PeppercomBlog

Quick Survey from BIG

Posted by Matt and Milos

Peppercom's Business Intelligence Group (BIG) is conducting research to understand consumer sentiment, trust and decision-making with respect to technology. Your responses are anonymous, so please take a couple of minutes to complete this very short, 10 question survey:

CLICK HERE FOR SURVEY 

Thanks in advance!

Is Social Media a Function of Social Media?

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Peppercom recently conducted a social media audit to uncover the “white space” areas of opportunity for a client. In the process, we collected data on over 1,200 mentions or social media “hits” for industry competitors, measuring their share of voice vis-à-vis various messaging categories and sentiments. After examining data on Twitter and blogs primarily, as well as Facebook, YouTube, Ning, LinkedIn, Delicious, and MySpace, we decided to do a quick experiment and answer the following question: For each competitor, does a strong presence in one social media channel translate, correlate, or spill-over into a strong presence in another social media channel? The answer was “yes.” 

To answer the question we looked at blog and Twitter activity for three competitors. We graphed the number of Twitter and blog “hits” over the timeframe analyzed, and generated the following three graphs. Do you see any relationships? 

Where did the inputs go?

Posted by Milos Sugovic 

How many times have you heard this question: “Should we measure outputs or outcomes?” The discussion of measurement in PR is flooded with a debate over which is a “better” metric: outputs or outcomes. Can you guess what the conclusion is always? You got it right - it’s “both.”  

So why the debate? Well, in essence, it’s a discussion around opportunity cost of doing each, be it in terms of financial resources or time, and usually doing the former over the latter is considered to be “cheaper.” But as technology and software develop and data becomes more readily available, the discussion will lose steam. Untill then, it’s a valid debate only if you consider outputs and outcomes to be perfect substitutes.  

Don't Rub It In.

Posted by Matt Purdue

In today’s L.A. Times, James Rainey’s column is a must-read for PR professionals. Rainey pithily summarizes the latest chapter of the Alessandra Staney saga at the New York Times (sorry, I refuse to capitalize the self-aggrandizing “the” in the paper’s title). A bit of background: Stanley, the NYT’s leading TV critic, has been chastised almost without mercy for the shoddy job she did on Walter Cronkite’s obituary in the July 17 edition. It’s become widely known that the obit included at least eight factual errors.

Everyone from Gawker to Katie Couric have ripped Stanley (and, to a lesser extent, her editors) for, once again, playing fast and loose with veracity. In one of the most scathing rebukes I’ve ever seen a journalist fire at a colleague, the NYT’s public editor placed blame with a reporter “with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.”