Automated network mapping

An interesting development in network mapping is the ability to do it automatic and “live”. I’ve been involved in doing network mapping of conferences the old-fashion way – manually (as I’ve written about before). This article in the Technology Review explains how automated network mapping was done at a conference. Simply put, conference participants were given a badge (as pictured above) that tracked their proximity to other badges and sent this data to a central computer which then analysed the data and produced a real time visualisation of the event’s social network (pictured above). Interesting…

Read the full article here >>

Guidelines for Evaluating Nonprofit Communications Efforts

For those interested in the area of campaign/advocacy evaluation, here are some very good guidelines on evaluating nonprofit communications efforts (pdf) from the Communications Consortium Media Center. The guidelines focus on “lessons learnt” in the evaluation of campaigns and sets out some key concepts to consider.

Glenn

What is a survey?

Just came across the “what is survey?” website which is a very complete guide to surveys from the US National Opinion Research Centre. The guide is also available in pdf (pdf version here).

In an earlier post, I also listed other useful guides about surveys.

Glenn

PR Measurement – Catch 22

PR Week has recently published their Marketing Management Survey (pdf). Amongst other subjects, the survey asked US-based marketing excutives about measurement and their activities. Ed Moed of the Measuring Up blog points out that the survey “rehashes many of the same weary and misguided perceptions” on PR measurement, notably:

“PR is a difficult one to measure.”

“ Clients value PR, but question its value because they think it can’t be measured”

“In an economic climate where budgets are tight, research and measurement are very often the first portions of a PR budget to be cut. Yet measurement is necessary to prove ROI, which can help increase budgets, providing a Catch-22 situation…”

As Ed points out “People, public relations can be measured.” I couldn’t agree more, read Ed’s full post on his blog.

Glenn