I recently came across this post from Nokia’s Arto  Joensuu titled Conversations are the New Conversion. In the accompanying SlideShare presentation, he makes the case that the traditional sales funnel is no longer linear and controllable. Consumers are now are in control and make their own journey through the “inverted funnel.” This puts new demands on marketers, as the traditional one-way forms of communication increasingly struggle to attract consumer attention. Arto’s presentation says that they have found that ~30% of engagements are generated from paid media, while the rest is generated through owned and earned media. This is why he argues that Social Media Optimization combined with SEO is critical. I couldn’t agree more. Whether you call it Social Media Optimization or Earned Media Optimization (which is the phrase we prefer), the basic message is the same: if you think that the media you own and the one you pay for is all you need to leverage in your marketing campaigns, then you’re missing a massive opportunity.

So what exactly is earned media? Earned media happens any time a brand or a product is mentioned or discussed in a place outside of a brand’s direct control. It can be anything from a positive review in the New York Times, to your best friend sending you a note via Facebook to check out this cool new product. Essentially, earned media is any media generated that you didn’t pay for directly, and if it is an endorsement or a recommendation by someone trusted, it can make all the difference. Conversely, one single bad review can be the ultimate deterrent, and ruin all well-laid marketing plans.

Now, it is important to note that while earned media occurs outside of a brand’s direct control, it does not mean that a brand cannot influence the process, or be part of the conversation. For one thing, PR has been – and still is – a proven tool for influencing influencers. And influence still matters today, even if the field of influence has fragmented and mutated into something many communicators are grappling with understanding. But crucially, it puts the onus on marketers and communicators to really understand not only what their target customers and their spheres of influence really care about, but how and where they talk about it. Because if you cannot communicate your message in a way that resonates with your intended target, they can skip it in an easy click.

And that is why the word “earned” is very apt. In an attention-deficit economy, it is harder and harder to earn the interest, attention, engagement, and ultimately, the trust of your customer. Therefore we think that it is critical for marketers to understand and optimize the impact earned media has on their brands. As Peter Drucker famously said, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot control it.” But understanding and optimizing earned media goes far beyond just measurement. As SEO and SEM pros will tell you, optimization means integrating analytics deeply into your planning process (and that planning process has to be actively managed and revisited). And it means going beyond “out-of-the-box” data. Data only becomes truly valuable when you apply the business context to it that makes it actionable to decision-makers. We’ll be posting more on Earned Media Optimization over the next few months, so stay tuned.

Republished From Institute For Public Relations Conversations Digest

“What do web analytics have to do with public relations?” It’s a good question, given that web analytics are most often used by SEO professionals and online marketers to track visitors and sales from search results and content advertisements.

The digitization of communications has enabled marketers to better understand the impact of their campaigns by directly measuring audience behavior. This is critical to companies that spend large sums on buying media placements or to optimize their website, as it has enabled them to understand what works and what doesn’t in dollar terms. There is no reason why the same methodologies cannot be applied to the media that a company “earns,” which is the media attention a company can generate through effective public relations and communications, or the “buzz” a product can generate online.

In fact, we would argue that earned media is actually a very powerful marketing channel that can be measured, understood and optimized on the same terms as paid media and search marketing. The number of unique visitors referred to an organization’s website by earned media, the pages that visitors access, and whether or not they completed some goal (e.g., downloaded a white paper, made a purchase, made a donation, etc.) can be directly tracked in a way that has not been possible before—at least not without extensive primary research.

In the new paper published by the Institute’s Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation, we outline practical steps for public relations practitioners who want to adopt web analytics as part of their media measurement strategy. The paper focuses on what sort of data public relations professionals can obtain from web analytics, how to conduct basic quality control for the data, and how to integrate the data with other media monitoring and research.

The paper addresses how web analytics can be used to answer broad questions such as:

• How do sale conversion rates from earned media compare to online marketing channels?
• Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
• Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
• Is “Key Message A” more effective at driving sales than “Key Message B?”
• Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
• Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?

At first glance, answers to these questions might appear out of reach. Fortunately, web analytics are more accessible and cost-effective than ever. This technology is not necessarily expensive (its free if you’re using Google Analytics) and most large organizations have a web analytics team that can help public relations teams get the data and reports they need to inform communication strategy.

Since web analytics technology has some technical limitations and most organizations sell products and generate sales leads through offline channels, web analytics might not be the “holy grail” ROI measurement system that the public relations industry has been waiting for. That being said, it might be the closest thing yet.

In much the same way that online advertising has revolutionized how advertisers can measure and optimize their efforts, public relations can leverage web analytics techniques to measure actual user behavior and optimize campaigns to get the best outcomes.

Go here to download the white paper or click the link below to got to the Institute for Public Relations website to read more.

Using Web Analytics to Measure the Impact of Earned Online Media on Business Outcomes: A Methodological Approach

The belief that traditional media has become irrelevant is well particularly well summarized by David Meerman Scott’s recommendations to PR professionals in the popular The New Rules of Marketing and PR:

“Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micro-publications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants that reach the targeted audiences that are looking for what we have to offer.”

This sounds like an exciting new way of doing PR, but the only evidence that is ever presented to support this perspective are case studies of wildly successful and serendipitous marketing campaigns– usually about a brand with a viral video on YouTube (think Mentos and Diet Coke).

For the vast majority of clients I work with, mainstream media is still well in control and by far the most “relevant” source of information. Influential blogs, forums, Twitter, even YouTube discussions around most types of brands (I admit, consumer tech might be an exception) all source most of their information from two very old-school forms of media: the press release and mainstream print and online publications (and I mean very old-school mainstream media, the sort that Murdoch owns). To help illustrate, I’ve shown a scrubbed version of a blog map for a month’s worth of discussions around one of our client’s brands below. The nodes indicate mainstream and social media sites. The arrows indicate on-topic inbound links, meaning that one site has sourced information about a brand from a second site. Sites that are solid gray are blogs and forums, while sites that only have an outline are mainstream media and press releases.

It’s a lot to take in but, basically, it shows that there are a handful of often-linked to and widely-read influential blogs and forums that usually source news from mainstream publications, such as NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, etc., as well as corporate press releases (in this month, the client’s press releases were the most often cited source online– something we see pretty regularly). These influential blogs are then linked to by much smaller, less well-read blogs and forums (what is usually called the “long tail”). To put it in a simplified graphic, the linking relationships usually follow this pattern:

While there are always exceptions, I estimate that 9 out of 10 times, this is what we see when we assess the relationship between mainstream and social media for our clients: mainstream media and press releases drive conversation in influential blogs, which are then linked to and re-purposed by the long tail. Mainstream media is hardly irrelevant. It still seems to instigate conversations in forums and blogs. Bloggers and forum members will certainly edit the content, and provide their own commentary on top of it. But the demise of mainstream and rise of social media isn’t nearly as black and white as many people seem to think.

Given what Context Analytics generally finds for its clients, I would caution PR professionals against throwing out their press releases and mainstream media contacts. Mainstream newspapers might be in financial trouble, and they are certainly reducing the ranks of journalists and the amount of content produced. But, this doesn’t mean that mainstream media is any less important. If you want to influence conversations that are happening in the long-tail, convincing newspapers and magazines to cover you is still going to be your best bet.

But the question is what the direction of the causality is – or to put it in the plain words of TechCrunch: “I really doubt that their level of social media engagement had anything to do with their revenue growth, it is just that the strongest brands are the most engaged.” This is not to say that successful social media marketing strategies can’t add value to a brand. To the contrary, the report could have simply stated that successful companies are more likely to be engaged in social media, and that laggards ought to try to catch up to keep up with successful brands.

So says a new study examining traditional news and blog coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Researchers at Cornell used computer algorithms to identify, track, and pinpoint the origin of repeated phrases on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs.

While a small subset of blogs such as Hot Air and Talking Points Memo generated internet widespread memes, most blogs lagged behind mainstream media by about 2.5 hours.

With Twitter getting all the credit for breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death, it’s nice to see mainstream media getting its due.

Read the complete paper, and New York Times coverage of the study, here: “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University

“Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle” The New York Times, July 12, 2009

Twitter was used to funnel information in and out of Iran: to organize Denial of Service attacks on government web sites, to distribute disturbing images of the crackdown, and to organize demonstrations all over the world. And as the New York Times quickly pointed out, “untold thousands used the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations,” voicing their anger that CNN and other cable news channels were not covering history in the making.

Some construed this as proof that mainstream media has failed because it cannot adapt to citizen journalism and the accelerated news cycles. And of course, Twitter is now being lionized as the future of news by those same people. But this misses the point. Live blogging by the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Huffington Post, to name a few, provided brilliant US-based commentary and aggregation of information, while the BBC, the Guardian and many other European news outlets were equally thorough and fast with breaking news. These sources fed the Twitter community, and vice-versa. As of mid day on June 16^th, the top most twittered link, according to Twit(url)y, a Twitter URL aggregation tool, was a Boston Globe story featuring Associated Press and Getty Image photos of the protest. Conversely, mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post linked to reports from citizen journalists and Twitter activists such as mousavi1388. Without that exchange of information, the story likely wouldn’t have gotten the legs that it did.

Perhaps this will be the defining moment for Twitter. In many ways it will depend on what happens next in Iran. Technology has played a progressively larger role in enabling the kind of open communication that is the enemy of oppressive regimes. But this does not negate the fact that we need solid reporting to bring out the truth – this should guarantee a role for both professional and citizen journalists – or we will all become poorer for it.

1) Which blogs are driving mainstream media content?

2) When are blogs cited?

3) Why do journalists cite blogs?

We chose to answer the “which blogs are driving mainstream media content” question by creating a ranking system based on the number of citations each blog received in mainstream media over the past two years. We chose this method, as it parallels one of the key indicators of influence in social media (linking relationships), and the results of this research can be found in the full Power 50 report.

There are a few surprises in the rankings (who expected that icanhascheezburger would be cited by mainstream media more often than GigaOm?). But, I think that the rankings will probably confirm what many have suspected all along—“influence” in the blogosphere is mostly concentrated among a handful of well-known political and technology blogs. Perhaps the most surprising result of the rankings is just how concentrated that influence is. The top three blogs, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Politico, alone account for 44% of all traditional media citations among the top 50 influential blogs.

Readers of the final report will find that the answer to the “when and why do journalists cite blogs” questions depend on the blog type. Political, gossip and business blogs are usually cited as primary sources. News breaks on the blog and the blog is cited as a source of information, but the blogger is rarely mentioned and hardly ever quoted. Technology and Lifestyle blogs, however, are often cited as secondary sources. News rarely breaks on these blogs and instead of being cited for content; the bloggers are quoted and treated as industry experts. We think this finding is particularly useful for PR professionals, because it suggests that political and gossip blogs should be thought of as “newswires” while technology and lifestyle bloggers resemble industry analysts in the way they add opinion and/or insight.

On a final note, it’s important to remember that, although the Power 50 blogs appear to be gaining influence in mainstream media (45% year-over-year increase in citations from 2007 to 2008), these blogs are not cited nearly as frequently as mainstream media sources. In fact, even relatively small regional papers, such as the Arizona Republic and San Jose Mercury are cited more often than the Huffington Post. Interestingly, even other blogs are far more likely to cite mainstream media sources. A quick search in Technorati reveals, for example, that the New York Times is cited twice as often in blogs as the most cited blog, Engadget. So, while it’s true that blogs are increasingly becoming trusted sources of news and analysis among journalists and bloggers, one should not forget that conversations in social media most often are sparked by mainstream media. While social media helps amplify, drive and add color to those discussions, any communications strategy needs to think about all media as a whole. Ultimately, the key to unlocking this is to understand key influencers – be they in mainstream or social media. This report provides one viewpoint on influence and data can be interpreted many ways. I’d love to hear your opinions on influence in the blogosphere.

Go here for the report: The Power 50: Most Influential Blogs