Measure What Matters

Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships

Katie Delahaye Paine

• Editorial: Wiley
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118016329
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Relations clientèles

In an online and social media world, measurement is the key to success

If you can measure your key business relationships, you can improve them. Even though relationships are "fuzzy and intangible, " they can be measured and managed-with powerful results.

Measure What Matters explains simple, step-by-step procedures for measuring customers, social media reputation, influence and authority, the media, and other key constituencies.

• Based on hundreds of case studies about how organizations have used measurement to improve their reputations, strengthen their bottom lines, and improve efficiencies all around
• Learn how to collect the data that will help you better understand your competition, do strategic planning, understand key strengths and weaknesses, and better respond to customer preferences
• Author runs a successful blog and serves as a measurement consultant to companies such as Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Raytheon, and Allstate

Don't draw conclusions or make key decisions based on guesswork. Instead, Measure What Matters and the difference will show in the most important measure: your bottom line.

Part 1

Not Your Father’s Ruler

Chapter 1

You Can Now Measure Everything, but You Won’t Survive Without the Metrics that Matter to Your Business

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

—Bertrand Russell

Until recently, the attitude toward measurement in business has been: “It’s too expensive and too complicated and really only applicable for major corporations.” In the past decade, however, a confluence of circumstances has pushed measurement and metrics onto the priority lists of businesspeople everywhere.

First there was the Internet explosion. The Internet, and specifically social media, has been adopted by businesses worldwide in record-breaking time. It took 89 years for the telephone to reach the level of household penetration that Facebook reached in just five.

As consumers increasingly research and purchase goods online, their behaviors, thoughts, and opinions have become easier to track and measure. At the same time, the proliferation of listening, analysis, and reporting tools has made such metrics affordable and accessible to every organization, from nonprofits to go-fast Internet start-ups.

Then there is the current global recession. In these hard times most every business is taking a hard look at what strategies, programs, and communications are working and not working. Today, if you’re in business and want to survive, you will need to continuously measure and improve your processes and programs. Whether or not you are measuring, your competition very likely is—and as a result probably knows more about your business than you do.

This book will do much more than just teach you how to measure. It will teach you how to measure what you need to make the decisions that are crucial to your business. It used to be that “he or she with the most data wins.” But today nothing is cheaper and easier to come by than data—especially useless data. It’s having the right data that counts.

While every program is different, all organizations have a core set of key publics with whom they need to build relationships, collectively known as the stakeholders. These include, among others: the media, employees, customers, distributors or sales force, the local community, industry influencers, financial analysts, and elected officials. Each stakeholder group requires slightly different measurement tools and slightly different metrics. That’s why this book is organized around the stakeholders—each with its own chapter and its own procedures and advice. This book shows you how to measure business relationships with just about any key public that your job involves.

Social Media Isn’t about Media, It’s about the Community in which You Do Business

Most of what I advocate in this book wouldn’t be possible or necessary without social media. We talk about social media as a shiny new object, as if it’s some sort of new toy for business. In fact, social media has changed everything important to your business. From marketing and sales to employee and financial management, the social media revolution has forced all of us to rethink how we approach business, our marketplaces, and our customers.

Today, customers talk to and trust each other more than they do companies. They choose how they spend their time and money based on recommendations from people with similar tastes and profiles. They trust, and therefore prefer to do business with, companies that are open, honest, and authentic. Companies with which they have good relationships are more likely to be forgiven when they make a mistake. Thus, companies that listen carefully to their customers and respond to their needs will survive and prosper. Those who don’t will be gone.

In order to succeed in this new era of easy and frequent conversations, it is critical that you continuously listen to and evaluate what your market is saying about you. Companies that do can promote themselves more efficiently, innovate more effectively, and operate more profitably.

Measurement Is So Much More than Counting

Before we get into the how-to’s of measurement we need to be clear on our definitions. Everyone in business already has some form of accounting in place. All business owners know how to count inventory, the number of ads they place, or the number of stories in which they are mentioned. They count their customers, their sales, and generally count their profits.

But counting is very different from measurement.

Counting just adds things up and gets a total. Measurement takes those totals, analyzes what they mean, and uses that meaning to improve business practices. Measurement of your processes and results—where you spend your time and money and what you get out of it—provides the data necessary to make sound decisions. It helps you set priorities, allocate resources, and make choices. Without it, hunches and gut feelings prevail. Without it, mistakes get made and no one learns from them.

What Really Matters to Your Business?

Only a handful of businesses—those that prosper, grow, and continuously improve—measure what matters. Most organizations, when asked what really matters to their business, would probably say, “my customers,” or “my employees.” And they’d be partially correct. But it’s not the number of customers and employees that matters, it’s the relationships that your organization has with them that matters.

Good relationships lead to profits. With good relationships, prospects become customers and customers become loyal advocates for your company. Thanks to good relationships, employees stay, learn, grow, and contribute to their organizations. Poor relationships result in more expensive operations, fewer sales, less customer loyalty, more churn, higher legal fees, higher turnover rates, more expensive recruiting costs, and, ultimately, disadvantage in the marketplace.

In public relations, if you establish good relationships with reporters, bloggers, editors, and other key influencers, they’ll trust your word, cut you slack in a crisis, and turn to you for your thoughts and opinions. A lack of good relationships with the media leads to crises escalating, omission from key stories, and less inclusion of your point of view in stories.

So what really matters is your relationships and the aggregated outcome of those relationships: your reputation. Today, if you’re not measuring the health of your relationships, you won’t be in business for very long. This book tells you how to measure those relationships and what to do with the data once you have it.

Why Measure at All?

When budgets are flush, there’s a popular misconception that it doesn’t much matter how you measure results, as long as there is a perfunctory number that shows up for your department every so often. But times aren’t always flush. And the bean counters and stakeholders are getting more demanding. Even when profits are rising, measurement saves time and money.

The spectacular proliferation of social media—from Twitter to Facebook to YouTube and beyond—means the average businessperson is faced with a bewildering array of opportunities and obstacles. It’s a new and rapidly changing world out there, and the most productive way to run your business is not obvious. The prudent and productive approach is to measure the results of all your efforts in a consistent manner and compare the results against a clearly articulated and predefined set of goals.

When I entered the field of corporate communications it was by way of journalism, and I had little practical knowledge of communications tactics and strategies. So I asked a lot of questions, such as, “Where do we get the most bang for the buck?” and “Which strategy results in the cheapest cost per message communicated?” At the time, no one had the answers at their fingertips, so I developed systems to get the data. And for more than two decades I have been refining those systems and developing new ones. You will read about them in detail in the following chapters.

Along the way I learned that measuring your success is not just another buzzword that follows Six Sigma, TQM, and paradigm shifts. It is a key strategic tool that helps you better manage your resources, your department, and your career. No matter what type or size of organization you are in, there are half a dozen advantages to setting up a measurement program. Here they are:

Data-Driven Decision Making Saves Time and Money

Making decisions based on data saves time and boosts your credibility. When faced with tough decisions, you’ll seldom find boards of directors or CEOs relying on hunches or gut instinct. Chances are any decisions made at the highest levels will be made following extensive research.

So why should other business decisions be any different? How credible would your CFO be if he got up in front of the board and said, “I know we’re making money because I see the checks coming in”? Just as the CFO relies on accounting data to give advice and make recommendations on financial issues, you need other data to decide where, when, and how to allocate resources in other departments, including HR, marketing, public affairs, communications, and sales support.

It Helps Allocate Budget and Staff

I once used a competitive media analysis to indicate the need for PR staff for a major semiconductor company. We analyzed this client’s presence in key media and compared it to that of three competitors to determine who was earning the greatest share of ink. As it happened, over a two-year period there was very little difference between the competitors, with the four organizations equally matched in coverage each month. But at a certain point the client’s results took a dive; all of a sudden its share of ink in the key trade media dropped to about two percent.

I presented the results and asked the audience, which included several managers, what had happened. The answer was: “That was when we reorganized and eliminated our PR effort.” I replied by demonstrating that, in the months following the reorganization, the market had had about nine times more opportunities to see news about the competition’s products than their own. That seemed to do the trick—the last time I was in touch, the PR staff had grown to about 10 people and their budget was increasing every year.

Gain a Better Understanding of the Competition

Your business or organization is always competing for something: sales, donations, search ranking results, share of conversations, share of wallet, or share of voice. So you need to know how you stack up against your peers and rivals. Measurement gives you insight into competitive strengths and weaknesses.

Strategic Planning

Deciding how to best allocate resources is arguably the most important responsibility of any manager. But without data you are forced to rely on gut instinct. And as accurate as your gut may be, it doesn’t translate very well into numbers. What you need is data—data you can rely on to guide your decisions and to improve your programs.

Measurement Gets Everyone to Agree on a Desired Outcome

You can’t decide what form your measurement program is going to take without an agreed upon set of goals. This alone may be the best reason to start measuring. Putting everyone in a room and getting agreement on what a program is designed to achieve eliminates countless hours of blaming and bickering later if the project doesn’t work.

This is especially true with social media. Too often people will complain that marketing dollars spent on social media are “unmeasurable,” when, in fact, the real reason metrics don’t exist is that no one ever articulated just what the social media program was designed to do. And, “getting our feet wet in social media” is not a measurable goal—unless you’re a duck.

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