If you haven’t read PRWeek’s annual measurement feature (reg req’d) by Erica Iacono, it’s worth checking out. She talks about the movement of PR toward embracing social media measurement and integrating it with traditional media measurement. She also emphasizes a growing understanding that market influencers could be journalists, analysts, bloggers or some combination of those things.The article also features a profile on Sun Microsystems, a Biz360 client. It outlines their integrated measurement strategy that includes domestic, global and social media analysis. This approach to understanding their market has lead to a change in the way they announce products:

Working with Biz360, the company has segmented the top 300 bloggers that it considers to be individuals that can ‘move the market.’ Sun tracks them on a monthly basis as far as what announcements they pick up and what issues are important to them.

This measurement strategy has impacted the company’s outreach to the community. When it came time to announce the launch of Solaris, a new operating system on the Open Source platform, the PR team made the decision to launch it into the blogosphere first.

Erica also references the biggest measurement story from last year, which focused on how P&G had discovered through market mix modeling (MMM) that PR had the highest ROI among the marketing disciplines in four out of the six brands it tested. David Rockland of Ketchum predicts that MMM will soon be the standard for measuring “quick sale, non-durable consumer goods.”

With increasingly sophisticated measurement and budgets on the rise, I think we’ll be hearing more about placing PR results in a larger business context.

This past Friday, I participated on a panel with Jim Nail of Cymfony at Bulldog Reporter’s Advanced PR Technology in Practice conference in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was online measurement and was moderated by Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom. There were two overarching themes that came out of our presentations and Q&A. The first is that the movement of content online, the expansion of social media and the development of free and premium services for tracking all this new content make it possible to measure much more than you could just a few years ago - and get the results fast.

The second is that there is now more reason than ever for PR measurement to be placed in a business relevant context. That could be correlating results with internal marketing data, such as Web traffic or lead generation. Jim suggested that internal PR leaders get to know the folks doing marketing mix modeling (he referenced a PRWeek story - reg req’d - about P&G using market mix modeling to determine that the ROI from PR was higher than other types of marketing for four out of the six brands tested). It could also be correlating PR with changes in public perception using social media as a proxy. The ability to change opinions and behavior has always been the promise of PR. Measuring that change usually required surveys, focus groups or Web site data (how did you hear about us?). Social media changes the game by allowing PR to quickly assess public sentiment broadly or compare the buzz of individual news articles in the market.

There were many other notable sessions that day, athough I wasn’t able to attend them all, so I’m just going to note a few things that stood out for me. Dan Gilmor provided an overview of how citizen media is changing journalism and how the public consumes information. He even addressed the folly of citizen media, citing an example of a photo-shopped image of a man standing against the rail of one of the twin towers with an airplane in the background heading toward it.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR actually convinced me that the press release is not dead. At Biz360, we talk about how the rise of social media has made it possible to take your message directly to your target audiences. Jamie talked about how press releases, properly optimized for search, often rank above actual news stories on Google News and that you can take your message directly to the public in this way. His advice is to use Google Trends to figure out the top relevant search terms for your press release, use those terms in the headline and first paragraph and include hyperlinks throughout the body to drive users to your Web site (let me know if any of this works).

So if the press release isn’t dead, it’s definitely changing. Brian Solis of FutureWorks PR talked about how to write a social media press release that includes includes social bookmarks from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr and other Web 2.0 goodies. Naturally, at throughout the day, attendees asked if companies would eventually ruin social media. I expect this to be a topic at the upcoming WOMMA Summit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics here, Eric Schwartzman’s post includes links to all of the presentations, including mine. He also set up a del.icio.us page where the speakers could share links to supporting materials.

Politics took center stage in U.S. news this week, thanks to mid-term elections. As expected, there was plenty of coverage in the mainstream media as well as blogs. Because bloggers commonly comment on news stories that they find interesting, a few sites that analyze blog content have become great resources for finding news about a given topic. My favorite free aggregator is currently Techmeme, which does a great job of surfacing the most-discussed technology stories online.

At Biz360, we monitor tens of millions of blogs—which gives us tons of data to mine. Because we also track thousands of mainstream media web sites, we’re able to track links between blogs and the media. In November so far, we’ve tracked 764,000 links from blogs to mainstream media web sites (and hundreds of thousands going the other direction as well). Analyzing the links enables us to surface some interesting nuggets, like this list of the most-linked news stories since November 1:

So why no articles on Democrats retaking Congress or Rumsfeld’s resignation? Even though these were two of the top topics in the news, they didn’t generate a definitive article that was linked to heavily by other writers. Because some of the stories developed over the course of multiple days, linking was diffused across different articles from many different sources.

The articles that did make this list span a number of different topics, but most of them share these common traits:

• Interestingness (a term coined by Flickr): the kinds of stories that spawn reactions and discussions.
• Authority: Many of the most-linked stories are based on exclusive reports or news scoops from trusted organizations. Half of the top 10 stories were from CNN, the third most-linked source after The New York Times and Washington Post.

Taken as a whole, online link analysis can be a valuable component of corporate early warning systems in market intelligence solutions like Market360. It’s important to know not only what’s being said, but also how far it’s being spread.