation. After all, its not the numbers its what they mean that counts. The other part of that solution is to take a brand health perspective on outcomes. It is important everyone agrees on the objective as brand health gains, or at least minimising damage in crises times. This means a common ground to work from and a valid way to measure progress – something the Exec. team will be keen to hear more about!

Workshop & Refine – This is the critical step of meeting to consider results, debate strategies and agree refinements. It’s a meeting of the minds to figure out the integration between comms and will payback huge ROI. Why? Because it creates time to think, plan and unify direction. It also uses brand health to take an external view from customers and prospects. So if your brand health tracking doesn’t consider all comms areas, then it may be time to upgrade it.

This triple-play formula aims to boost your communications outcomes, your brand health and should also contribute to a lift sales over time.

Trust or Dare!

For several years now we have been collecting and scoring the Trustworthy theme in every article we assess at Precise Value. This has built a significant results base of more than 10,000 articles, consolidated across all our clients. Analysing these results recently uncovered several interesting insights:

·      CSR coverage delivered the highest proportion of Trust of any article subject

·      Environmental themes were the next highest contributor to Trust followed by Industry commentary

·      Where Trust was present the average uplift in tone was +0.7 more than doubling the average article favourability (on a +2 through -2 scale).

The chart below shows these results as a percentage of each topic where Trust was noted. The HR topic illustrates how business re-sizing through the GFC can heavily impact Trust. The importance of offsetting activity including CSR is therefore highlighted yet we actually saw CSR coverage ease since the GFC.

% of Articles with Trust assessed (as positive or negative)

Results also suggest environmental initiatives generated significant Trust. Further, these articles saw a very high tone score and were free of negatives. Whilst few in number, they are growing sharply and this suggests keen media interest in environmental communication. Of course this interest varies with the quality and authenticity of that communication.

Looking more deeply into just CSR articles, we also found that:

·      Out of 181 CSR articles we assessed just 1 was negative

·      The average tone of CSR related articles was more than double that of other coverage for the same period

·      Some 85% of articles did not evoke a theme of Trust and a further 5% generated Trust decay - suggesting an opportunity to review and refine specific PR activity

Finally, hidden behind the chart we note that the majority of all coverage is product related and by a good margin. So it is intriguing to note that just 9% of this coverage generates positive Trust and nearly as much generates Trust decay. It makes you realise there is still much to be done and some science to guide that will be critical to achieving any real results.

So a key question arising from this is: How badly do Australian marketers really want to build Trust and how much existing effort is being wasted?

Let me know if you would like access to re-publish this chart and I can arrange for you.

Why analyse your media?

Someone asked me recently why is media analysis important?
 
Everyone wants us to do more with less these days so how do we do that and still have a life? We need to blend some science with the art of communications so we work smarter not harder.
 
Tracking the impact of content shows you where to focus for best results. It makes you more effective at what you do.  By creating structured feedback we can show which content had what impact, where. This is particularly important when the communications objective changes over time – as does the competitive landscape.  The tracking analysis is like a map that shows you the shortest path to meeting those objectives.
 
Tracking analysis of content impact will typically also:

• Reduce the effort required to achieve the same result
• Give you the ammunition to argue for more budget
• Help you outperform competitors
• Compliment your skills & improve your value

If high performance marketing communications is important to you or your company then adding science to the art of communications excellence helps you get there faster.

The ad:tech Playground

I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the recent ad:tech event in Sydney. It was an immersive experience. Something like IT in the early ‘90’s, summed up by this elegant quote: “One strategy is worth 100 tactics”. It captured endless discussion on a blamange of tactics and tools. But a worrying dearth of strategy.

Brand thinking with the structure of real strategy was clearly not the focus. More so fun new tools that spew out metrics to a hungry audience wondering what to do with them. Wondering how they could potentially create new business value, if they had some kind of plan in which to interpret them. Where were the measures of brand equity anyway and how did digital contribute to lifting them?

Then the reason dawned – these were creatives in a playground full of new toys. Can we really expect them to work to a strategy?

Enter the seasoned architects. They remind us that exchanges of value are based on trust. Trust is created by relationships with people behind the brand. People that operate on principles and values, not scripts or rules. This blends across touch points in the business. At its core is communications – co-ordinated across functions, beholden to a bigger strategy. A strategy that in this new world is not set and forget. It is iterative and fluid. And who drives that, when so few senior people understand the medium?

Do not be alarmed, we are passing through the twilight zone and will shortly arrive…somewhere! More soon…

How a Common Currency Helps

The common currency that many communications professionals seek is the effect on an audience. This is brand. It is a measure of attitudes, an understanding of reputation amongst key publics or market segments. But why are attitudes important? Because we know from consumer behaviour theory that attitude change must occurs before behaviour can change. And behaviour change is generally what marketers want. Whether its product trial, brand shift, increased usage or brand advocacy. It could even be social change, such as socially responsible drinking. Finally, by knowing where attitudes sit we know more about planning relevant communications. So the steps can be mapped as follows:

• Social (& other) communication activity occurs
• Attitudes are changed in some way
• Brand shifts
• Behaviour changes toward that desired
• Advocacy status shifts

The other important thing about a common currency is its a universal success measure. Universal across all your communications activity. So if you keep track of the activities you did and your brand health resulting then you can relate the two together. Its just cause and effect. More often its probably 'causes' plural, reflecting multiple activities and thats good because integrated communications is all about synergy. Where it gets tricky is separating the causes to help understand what to do more or less of. But its worth the effort because that understanding can save you big chunks of budget and/or precious time that would otherwise be wasted. Simply put understanding drives good planning and good planning creates new value.

So the question becomes "What was my return on each communications activity?". Over time this can be answered if you are systematic about your tracking. In fact, simply charting the communications activities against brand preference scores can be very revealing. Even better, if you can evaluate acitivites to convert them into outputs like reach and tone of media or blogs and number of people attending events. Building up that collection of metrics creates an asset to improve decisions and prove your results. Also, you then have the option of using more sophisticated statistics. These can show how strongly each activity drove brand or sales. And even what type of content to focus on. For more how-to info see this document.

Imagine how it would change your comms planning if you knew, for example, that the Trust brand attribute drives 22% of your brand preference result! Or that for every $1 you spend on PR you get back $5.50 in Sales but only $2.70 for advertising. There's a compelling value proposition.

Need Market Traction - Get it with Attitude!

Understanding attitudes is the next step. Traditionally this has been done by market research and in particular qualitative research. A semi-structured exploration of thoughts, feelings and ideas is an incredibly valuable reality check for marketers and communicators. It enables you to test and explore in an organic way with rich insights resulting. In the social media, many of these opportunities exist already in the conversation stream. Whilst you don’t get to select your respondents, the feedback could be nonetheless valuable. On the upside it is a ‘clean read’ by observation in a ‘natural’ environment. On the downside, strong opinions may crowd out others and Distance bias may also inflate persona’s. The bottom line is that understanding is created from a unbiased position and assembled in a systematic way. By either method, the resulting insights should contribute to a structured set of frameworks and guidelines.  


Armed with this valuable understanding, we then set out to change attitudes with appropriate communications. But how do we know that we have succeeded? And there is no common currency to measure communications anyway, is there? Yes, there is! The problem is many don’t get to see that currency measured properly or at all. So there is no accurate yardstick. No diagnostic if things don’t come out as expected. And thats the topic for next time!

The Mechanism of Social Media

In preparing for the upcoming ad:tech 2010 conference, I drafted some initial thoughts around a session that seeks to explore how we can create and identify more business value from social media. There are several threads to consider in that discussion so here are some thoughts on each of those over the next few posts.

Firstly, an understanding of the mechanism of how social media works creates a very useful foundation. Social media is a lovely, unstructured channel for communications and feedback. The session appropriately highlights that its value potential comes from how it is used as a three-way messaging channel. Three-way because people either seek opinion, offer opinion or observe opinion. This blog captures and defines that concept with Australian market research.

In the commercial world, messaging either drives or erodes business value. But how does it do that? Specifically, how does social media do this? That question is at the core of understanding how to build more value.

Essentially it’s a special kind of WOM. The research confirmed what many suspected: WOM that pans is more powerful than WOM that praises. This is because more people are told and the advice is weighed more heavily from friends. There is also a status gain at play whereby good advice boosts status of the advice giver.

So in sharing advice and opinion freely, peoples attitudes are being influenced. Its fair to say that not all communications will change attitudes. Much of it will be neutral or reinforce existing attitudes. But lets say we are seeking to understand and change people attitudes so we will focus there.