Measurement v. ROI

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, Waves PR

The debates being held by relative newcomer ‘communicators’ around  ROI on social media are the same ones that have been had for years around the wider communications ‘industry’.  PR was most usually compared to advertising, where you paid for something, owned the message, and didn’t pay unless the ad appeared. PR was harder to justify.

For any social media purists with only an outside perception of what PR does (and boy, does our reputation need cleaning up!) , PR has, at its best, been about that all powerful third party endorsement – from happy staff to happy customers – with an emphasis on ‘relations’. For PR people who have tried to embrace best practise, communication in social spaces is easily learned and adapted to. A good PR practitioner differentiates the needs of  the Sun and the FT, of different bloggers and of each social space. (As information due out later today will show, however, the ‘good’ may be  a small one in ten.)

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Likeminds 2009: the conference with a Marmite effect?

Claire Thompson, Waves PR

Likeminds 2009: Measuring Social Media, and making it sustainable

I am probably going to be popular with no-one here. So before starting this blogpost, let me just say for the record that I have great respect for the people who were on the stage at the Likeminds ’09 conference in Exeter on Friday. And that I enjoyed being able to catch up with people in an out of London venue, and also to share with people from another country and get a different perspective. As well as catch up with friends.

This was the conference billing:

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