Categories
General PR tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech Weblogs

How to use 80/20 analysis and thinking to maximise blog effectiveness (And thank you, Rory Cellan-Jones)

I’m a big fan of Richard Koch’s 80/20 analysis and thinking. So I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and apply the 80/20 principle to analysing my own blog.

Since setting up In Front of Your Nose in January, I’ve discovered that 5pc of my blog posts generated 54pc of my page views. And, spookily, I find that 20pc of my blog posts have generated 80pc of page views (OK, it was 78pc, but you get the point).

To use Koch’s terminology, these are “the vital few” – again demonstrating the natural imbalance in nature – blogging being no different.

From an 80/20 perspective, I decided to focus on analysing the characteristics of the top traffic generating posts to identify what factors contributed to their success eg subject matter, keywords, comments, in-bound links, etc.

For example, my 2 most popular blog posts (generating nearly 20pc of my traffic) were: How to start a PR company with Google and a credit card and BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones and the death of the journalistic backgrounder.

A little further analysis reveals why they proved so popular. With the first post, it got picked up on Social Media Today and this generated a lot of inbound interest. Second, an analysis of the most popular search terms that attract traffic to my blog all centre around starting a PR company eg: how to start a pr company, setting up a pr company, etc. (More 80/20: these terms constitute 10pc of the total number of search terms – and yet generate nearly 70pc search generated traffic).

With the Rory Cellan-Jones piece, one factor stood out like a sore thumb – it was listed on the BBC Dot Life Technology blog as a “Link We Like” for nearly a month – it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you get link love from such a high profile site then you are bound to benefit. But what made the BBC link to the post in the first place? Simple. Rory Cellan-Jones himself thought it was a great post (he told me) ie it was good, relevant content.

An analysis of search terms is also quite revealing. As I said, until I’d looked at it closely, I hadn’t appreciated the volume of searches around starting a PR business.

What does this tell us? That there are a lot of people out there thinking about doing it and looking for information related to “going it alone” in PR? And is that the kind of person I want to attract? How will that help my own business and revenue goals? (Well, if people want to give me a free stake in any new business venture they start, that’s different).

My search analysis also showed me that terms like online PR and digital PR are still in their search infancy – they are still very much in the early adopter search phase. I’m confident that these terms will increase in popularity (in which case, this blog should be well positioned to pick up on that trend). But clearly there is no guarantee – and it shows that mainstream PR buyers are still using traditional terms to find what they want.

So what now? It has certainly given me some pointers in terms of the type of content I might create in the future – and to think more clearly about linking conversion goals and the relationship between input and output. But perhaps most importatnly it has helped to FOCUS my resources and energy. Which can’t be a bad thing. 80/20. You know it makes sense.

Categories
Uncategorized

UK PR, marketing and media jobs see big drop in June 2008

Marketing, PR and media sector jobs registered the steepest decline in availability in June, according to online recruitment site Monster.

However, “opportunities increased significantly in hospitality and tourism; and healthcare, social work whilst the arts, entertainment, sports, leisure sector surged year-on-year.”

Categories
General PR

Do PR agency directors earn less than £20 per hour?

A bit of data extrapolation. Recent PR Week features say that the average PR agency director’s salary is £75,000 and senior agency folk work on average 59 hours a week. In which case, that means the average PR agency director earns around £26.50 per hour (this assumes they take 4 weeks holiday – which I suspect in some cases they don’t – so that would drop the rate slightly further). Of course, the £26.50 is before tax – a £75,000 salary of course attracts a tax rate of 40pc on everything above £34,000 (allowing for personal allowances, amount taxed at lower rate, etc) . So this could mean take home pay is actually below £20 per hour.

PR Week’s data would also suggest that if the average PR agency account exec is earning £19,800 and working 50.5 hours a week, then the average hourly rate is about £8 pre-tax). Post tax takes the figure closed to £6 per hour. Which may explain the lack of morale cited by PR Week – or why office cleaning offers a similar rate of pay for shorter hours.

Categories
People tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Why you should question any tech B-to-B PR campaign that emphasises print over online

A very instructive interview with IDG founder Pat McGovern in today’s Guardian – with some unavoidable conclusions for the tech PR sector.

McGovern hasn’t built a $3bn empire by getting things too wrong – so worth listening to his views on the future of B-to-B publishing (he says all B-to-B publishing will be online in 10 years).

A few things in the feature did stand out. For example, many questioned his decision to drop the print edition of Infoworld in the US – saying farewell to distributing 180,000 copies every week. “Many said without print people wouldn’t be reminded every week of our brand and 40% of our revenue would disappear overnight,” claims McGovern.

One year later, InfoWorld’s online revenues had trebled, the magazine’s overall revenues were up 10%, and without the costs of print, paper and postage, profit margins went from -3% to 37%.

He also says it costs around $20,000 to launch a new online magazine title – compared with $400,000 for a print version.

And here’s an eye-opener – 60pc of the content on IDG’s B-to-B sites is user generated. As McGovern rather too gleefully admits: “It’s nice to have more than half your content generated for free.”

So what are the implications for tech PR?

1. Any PR approach that prioritises print over online needs to be seriously questioned.

2. Tech buyers still trust media brands such as Computer Weekly, Computerworld, etc – however, the way they consume and interact with the magazine is very different. They are unlikely to pay much (if any) attention to the print title. And even when they get information from the online version, it is most likely to be via search rather than because they treat the online title as a destination. Even the small proportion of readers who will subscribe to a magazine RSS feed are likely to filter the content. The 80/20 principle applies ie 80pc of individual reader value will lie in 20pc of the content – readers will increasingly select only the really relevant stuff.

3. If 60pc of content is user generated, then the way in which PR is involved in the process of content generation and conversation is going to be very different.

4. Paradoxically, some magazine related events may become more valuable eg I’d wager that Information Age events are seen as more valuable by many of its readers than the print version of the magazine. They trust the brand, but they don’t have time to read the print version. And they will get content from the magazine online – and via search (and RSS if the magazine reinstated its RSS feeds….). Particular events, however, allow for networking, peer contact, etc.

Given the importance of search in this whole equation, any tech PR programme that doesn’t integrate with a carefully thought through approach to buyer behaviour and search is seriously flawed.

Categories
Web/Tech Weblogs

Predict the future with Web Of Fate

My thanks to Mashable for the tip on a new site called Web Of Fate:

20-word Description: Web of Fate is a semantic analysis engine that extracts meaning from historical, present and future events and draws connections among them.

CEO’s Pitch: The Web of Fate semantic analysis engine can visualize and uncover hidden relationships among historical, present and future events allowing people to:

– Study the flow of events and decision paths chosen by historical figures.

– Take snapshots of the exact state of when a predictive event is made. So future generations can understand why certain choices were made.

– Identify trends, locate anomalies, detect threats and track multiple/alternate futures with FutureGraph.

Web of Fate also provides semantic web services, allowing users to integrate semantic and decision analysis into their own products and services.

It is quite an intriguing concept. I particularly like the Quote feature that allows you to highlight predictions made by 3rd parties – and then you can check back at the appropriate time to see whether the prediction came true or not (and how likely other people think the prediction will come true) – so checking on, say, Gartner predictions now becomes easy.

You can enter your own predictions – perhaps, I intend to get a client featured in the Financial Times – and people can then vote on how likely the outcome might be. Could be a useful tool for setting management expectations appropriately.

Categories
Books General PR People Technology PR

How the 80/20 principle dominates PR, social media and life

Richard Koch’s book The 80/20 Principle was first published in 1997 and went on to become a cult business classic (500,000+ copies sold. He later wrote the 80/20 Way which extended the approach to life generally).

I only properly read both books recently as a result of the suggested reading list in Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week (it made me realise what a big debt Ferris owes to these earlier works – in many ways, the 4HWW philosophy is a practical application of Koch’s 80/20 approach).

So what is the 80/20 Principle? In short, it is an extended application of Pareto’s Principle (Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, 1848 – 1923, was looking at patterns of wealth and income in 19th century England. He found that 20pc of the population enjoyed 80pc of the wealth – he also found that you could reliably predict that 10pc would have 65pc and 5pc would have 50pc. The key point is not the percentages, but the fact that the distribution of wealth across a population was predictably unbalanced).

Koch’s insight was to apply this predictable imbalance across a whole host of business and life phenomena. However, reading his books made me realise that although the 80/20 concept gets bandied around a lot, people often miss the subtlety of what Koch was getting act. For example:

80/20 is simply shorthand – the ratio could be anything 90/10, 70/30, etc. In fact, it doesn’t need to add up to 100 eg 70/20. The key point is that a 50/50 relationship between two sets of related phenomena is the exception rather than the rule. And yet, we naturally act as though the norm is a direct correlation between input and output or effort and reward.

The principle is thus counterintuitive. As Koch points out: “High performers are not 10 or 20 times more intelligent than other people – it is the methods and resources they use that are unusually powerful.”

Take some of his examples: Less than 20pc of all recorded music is played more than 80pc of the time; Fewer than 20pc of clouds will produce 80pc of rain, etc.

Let’s look at the world of PR and social media (I have no scientific evidence for these examples – I suggest them as possible ratios – why not analyse these in your own business and see what results you get:

20pc of agency employees do 80pc of the work clients value

5pc of companies gain more than 80pc of press coverage

Less than 1pc of press releases generate 99pc of press interest

Less than 10pc of your press contacts generate 100pc of the press coverage

Less than 10pc of your blog posts generate more than 90pc of the blog hits

I’m sure you can come up with many more. The point Koch would no doubt make is that in many cases, people will carry on behaving as though there is a 50:50 relationship in the above examples.

As Koch says, the world is resolutely non-linear. By focussing on and analysing the 20pc of inputs that generate the 80pc benefit in all cases, you should be able to obtain significant gains. Less is more.