Last week, Forrester senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang, a prolific and astute observer of web strategies (and someone whom I hold in high esteem), posted a link to a new, sobering USC Annenberg study on the state of the PR agency business. (It dovetailed well with the Council of PR Firms' own look at t...

It’s Black Friday and if you’re running a PR business, you’ll be consulting a bottle of red wine (Australian, of course) as to how to keep the business going in the coming recession. There’s no doubt that there will be casualties in the PR business and so you need to prepare your business fo...

The Short Answer: Not likely Never mind that the investment bank has disappeared under the corporate umbrella of its new owner JP Morgan -- the brand will live on in infamy. Our prediction is that Bear Stearns will be to the end of the first decade of the 21st Century what Enron was the beginning. J...

Social Media Measurement by Katie Delahaye Paine Many people groaned when KDPaine & Partners announced our social media classification of 27 types of conversations and 19 types of videos. At first it does seem like we're adding unneeded complexity to an already confusing field of study. But meas...

While working on last issue's article "Measuring Naked Relationships: Your step-by-step guide to using relationship metrics to evaluate the success of your social media program," a question came up concerning relationship measurement surveys: How many completed questionnaires are sufficien...

There are few things in life as exciting as solving a measurement problem with the innovative use of some new source of data. Followers of this blog and The Measurement Standard newsletter probably share our enthusiasm about Freakonomics (see our review here, and another example on beauty premiums h...

Jenny Schade's Making It Count   Using research to harness the power of your brand's essence. Barack Obama has it. So does Sex and the City. Starbucks was a pioneer. All three of these "brands" developed a competitive advantage that significantly increased their likelihood of success....

Tempest in a Twee Cup? It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the microblogging site Twitter. I cite it frequently in speeches as a source of ideas, entertainment and breaking news. It got a lot of good press recently when one Twitter user managed to get out the message "arrested" as he was ...

Jenny Schade's Making It Count Salesgenie.com's $2.7 million mistake, and how a major retailer avoided making a similar one. Note to Salesgenie.com's CEO: A little investment in research generates a huge return. Vinod Gupta, the InfoUSA CEO who owns Salesgenie.com, learned this lesson the hard way w...

The most challenging thing Mark and I deal with on a day-to-day is measurements: metrics, numbers, penetration, impact, and influence. Whenever I look at the sort of numbers that advertising and marketing offer I am generally amazed. Every day we’re learning more and more on how to convey our ...