We selected ten sites each from the following areas – UK Nationals, Business, Marketing, Technology and Consumer. There was no particular selection process, just an attempt to have a reasonably representative sample and we both hasten to state that this is a relatively limited exercise which should therefore be taken with at least a pinch of salt. Particularly since indexed urls have been used as a proxy for content as this can be impacted significantly by site structure (as stated in slide 21), with some sites having sub domains and/or a more complex content directory structure.

However at the same time with the data that is readily available we think it provides some (arguably) valuable food for thought. So after several hours of research, number crunching and graph generation here are the results (I suggest you view in full screen mode unless you have excellent eyesight):

Site data is sourced from Google for the number of indexed urls via the “site:domain” command and from AdPlanner for the traffic data.

However they don’t mention the following three crucial issues about the traffic to their site.

1. That volume of traffic is clearly going to be affected by quantity of content.

2. The time visitors actually spend reading their content.

3. The relevance of those visitors to the content.

At RealWire we are always keen to make sure that discussions are based around the facts so let’s look at each of these in turn to see how our readership, engagement and relevance are all in fact apparently superior to Big Wire Corp’s.

Quantity of content

Q: Which is the more “popular” of the following two sites?

Site A – 1 piece of content and 1,000 page views in a month
Site B – 1 million pieces of content and 1 million page views in a month

Well according to their literature Big Wire Corp would apparently see Site B as a more popular destination because it has 1,000 times more page views. Makes sense, bigger is better right? Wrong.

Site A’s one piece of content has been viewed 1,000 times, whereas each of Site B’s stories has only be viewed once on average. Now which site is more popular? Site A of course.

Now let’s apply this concept to Big Wire Corp’s website.

First of all let’s get an idea of volume of content. The Google “Site:[url]” command gives you the number of unique pages indexed by Google on a particular site – a good proxy for the amount of content.

In this case the answer is 406,000.

Next we need an idea of traffic to the site. Google AdPlanner provides estimates of monthly page views.

In this case the answer is 7.5 million

If we then divide page views by content, we get an estimate of the number of views per article per month. Answer 18.5.

RealWire’s equivalent data from the same sources is
Content – 5,500
Page views – 200,000* (less than 3% of Big Wire Corp’s figure)

This gives 36.4 page views per article per month.

Twice the Big Wire Corp figure suggesting RealWire has higher readership for each article.

*I happen to know that the page view figure is too high in RealWire’s case (we do have analytics of course) but it could equally also be so for Big Wire Corp and so until I can get a hold of actual numbers for them I am being consistent.

Engagement

Q: Which of these two sites is engaging its readership the most?

Site A – average time spent on each page 2 minutes

Site B – average time spent on each page 5 seconds

Site A obviously. Each of the readers are spending 24 times longer reading an article on average than on Site B.

So let’s apply this to Big Wire Corp again.

Again Google AdPlanner can help. It tells us how many visits the site receives and how long each one lasts. From this we can get Time spent per Page as follows:

Big Wire Corp numbers

Time spent per visit = 3 minutes 50 seconds (230 seconds)
Total page views = 7.5 million
Total visits = 3.5 million

Time spent per page = 107.5 seconds or 1 minute 47.5 seconds

RealWire numbers

Time spent per visit = 8 minutes (480 seconds)
Total page views = 200,000
Total visits = 64,000

Time spent per page = 153.6 seconds or 2 minutes 33.6 seconds

43% more than Big Wire Corp suggesting readers of RealWire content are more engaged.

Relevance

Q: Which of these two sites is most likely to have the most relevant readership to a UK relevant story?

Site A – 100% of visits from the UK

Site B - 1% of visits from the UK

A: Site A – Yes I know these are getting ridiculously easy now!

Big Wire Corp’s market report focusses on US usage of their site when comparing themselves to others such as RealWire. However given that the vast majority of their content is from US companies it will come as no surprise that the vast majority of their traffic does as well. Google Ad Planner again helps us out.

US traffic – 76% of total

But the majority of RealWire’s clients and therefore content are from the UK. So what’s Big Wire Corp’s UK traffic like?

UK traffic – 3% of total.

And RealWire’s UK traffic? Well AdPlanner estimates around 75% but the real figure is nearer 45% or 15 times the Big Wire Corp figure.

Suggesting that RealWire’s traffic is around 15 times more likely to be relevant.

Conclusion

When evaluating traffic between sites it is imperative that you don’t get drawn in by the size of headline traffic numbers and that you consider:

a) normalising traffic for levels of content

b) how engaged the readers are

c) how relevant the readers are

Or you could find yourself reaching some very misleading conclusions. Just ask Big Wire Corp

* Hattip to Andrew B Smith for highlighting the value of Google Adplanner for such analysis

As comforting as this figure might be to all of us working in, or with, the PR industry my own take on the figures suggests that the picture may not have been quite so rosy.  I estimate that a reduction of around 5-10 per cent is probably a more realistic range and is more consistent with David Brain’s analysis yesterday from a global perspective.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of the changing make up of the table and other supporting evidence.

For clarity PR Week’s 2010 league table is based on income generated in calendar year 2009. Similarly the 2009 league table is based on income generated in calendar year 2008. 

Analysis of the league table positions

The table below shows the income that an agency had to achieve in each of the last two years in order to be ranked at the particular positions shown in the league table;

The table shows that to achieve a particular position in 2010 requires significantly less income at all levels compared to the 2009 league table. For instance to be ranked 25^th in the table this year required an income of £7.52m, but to achieve the same position last year required £8.35m, a 9.9 per cent reduction.

Excluding the change at the 150^th position the reductions are between 8.0 and 14.4 per cent with an average of 10.9 per cent.

In producing this table I have made adjustments for new entrants and mergers to make it more accurate:

2010 New entrants

Of the agencies that were new entrants into the Top 150 this year six of them would have been included in last years list had they submitted their figures. I have added these into 2009’s list for consistency.

Mergers

The numbers are also affected by the mergers of Grayling/Trimedia, Ketchum/Pleon and Tonic/Huntsworth Health. In these cases I have also combined the income for the three combinations in 2009’s list as well in order to compare like with like.

Other evidence that doesn’t fit with the headline estimate

Agencies joining and leaving the list – is it a fully representative sample?

It would appear that Stephen Waddington’s challenge to the industry to submit their numbers for the benefit of all has gone unanswered by some. 30 agencies (excluding those that have merged) that were in the top 150 last year do not appear in the 2010 league table.

Between them these agencies had total income in 2008 of £67.2m and varied in size between £13.80m and £1.13m. Given that the 150^th position agency in the 2010 league table has income of £0.44m these agencies would have needed to have suffered a reduction in income of between 61 per cent and 97 per cent to have not made the cut.

This seems highly unlikely and what I suspect is more likely is that these agencies just didn’t submit figures this year. Obviously individual agencies could have any number of reasons why they chose not to, or were unable to, submit figures. However the absence of 20 per cent of last year’s list begs the question as to whether relying on just those who have submitted represents a valid sample. Have some agencies chosen not to submit numbers for fear of how they might look? Is the table therefore more likely to be biased towards those that performed better?

It is impossible to calculate a sensible estimate of the impact of these absences, but it does seem reasonable to question whether the sample, that the 0.75 per cent growth figure was based on, is truly representative.

Performance of the major Marcoms groups’ PR brands

The major global Marcoms groups that publish figures for PR specifically performed as follows in 2009:

WPP is organic change from 2009 analyst report
Interpublic from PR Week article 17 March 2010
Omnicom is organic change from 2009 analyst report

It is obviously possible that the UK elements of these businesses performed better than the rest of the world. However given that the UK recession was amongst the longest and deepest and in the absence of any specific data to the contrary, I would take these figures as they stand.

Between them these three groups account for approximately £2bn in PR revenues worldwide and these figures would also indicate a reduction of approximately 5-10 per cent.

Conclusion

It was clearly going to be a challenge for PR Week to pull together a robust analysis this year due to the optional submission nature of the list. However I think there is significant evidence to suggest that the headline performance of slight growth is more than a little misleading.

But what do agency heads think? Is my estimate of minus 5-10 per cent nearer the mark?

By coincidence I had been talking about a specific example of this earlier yesterday at the Social Media World Forum – my topic the Social Media News Release (SMNR).

In my presentation (below) I also highlighted the need for design* where PR content was concerned and that as of now the best attempt to date has been the Social Media News Release (hattip Mr Todd Defren). But like Tim I concluded that despite being one of the first to implement the template, it still only represents an incremental improvement over the press release – evolution not revolution.

The PR community (including us) needs to find even better ways to design our content and its packaging to suit a world that has many different audiences/communities, is increasingly accessing content across mobile platforms and is suffering from an overload of messages.

We, RealWire, also announced yesterday the results of research into the extent to which multimedia content is used to enhance press releases. The research found that of a sample of almost 3,000 press releases across six newswires only 13 per cent included any kind of “multimedia” (if you ignore company logos) and that in fact for the vast majority this was just a picture. Only 3 per cent included any other form of content e.g. audio/video etc and only 2 per cent included content that was hosted on social media platforms. You can hear me talking about these findings in more detail here. (For information RealWire’s comparative figures were 46 per cent, 11  per cent and 7 per cent respectively).

The research suggests that a substantial proportion of the PR community is not yet even making full use of the incremental innovations such as the SMNR, as well as the generic social media platforms. Given this lack of adoption of these new tools what do people think is the game changing solution that will get us to take our driving tests?

* favourite part of this video is Nick Leon between 1.45-2.15

Hattips for title of presentation to Greg Jarboe and Seth Godin

Social Media News Release – A Press Release for the Online World or a Meatball Sundae

Update: We have posted answers to the main FAQs regarding the animation here. The debate has also moved onto PRWeek UK here.

The three words that kept coming to my mind were authenticity, humanity and community. In the order of their occurrence in the film these were some bits that stuck out for me.

1. Open and honest with people – refers to his own background and life on a number of occasions including referring to himself as “still almost normal” and sharing the pain of the loss of his grandmother.
2. Generous when giving credit – when talking to his campaign manager for Senator it is she who he credits for success not himself.
3. Calm – in both positive and disappointing situations like losing the New Hampshire primary after winning Iowa and the knock backs in Ohio and Texas.
4. Empathises – even with a nine year old over the act of shaking hands.
5. Relaxed – his body movement is so natural it’s frightening and he’s not bad on a basketball court either!
6. Community organiser – always talking about a grassroots movement for change.
7. Clarity – Looks for simple, clear messages e.g. when talking about fuel and emissions standards when he highlights the simple win-win and of course “Change. Yes We Can.”
8. Inspires all ages – even a nine year old volunteers to make calls for him and an older voter is out on the street campaigning for the first time since Bobby Kennedy.
9. Personal – asks everyone their name when meeting people on the street, recognising that names are one of the most personal things to everyone.
10. Nothing is impossible – Hillary Clinton’s 30 point lead in the national polls doesn’t deflect him.
11. Treats his opponents with respect – congratulates Clinton on Ohio and Texas, though sometimes uses light hearted humour to have a dig e.g. the “likeable” comment in connection with Clinton in the New Hampshire debate.
12. Truth – when he speaks his mind about race at the National Constitution Center even though he doesn’t know if it’s a good idea for the campaign.

And above all the process it is not about him. He is seeking “an American victory” and when successful in primaries the vote wasn’t about him it was about the people “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.

Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg these are the qualities I want in a leader and I suspect many other people might too.

“due to adverse weather conditions we have decided that employee safety is paramount and we want our employees to get home safely so our offices are now closed.”

Whilst this is admirable and I *applaud* their concern for employee safety the fact that they hadn’t thought to put in place alternative arrangements to handle inbound communications amazes me in 2010. And this from an organisation whose strapline is “We CAN be bothered”. Well Simply Health apparently you can’t be bothered to make any arrangements to deal with members, some of whom could have urgent health matters. Couldn’t you have diverted your numbers to a mobile number? Couldn’t someone have rung in and got messages off voicemail and returned calls? Couldn’t you have manned an email address and then returned calls? Couldn’t a senior member of staff with appropriate transport have manned the phones? Ironic really when a recent press release stated:

“During difficult times such as these, companies need to be working harder than ever to attract and retain customers and it is disappointing that customers are finding this is not the case.”

“At Simplyhealth, we pride ourselves on always putting our customers first and doing the right thing, not the easy thing, which we believe is the way in which all customer facing companies should operate.”

I realise that the current weather conditions are adverse – I am in Newcastle which is pretty badily hit – but in this day and age of technology there is no excuse for not maintaining communications. If you are going to make a big thing out of your attitude being different you need to demonstrate it.

Update – I was contacted by Twitter shortly before finalising this post which was a good response and as I have said I don’t disagree with the sentiment about employee safety merely the lack of effort that would appear to have been made to “do the right thing not the easy thing”.

Update 6pm, 8/1/10 - Have received a call from the Corporate Sales and Marketing Director at Simply Health who was  in agreement that with hindsight more could have been done to maintain service levels. The “can be bothered” sentiment was expressed strongly with promises of actions to be taken and I will be updating this post as and when these occur. I hope to be able to report my trust being restored in the brand over the next few days.

Update 9.30am 9/1/10 – Received a call from their customer services manager who had been alerted to my issue by their PR Manager. He apologised for the frustration caused, accepted the constructive nature of the criticism and promised action to resolve my issues first thing on Monday morning. Mark sounded very concerned to ensure that his customers were looked after. The response so far has been excellent, it would be interesting to know though what other customer experiences have been like.

Update 3pm 12/1/10 – This should be my final entry. Have now been contacted by customer services they have processed my referral and an appointment is about to be made. An excellent service in the end. Would be good to know if Simply Health are going to put in place different procedures in the event of any similar situations, but I have definitely experienced evidence that they can indeed be bothered.

Case closed.

Fear – To a certain extent this is the more irrational of the two. What if I don’t do this? What won’t I know? What will people think? What if my competitors do or perhaps they already are?

Value – This is the more rational. If I do this I will derive this much benefit.

In the recent Econsultancy Social Media and Online PR Report (well worth reading) amongst many interesting statistics a few that jumped out at me were in connection with organisations’ (Figure 17) and Agencies’ (Figure 19) views of the potential value of social media.

Two points jump out at me from these stats. Firstly that Agencies think organisations are more sceptical about value than Organisations apparently do themselves. Perhaps this is due to lack of follow through on spending decisions?

Secondly that in both cases these figures imply that value is seen as a much bigger challenge to the argument for engaging in social media activities than the challenges and risks.

This is borne about by the findings of Figures 48 and 50 where from both Agency and Organisation perspectives 60% of respondents considered they had achieved some benefit from their social media activities but nothing concrete.

So with the vast majority of respondents seeing no concrete value in what they are doing does this suggest that fear – fear of what is being said about you, fear of missing an opportunity – is playing more of a role in justifying investment in social media than value?

Oh and the picture is from the 1970s TV version of Salems Lot and this scene was quite simply the most scary experience of my life at the time and I have never forgotten it!

In the past, Technorati’s authority score for a blog represented a count of the number of different sites that had linked to a particular blog in the preceding six months. Until the summer of 2008 this count included links where blogs appeared in blogrolls. These were removed from the calculations at that time, as they were identified as being too slow to change. Basically people’s housekeeping in connection with blogrolls was identified as being less than real time – to say the least I suspect!

The rank of a blog then represented how many blogs had a greater authority score i.e. more different inbound links than the selected blog.

The new measurements from October 2009 are less transparent but arguably more valid and useful. According to Technorati, authority is now based on “a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time”. This results in a score out of 1,000, with a higher score indicating greater authority. The advantages of this approach are that it is less easy for people to manufacture authority by creating fake links, plus the ratings are more dynamic, reflecting the extent to which individual blogs are the source of conversation.

They have also introduced a second authority score when viewing blogs through the Blog Directory feature that relates to a blogs relative authority within the sector or sub sector that it is classified in. For example if you want to know the blogs with a small business focus that Technorati thinks have the most authority on the subject then you can see a list here. In this case the Online Marketing Blog is assessed at having quite a bit more authority (961) within the small business blogs than the second ranked blog is this sector, Social Media Today (871). This is despite their overall authority scores being 614 and 689 respectively. Indicating that though SMT has more authority generally, Online Marketing Blog is considered to be more influential within the small business sector.

This is an interesting, and I would suggest, very useful change as it is relative and relevant authority that matters when assessing the importance of different sites not an absolute measure. We take the same approach to ranking sites at RealWire when calculating our RealWire Influence Rating for coverage achieved. If you don’t take this relative/relevant approach then you will always end up saying that the most influential sites are ones in the biggest communities e.g. Tech, but that is obviously not appropriate if you were trying to assess which sites were influential to, say, the fashion sector.

You can also see those blogs that are rising and falling the most within that sub sector on the right hand side of the same page.

I reckon these changes mean that it is easier to find key blogs that are relevant to you and those that are becoming more and less influential over time. And no this isn’t just because my blog now appears in the top 20k! What do others think?