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A guide to PR 2.0 as a business tool, by Mara Gojgar

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A GUIDE TO PR 2.0
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A BUSINESS TOOL
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by Mara Gojgar
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 CONTENT

1. Introduction................................................................................3

2. What are the social media..........................................................4

2.1 The history of social web
2.2 The Cluetrain Manifesto
3. The benefits of social media......................................................7

4. The most influential social media in Romania...........................8

4.1 The social media map
4.2 Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter
5. Social media as a business tool..................................................14
5.1 How to integrate social media into the business
5.2 How to use social media
5.3 What does social media cost
6.How to measure social media........................................................23
7. Conclusions................................................................................37
8. Bibliography.................................................................................38

2
 1. INTRODUCTION

“The magic of social media is not what happens in social media,

but what happens outside of it because of it”
-Paul Isakson

Only now, after several years of presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, I
came to realize what a great gain, or what a colossal loss, social media represents for the
professionals of different fields.
Besides, the whole documentation for this paper has, almost exclusively, online
resources. Although there is a substantial bibliography for beginners and for advanced in
the web 2.0 communication, I preferred the online books (e-books) and the specialized
blogs, precisely because social media explodes from one day to another, it is invented and
reinvented and so, any written work, from the moment when the author has put down the
last idea until it gets to be browsed by its readers, there is a great possibility that content
is already obsolete.
I was talking earlier about the bibliography. I collected it during several months of
open dialog via LinkedIn/Facebook with professionals in Public Relations, in SEO
(search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing), but also via e-mail
exchange with Paul Holmes, Dennis Wilcox who validated my idea that social media is
currently one of the most important trends in all the branches of communication.
Web 2.0 represents an immense business resource, which, used strategicaly,
completes and enhances the actions of offline communication. Once the social media
appeared, the communication is divided in two distinct era, before social media and after
social media.

3
 2. WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL MEDIA

2.1 The history of social web

The first website was launched online on the 6th of August 1991 and belonged to
Timothy John Berners-Lee1. From that moment the “www” space had a fulminant
evolution.
The mass web revolution was unleashed by companies as Yahoo!, AOL, Amazon,
eBay, PayPal, Ticketmaster and also by browsing services, email or online banking. This
can be called the “Transactional Web”.
The second stage, named Social Web, was catalyzed by the so called Web 2.0
technologies that facilitate the interaction, are easy to use and involve a high degree of
impliction from the users. It is a space for self expression, for relationships, for for
affiliation, for trust and the is content created and generated by the user.
The term “Social Web” was defined in the year 1998, according to Wikipedia, as
both a technological and social concept. This duality is legitimate, as long as web 2.0
supports, through the means of technology, the social interaction2.

2.2 The Cluetrain Manifesto

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are
discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As
a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most
companies3”, as the Cluetrain Manifesto states.

1
Timothy John Berners-Lee is a british programmer, inventor of the World Wide Web. He is currently the
manager of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that protects the standards of the Web.
2
The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3844887/The-Social-Web-Analytics-
eBook-2008
3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cluetrain_Manifesto

4
 The Cluetrain Manifesto1 represents a set of 95 thesis organized as a call to action,
addressed to all the organizations which operate on the new market. The ideas promoted
by this Manifesto examine the impact the Internet has on both the consumers
organizations.
The Manifesto was written in the year 1999 by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke,
Doc Searls and David Weinberger and was printed in the year 2000 at the publishing
house Perseus Books (ISBN 0-7382-0431-5).
Social media have become, lately, what it is understood by buzzword, that is a
word that is repetead regularly, until it reaches even demonetization, but, still, it is not the
case for social media.
Broadly speaking, social media means conversation, online conversation, using
the social networks, the blogs, the social bookmarking, the video materials, all of this
with the role to facilitate and to simplify the interaction. The main stake of social media
is the involvement through conversation.
Marketing and Public Relations use social media as a component of the
communication strategy, through which the “social” influences, the social platforms and
the online communities are used to send the key messages, to obtain direct feedback from
the customers/consumers, to personally know who those are.
The most common tools of social media include networks such as Twitter 2, blogs,
LinkedIn3, Facebook4, Flickr5 and YouTube6. It often happens that in this sextet the blog
represents the war room (Toprankblog.com7).

1
The term "cluetrain" comes from the following quote: "The clue train stopped there four times a day for
ten years and they never took delivery." — Veteran of a firm now free-falling out of the Fortune 500.
2
Twitter is a web site founded in 2006, which allows the users to write and send messages of maximum
140 characters. It is sometimes described as being the "SMS of the Internet": wikipedia.com.
3
LinkedIn is a social network created especially for business. Founded in December 2002 and launched in
May 2003, it is used especially for professional networking: wikipedia.com
4
Facebook represents at this moment one of the most spread socialization network (social network) of the
world. The users can enter this network and can socialize from eny place where there is Internet access.
5
Flickr is a site for hosting photographic images.
6
YouTube is a web site which allows to upload and view video content. The users can post videoclips
under more forms: animations, public events filmings, personal recordings, entertainment etc. The clips
with illegal or inoffensive character are totally excluded.
YouTube was created in February 2005 by 3 employees of the company PayPal.
7
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/08/answers-to-social-media-questions-you-should-know/

5
 The king element in social media is “the content”. To be successful in social
media, you must be capable to generate fresh, innovative, unexpected content, able to
attract and intrigue the reader.
Unlike the traditional media, where the communication was unidirectional, the
social media chalenge is precisely in a multidirectional communication, that has at hand
all means of expression.

3. THE BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

A study created in the year 2008 by

the Marketing Executives
Networking Group (MENG1), the
marketing managers communion
from the U.S.A, highlights the main
benefits that the marketing
executives take into consideration
when they include web 2.0 in the
communication strategy.
From the 11 benefits indicated by
them, on the first position it is the
consumers’ implication (85.4%),
followed by the possibility of a direct communication with the customers (65%), the
feedback speed (59.9%), the oportunity to know the consumers’ preferences (59.1%) and
the low budget involved by these media (51.1%).

1
http://www.mengonline.com

6
 Among the other benefits indicated by the respondents there is building the
brand’s image (48.2%), market research (42.3%), the credibility of “the many” (40.1%),
the possibility to reach a wide audience (37.2%), a source to generate potential customers
(21.2%) and the possibility to give the customers direct support (17.5%).

4. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SOCIAL MEDIA

4.1 The social media map

The interactive marketing agency, Overdrive Interactive, has designed a map1 of

the web 2.0 enviroment, which includes socializing services (live transmission, social
networks, video sites, search engines, micro-blogging services, social networks for
business, socialization, blogging and photos platforms, reviews websites, wikis platforms,
bookmarking websites, podcast platforms) and has identified the most used socialization
websites internationally .
Invited as a speaker to a regional meeting of the European Association of
Communication Directors2, Cristian Manafu, ex business journalist and one of the most
active blogers in Romania, has made an analysis of the most used social networks in
Romania. The analysis made in the period September - November 2009 shows that, in
Romania, YouTube has 2.000.000 visitors per month, the Romanian blogosphere
amounted, in October, to 35.611 blogs, out of which 11.436 are active; Facebook counted
in November 450.000 users; 149.956 users were present on LinkedIn in September, and
on Twitter 17.000 acconts were present in November3.

4.2 Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter

1
http://www.ovrdrv.com/social-media-map/
2
http://www.eacd-online.eu/
3
http://manafu.blogspot.com/2009/11/trends-social-media-in-romania.html

7
 In the paper (e-book) How to Effectively Leverage Social
Media Relationships with Real-Time Collaboration Tools1,
Tom Bunzel2, a specialist in web 2.0 communication,
presents the importance and advatages of using the professional network LinkedIn.
Firstly, LinkedIn offers many of the facilities of a social network – invitations,
status update, creating discussion groups, but, being a niche network, also offers the
necessary tools to connect to the business environment, as well as a contact management
system. The LinkedIn Bar designed to be used by the Outlook application, allows to
create some networks from the current contracts and to manage the contracts from
LinkedIn into the Microsoft Outlook application.
Another extrordinary advantge that LinkedIn makes available for the users is the
possibility to use the SEO (search engine optimization3) to identify the contacts of
interest and to make some research such as the number of people who activate in a certain
field, in a certain country. Also, the use of the key words and of the tags4 in the sections
Summary and Experience, places that profile in the search engines and facilitates the
contact with people from similar business areas.
During the SEO World Coffee5 seminar, dedicated to social networks, Olivian
Breda6, SEO specialist, warns that “it is totally contraindicated to have a user account on
LinkedIn and to use it as a company”.
Instead, on LinkedIn a company can create discussion groups where it can
announce events, news, jobs, can launch and answer discussions.
Olivian Breda also says how the group must be used once created: „promote it in
your own network of acquaintance, towards the potentially interested people; ask the

1
http://whitepapers.bx.businessweek.com/whitepaper6308/
2
http://www.informit.com/authors/bio.aspx?a=53985FD6-578D-49DB-8137-DC3B754B1BD5
3
„Search Engine Optimization” is a subcategory of online marketing, which started in the year 1990, with
the appearance of the first sites on the Internet, and which represents all the technics by which a website is
brought to a shape in which it is propelled higher in the result lista given by a search engine for different
key-words. With time, the optimization of a web page of a site has become a service offered by some
companies and/or corporations.
4
In IT language – label.
5
http://seoworldcoffee.wordpress.com/
6
http://getaresultnow.com/only-read-these-things-on-my-blog/

8
contacts from your network (or the ones that subscribe to the group) to promote the
group, be active on other LinkedIn groups1”.

YouTube is currently the largest video platform. Although many see

it as an entertainment site, for the companies this is the space where
they run their viral marketing2 campaigns and which allows them to
build brands, to receive feedback, to send comments and to consolidate the relationships
that they have made on other socialization networks.
I think that currently there are two important ways to use YouTube:
As a company channel which allows it to organize the content, to incorporate it on
other sites through the function “embed”, or to send links in a simple way.
Creating a new group or joining an existent group and participating to
discussions, allows the contact with potential clients.
Yet, the possibilities to embed and to send the content as a link are the main assets
of Youtube.

Twitter is currently the biggest microblogging network.

A study launched by the market research company Daedalus Millward
Brown in September 2009, „A peek inside social media”, shows that
Twitter is associated with personal development, with success, with
inovation and with leadership. The Twitter users are the so called „early adopters”, are
opinion leaders. Also, most of them have personal blogs and are concentrated on
networking.

1
http://seoworldcoffee.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/2009-12-22-olivian-breda-folosirea-de-catre-
companii-a-twitter-facebook-si-linkedin.ppt
2
http://www.markmedia.ro/article_show.php?g_id=748: Viral Marketing is about making customers talk
about you, about your products, recommend you. It is also about the awarness clients have about the
product. Viral marketing should start by making proof of a significant understanding of the potential
clients and to try to enter into the social psychology of the enviroment in which they live in, with the
purpose of giving value through the information being sent to them, and this means respect for the
consumer.

9
 For the Facebook users, Twitter fans are opinion leaders, they represent
aspirational models, but, at the same time, they see them as being excessively
preoccupied with themselves and with their personal development.
The Twitter users think that this network is a „trophic chain” dedicated to
information, they are people with an active life, passionate about what they are doing,
people that have something intelligent to say in real time. Twitter means efficiency,
knowledge, opportunities.
Twitter is seen as an useful tool for personal development and to reach a wide
recognition and social power.
On Twitter you can find useful and last minute information, this is why self-
promotion is inappropriate for its users.
Twitter is seen more and more as a space of services and has passed from a
community platform to an instant messaging service. For this reason, the focus of the
discussions on Twitter is on the practical information.
As a general aproach, once an account on Twitter is created it is important to bet
on credibility. In this respect, the indirect marketing is the most appropriate. It is
important to allow the people to discover you progressively, to come to you from their
own desire, on the basis of the content you share. If you are the one that follows his
customers, show them that you get involved, answer them, make comments, react to their
postings. Also, give prompt answers to those who mention your brand – Twitter’s
applications allow monitoring the mentions. Also, the tone of the discussions should be a
personal one.
As for the content, the information should be new, relevant, to come from an
expert. Also, it is important to show that you want to help through the expertise you have,
and, if it is the case, even to offer online technical assistance.
The main indicators of an account are the number of tweets (posts), the number of
followers (people who follow the account) and the number of followed people.
To obtain as many followers as possible, in order to reach a representative
audience for the company’s messages, it is important to use the hash-tags (key words that
a user wishes to follow, these words have before them the sign „#”).
Also, the intervention in discussions should be made using “@username”.

10
 The Twitter account can be promoted on site/signature/status. Also, once the
account is created, it is important that at least 10 tweets are created and subsequently to
interact with other accounts.
According to the study conducted by Daedalus Millward Brown,
the socializing network Facebook is associated with stability,
membership and with the concern for the others.
In this study it is shown that Facebook users are educated people, decent, most of them
young professionals, people who read blogs (are interested about other people’s
opinions), are focused on having and sharing the information.
Facebook users describe this network as being „the network that matters”, it is a
private space that they control, a space where they share their interests in their free
moments. Facebook represents for them a way to create their own image, a way of virtual
entertainment and to promote good causes.
Facebook is an etertainment and relaxation space, usually, the users are interested
in their friends updates (updating the status); in turn they post updates, they use the
games application (Quizzes). Usually, the network extension is based on the criterion of
common interests.
On Facebook the users create the network that matters for them, and the intimacy
plays a very important part. In this context, the information published is carefully
selected, so that it does not bother the others. Usually, the information shared on
Facebook is from the news area, from the interests of that person and represents the proof
of the cultural interests.
On Facebook, the users are open to communicate with the brands, as long as they
are not trying to sell something to them.
The Facebook ads campaigns are a good way to involve the users. Still, the
advertisers must take into consideration that users prefer the commercials displayed on
the right side bar of the Facebook screen to the messages received in the inbox.
As for the ways in which a company can be present on Facebook, there are 3
options, by user account, by Page or by Group.
Although Facebook does not encourage the companies to create user names, this
is still a common practice.

11
 Furthemore, there is the possibility to syncronize the Twitter account with the one
on Facebook, and the Twitter account can be taken over by the company’s blog as well.
Once the Facebook account is created, this has to be promoted, and some of the
most common and efficient ways to do this are the widgets on the blog and website, the
linkbuilding campaign, the commercials on Facebook, the links in the email signature,
and the links on the website and at the status.
As for the discussions’ monitoring on Facebook, Facebook Lexicon
(facebook.com/lexicon) and Facebook dictionary are some of the most handy tools.

The Wheel of Values – A pick inside social media ,

Daedalus Millward Brown România

Regarding the evolution of using Facebook in România an upward trend is observed, with
the peak being reached in September 20091

1
www.mihaidumitru.com/social-media

12
 5. SOCIAL MEDIA AS BUSINESS TOOL

5.1 How to integrate social media into the business

In a recent article published on his blog, „10 stages of social media integration in
business1”, Brian Solis describes the process through which a company should go through
in order to start using the web 2.0 space in a strategic way, in order to deliver return on
investment.
Observe
One of the most common advice in social media is to listen before launching a
company, a brand, a product. Listening is made with the help of some services as Google
Alerts, Twitter Search, Radian62 or PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics3 on the basis of
some key words that allow the identification of the conversations associated with a
certain brand.
All these conversations are later being constitute in a report for managers and
executives. This early form of reporting leads to taking some decisions based on concrete
information connected to the needs of the target audience.
1
http://www.briansolis.com/2010/01/the-10-stages-of-social-media-integration-in-business/
2
http://www.radian6.com
3
http://www.prnewswire.com/products-services/targeting-monitoring-measurement/social-media-
monitoring/Social-Media-Monitoring.html

13
Setting the stage and trying on the costumes
Many companies create accounts on social networks and, unfortunately, generate
content without a plan or a purpose.
Creating the official presence on channels as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and
Flickr starts with an experimental phase where it is tested the impact of the presence and
the way in which this channels work. Nevertheless, an analysis based on the frequency of
mentioning the company/brand, the traffic and the number of connections (friends,
people who follow the account, fans), offers to the managers only a limited image on the
effects that the presence and the participation of the company has on the social networks.

Socializing
In this stage the companies involve in conversations, pay attention to the reactions
of the audience to be able to answer on time and to improve the content generated, the
future engagements and to humanize the communication.
This form of participation is reactive, based on the nature of the dialog and on the
subjects already launched.
Finding the voice, the sense and the purpose
This is a milestone in the maturation of the presence of a business in the web 2.0
space.
By listening to and by observing the way in which our target interacts in the web
2.0 networks, we identify the main problems, we generate ideas, we learn, we set an
empathy based relationship with our public.
Through a careful research of the positive, negative and neutral comments, we
find out the tendencies in the behavior of our target audience and this allows us to create
a strategy focused on strategic activities, at various levels where we can incolve, as
appropriate, the voice of the marketing, of the PR, of the sales department.
The strategic visibility demonstrates the fact that, in order to generate presence on
the social networks, it is necessary to concentrate exactly on the critical places where our
audience is.

14
 Because they understood that social web means more than Twitter, blogs and
Facebook, the brand managers research the whole web space using the listening services
or the methods offered by The Conversational Prism1 to identify the points of influence in
the web 2.0 dialog.
The power of words in action
Social media bring forward those who have something to say and help the
communicators to reach their target audience and understand what motivates them.
Humanizing the brand and defining the experience
Once we obtain a refined understanding of the people who influence the market, it
is required to create an image worthy of attention and which can generate loyality.
Within this stage, the brand image is evaluated through the brand’s actions, the
situations associated with the brand, through the target’s interaction with our brand. At
the same time, in this stage, the brand’s personality and the one of those who represent
the brand is being calculated and defined so that the desired image of the brand is
reached.
The community
In this stage, a company learns and visualises, through experience, in the light of
the connections set, through interests, through shortcomings, through the benefits who
build the univers of the communication with the brand.
The social Darwinism
Before collaborating with the universe outside the brand it is necessary to improve
the communication from the inside. Social media, as they were approached at the
beginning, were not measurable. Introducing new roles leads to restructuring the teams
and the flow of the activity, which, ultimately, needs an organizational transformation to
support the involvement, the production and the permanent evolution to ensure the brand
and the product’s relevance.
To be competitive in time, the actions that govern the listening of the audience’s
voice, building communities should be in accordance with the capacity of the
organizations to adapt and to improve the products, the services and the policies
according to the laws of the Web space at a certain moment.

1
http://theconversationprism.com/1024/

15
Socializing the business process
The Social Customer Relationship Management (SRM), by combining the
principles, the philosophies and the technological processes, sets a value chain which
supports the relationships created in the traditional business environment.
Measuring business performance
Without a pragmatical understanding of the volume, of the location and of the
nature of the online interaction, the real impact of the digital fingerprint that a business
leaves is impossible to evaluate. Including the influence that social media can generate
for a business, next to a detailed vision on the route and on the effects that these can lead
to in achieving the business objectives, allows us to evaluate for real the ROI generated
by social media.
5.2 How to use social media

“Before having an account on Twitter, on Facebook, the companies should

carefully analyse what happens in social media, what, how and where their products and
their competitors are being discussed. Nobody does that, nobody does a thorough
research. This is absolutely wrong. And if things are not working, everybody say how
silly is social media”, considers Susan Rice-Lincoln1, present to the forth edition of the
RoNewMedia event2.
Larry Brauner, social media consultant and blogger, with over 30 years
experience in marketing, proposes on his blog 11 publishing strategies in the web 2.0
space.
Develop a quality content – reported and relevant to a certain context, a content to
communicate about you, about what you are doing and about what makes you different
— in a tone that does not seem a letter that tries to sell.

1
Susan Rice worked with companies such as Ericsson, Nike and LEGO. Before launching her own
company in 1994, she was the communication director for BBDO Europe, having in her subordination 25
countries and businesses of 3 mld. dollars. Among the instruments created by Susan Rice-Lincoln there is
The Web Wheel (an application that associates social-media tactics with the most appropriate strategies),
Social media in 7 steps (a program that helps companies to successfully implement social media),
Monitoring Social media (a strategic evaluation of the company’s presence in the social network).
2
http://mad.wall-street.ro/articol/Media-Advertising/74703/De-ce-abordarea-E-cool-vreau-si-eu-in-social-
media-nu-va-functiona-niciodata.html

16
Do research after key words, so that, while you are writing for the people, you can also
help the search engines, because the vast majority of the traffic comes from the search
engines.
Fishing where the fish are
Choose those sites of social networking that you consider that attract those
people your company needs. If you find your competitors there, it is a good sign, because
this means that your public is there also. What will differentiate you from the competition
is the content or your ability to solve some needs that the competition cannot satisfy.
Throw your trawl
Do not over think. Better to be wrong by a too “inclusive” presence on web 2.0
than by a too “exclusive” one. Participate on a wide range of social networks and expose
yourself to as many people as possible, both you and your message.
Let people decide for themselves how relevant is for them the content and if this can
help them or not.
Do not stretch too much
Web 2.0 is like a virtual candy store, and the eyes can see more than the stomach
can digest. So, the rule 80/20 is applied - 80% from the results can be reached with 20%
of the existent social networks. It is very important that the networks complement each
other.
Be personal
Even if you are a company, people want to connect to you as a person. In social
media you are a part of your brand.
Experiment and be ready to adapt and to change on the move. Communication people
know that they cannot do everything perfect the first time they try, so it is better to
consider that everything you do is on going.
Establish a continuous presence
Be consistent! It is very important to be there at the right time.
Use media 1.0 to support and and complement the efforts of web 2.0.
Ask for help if you do not have the necessary expertize. Help can consist of advices,
project management or outsourcing.

17
5.3 What does social media cost?
Social media are an extremely generous channel to create a personal brand, to
promote a company, a corporate brand, a cause, and the ways to expose to the target
audience can be both free and paid.
During one of the semniars of SEO-PPC World, which focused on social media,
Mihai Dumitru1 strategy consultant for Kinecto, presented the ways through which
Facebook, for example, can be accessed with or without financial costs.
Presenting the brand (Facebook pages), the support groups, the thematic surveys,
the interaction of the brand with other users, creating a group of “Fans”, are the free ways
to use Facebook.
Facebook gives the possibility to use the paid services, like the banner campaigns
(through Microsoft server), the text-ad campaigns (Cost Per Click or Cost Per Mile).
Also, Facebook has its own resource which allows the identification of the target
audience, www.facebook.com/ads, promoting Facebook channels through text-ads.
Danny Brown, consultant in 2.0 communication for companies from Fortune 500,
speaks in an article published on his blog, http://dannybrown.me, about the costs
involved by social media. The title has a great impact: The real cost of social media2.
Through his affirmation, Brown breaks the myth of the generous and free social media.
Brown says that it does not matter if a campaing on social media is conducted
through the internal resources of an organization, or if it is externalized. In both scenarios
it needs a budget. The budget includes costs for strategy, community management,
mobile applications, moderation and maintaining the accounts. The author of the article
gives an example (in dollars) of a twelve months social media campaign.
• Social media strategy: 10 h/week X 100$/h = 1.000$/week => 52 week –52.000$
• Community manager: 307 h/week X 60$/h = 1.800$/week => 52 săpt –93.600$
• Creating microwebsites (if not using existing platforms) –15.000$
• Mobile applications (more than 70% from the searchs on the internet are made with the
help of the mobile phones) – between 20.000$ and 150.000$
• Permanent moderation and evaluation, using external spoecialists – between 30.000$ and
80.000$ depending on the frequence.

1
www.mihaidumitru.com
2
http://dannybrown.me/2010/01/17/the-real-cost-of-social-media/

18
• Total = 390.600$

6. HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA

In order to sell, the brands and the companies develop more and more their
sociable side. This way they ensure their transparency, authenticity, and accesibility,
sometimes reaching an over-saturation regarding the exposure, at a double-edged
ubiquity.
As James Poulter, public relations and web 2.0 communication specialist for
Ogilvy PR Worldwide, states in an interview for the new media blog Digital Lunch
(http://digitallunch.blogspot.com/) in September 2009 “any methods used in marketing
communication are measurable. Social media can be measured by reach, changing the
perception (measuring positive/negative feelings regarding a company/brand or by the
number of Return on Investement (ROI) (the equivalent of PR/publicity) – but they are
quite doubtful because, currently, there is no universally accepted benchmark in the
industry to measure the ROI for social media. For this reason, each agency proposes its
own measurement methods, according to the client’s needs1”.
David Meerman Scott2, author of the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR,
in the same interview on Digital Launch, states: “I’m often confronted with the issue of
how to measure an online initiative’s results. Executives at companies large and small as
well as marketing and PR people push back on the ideas of a World Wide Rave because
they want to apply old rules of measurement to the new world of spreading ideas online.
The beauty of the Web is that you benefit from instant access to conversations you could
never participate in before”. According to David M. Scott, “the old rules of measurement
used two metrics that don’t matter when spreading ideas, especially online:
1. Measuring the sales (“leads”) — how many business cards we have received, how
many people called the free access number, how many people stopped at our stand, how
many people filled in the online form.

1
http://digitallunch.blogspot.com/2009/09/measuring-social-media-hard-vs-soft.html.
2
David Meerman Scott is one of the best known marketing strategist, entrepreneur, speaker andbestseller
author. He has written over 100 articles in magazines and has won many prizes. Among the five books on
PR written by Scott, the best selling one is The New Rules of Marketing and PR which is published in 22
languages. The other books written by this well known strategist are World Wide Rave, Tuned In , Cashing
in the Content and Eyeball Wars.

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2. Also, we got used to measuring the articles appeared in the written press, on radio or
television.
While these measurement forms are appropriate for the offline environment, they
are not relevant for measuring online success, furthermore, each attempt to find potential
customers and to collect their e-mail addresses prevents the spread of the ideas1”.
Don Bartholomew, a member of the digital research team of the global agency of
marketing and corporate communication Fleishman-Hillard2, a member of the Measuring
Commission of the Public Relation Institute3 and professor at the North University from
Texas, tried to reconcile the two sides that state two different models are necessary to
measure the results given by online media and, respectively, the offline one.
The model proposed by Don Barth was initially based on 3 pillars: the Exposure –
the degree on which we ensure the exposure of the materials and the messages of the
company, the Influence – the degree in which the exposure created perceptions and
attitudes, and the Action – as a result of the public relations efforts, what actions has
undertaken our public4.
Nevertheless, in the E-I-A model, there is a significant gap between Exposure and
Influence, so Barth has introduced the concept of Engagement, key concept in measuring
social media.
Once with the launching of the Engagement concept, we have a new category
including key measurement indicators such as view-thrus, the duration of the time spent
on a certain content, re-commentors, the ratio comments/post. Also, this category can be
used for the measurement in the old school system, that focused on reminding the
brand/company and on customers’ retention.
The Engagement is the basis for forming the communities and it is fundamental
for brands.

1
http://digitallunch.blogspot.com/2009/09/measuring-social-media-hard-vs-soft.html
2
http://www.fleishman.com
3
http://www.instituteforpr.org/
4
http://metricsman.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/a-new-model-for-social-and-traditional-media-measurement

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 Don Barths also proposes a framework to create the measurement programs for
ROI in social media. Here it should be made the distinction between the value created
through social media and through ROI – Return On Investment.
The social media programs, the PR and marketing ones, create a value and, in
some cases, generate ROI. The relationship between value and ROI is similar to the one
between the square and rectangle: a square is a rectangle, but not any rectangle is a
square. ROI is a kind of value, but not any value takes the shape of ROI. ROI is a form of
financial measurement, is transactional, is created by incomes in business terms.
The value is created when people become aware of our existence, get involved in
the content generated by us or become ambasadors of the brand, are influenced by this
involvement and act in the sense of recommending or buying our product. The creation of
value is made in time, and not at a certain moment in time1.
Returning to the framework of measurement programs for social media, Don
Barthes identifies 5 steps to follow: set measurable objectives adjusted for the business
objectives, adapt the measurement and understand as accurate as possible the business
process, choose a communication model, the approach of the research and the
measurement methods, gather and analyze the information, make and deliver the report.
At a higher level, the thorough knowledge and understanding of the industry
where the company operates is of capital importance at the moment of making the
research.

1
http://metricsman.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/the-difference-between-value-and-roi/

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 Below, there is a table where the business functions are represented, a few ways
in which the social media programs can be used for each of them, the applicable business
process/model, a series of basic metrics (sales figure, cost economies, avoiding the costs)
to create ROI.

In the work Putting The Public Back In Public Relations, its authors, Brian Solis1
and Deirdre Breakenridge, launch the concept of Conversation Index, which is a part of
the measuring process in web 2.0.
Actually, the Conversation Index indicates “the placement, the status, the ranking,
the perception and the participation in the social media’s sphere”. As social media are
rooted in conversation, in participation and in engagement, these are elements that
determine the ROI and the success: The conversations through key words, the Traffic
generated, the Prospects and sales, the Call to action, the Engagement, the Relationships,

1
Brian Solis is the director of the communication agency FutureWorks, one of the best awarded acencies of
Public Relations from Silicon Valley.

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the Authority2, the Education and participation, the Perception, the Records, the
membership and the community activity.
The Conversation Index goes beyond Public Relations. It reaches all areas from
sales communications, branding, customer service and product development. Thanks to
the new metrics we can measure the success (or the failure) of our Public Relations
strategies, which was impossible before. The new metrics justify the role of Public
Relations in marketing 2.0 because they widen the relationship area, build trust, create
communities and help increasing the sales, and so it proves to general managers the value
they win by investing in PR 2.0 strategies.

7. CONCLUSIONS

The only constant in social media is the permanent change.

Social media represents the main competitor of the traditional media, but the
presence on social media is necessary but not enough.

2
The authority in online environment is given by the position in Google, by the traffic generated by the site
etc.

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 Social media are the media of the future, the newest communication channel with
an unprecedented expansion speed.
Social media means direct contact with the audience of the organization and direct
feedback.
On social media, personal/corporate brands leave their footprint as experts or
authorities in a certain field.
Once it enters the social media arena, an organization cannot be anymore 100%
the guardian who controls this communication – few minutes can stay between triggering
and propagating the crisis at a significant scale.
Social media are a cheap and generous communication resource.
The presence of a company on social media is a trust mark both for the external
and the internal target of a company.
There is no best way to use social media, the possibilities that they offer are
countless.
Real monitoring and measurement of social media are another question mark for
most of the companies and communication specialists.
Social media are the search engine of the future.

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Web Sites
• Online publications
businessweek.com
business.com
capital.ro
zf.ro
wall-street.ro
• Media & advertising publications
checkfacebook.com
eacd-online.eu
e-marketer.com

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fleishman.com
informit.com
instituteforpr.org
markmedia.ro
mashable.com
mengonline.com
mckinseyquarterly.com
ovrdrv.com
wikipedia.org

E-books
The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3844887/The-Social-
Web-Analytics-eBook-2008
E-book: How To Effectively Leverage Social Media Relationships with Real-Time
Collaboration Tools: http://www.box.net/shared/ocjvqn877k

Blogs
http://businessblogconsulting.com/
http://chrisbrogan.com
http://digitallunch.blogspot.com
http://getaresultnow.com
http://manafu.blogspot.com
http://metricsman.wordpress.com
www.mihaidumitru.com
http://www.paulgillin.com/
http://www.pr-squared.com/
http://www.rotorblog.com/
http://seoworldcoffee.files.wordpress.com
http://social-media-map.ro
http://paulisakson.typepad.com
www.toprankblog.com

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http://web-strategist.com/blog

Studies
Daedalus Millward Brown, A peek inside the Social Networks in Romania, Qualitative
study, September, 2009
McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of McKinsey & Company

Books
Middelburg, Don – „Winning PR in the wierd world”, McGroaw-Hill, New York, 2001
Migliore, Henry – „Strategic planning for non-profit organizations”, NY: Haworth,
Binghamton, 1994
Wilcox, Dennis – “Public relations strategies and tactics”, Publisher Curtea Veche,
Bucuresti, 2009
Witmer, Diane – „Spinning the Web: A handbook for Public Relations on the Internet”,
Longman, New York, 2000

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