Are you AVEing a laugh? The Fire Brigade aren’t – they just hosed down ad-equivalent to an inch of its life! [Poor AVE]

By , March 28 2010, 10:48 am 4 Comments

Picture 4
  

I’ve long been blah-ing on about the need to just forget AVE when it comes to PR but it’s rearing it’s ugly head again recently because no-one has (yet?) come up with the holy grail of measurement for social media.  I’m certain there will never be something like AVE for social media because of the vastly different things it produces and goes for in the first place.  Now, don’t get me wrong, AVE served its purpose but (even as a client) it never made one iota of difference when we were measuring and wanted a coverage report.  When I have the myriad of other tools at my disposal [thanks to bit.ly and all his other pals!] it makes no sense to multiply up add pass on blah blah blah – we have the real picture we have been craving.  Is it just that the numbers are shocking you?  No-one is telling us to keep using it – so why are we?  It’s a great blanket and worked in the past but aren’t we better now?  Don’t we want to be?  Don’t we know that clients know the difference between ads and pr?  Isn’t that OUR job? Haven’t things moved forward?  Shouldn’t we be researching this?  [Cough CIPR/PRCA]  Is it even possible? I put it to that militant rabble we have come to know and love to wade in on.  It got ugly… fast.

Are they right?  Duke it out in the comments!!!

**** The Fire Brigade is recruiting!  Email prweekblog@gmail.com to sign up! *****

“AVE was at best a finger waved in the air and made clients think that it was advertising that set the standard. Social Media should be measured on outcomes and actions, not on the numbers of followers and fans, that’s counting the success of the tactic, not the strategy.” 


- Kerry Gaffney / Porter Novelli

——————————————————————————-

“Social media doesn’t perform one task; it performs many – marketing, customer service, PR and more. You can’t collapse all of those different impacts into one measure.
 - Mark Pack / Mandate Communications

——————————————————————————-

“First things first, PR should never have had a benchmark like AVE!  To boil all the different objectives and myriad nuances of communication down to a ‘score’ completely defeats the purpose of measuring.  To measure and act on results you need a dashboard of metrics and levers that allow you to plan, course correct and improve the effectiveness of your PR.”  
 - Kristin Wadge / Metrica

——————————————————————————-

“As Joan Collins once said, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!” And that is exactly what we’ve done by using AVEs as a measure of PR effectiveness. The juice may taste great; our clients may wow at it but the fact is it’s still made from lemon, freshly squeezed. See, AVE doesn’t measure share of voice, perception change or alert us to an issue. AVE is not an effective measure of PR value, it is simply the accepted measure, in lieu of a better option.” 

- Meredith Carson  / Action Global Communications 

——————————————————————————-

“it’s [likely] true social media will never have a comparable benchmark, that’s not something to be afraid of. Social media has a variety of other ways to measure itself, from engagement to web traffic to SEO impact. Like any good campaign, measurement only works if the goals are defined and those goals have a much broader range of possibility than something as simple as AVE would ever address.”

- Angela Beradino / The Spin Kitchen

——————————————————————————-

Firefighter-Dolls  **** WANT TO JOIN THE FIRE BRIGADE? **** 

It’s free and easy… just like…something free and easy!  : email prweekblog@gmail.com to sign up!



Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , ,
  • http://wp.me/pHKCx-4t alyssa royse

    It’s the quickest race to the lowest common denominator for both content and consumers. Can’t be worth much in terms of information or audience. When will quality be worth more than quantity again? http://wp.me/pHKCx-4t

  • http://reputationreputationreputation.blogspot.com/ Jonathan Welsh

    AVE is the most unsuitable benchmark ever created and thank god social media can start afresh and measure influence and reputation – a truer reflection of PR success than AVE could ever be.

  • http://www.brayleino.co.uk zia namooya

    I agree with Alyssa – AVE was the easiest route available to many PRO’s at the time but we’ve now seen such a shift in knowledge in this space from comms people. And now seeing a smarter approach to this portal dependent on client request/expectation.Brands tend to like the CPE model though…

  • http://www.mccluskeyinternational.co.uk Ian McKee

    There’s so much wrong with trying to apply AVE to social media it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly, as other’s have mentioned it’s a totally flawed technique of measurement in the first place, why would we even want to apply a benchmark like it to social media? If anything we should be looking for something more accurate.

    The obvious choice would be to convert social media results to their online advertising equivalent. Use bit.ly and Google Analytics to measure click throughs, then ask how much would each click be worth at your average PPC campaign click through cost. I fear that as bigger business gets more involved with social media this will turn into a common system of measurement, the problem is that it ignores the major real benefits of social media – engagement and awareness.

    For me it has to be a combination of a of lot of different numbers, use of that (slightly garbled) advertising term ‘opporunities to see’ to measure not just friends and followers interactions, but numbers of friends’ friends and followers’ followers. That along with inbound links, number of mentions, equivalent in PPC etc. The difficulty is not that these numbers don’t mean anything, it’s that often a client has no understanding of them – social media won’t be subject to anything close to accurate measurement until they do.