New white paper on Social Media

We've just released a new white paper on social media, called Tracking the Influence. Influential web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang and Dow Jones' Matt Toll co-authored the report, which was based on the discussions from a blogger round-table held late last year.

For communications practitioners who are new to the whole social media phenomenon, the white paper basically tries to answer the question "why should I care about it".

It sets the scene with a discussion about the nature of Net-based conversations, the breakdown of barriers between buyer and seller, and the troubling stats that very few people trust CEOs. Troubling if you're in the PR team supporting that CEO and substantially more worrying if you are in fact a CEO.

It then looks at the discussion from the blogger roundtable, which pulled together influential bloggers and communications professionals. The participants sought to define what was important in social media, why we should attempt to measure it, and what those measurements should entail. The concepts of engagement, community, influencers, reach and sentiment generated much debate.

The paper concludes with some ideas around what capabilities an organisation needs to understand and drive sucecss in the world of social media, and lists a stack of helpful resources.

It's worth a read, particularly if you've been getting regular requests from your mates to join facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Plaxo etc.

New white paper available: Best Practices in Media Measurement

Dow Jones recently commissioned Professor Paul Argenti of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business to write a thought-provoking article about the evolution of and best practices in media measurement.

A key driver of the growing importance of media measurement is the increased number of C-level executives demanding accountability from their communications departments. Without
using new media-intelligence technologies, it is impossible for public relations or communications professionals to be truly accountable, comprehensively monitor media coverage, or make fact-based decisions regarding communications strategies.

This white paper is intended to help communications professionals understand how new media- intelligence technologies are changing their roles. It also provides ideas about how media measurement can be adopted to add more value going forward.

Feel free to download a copy of the article here.

What price reputation: BusinessWeek article references Factiva Insight

This week, a BusinessWeek article referenced Factiva from Dow Jones as one of the vendors who can help companies get more scientific about reputation management.

It said:

"That's why companies are trying to get more scientific about reputation management. Many big companies now shell out $2 million a year on image research. This will be a tiny slice of the $4.2 billion spent on PR this year, but such research is growing fast. To get a fix on how companies are seen publicly, they are hiring firms like Factiva and Delahaye that use powerful search engines to track databases of all print, broadcast, and Internet coverage and to search for trends."

The article debates amongst other things, whether a good reputation is linked to better stock prices. This echoes the findings of a white paper Factiva commissioned in 2005, entitled Strong Corporate Reputation Delivers Shareholder Value...But Who Controls It?. Worth a read, but if you want the short answer - yes. Good reputation was found to have impacted share price positively.

It was interesting to note that reputation management was not discussed too much at last week's PR Week Forum, as it had been in earlier years. As I mentioned earlier in the week, there was more focussed on online communities - which can certainly have an impact on a company's reputation.

Anyway, check out the BusinessWeek piece!