Measuring Relationships from Social Media

I had an opportunity to meet Katie D Paine this afternoon at an Open Government and Innovation conference in DC. Katie specializes in public relations and measuring their effectiveness. Her commanding presence underscored her depth of knowledge, and her open and friendly demeanor in a one-on-one situation proved to me that she practices what she preaches with respect to building relationships of her own.

I bought Katie's book on the spot. Six hours later I have already found a good many nuggets of information that I believe will be useful for Transformation Agents in the DoD.

Gaining trust, building relationships, and communication with a purpose are things that many people instinctively understand are an important part of a change management program. But until now, I didn't know anyone who had a well documented methodology for measuring success (or failure) in these areas.

For anyone engaging social media as a means to an end: Katie's talk today was about how to measure the quality of relationships created through social media vs measuring the number of hits a social media site gets. The crowd laughed as she described her personal definition of "Hits" as

"How Idiots Track Success."

She made a good case for why measuring the number of hits a Web site gets is insufficient. Relationships matter more.

If you haven't already heard the question, I expect it will be a common for people holding the purse strings in the DoD to ask: what is the effectiveness of this media? We will need to be able to step up to that question with evidence.

Her book is titled Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success, and can be found on Amazon.com.

Katie also has a PR Measurement blog at http://kdpaine.blogs.com/

I recommend this book for anyone wanting to inject some science into an area traditionally thought of as "mushy" or unmeasurable: relationships.