Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships [Hardcover]

Katie Delahaye Paine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2011

In an online and social media world, measurement is the key to success

If you can measure your key business relationships, you can improve them. Even though relationships are "fuzzy and intangible," they can be measured and managed-with powerful results.

Measure What Matters explains simple, step-by-step procedures for measuring customers, social media reputation, influence and authority, the media, and other key constituencies.

• Based on hundreds of case studies about how organizations have used measurement to improve their reputations, strengthen their bottom lines, and improve efficiencies all around
• Learn how to collect the data that will help you better understand your competition, do strategic planning, understand key strengths and weaknesses, and better respond to customer preferences
• Author runs a successful blog and serves as a measurement consultant to companies such as Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Raytheon, and Allstate

Don't draw conclusions or make key decisions based on guesswork. Instead, Measure What Matters and the difference will show in the most important measure: your bottom line.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

If the only numbers you really care about are revenue and profits, you'll never fully understand what makes them go up or down. Want to know what people think of you? Want to know how those opinions will affect your sales? You're only guessing unless you learn how to Measure What Matters.

Today, even the smallest business can track and measure relationships with customers, with the media, and even with employees and sales forces. Measure What Matters delivers the know-how to find those tools and use them to increase your revenues.

The right data tells you whether you're getting your share of ink. It tells you how you stack up against your competition in search ranking, sales, share of conversations, and share of wallet. Good data measures what your marketplace is saying,thinking, and doing. It reveals which of your methods work and which ones don't.

In Measure What Matters, you'll get step-by-step guidance to:

• Build a list of the top 100 influencers in your marketplace
• Use data to get closer to your customers and determine which outlets matter to them most
• Measure the impact of events, sponsorships, and speaking engagements
• Measure your relationships with your local community, members, donors, employees, salespeople, and distributors
• Reduce the impact of crises

Don't rely on hunches or your gut. Good data will save you time and boost your credibility. You'll have the leverage you need to set priorities, allocate resources, and improve business practices. Now is the time to figure out why your sales rise and fall—and what you need to do to make them rise faster.

From the Back Cover

praise for measure what matters

"Katie Paine not only gets it and teaches it, she helps companies implement it and profit from it. This book is filled with impressively sound judgment, tremendously powerful guidance, and practical how-to advice."—Jim SterneChairman, Web Analytics Association, and author of Social Media Metrics

"Katie Paine understands social media and social PR in away that few others out there do. Over the years, she has consistently called for rational and reasonable metrics for success in public relations, and she continues that call in our new age of social communication. Measure What Matters will teach you just about everything you need to know about managing online relationships."—Eric T. Peterson author of Web Analytics Demystified

"Katie Paine has elevated measurement from merescience to high art and, in the process, given us a powerful newset of tools to refute the tired claim that customer relationships can't be quantified. Marketers should devour this book. It will help them persuade skeptical executives of the need to adapt to the new world of empowered customers."—Paul Gillinauthor of Social Marketing to the Business Customer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470920106
• ISBN-13: 978-0470920107
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.9 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #173,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Business & Investing > Marketing & Sales > Public Relations

More About the Author

Katie Delahaye Paine (twitter: KDPaine) is the founder of KDPaine & Partners and Chief Marketing Officer for News Group International. Measuring the Networked Non Profit is her third book. The first, Measuring Public Relationships is a widely accepted academic text book. Measure What Matters, published in 2010 continues to be a very popular handbook for social media measurement.

She also writes the first blog (Katie Paine's Measurement Blog) and publishes the first newsletter (The Measurement Standard) dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability. In the last two decades, she and her firm have listened to millions of conversations, analyzed thousands of articles, and asked hundreds of questions in order to help her clients better understand their relationships with their constituencies.

For the past 17 years, Paine has been providing marketers and communications professionals tools, data and information to help them make better business decisions. She and her firms have read and analyzed millions of news articles, Internet postings and internal communications and have conducted hundreds of thousands of interviews in the relentless pursuit of quantitative and qualitative measures of her client's marketing success. She works with some of the world's most admired companies including Raytheon, Hewlett-Packard, and Southwest Airlines. Most recently, her endeavors have been focused on providing cost effective measurement programs for non-profits, small businesses, and government agencies.

Prior to launching KDPaine & Partners in 2002, Paine was the founder and president of The Delahaye Group, which she sold to Medialink in 1999. Katie was an initial founder of the Institute for Public Relations Special Commission on Measurement and Evaluation. She served as the US liaison to the European Standards Task Force to set international standards for media evaluation. She writes a regular column for PRNews on corporate image and crisis communications and contributes to PRNews, Communications World, PR Week, Business Marketing and New Hampshire Magazine.

An accomplished speaker, Paine frequently lectures to conferences and universities including The Conference Board, The American Strategic Management Institute, the Public Relations Society of America, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Institute for International Research, the International Public Relations Research Conference, Ragan Communications Conferences, the PR Executive Forum, IPRA, the University of New Hampshire, and Southern New Hampshire University.

Paine was named Entrepreneurial Venture Creator Person of the Year by the University of New Hampshire. A Cum Laude graduate of Connecticut College's class of 1974, Katie majored in history and Asian studies. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from New Hampshire College in May 1996. She is an Athena award winner and a Board member of the New Hampshire Political Library. Her life is featured in Mark Albion's book, "Making a life, making a living."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you only read one book on social media measurement, make it this one! May 22, 2011

By cksyme

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

We keep hearing that measurement is going to be the most important skill for social media practitioners this year. The ability to match a metric to an objective that will measure a specific outcome will start to separate the social media men from the boys, as they say. If you want to get a handle on that process, this book is for you. If you just want to measure hits, likes and retweets, you just might get a paradigm shift reading the book.

Katie D. Payne's Measure What Matters is the preeminent work in this area to date. I know I'm going out on a limb saying that, because there have been some good books written on measurement. But nothing as thorough and in-depth as this, in my view. I've read them all, believe me.

Even though this book includes some heavy lifting, it's worth the time it takes to read carefully and learn. Those of us without a business or marketing degree may have to slow down in some spots, but for the most part, this book goes at a pace that most marketing and communications practitioners should easily feel comfortable with. I love the fact that the book also offers specfic advice on measuring events, relationships with local communities, higher ed, crisis, internal employee relationships, sales and partner relationships, and the list goes on. It is thorough, and it will open your eyes to the fact that there are much more effective ways of measuring than HITS (How Idiots Track Success). Must read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ: Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships June 3, 2011

By HTOsborne

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Incorporates everything I like about K.D.Paine, and I like K.D.Paine. "Measure What Matters" cuts through the chaff and the fluff of social media banter and gives novices and experts alike the background, foreground and step-by-step navigation to understand and use social media. If you have time for only one book on social media, make it this one.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Measurement Resource January 21, 2012

By Paul Gillin

Format:Hardcover

(This review is excerpted from my blog. Read the full review at [...])

The Internet is the most measurable medium ever invented, but the perception that returns on online social interactions can't be quantified stubbornly persists. Those who still harbor this misconception should do themselves a favor and pick up Measure What Matters, a guide to digital ROI that puts common sense ahead of the current fan/follower frenzy.

Like many former publicists, Paine has smoothly migrated her relationship-building skills into the social world, but unlike most of her peers she has chosen to specialize in numbers. That's a good thing for the rest of us because social media marketing, like PR, has always been challenged by the lack of reliable success metrics.

Paine believes that anything is measurable if you know where to look, and in this book she offers plenty of ideas. Measure What Matters isn't about social media as much as it is about the importance of relationships and the need to understand how they equate to success. This is an important point because many of the tools Paine recommends work well in any medium.

In fact, one of her favorite measurement tools - the Grunig Relationship Survey - was invented in the days before blogs and Twitter, but is every bit as useful today as it was a decade ago. Even conventional research tools like mail surveys and focus groups still have their place, Paine argues, despite the fact that many people consider them to be passé. The point isn't for organizations to argue about tools but to figure out the best ways to measure success. If that means counting mentions of a brand in newspaper headlines, so be it...

Paine's practical and time-tested advice is a welcome relief to a Klout-obsessed world that seems more taken with fans and followers than with business results. I highly recommend it.