PR News Online — Measuring Corporate Reputation, Part II: Unrolling The Road Map, Reaching A Goal

Here's a nice summary of one approach to corporate reputation measuring from the folks at PR News Online. Many of the typical points we talk about are mentioned (clearly agree on and define your objectives, techniques and metrics). The article concludes that reputation management is more of an art than science and is imperfect but that "the numbers it provides are just as good as those offered by, say, the marketing department." And adds this metaphore.

Have you ever heard the story of the two guys in a tent contemplating the bear
outside? As one laced up his shoes to make an escape, the other looked on in
disbelief and said, 'What do you think you're doing? You can't outrun a bear.'
The other just smiled and said, 'I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to
outrun you.'

Nine Hours Ahead

I just barely had time to unpack after the Factiva Social Media Roundtable trip to Palo Alto and I am off again -- this time to Germany and France to talk about media measuring in Europe.

We are holding a customer roundtable in Frankfurt on Wednesday. No bloggers at this one. It's more of a chance for Factiva to talk to our customers and prospects about media monitoring and about the new world of social media. My hunch is that Europe (I know it's dangerous to generalize) is a couple of steps behind the States on putting together corporate action plans on monitoring social media. It seems that outside of a few industries and locales in the States who already get it, much of rest of the U.S. is about 6 months behind. So I suspect Europe is 6-12 months behind that.

I'm eager to hear feedback on Wednesday to see if I'll be surprised or not.

An Aside (and generating my own customer content): Kudos to Continental Airlines who wisked me off my delayed flight into Berlin and onto my connecting Lufthansa flight. They met me at the door of the plane, ran me to a waiting car and we zipped across the tarmac -- but too bad they couldn't get my bag to my second plane as quickly. (Huzzah to Lufthansa, who several hours later brought it to my hotel.)

The Day After -- My Head's Still Spinning

My head is still spinning from last night -- and not from the wine. There is simply so much to digest after a night with two dozen people who spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of social media.

What I'm saying is the Factiva Roundtable we held last night in Palo Alto was a success. Just about everyone in the room seems completely engaged and continued the conversations through drinks and dinner. Jeremiah Owyang, our guest emcee from PodTech, did a wonderful job and has written an amazingly complete post within hours of the event. He also managed to take some wonderful photos.

Huge thanks to Daniela, who took on this project with gusto because she just loves this stuff. Thanks also to Matt Toll, Saurabh Goorha and Sally Hammond, the others on our little team, for the hours they put into preparing for the event.

We are going to be working quickly to create some outputs from this -- white paper, blog posts, podcasts, etc. More on that soon.

Social Media Roundtable Attendees

As I stated previously, we're expecting 23 thought leaders at the Factiva Social Media Roundtable today in Palo Alto. With the 6 of us leading the event, we've maxed out the room. The intent was always to keep this intimate. Daniela created a wiki and asked the attendees to post their names if they wished. Respecting those wishes I only list those who did so to date:

• Andrew Lark, Founder, group lark www.grouplark.com
• Ed Terpening, VP Social Media, Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo Blog Index
• Christopher Kenton, MotiveLab, www.marketonomy.com
• Jeanette Gibson, New Media Communications, Cisco, http://newsroom.cisco.com/, http://blogs.cisco.com
• Brian Solis, FutureWorks PR, http://www.future-works.com/ / PR2.0, www.briansolis.com
• Ian Kennedy, Product Manager, Yahoo, flashpoint
• Jeremy Pepper, Social Media, Weber Shandwick / POP! PR Jots
• Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder, BlogHer, LLC; www.blogher.org
• Mike Manuel, Strategist, Voce Communications, Media Guerrilla
• Andrew Vignolo, Director, Market Trends & Analytics, Levi Strauss & Co.
• Jeff Beckman, Director, Worldwide and U.S. Communications, Levi Strauss & Co.
• Tony Obregon, Director of Social Media, Cohn & Wolfe

The attendees are a mix of PR/measurement practitioners, independent bloggers and social media thought leaders.

The Questions: Should social media be measured by business?

Daniela Barbosa (Factiva integration sales), Saurabh Goorha (Insight product manager) and I met for dinner with Jeremiah Owyang and John Aguilar of PodTech last night. The intent was to prepare for the Factiva Social Media Roundtable which is taking place in a few hours in Palo Alto.

(Jeremiah is just settling in at his new job at PodTech and you can tell he's jazzed because he can now focus all of his efforts on social media -- clearly where his heart is. )

Here are some of the questions we are going to be asking our slate of 23 social media thought leaders:

• Do you believe social media is important to the business community? If so should it be measured?
• Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
• If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
• Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
• So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?