By Rebecca Canan

As part of our 2010 research initiative, Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment, I’ve been thinking a lot about media monitoring.  After all, it brings a science to communicators’ efforts to develop messages that resonate with audiences—not to mention flow through their social networks.

In my recent chats with (smarty) CEC members, I’ve heard the name Katie Paine crop up quite a few times.  In case you don’t know her, she’s the CEO of KDPaine & Partners LLC and a PR measurement expert.  So, I thought I’d get Katie’s direct perspective on some of the questions that members—and we at CEC—are asking.

Rebecca, CEC: Communicators are often overwhelmed by the number of monitoring vendors out there, all lauding their services.  Then, when they finally select a service, it’s hard to make sense of all the data.  Is there an easy answer?  What’s been your experience in working with vendors?

Katie, KD Paine: My experience has been that many vendors “sell the dream”; that is, you think you’re going to sign-up and instantly receive all the data and intelligence that you need.  The reality is that it’s hard work.

I think that many of the traditional vendors like Vocus, Factiva, Cision, & Meltwater are a bit late in the social media space.  After extensively testing a variety of tools, we found that many of the most popular tools like Radian6 only picked up about 70% of relevant info.  Techrigy SM2, now Alterian SM2, was only 60% accurate.  BoardReader—which is not fancy—gives the basics and doesn’t miss as much, but it doesn’t have the fancy campaign management features.  And, in the interest of transparency, I worked extensively with SAS on their new SAS SMA tool, which answers many of these problems, in my opinion.

The bottom line is that collecting and counting data is only the first step. It takes people to do the data crunching and get the insights from the data.

Rebecca: Do you find that communicators need help with social media listening because they don’t have the right skills to analyze the data OR they just don’t have time?

Katie: It’s all about time.  You can’t automate everything and, especially with data analysis, you need human involvement.

Rebecca: What’s your biggest frustration in working with clients on social media measurement?

Katie: It can be hard for them to articulate their goals.  A lot of communicators face pressure and expectations from management, who expect their PR people to “count stuff.”  What impact does that have???  You become what you measure; you need to know what your goals are.

Rebecca: We work with a lot of CEC members who have skeptical executives.  How do you help them to see the value in investing in social media measurement?

Katie: I tell them that even if they aren’t currently in social media…their customers are talking.  Their potential recruits are talking.  Isn’t that important to your business? And if they don’t jump in, their competition will beat them to it.

Rebecca: Does that really work?

Katie: Yes, I find that reminding them of that reality helps them to see the importance.

Rebecca: How do you define influence in the social media space?  Is “influence” a metric you can track?

Katie: There’s not a standard way of looking at influence in social media.  Someone may have a scrollable list of followers, but that person may not really matter to your business.  Someone else may have only 50 followers, but they’re a former defense department official, a trusted voice in your industry, and actually have considerable influence for you.  You really need that human analysis.  It’s nuanced—we’ve put together a dashboard that helps prioritize influence using 27 different filters to measure it.

Rebecca: We’ve heard mixed opinions on whether the “principles” of communication are the same in social media vs. traditional.  What do you think?

Katie: The principles are the same—it’s all about building relationships between the brand and the people who use or buy that brand. Content analysis should always be a principle.  Does it contain your key messages?  Does it promote your company’s thought leadership?  There’s a big shift going on in terms of the integration between content analysis and survey research.  You can now identify a closer correlation between what you’re doing and what impact it has.

Folks, we’re having great discussions every day with thought leaders in this space (e.g., yesterday we chatted with Brian Solis!). Do you have questions we should add to our Q&A mix?