But before examining how analytical methods detect bias, it’s important to decide what we mean by the term ‘bias’ in this context.

One definition is:
To show prejudice for or against (someone or something) unfairly: "the tests were biased against women"; "a biased view of the world".

Another:
To show prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. 

Note that inherent in both definitions of bias listed here is the presence of the somewhat allied notions of the absence of fairness and of prejudice. 

In other words, bias can be said to be present when an opinion or position is taken up without a fair examination and presentation of both sides of an argument, or where a judgment is made and a position expressed prior to the examination of the facts.

Based on these definitions, it is not enough for us to claim that a media organization is biased simply because it disagrees with our position. Rather, there needs to be evidence of unfairness or prejudice in what it publishes or broadcasts – and this includes the practice of presenting just one side of a story as though it were a fair and reasonable representation of both sides.

Fortunately identifying the elements of bias is not a particularly difficult task so long as one has: (a) the right data handling tools and (b) a set of proven analysis procedures to follow, and (c) quality control regimes capable of checking analysts’ objectivity.  Armed with these, bias can be detected though a fairly simple assessment of the nature and position of the messages that comprise a set of news articles, and through which all positions are put and arguments made.

There is one more thing to keep in mind however.  When it comes to an examination of media content, bias is a relative concept - and spotting and quantifying it is an exercise in comparative assessment rather than absolute determination.  So in order to make an assessment in respect of the presence or absence of bias in the media, an analyst needs to have access to a representative volume of material from multiple publishers and over a reasonable time frame.

Only then can any assessment be considered to be accurate and defensible.

Some of the message characteristics media analysts look for are:

1. The selective omission of facts that are pertinent or critical to either side of an argument, but which are raised and presented elsewhere as a matter of course
2. Inclusion of statements that are at odds with other sources and which could be said to be false or misleading
3. The deliberate disadvantageous positioning of key facts – perhaps by hiding some valuable piece of information at the very end of an article
4. Presenting personal opinion or hearsay as fact
5. Deliberate substitution of emotive for factual arguments in order to obfuscate the matter under examination
6. Demonization of those seeking to present another side of an argument rather than dealing with the points they raise.

Once any of these message characteristics are identified, validated and tabulated, it is a relatively straightforward affair to determine the extent, precise nature, and perpetrator of the bias.

Sean’s post was supported by comments from Professor Jim Macnamara – who teaches at a Sydney university.

Sean says you shouldn’t worry about measuring communication activity when:

1. You cannot make a difference,

2. You’re unwilling to do what it takes to make things better, or

3. It’s more expensive to measure a program than to do it.

The more I’ve thought about his words, the more I struggle with the logic.  To illustrate why, and to provide a kind of reasonabilitytest for the arguments, I’ve applied Sean’s thinking to another everyday form of measurement: accounting.  Why accounting? Because both PR measurement and accounting are simply means to an end; they’re tools that ideally inform better organizational outcomes.

They both do that by assisting an organization to: understand its current position, inform planning efforts, and determine the right tactical responses to various situations.

Anyway, Sean’s statements – when applied to accounting – look like this:

1. If you can’t make a difference to a business situation, you shouldn’t keep a record of it in your accounting system, or report it to your executive team, your country’s Taxation Office or your shareholders.  Stuff happens, and rather than quantifying the damage, you should just get over it and move on.
   
   
2. If you’re unwilling to do what it takes to remedy a business problem – maybe by taking the tough decision to close an underperforming plant or by making certain staff members redundant – there’s no point in keeping track of the impact of your inaction, or in informing key internal and external stakeholders.  Again, just get over it and move on.
   
   
3. If a business transaction is seen as too small to worry about, then don’t bother recording it, or including it as part of your financial reporting regime.  The cost of doing the books just isn’t worth the hassle.

See how these sound at odds with accepted standards of transparency and completeness in this different context?  So why did Sean place limits on the need to measure what’s going on in your environment? 

I suspect there are two reasons.  Firstly, like many in the PR field, he may define communication measurement too tightly – perhaps as only the stuff you get external agencies to do for you.  But there are many organizations that successfully run their own measurement systems in-house – just as most organizations have in-house bookkeeping or accounting functions.  The cost of this work is built right into the comms function’s running costs, which weakens his argument that it’s an unaffordable practice under certain circumstances.  It simply becomes a necessary part of what we do.

Secondly, he may also be focused only on measurement of out-bound communication efforts.  But again I think that’s too limiting.

Is the function of a professional communicator purely to grind away at placing organizational messages?  Or should comms groups be about more than that?  Shouldn’t we also be monitoring and taking the pulse of the media space to see what’s happening outside our organizations, and alerting our executive teams to how events are likely to impact on the organization’s prospects?   If so, then we need to be measuring both inbound influences and outbound placement activities.

The big difference of course, is that assuming a more complete role allows professional communicators to provide valuable insights and to be advisors to their organizations: to become part of the management planning and execution process.

I hear a lot of communications folk complaining about not being taken seriously by senior management, and how PR in particular generally lacks the status of other professions.  I’ve been there and I understand the difficulties.

But perhaps one way to change all that is to stop being “the story placement guy” and to start providing a more complete more rounded communication service to the organization.  And that requires the input from good, informative measurement systems; ones that aren’t optional.

About a week ago I saw a comment on a LinkedIn forum, along the lines that media analysis never tells the “whole story”, and is therefore so flawed as to be useless to PR folk and the world in general.  Someone else agreed, suggesting that the most effective measure a PR professional can have is his/her “gut”, and that every other measure of success is useless.

I may be overstating their positions a little, but you get the idea.

These comments suggests several things to me:

1. These folk may have had some very bad experiences with measurement systems,
2. They have probably not spent a whole lot of time considering what the “whole story” or “complete picture” of any situation might actually entail, and how real-world measurement systems cope with that,
3. There is a need for colleges to provide those studying to become professional communicators with a more adequate introduction to the broader concepts of how measurement systems work and evolve.

_______________________________

In regard to the first point – they may have had some bad experiences with measurement systems.  That would not shock me at all. 

There are some pathetic excuses for media analysis systems out in the marketplace -- that are practically guaranteed to give you a bad experience. 

But there are also some absolutely lousy golfers out in the world as well, and their existence doesn’t necessarily mean that golf per se should be considered bad or useless.  In this case, it’s about how well something is done, rather than the thing itself. 

It’s true that there is some genuinely useless media analysis on offer around the world – but that simply does not equate to the proposition that all media analysis shares those characteristics.

Second point.  What’s a “complete picture” or a “whole story” anyway?

Let’s start this with an example. 
You’re driving along and you look at the speedometer.  It says you’re doing 95.  That’s an important measure, but will knowing your current groundspeed ever tell the “whole story” of what’s going on around you or in the car?  Of course not – and you don’t expect it to.

You know that a more complete picture would include many more data: the speed limit for the stretch of road you’re using, the prevailing weather, visibility, and traffic conditions, as well as the state of your car and its driver at that point in time.  You also know that all that information just wouldn’t fit on your dashboard, and if it did you wouldn’t be able read and absorb it without crashing your car. Which defeats the purpose of giving you helpful little bits of measurement that guide your actions - like your current speed.

The bottom line is, the “complete picture” or a “whole story” is almost never available to us.  And even if there were, a single metric wouldn’t paint it or tell it. 

The world is just too complex for that. 

Most times, measurement systems are there to present just the stuff you really need to know right now – maybe in order to do something better or safer, or in the case of a well-designed media analysis regime, to make better business decisions in respect of your media positioning.  And often, that’s enough.  It’s certainly a whole lot better than not knowing anything. 

Point three.  Here’s a short introduction to the realities of measurement.

1. No matter which human endeavor you’re talking about, no measurement system is perfect. 
   
   
2. Today’s measurement systems are often as good as we can make them.
   
   
3. There’s almost always a better measurement system under development.
   
   
4. Using well thought-out, well-designed measurement systems makes the world work.  From the power, water and gas supplies we take for granted to traffic management, food delivery, and health services … everything is facilitated by the effective implementation of measurement systems.  And PR is no exception
   
   
5. Depending on how your organization thinks about measuring performance, it may be untenable to present “what you feel in your gut” to your senior executive team as proof that as a PR professional you (a) know what you’re doing, or that you (b) have succeeded in accomplishing your allotted task, or you (c) should be taken seriously in a world where most people are held accountable via hard numbers.

Regarding media analysis systems in particular: they can answer a lot of questions regarding any organization’s competitive media landscape – which in turn can inform both strategic planning and tactical responses to situations that arise in the media. 

Like all measurement systems, media-centric metrics need to be tailored to and aligned with your circumstances and your requirements - by people with the skills and the tools to do so. The alternative may be nothing more than (expensive) lies, damned lies and statistics.

You might think that someone remarking on the high number of suckers in the community just had to be a swindler.  And that’s a reasonable call. But the consensus among folk who study such things is that P.T. Barnum never actually said it.

However that hasn’t stopped people saying he said it.  And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

These days, if someone in the media (be it traditional or social) says you said something, or says that you’ve done something, a lot of people will probably believe it -- even if it’s a total fabrication.  If you’re wrongly credited with something good, you can probably relax.  But if you’re falsely blamed for anything bad, your personal or professional “brand” just might be in big trouble.

In a recent newsletter, US measurement guru KD (Katie) Paine provokes thought by asking a number of questions regarding the impact of the sentiment in media stories (also known as tone, or favorability).  http://kdpaine.blogs.com/themeasurementstandard/2011/05/does-sentiment-matter.html

Her first question is along the lines of: Does it actually matter?

Carrying out media and reputational research for literally hundreds of companies and Government agencies over the past 16 years, tells me that whatever messages are linked to your brand matter a great deal. 

That’s partly because they frequently carry with them either overt or inferential favorability, and partly because these days those same messages wind up being widely syndicated.  They hit audiences from many sources, over and over again. And that learned reputational narrative could effectively destroy your personal or organizational reputation.  That’s a place you definitively do not want to be.

In support of this assertion, consider these two statements:

1. Our attitudes influence our behavior. 
2. Attitudes are formed or changed through repeated exposure to consistent messages, from multiple, credible sources – in the context of our culture.

If these statements seem hauntingly familiar, it’s because they’re an aggregation of the basic stuff you learned in Communications 101, with a smattering of Learning and Cognition Studies thrown in for luck.  They also lie at the core of most professional communication endeavors – regardless of whether we’re talking about above the line, or below the line activities.

To put it another way, if we hear the same thing from enough of the people we trust, we’ll generally think it’s true – so long as it doesn’t conflict with some of our most closely held cultural values.

P.T. Barnum’s remark about not caring what was said about him may have been nothing more that a throwaway line.  He was after all, a journalist in his earlier life, and knew the value of good publicity. 

I think if P.T. could have looked into the future to see how many people would feel the need to defend him against the slur of the wrongly attributed “sucker” quip, he might have said: “Spell my name right and get your facts straight.  Don’t you boys know … sentiment matters!”

For those who have never encountered AVE, it’s an antiquated measure that seeks to represent PR success as a single dollar figure.  So why is it still demanded as a PR effectiveness measure by executive teams in organizations all around the world? 

Well, as metrics go it’s very simple to calculate … and it’s easy to understand any ‘score’ that’s in dollars or euros etc. After all that's the language of business right? This appealing combination of simplicity and ease explains why executives teams are hooked on AVE.  It’s just a pity that it isn’t accurate. Let me explain why. 

Advertising Value Equivalent – as the name suggests – is all about putting a total dollar value on the volume of coverage a PR team places in a given timeframe.

The formula is simple:

AVE = the total column centimeters occupied by your stories multiplied by the cost of placing ads that occupy the same column centimeter space, across all the publications in which the stories appeared.

The resulting figure is supposed to represent how much it would have cost you to buy ads that cover the same page area as your stories.  But what does this really mean in terms of answering questions that can make a difference to your comms efforts?

Using AVE-centric KPIs forces communicators to focus only on the largest publications or media outlets: those that charge the most for ads. Forget targeting key messages to specific stakeholder groups where you may get superior impact or up-take of your ideas.  AVE forces comms groups to trade insight, skill and precision for raw size, homogeneity, and mediocrity. That's how they "win" with this metric.

Further, AVE is an aggregate that cannot inform an organization as to why a campaign worked or didn’t work.  It’s just a dollar figure, devoid of depth, which robs organizations of the opportunity to learn and improve.

Communicating with customers, employees, regulators, investors and other stakeholders is a challenging and let’s face it, untidy task.  It’s also an activity that doesn’t lend itself to simplistic measurement, but don’t get me wrong, it can definitely be measured … and very effectively at that.

All we need to measure communication effectiveness better, is to answer the right questions.  Here are some suggestions:

1. How often did we manage to place our messages in front of our target audiences, in comparison with those we’re competing against?
2. How consistently did we place those messages?
3. Were our messages couched in favorable terms?
4. What evidence is there that our messages elicited the desired shift in audience attitudes?
5. What evidence is there that our efforts have brought about desirable audience behavior (like buying our products or services etc.)

This is not an exhaustive list of course, but you get the idea.  The right questions in respect of good media analytics are typically those that serve as a bridge between our objectives and indicators of our success.

Seeking to answer the right questions about any communication effort, and thinking about these before racing out to implement a campaign, leads to better campaign design, and gives you a fighting chance of being able to link comms efforts to business outcomes.  And that’s something AVE simply cannot and will not ever deliver.

Now, which way to rehab?

It’s not as though communicating your organization’s broader value proposition is a trivial matter. I’d argue that placing your organization’s key messages in front of key stakeholders in a consistent and positive manner is at least as important to organizational success as delivering an excellent product or service.

And to those I’ve met who persist in thinking of communication activities as being somehow “fluffy” and insubstantial in respect of their contribution to positive organizational outcomes, I ask - how or why anyone would pay good money for a product or service if they’ve not been told:

(a) that it exists,

(b) why its deserves to be purchased over competitive offerings, and

(c) how and where they can buy it?

The reality is, effective communication of an organization's value proposition maximizes success.  Anything less contributes to inefficiency, mediocrity, or failure.

I suggest there are four main reasons for communication analysis being less common than it should be:

• Lack of awareness of how other organizations successfully measure their communications success.
  It’s hardly surprising that most organizations won’t trumpet how their analysis regime gives them a competitive advantage when it comes to communicating key messages to target audiences.  Or how measuring campaign success tends to yield more consistent improvement and greater efficiencies than their competitors. Yet such insights can be vital in justifying the implementation of a new analysis regime.
  
  But that doesn’t mean such information is totally unavailable.  Some (very large) companies I know, are happy to attend seminars and tell participants what they’re up to.  You just need to keep your eyes open for seminars where such presentations or workshops are on offer.
  
  Alternatively, most established analysis houses have a plethora of “sanitized” case studies they can share with you.  Of course, their clients’ names and any other identifying details will have been removed to protect their investment and corporate privacy, but the important bits - the problem that needed a solution, the approach that was taken in terms of designing the analysis regime, and the outcome - will have been preserved.  All it takes is a call or an email.

• Fear on the part of professional communicators.
  A number of the folk I’ve spoken with over the years have expressed concern that measurement would expose their work to scrutiny from people who ‘don’t understand the field’.  And to some extent they’re correct.  However this is a chicken-and-egg situation: something has to come first.
  
  If any activity is not measured or its operations explained to a management team, it’s only natural that many will think of that thing as arcane - and possibly useless.  After all, they’ve not been given any opportunity to “understand the field”. 
  
  When delivered correctly, measurement breeds understanding.  And in the case of organizational communication, that understanding fosters a view of PR and marketing comms as being a key component of the organization’s business.

• Perceived lack of “standard metrics”.
  Over the course of a year, I see many PR articles – mostly from US organizations – talking about the need for standardized metrics.  And while progress toward a set of globally recognized standard measures is being made, the rate of progress seems to me, much slower than it should be.
  
  At the risk of being howled down by my US colleagues, I believe there are 5 core communication metrics available to us right now, that allow us to answer almost any question in respect of a campaign’s success:
  
  - How much coverage did we receive vis-à-vis our competitors?
  - How consistently did we receive that coverage?
  - How positive was the coverage?
  - How clear and consistent was the messaging?
  - How impactful was the messaging (targeted, focal, etc.)?
  
  And best of all, these measurement elements have proven valuable in a whole raft of correlative exercises that link communication efforts with the accomplishment of campaign objectives and back-end organizational outcomes (like attitudinal and behavioral responses, including sales).

• Outdated technology.
  Many of the old media measurement systems (still used by some analysis houses around the world) just cannot keep up with recent developments in the media, or with the complexity of today’s broader competitive environment. 
  
  Maybe that’s not surprising … since most are based on methods that are straight from the 1920s.  They simply cannot deliver what many professional communicators want. 
  But that doesn’t mean you have to shelve your analysis plans. 
  
  There are several new and far more advanced methods out there, that can cope with the explosion of social media channels, and increasingly complex competitive landscapes.  So before making a decision to just sign up your clipping company or PR agency to deliver an analysis regime, talk to a few boutique analysis companies.  Then go with whoever can show they’re not still living in the 1920s - using outmoded coding based analysis systems.
  
  There's no question -- a practical, effective analysis regime is a clever piece of work, but implementing it shouldn't be difficult or stressful for you.

Late in March, Ragan’s PR Daily newsletter described a PR event in the US.  It laid out some of the points from a discussion that took place titled, Why PR’s future May Not Look Like PR(http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/7703.aspx).   As I read through the piece, I saw a reference to the emerging 5-minute news cycle.  This was in the context of how social-media tools can provide people with the ability to react to a story almost instantly – commenting, praising or criticizing whatever they’ve just seen or heard. 

Bottom line: the adoption of social media platforms can see entire, new conversation-threads emerge in just five minutes – and this rapid reaction time has the potential to impact on the fortunes of any organization that’s being discussed.

So, in this case, the term “news cycle” is all about the speed of response of an audience. And that’s quite different to how I’ve usually thought about it. For me, the notion of the news cycle equates to the often-mentioned 24-hour news cycle. In my mind, it’s about the global news machine being always “on”, never sleeping, perpetually vigilant, and on the lookout for a hot story.

Thinking about the news cycle in the sense of a borderless beast that never sleeps, drives an organization’s media monitoring and analysis buying decisions towards offerings with global reach, and 24 hour-a-day vigilance. But adding the concept of increased audience reaction-speed to the mix, makes both monitoring and analysis significantly more challenging.

All of a sudden we have to add raw processing speed to our requirements for global reach and perpetual availability. We find ourselves asking how quickly and how often our monitoring agencies can gather and present critical news and how fast we can analyze that content.

Turning up the pressure still further, is the almost incredible scale of today’s media landscape.  How do you capture what’s being said across the seemingly endless list of news and social media sites? After all, any one of these – and there are many millions of sites out there – might be critically important to your organization under certain circumstances, and totally irrelevant otherwise.

The off-the-top-of-the-head answer to addressing this need might be to aim for “monitoring with works”, the super-sized, deluxe mega-burger of the monitoring and analysis world with global reach, 24–hour vigilance, real-time monitoring of the entire media universe, and the instant availability of in-depth analysis.

However I would argue that such an approach is an incredibly expensive overreaction, which may not even be possible using today’s commercially available technology. 

Instead, I propose more of a balanced hierarchical approach to monitoring and analysis. The concept is simple – taking advantage of the inherent nature of today’s media. 

The collective of communication channels we label “the media” exist on a more highly interconnected, interdependent “landscape” than ever before.  So, if a big (read damaging) story breaks anywhere on that landscape, the ripples are felt across many channels.  And because no big story exists in isolation, monitoring and analysis of a representative set of influential media outlets – both mainstream and social – can serve as an effective early-warning system for impending crises.  The advantage of working with representative proxy sets of media sites is that it allows organizations to cover all their key audience groups in both a timely and cost-effective manner. 

A logical extension of this thinking, also allows organizations to segment their analysis efforts such that they can get a heads-up from on-line, dashboard reports in near real-time, while also enjoying more in-depth analyses of their competitive position in monthly or quarterly increments, in order to identify longer-term trends.

Easy access to social media tools may well shorten the response time for audiences to voice their support for or opposition to our organizations … a veritable army of instant critics.  But it is also true that there are proven monitoring and analysis tools that can deal with this development.  These can assist professional communicators to assess their competitive environment, and inform both strategic plans and tactical responses in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

If you look on www.brainyquote.com, you’ll see that despite spending a lot of his time grappling with complex questions of theoretical physics, Professor Albert Einstein had much to say that was common sense and simple.  My favorite quote is: “Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler”.

You could also express this idea as: don’t make it more complex than it is, but don’t dumb it down too much either.  This little piece of wisdom applies to many things, including media-based communication efforts - and their analysis.  

The issue of perceived complexity needs to be addressed now, because recently I’ve seen an increase in the amount of state-of-the-industry commentary, of the scary kind.  The common theme is that the advent of social media has made, or will soon make the practice of PR, advertising, and anything else remotely connected to organizational communication, either obsolete, or a whole lot more complex … or just plain impossible.

Now given that all change brings challenges, you could say that the emergence of a new media channel is bound to take some getting used to.  After all, social media is today’s version of television, which I’m sure presented significant (perhaps greater) challenges to communicators of the day, when it first emerged as a major new channel through which organizations could reach stakeholders. But far from being bearish about the situation, I see social media as a collection of fantastic new communication channels, which can present valuable opportunities for organizations to engage in proper dialogues with their various stakeholders.  From where I sit, the possibilities are more exciting than they are frightening. That also applies to the analysis of communication success in this new world.  There is absolutely no need for alarm, simply a requirement to see the situation … as simple as it is, but not simpler.

You see the foundation that underpins any kind of media content analysis remains the same - whether it’s directed at traditional media outlets like newspapers, magazines, television and radio, or the various forms of the “new media”: blogs, tweets, wikis etc. Like the communication effort itself, success in analyzing how well we’re getting our message out there, comes down to understanding the way in which people learn things, and how that can influence behavior.  This is something we all learn in Communication 101, but is sometimes lost in the daily hubbub of professional life.

I encapsulate this notion in the following statement:

Behavior is affected by our perceptions, and our perceptions are formed or changed by repeated exposure to consistent messages, from multiple, credible sources, in the context of our culture.

Turning this into an analysis method means tracking five ‘core’ characteristics of media presence:

1. Volume of Coverage per unit of time
   (Minute/Day etc., depending on the situation)
2. Consistency of Coverage
3. Content Favorability
4. Message Clarity and Consistency
5. Appearance Impact.

Of course there’s a bit more to the process of running media analysis regimes than just capturing those five data elements, or I’d be out of business.  But my point is that the building blocks of a well thought-out, proven analysis system will apply equally to any communication channel - including social media. 

So, in the words of Douglas Adams, that other great thinker and author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – “DON’T PANIC”.  After all, it’s just another communication channel – albeit a shiny new and exciting one.

Perhaps you already get a monthly clipping book and ad-value report from your agency … but whatever the situation, all of a sudden and right now, the communications team has to measure performance differently – more in-depth. And (situation normal) both the budget and time frame are tight. So, what do you do?

Faced with this situation, professional communicators often take one of the following decisions:

• They give the task to the guys down in market research (that’s if there are guys down in research, of course)
• They bring in an economics student or someone studying statistics, to do the work as an intern
• An existing comms staff member is seconded to undertake the analysis task
• The PR agency takes on the responsibility for the work
• The organization hires a specialist analysis house – either directly, or through its agency.

Any of these options can be viable, but you will need to really understand the circumstances before making a decision.  After all, trying out an analysis strategy only to change your mind later might not seem like a big deal, but trust me when I say that picking the wrong strategy, and delivering a piece of work that abjectly fails to meet the needs of the senior executive team, can be a very uncomfortable experience.

Some of the points to consider are: the complexity of the task, the issue of perceived independence and objectivity, the real cost of running an analysis, and the extent to which your selected strategy delivers the experience, depth of expertise, and focus to “get it right”.  For those interested in exploring these points further, more detailed examination of each point follow below.

For those who just want the simple answer, here it is: if you’re only going to do simple volumetric share-of-voice analysis, you can do it yourself.  However once you want to analyze sentiment, message cut-through and organizational-outcomes, I’d recommend engaging an independent, objective, professional analysis house.

The complexity of the task

Answering a question, like “what was our share of voice” really is simple. You source the articles that mention everyone in your industry, count the number of articles in which each of the competitors appears, and build a chart. Piece of cake!

The problems begin when you need to answer questions that sound simple at first, but which become a whole lot tougher the more you think about exactly what’s involved and how you might do the analysis. Some of the more prickly questions often revolve around: proving the relative favorability of organizations in your competitive set, identifying who placed the better messages (us or them), gauging success in terms of message cut-through, and assessing the benefit (or Return On Investment) gained from a campaign.

The reality is, answering these harder questions requires exponentially more expertise and resources than addressing the really simple ones.  So, before determining to charge ahead, it is important to ensure that you have the tools and the capacity to the job.  If you don’t, hire someone who does.

The issue of perceived independence and objectivity

When I first worked as a director of marketing and introduced the idea of measurement to my organization, each analysis report I tabled was the subject of some skepticism in respect of its objectivity. Particularly when the results were favorable to my team. 

While I felt somewhat insulted at the time, by what I thought was the suggestion that I might be “fixing” the results, it is nonetheless true that people who have invested a lot of hard work in a project, are emotionally attached to that project.  And that’s the case even if they’re not conscious of it (and most are not).  This makes it far more difficult for staff members or agency teams to be truly objective when assessing their own work.

The “antidote” to what we might call unconscious bias is to either: (a) adopt systems that have been proven to deliver consistently accurate, verifiable and defensible research, or (b) use an external analysis agency. 

The real cost of running an analysis program

People almost never consider the very substantial level of investment in computer hardware and software, premises, R&D, people, and the myriad other production elements needed to deliver a media analysis report to your desk or desktop.  Perhaps that’s because people typically underestimate the complexity of the things other people do.  After all, how hard can it be to source, sorting, analyzing and report on the media?  Hey, I get the morning paper.  I watch the news.  I can do that!

A PR colleague of mine once observed: “anyone with a pair of scissors thinks they can be a media clipping agency, anyone who can type thinks they can write better than their PR agency, and anyone who can count, thinks they’re an analyst.”  Perhaps that’s exaggerating things just a little, but you get the idea.

The reality is that to set up a media analysis group that can answer the really hard questions and deliver consistent, objective, high quality, and defensible analysis to your board of directors, you’ll need to start thinking about investing somewhere between hundreds of thousand and millions of dollars - and quite some years of effort.   The question must be asked if that’s an impost your organization is prepared to live with, or whether hiring an analysis agency makes more sense.  After all, a specialist agency will - or at least should - be able to deliver at a comparable research product for significantly less money than any in-house team, simply because it can amortize its establishment and fixed costs between many clients.  In contrast, the in-house team must pass the burden of its total expenses, directly to its one and only client.

The extent to which your selected strategy delivers the experience, depth of expertise, and focus to get the research right the first time

It’s important to recognize the difference between the possession of a skill, and the expertise that is built up from repeatedly applying that skill to a specialized task.

Just as we know that not every surgeon is expert at working on the heart, so to not every statistician, economist or market researcher is an expert media analyst.  The background qualifications may be similar, but that’s where it ends. 

The possession of a high degree of numeracy or mathematical intelligence in no way guarantees excellence in the production of a media research report.

At Cubit, we’re continuing to use narrative-analysis as a key element of our tailored analytics offerings.

To understand the notion of a reputational narrative, think back to the last time you heard someone describing their latest purchase, or talking about something they were passionate about.  Remember what they said and how they said it?

“I just got my new notebook PC, and I love it!  It’s got a really nice screen, it’s fast, and the battery life is fantastic!  Only thing I wasn’t wild about was the price; it was quite a bit more expensive than the PCs I’ve seen advertised … but did I mention the terrific keyboard!”

Or conversely:

“Went to that new restaurant down the road. Boy what a dump.  The food was dreadful, the service was worse … and it was expensive.  There should be a warning on the door.  Oh, did I mention that I got food poisoning?”

Each of these quotes is an example of a reputational narrative - telling us: (a) the factors that are important to the narrator, and (b) the extent to which the product or service met the narrator’s expectations in respect of these factors. 

By looking at larger sets of media content over time, and by extracting all the various narratives present, we gain further valuable knowledge about the ways in which various narratives have formed, and how they’re changing.  We see how the people have and are expressing approval of a thing, and how many of them are unhappy … and why.

Armed with this information, an organization is well equipped to make whatever changes it deems necessary to reverse the negative narratives, to boost positive ones, and to enjoy that winning edge.