April Fool’s Day

Google changed their landing page today in honor of Topeka, who had changed their name to Google for the month of March as part of their effort to convince Google to select Topeka as a beta site for the gigabit fiber project.

The effective use of humor can go a long way towards personalizing your organization and creating goodwill.

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You Are What You Measure

In managing an effective communications program, one of the most important tasks is in choosing performance measures to determine your success. The things that you measure are the things you and your staff will give the most energy to. By closely aligning your measures to your goal, you can increase the odds of actually achieving your goals.

Here are some suggested measures that you could evaluate for use in achieving your communication goals.

Reach & Penetration

A basic measure of the success of your communications program is the number of people who see the media you produce. There are a number of metrics to determine if you are actually reaching the audiences you are trying to communicate with. The following measures provide information on your audience to determine reach (how broad) and penetration (how deep):

• Cable television subscribers (if you have a PEG channel),
• Number of your channel’s viewers (using a survey),
• Online video views (your website, YouTube analytics),
• RSS subscribers (your website),
• Blog/newsroom visits (your website),
• Traffic source (location of visitors/viewers),
• Raw author contribution to blogs (posts per month, characters per post, videos, photos),
• Document downloads from your website or hosted locations like Docstoc.com,
• Unique website visitors,
• Duration of website visits,
• Incoming links,
• Website transaction volume,
• Call center contact volumes, and
• In-kind value of ad and PSA placements (ad equivalency).

Level of Engagement

One way to measure engagement is to measure the reach of particular messages about engagement opportunities though individual communication channels and measure the actual participation, and then compare the media and message mixes to the participation outcomes. Most of the time you won’t want to experiment with live issues or events, so the opportunity for a rigorous approach is limited.

So while you may not be able to isolate the most effective communications mix, you can describe the overall success by collecting the following data:

• Attendance at events, forums, and meetings,
• Participation on boards and committees,
• Conversion or “click through” rates on opt-in email broadcasts,
• Participation in online polls and voluntary surveys, and
• “Citations” or shared web resources that you’ve produced.

Experience & Opinion

One of the more challenging aspects of the changes in media is that while there is now more subjective feedback available directly from constituents on issues, this flood of information is difficult to compile and analyze in a way that provides actionable data.

One way is to collect comments and feedback from various sources and conduct an affinity analysis to see what the general tone or direction those comments are taking.  To do that analysis, collect the following data:

• Satisfaction with City communications (City survey),
• User ratings (YouTube, Flickr, Etc.), both City-produced and user-content generated,
• Blog/Facebook/MySpace/Twitter mentions,
• Number of fans/subscribers/followers, and
• Comment tone on other sites.

Another area that is evolving and will require some attention in the future is in the realm of online reputation management. This is a type of media tracking that is done through subjective analysis of user comments on blogs, social networking sites, and discussion groups.

Media Tracking

One of the ways to determine the effectiveness of campaigns and other communications programs is to measure the number of times messages appear in earned media.

In July 2008, Reno began using Vocus, an online media tracking program to assist us in determining the placement and tone of media mentions of City policies and programs.

We had several challenges in implementing this program. The first was in designing search terms and setting up media sources to make sure that Vocus captured relevant media mentions. Second has been in reviewing and “scrubbing” collected data. For example, most television news stories are captured through transcript postings that include multiple stories from a single broadcast. Staff must read, edit, and format the entry to make it useful. This is time consuming and with current budget constraints we have let go the part-time staff who formerly managed this process.

Another example is in syndicated stories. The Associated Press will occasionally pick up a Reno Gazette-Journal story related to Reno and it will be republished on websites across the Country, making it difficult to determine what the actual reach of the story was.

It’s also expensive, with most companies like Vocus, Cision, Meltwater, or Burrelles-Luce starting between $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

We also purchased a television monitoring server made by Snapstream that records all four local news broadcasts so that we can make news stories about Reno available on the internal network to City staff.

Data collected under this rubric could include:

• Number of stories, both in general and on specific topics,
• Number of stories generated by City staff efforts,
• Tone of stories, and
• Value of coverage.

While this list is certainly not exhaustive, I believe it covers the important concepts in determining if communications have been successful, and acknowledges the broad range of media used by most governments today.

Do you have any good measures to share?