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The Monthly
Measurement Maven and Menace
Awards

The Measurement Maven

Wayne Clough
President, Georgia Insitute of Technology

Dr. Wayne Clough is the best of the best. I've talked to a number of university presidents in the last few months, and it's amazing how few measure their image or their PR efforts. (See our recent article "BMOC Stands for Big Measurement on Campus: How to measure in the academic environment.") They may know the average SAT score of applicants, or what percentage of alumni give money, but few pay close attention to the communications that drive those results.

Dr. Clough is a star in the field. He invests in research in all forms, from academic to market to media research. He understands that it is a powerful tool for discovery, and that in the PR realm it is invaluable for charting future strategy and evaluating outcomes. That's probably why Georgia Tech is one one of the top research universities in the nation.

We are particularly impressed with Georgia Tech's program to provide its communicators solid data on which to make better decisions. We are proud to say (modestly) that their media dashboard is among the most sophisticated and advanced that we've created. Georgia Tech Office of Institute Communications and Public Affairs Associate Vice President James Fetig is directing those efforts. Jim is one of our past Measurement Mavens. -KDP

The Measurement Menace

Forrester Research

Forrester Research recently put out a report and accompanying case history on the ROI of blogging. The good news is that it costs $379, so with luck a lot of people won't read it.

The content is truly aggravating. The ROI calculations put forth by Forrester are all about equating blogging with traditional advertising. Witness this section:

Press coverage. We broke press into two categories: offline press and high-visibility Web placements, which includes high-profile bloggers. To estimate the value of offline press, we used a full-text PR database, finding 35 stories about FastLane in 2005 and 17 stories in the first 10 months of 2006. We then estimated the cost of buying similar-size advertising in representative publications.

And, finally, we projected the number of stories for the rest of 2006 and multiplied total stories by the advertising cost equivalent. To estimate the value of high-visibility Web placements, we used Google Advanced Search to identify well-known Web destinations that updated content about FastLane in a typical month.

We then estimated traffic levels for these sites and multiplied by the cost of CPM advertising on similar types of sites, in this case, InformationWeek.

This added up to approximately $381,000 in 2005 and $215,000 for in 2006...

This stuff makes me nuts because it totally and completely ignores the fundamental benefits of social media: the conversations, insights and relationship-building.

By putting this drivel into the hands of marketers hungry for ROI information, Forrester is doing an enormous disservice to the industry. And for that they get our Menace of the Month award. -KDP

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