the impact blog

• Social is Business
• Brands of the Future

A lot of buzz was generated on Twitter and the hashtag #indiasocial12 was trending on twitter. We monitored twitter conversations on this topic from Apr 1, 2012 to Apr 5, 2012 and our team of analysts have come up with the following key findings:

 

 

• 2731 tweets were made by 480 unique authors
• A "word cloud" analysis of the tweets reveled that "future of brands" was the most discussed topic overall.
• Online conversations included some famous influencers from the print domain as well - @madversity, @livemint, @SachinKalbag etc.
• A report on Santosh Desai's keynote on "Brands of the future" was the most shared link with 15 shares

The full report can be downloaded here.

We look forward to your feedback and suggestions.

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Thanks to all our clients, partners, team members and other well wishers. We had a great 2011 and hope for an even better 2012 for all of us.

 

Last year we worked with several of our clients. We helped them, as well as learnt from them, on how to MEASURE the impact of corporate communication programs.

In 2012, we are happy and excited that the year is starting with Asia Pacific's first PR summit on measurement thanks to AMEC. We are expecting top PR professionals from India to also attend and participate. On behalf of AMEC, we would like to extend a warm welcome to all PR professionals in India. We learn that PRCAI is also supporting this event. 

More details on the 1st Asia Pacific Summit are here. 

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AMEC published their new research - International Business Monitor study- today. It shows that, globally, measurement sector did well in 2009-10. AMEC members reported industry growth of 14% in year 2009/10 compared with 2% in the previous 12 months period.

Official announcement/ press release is .

Three findings which we found interesting are:

1. 76% said clients were becoming more interested in linking media analysis metrics to business goals and business outcomes.
2. More than four in ten (44%) believe that clients and PR consultancies have become more interested in developing programme measurement without AVEs since the Barcelona Principles were adopted in Spain in 2010. However 59% said they expected AVEs to remain a significant element in measurement programmes for the foreseeable future.
3. A surprise result was that 94% said clients talked about return on investment, but did not know how to measure it effectively

The points above clearly indicate the opportunity for the measurement industry. Seems clients are also talking the same language now :)

Another interesting finding was highlighted by Peter Granat, Chairman of AMEC’s Business Development Committee and President and Chief Operating Officer of Cision North America when he said “despite the sector’s growth, a major surprise in this year’s study was the small proportion of clients asking for social media measurement (11%). There is a clear disconnect between clients and PR consultancies saying they take social media seriously but not feeling it is yet important enough to measure.”

The above is true for India as well. Proportion of Indian companies with focused social media measurement programs is very small. Additionally, in India, companies and PR professionals, who believe that Social Media is very important, are also shying away from participating in social media conversations. Those, which are active on social media platforms, are also using the same as a broadcast medium rather than an interactive listening and engaging opportunity.

AMEC is presenting the 3rd European Summit on Measurement with the Institute for Public Relations, in Lisbon from June 8-10. More than 150 representatives from measurement companies and PR agencies in nearly 30 countries are expected to agree on industry-wide metrics and measurement techniques. If you have not registered, you may still like to do so at www.ameceuropeansummit.org

 

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You all may already know about the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC). AMEC is currently running a survey to find out the attitudes of PR professionals to the use of PR programme measurement. Since, Impact is the only Indian company to be a member of AMEC, we are supporting them on this effort from India. Our objective is to ensure that the views of the Indian PR professionals also make it to the survey.

We would ask you to take a few minutes to take part by clicking on this survey link. The deadline is 1st June.

The study results will be presented at AMEC’s 3rd European Summit on Measurement, to be held in Lisbon from June 8-10. We will also publish the survey results on our blog in due course. Your inputs will help us come away from Portugal with a series of measures to establish the value of communications to CEO’s and Finance Directors who do not know how to put a proper value on their PR spend or understand its true value.

Amongst the questions in the survey will be to ask PR professionals whether better definitions for the ROI of public relations are needed; if the language of PR measurement needs to change to connect better with the C-Suite and Board table and about the importance of clients in making the measurement of public relations a top priority.

As we shared earlier, Meenu Handa, an Indian PR veteran (and Director, Microsoft India) will also speaking at the event. Details here.

Thanks for your time and support!

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Press Release

11th April, 2011

 

Meenu Handa, Director Corporate Communications for Microsoft India, is the latest top speaker to be announced for the 3rd European Summit on Measurement, organised by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and the Institute for Public Relations and held in Lisbon from 8-10 June.

 

Ms Handa will join a panel of client speakers including representatives from FedEx and Philips in the key Summit Debate in Lisbon to challenge communications professionals to plan the future of communications programme measurement ROI by 2015.

 

David B. Rockland, Ph.D., Partner/CEO Ketchum Pleon Change and Global Research, who is running the Summit Debate session, said, “It is a huge statement of the growing importance of the Summit that Meenu has agreed to join us.”

 

Aseem Sood, Chief Operating Officer, Impact Research & Measurement Pvt. Ltd, AMEC’s first member in India, said, “Companies in India are increasingly exploring and investing in measurement tools to monitor the impact of their public relations programmes. Microsoft India is at the forefront of this initiative and her views on measurement from an Indian perspective would be invaluable at the AMEC forum. I urge public relations professionals in India to attend the Summit in Portugal and learn about new developments in measurement from international experts.”

 

Barry Leggetter, Executive Director of AMEC and Summit Director, said: “We are delighted to welcome our first speaker from the Indian sub-continent. Ms Handa’s presence reflects the growing importance of this event to PR professionals worldwide. We hope Ms Handa’s involvement will help to bring home to PR professionals in India the importance and benefits of programme measurement and analytics.”

 

The Summit Debate, called “The Measurement Agenda 2015” will be chaired by David B Rockland. He said, with Ms Handa’s involvement, the Summit Debate would include speakers from Europe, North America, India and guest experts from the Middle East, Latin America and Asia Pac.

 

As well as Ms Meenu Handa, other speakers at the three day Summit in Lisbon include: 

 

Daniel Höltgen, Director of Communications, Council of Europe; Alberte González Patiño, Director of Global Corporate Communications, BBVA; Kathy Dykeman, Head of Measurement & Insights, EMEA for Facebook; Andre Manning, who heads Global Marketing and Communications for Royal Philips Electronics and is Vice President of External Communications; Cindy Connor, Manager of Reputation Research and Trends, for FedEx.

 

Discount EarlyBird delegate registration is available now through the European Summit website, together with a special rate on accommodation at the Summit Hotel, the Tivoli Lisboa Hotel, Lisbon, can be booked through the Summit website.

 

For further information contact:

 

Barry Leggetter, Executive Director

4 1268 412414

Barryleggetter@amecorg.com

 

Robert W. Grupp, President & CEO

Institute for Public Relations

+1-352-392-0280

rgrupp@instituteforpr.org

 

Aseem Sood, Director & COO

Impact Research & Measurement Pvt. Ltd.

+91 9899 111698

asood@impactmeasurement.co.in

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Last year Impact published a desktop calendar using previously unpublished photographs from Kishore Bhargava. The calendar was distributed free of cost to Impact’s clients, associates, vendors, employees and their families; and was extremely well received and appreciated.

The objective of publishing the calendar, apart from being a convenient mechanism for re- call of the Impact brand, is also to publicize and promote the works of talented, upcoming  photographers.

 

Calendar 2011
Continuing with the success of the 2010 calendar, Impact wishes to produce a desktop calendar for the year 2011.

Theme for Calendar 2011
Wildlife - Animals in their natural habitat, not in captivity. Not including birds as the year 2010 calendar exclusively contained bird pictures.

 The challenge
Impact invites photographers – professionals, enthusiasts, amateurs, to submit their original pictures based on the theme of the calendar.

A panel of judges will select 12 best entries which will be part of the Impact calendar 2011.

Please click here to read the full terms and the procedure for submitting entries for the calendar. 

This is rather urgent as we are already in the first week of December and the last date for submission of pictures is December 10, 2010. So do rush your entries and spread the word around.

I do hope that the Impact 2011 calendar will feature some fascinating pictures and will become something of a collectors item.

 Cheers!

 

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Our team conducted a quick analysis of #AMEC10 conversations and discovered some stuff that you may find interesting.

A fairly large number of tweets (1141) were observed in a 6 day period (Jun 14 – Jun 19). Around 40% of the total tweets were RTs. Second day of the AMEC conference saw the maximum number of tweets.


The number of people that tweeted about #AMEC10 were close to the total number of participants that attended the conference at Barcelona. Interestingly countries represented by the Twitterers were also not far behind.


A comparison of the country of origin of conference participants and the Twitterers showed:

• 12 countries were represented at the Barcelona conference but not on Twitter
• 6 countries were unique only to Twitter conversations.

So, was there a buzz around #AMEC10 on Twitter?

While number above indicate an average of 6 tweets per particpant, the results also showed that top 5 twitterers accounted for 42% of the tweets.


Results also showed, only one of the top 10 twitterers (based on number of followers) attended the conference. Other 9 were following #AMEC10 on twitter and helped spread the message further.


The above is a very quick and dirty quantitative analysis of the twitter conversations. We would have loved to dive deeper into the issues and types of conversations, but then the team decided to go home early as I could not give them a valid charge code for this project :)

Comments are welcome!

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Tech Mahindra seems to have taken a cue from media reports while announcing Virtual Pool for Satyam's employees, considering impending layoffs at Satyam was the most talked about topic in the media post Satyam's acquisition by Tech Mahindra. Analyzing media coverage featuring Satyam in last 45 days, we observed that same was clearly dominated by "HR issues" Key highlights of this study are:

• Maximum news stories focused on HR issues, with fears of impending layoffs at Satyam (post its acquisition by Tech Mahindra), being extensively covered by the media.

• On layoffs, contradictory statements were noted from both, Satyam's board as well as the Government, as nobody wanted to be seen as the bad guy. Even Tech Mahindra tried to play it soft by announcing that though there are 10,000 excess employees at Satyam, "the company is looking for the least painful way to deal with the situation" commented Vineet Nayyar, MD and CEO of Tech Mahindra. 
  • Satyam Board: Satyam chairman Kiran Karnik ruled out the possibility of Layoffs. However, another board member CP Gurnani, while addressing middle and senior level employees in Hyderabad made it clear that surplus staff needs to be cut.
  • Government: In several media reports on 1st June, Minister of Corporate Affairs, Salman Khurshid announced that Government would not turn a "blind eye" to the issue of layoffs in the scam-tainted Satyam. However in an interview with Economic Times on 6th June, he categorically denied any plan to intervene in Satyam's layoff issue and expressed his confidence in Tech Mahindra's management.

• In view of constant media attention surrounding layoffs at Satyam, on 11th June, Tech Mahindra finally announced its Virtual Pool plan for the company. , Well received by the media, this plan was reported to help Satyam sidestep the sensitive "staff sacking issue", simultaneously saving large sums of money spent as salaries.

• Satyam received highly favorable coverage for announcing unexpected good financial results resulting in Satyam's share hitting the upper circuit two days in a row. The results were also reported to have nailed Ramalinga Raju's lie about Satyam's financial position which did not come out as bad as he had projected.

 

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Source: Metrica Numbers 2008/09

Recently, I read this report by Metrica on PR Measurement. It consolidates media analysis meta-data from more than three million press articles over the last decade to enable industry trends to be identified.

You can download a copy of the reportMetrica Matters here.

Here is a list of report findings that I find interesting; I have added an  INDIA perspective as well:

a. Contrary to the popular belief that media tends to promote more ‘sensationalist' (negative) coverage, this report finds that in 2008, just 4% of articles were classified as 'strongly unfavourable'.

My sense is that the same would be true for Indian PRINT media as well. However, this number may be way higher for the Indian BROADCAST media especially hindi news channels like Aaj Tak, India TV etc. Also, last few months of 2008 were really bad for the financial services sector. In India we found ~20% of print media articles  in the financial services sector to be 'strongly unfavourable' especially w.r.t international banks.

b. It also reports trends in AVE; which suggests that there still are companies in the western world that depend on AVE as a measurement metric.

In India also, most of the companies take AVE as an important measurement metric. But I am happy that lately, I have seen more and more corporates (espcially our clients) look at more evolved/ relevant metrics.

 

c. Broadcast coverage saw a decline in the last two years.

This comes as a surprise to me. On this one, things seem to be totally different in India. Broadcast is now as important (if not more) as traditional PRINT media.

d. Social Media, though small (3% share) is seen as an important medium.

In India, thanks to the low internet pentration, social media is seen as an important medium only by a small number of companies; in select sectors/ products/ service offerings. While most of the corp comm professionals may say that social media is an important medium they may not even be actively planning or monitoring the social media activities formally.

The report is fairly detailed and can be downloaded  here.

 

I learnt about this report here. 

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I recently read the key findings of the Pitch-Madison Media Advertising Outlook 2009 study. While you can read all findings of the study here. I would like to discuss only the following three.

 

1. Total advertising market grew 17% in 2008 and is projected to increase 2% in 2009. While the growth projection may sound depressing, these numbers serve as a good benchmark. Also, could a lower growth in advertising mean that corporates will increase their focus on PR? I don't know but I do hope so.
   
   
2. Print Media continues to dominate with 47% share. It may have lost 1% share compared to 2007 but its still strong. Same is the case in the PR Industry where maximum efforts are made in the Print Media program execution.
   
   
3. Internet vs Television: While it is expected that Internet spending will overtake television spend globally, the situation in India is and will continue to be very different. TV had a 41% share in 2008 compared to 1.7% for internet. Thus, in the Indian advertising world internet is still not a very important media. In the Indian PR world however, the importance given to internet focussed programs will certainly be much much higher in 2009. Because apart from reaching the target audience, discussions on internet have a spiraling effect as they may form an input for the stories featured in the traditional print media and television.

 

What do you think? Do share your comments.

Related links

a. Advertising Outlook for India 2009

b. TOI story Print ads corner 47% share in 2008

 

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