360DigitalInfluence

During one of the best sessions from Ogilvy’s Verge event in London last week, Rory Sutherland shared an intriguing point of view that in order for true innovation to happen within any marketing group, you need to first change the metric.   The example he used was how a GPS system makes the consequences of a wrong turn much less.   Now you can choose to experiment with new routes to get from point A to point B because if you happen to head the wrong direction, you’ve got the GPS to steer you back on course.   In marketing, experiments are often not rewarded, and often they are discouraged.   Marketers stick to what they know how to measure or what has been moderately successful in the past.

In the world of public relations, many professionals have become frustrated with the increasing focus on numbers in a bad way.   What’s the bad way, you wonder?   Focusing on getting higher volumes of coverage or only focusing on top tier media instead of more targeted media is one example.   Another is blogger relations.   If you read our code of ethics or any of the interesting discussion on other blogs about how to pitch bloggers … the one thing that might strike you is that it seems like a lot of work.   It is, if you have to contact a hundred or more “outlets” in order to feel as though you have done your job.   It’s not if you have chosen the 6 bloggers who have the most influence and are most likely to care about what you are talking about.   The change in metric is from quantity to quality.   Imagine if you had half of the blogs that you contacted write about it.   Choosing them correctly, these posts might get picked up by others, and your message ends up on far more blogs.

The point is, if you continue to focus your metrics on quantity of outreach … you’ll never be able to reach out to bloggers in the best way.   If you continue to blast every media outlet who accepts press releases about something, you won’t have any time to do the right kind of outreach to the media that really matters.   Perhaps the real change we need in the metrics is to start to value quality more highly than quantity.