As campaigns become increasingly complex, taking in more media channels and connecting with audiences in new ways, it becomes even more difficult to measure the success.

At Crowd DNA we have tested over 75 campaigns and brand partnerships across TV, online, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines and events over the last couple of years. In addition to standard effectiveness measures like awareness, comprehension, loyalty and participation, we have developed Impact DNA to test campaigns in a more comparable and actionable way.

Impact DNA’s combination of normative measures allows for the tracking and comparison of campaigns, or brand partnerships, regardless of media mix or sector.

Impact DNA uses six easy to understand, but highly powerful measures to assess the success of campaigns. It utilises tried and tested measures alongside innovative metrics that take into account online and offline performance.

The results are presented as a single-page PDF using the Impact DNA performance dashboard, as well as in a full debrief document, making the results easy to access, share and act upon.

For more information on using Impact DNA, or about any of our other work, please contact Paul Allen

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Last week social media was the primary tool for rioters, police, public and traditional media. It was credited with driving rioter and ‘civilian’ action, media coverage, government responses and ensuing brand involvement. But now that the dust is settling, how have social media and brands faired in the riot aftermath?

With 37% of all British youth on the private, untraceable, encrypted BlackBerry BBM network (Ofcom 2011), a handful of widely reported messages quickly attributed the brand as the rioters’ weapon of choice. With 60% of young people in the UK ‘highly addicted’ to their Smartphone (Ofcom 2011), BBM’s free instant messaging is one of the most popular tools to stay in touch and features hugely in Crowd DNA’s research with young people – not just among rioters. However the ‘corruption’ of BBM has caused a major shift in the public’s brand perception, with negative Twitter mentions rocketing from 16% to 24% over the riots (BrandWatch).

As Tottenham MP David Lammy pressured for the shut down of the entire BBM network at the height of the riots, hackers simultaneously threatened to release employee details from Research In Motion – the maker of BlackBerry devices – if they did so. The reach and influence of social media has been made painfully clear by BlackBerry’s adulteration by rioters. David Cameron has called for extended police powers when social media is used to incite violence, disorder and criminality and Theresa May will meet with Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion in the coming weeks to discuss social media safety (The Guardian).

As BBM became synonymous with rioters, Twitter took on the mantle of ‘voice of the people’ by facilitating immediate public, police and media responses. Real time, first hand reporting from ‘civilians’ democratised riot knowledge, preceding traditional media coverage and facilitating mass public response to key issues.

Civilian-lead campaigns such as #Riotcleanup and #Riotwombles saw the online become offline as hundreds gathered to sweep the streets, and within hours civilian researchers were mapping the riots using online tools – laying the riot sites over the social deprivation index and against real-time twitter feeds to create up-to-the-minute mapping. Civilian policing became public as Twitter shared news of the Turkish communities defending the streets of Dalston, civilian journalists shared video content on Youtube and thousands who tweeted, posted, blogged and commented online.

The HM Government e-petition ‘Convicted London rioters should lose all benefits’ has seen the biggest public engagement in policymaking to date, with social-media-enabled link sharing leading to over 200,000 signatures – nearly 500% more than any other e-petition to date and twice the number needed to be considered in the House of Commons.

Police were quick to use civilian ‘detectives’ to identify rioters; with the Met’s Flickr site ‘Giving Photos From Operation Withern’, ‘Catch-A-Looter’ and ‘Zavilla: Identify UK Rioters’ all using social media to enable public identification. Social media is not a new resource for policing - the Greater Manchester Police were nominated for three ‘Golden Twits’ back in 2010, for tweeting every 999 call they received in real time in 24 hours, posting 3200 tweets across 3 twitter accounts. Social media helped to align police and public interests, give police a human voice and promote transparency – a significant issue in a society still reeling from expenses and phone hacking scandals and shocked by the lack of police presence in some affected areas.

Traditional media also relied on social media for up-to-the-minute information, with the BBC website merging traditional and social media coverage by offering live TV news alongside a live feed from tweeting journalists, official statements, press updates and public commentary; and broadsheets and magazines turned to Twitter to appeal to civilians to post from ‘in the action’. However traditional media sources have not been usurped by the civilian voice – they were very active on social media themselves, with journalists offering trustworthy tweets that cut through the wealth of rumour from unfounded sources.

Aside from BlackBerry, sportswear brands and retailers such as Adidas, Nike and Footlocker were also pervasive across all riot imagery – emblazoned on the trakkies or hoodies of the rioters themselves as they searched for the coveted loot of Nike Air Max and Sony TVs. The rioters’ focus on luxury sportswear and expensive technology drove right wing distain, claiming that rioters were ‘greedy not needy’ and that brands endorsed ‘boorish behaviour’ (Daily Mail) through celebrity endorsements such as Snoop Dogg for Adidas. Despite Levi’s pulling their ‘Legacy’ advert that features rioting, they have still received significant criticism for endorsing violence and being in bad taste despite never being aired in the UK.

Some brands took the opportunity to gain positive press and public acclaim by offering support to high profile riot victims. Ashraf Haziq (the exchange student mugged on camera during the riots) was given a replacement PSP from Sony along with games from Namco Bandai. Brands also engaged in civilian campaigns to public acclaim, with London ad agency BBH raising over £35,000 in less than 5 days for 89-year-old Tottenham barber Aaron Biber, EasyJet flying home over 60 MPs and Sainsbury’s handing out water to #Riotcleanup helpers. However Old El Paso must be the most unlikely brand to jump on the riot bandwagon, with their Facebook update –

“In these trying times I think we could all benefit from a bit of comfort food, and there are few things more tasty and reassuring than baked enchiladas, full of spicy chicken and topped with lots of bubbling cheese”

So what have we learnt from the riots? First and above all – social media makes the public powerful. It helped facilitate the riots and stop them, it democratised news reporting and comment and it gave the public the opportunity to work in partnership with and beyond the bounds of government, policing and traditional media. Social media united and mobilised public voice, gave it a political mandate but yet the most trusted sources were still traditional media operating in the social media space. Clearly there is still a clear challenge in how you cut through the din in the social media space; it’s a noisy environment, but, as those seeking credible information during the riots learnt, not all of the noise is reliable or trustworthy

For now, social and traditional media are complementary mediums that enrich and integrate the social experience and information sharing.

And as for brands faring badly from riot affiliations or cashing in on riot hype… as Ice T said, ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’.

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The network audit is a research method we've designed, re-designed, re-designed some more and, along the way, used to good effect on a number of projects for clients in media, FMCGs, fashion and alcohol. It is, in fact, less of a method and more of a tactic – not a set-in-stone technique, per se, but something that can be remodelled and adjusted for use online or offline, to connect with smaller or larger sample sizes, and over varying lengths of time.

In a nutshell, we use the network audit to help better understand how ideas, messages, advice and recommendations flow (or indeed don't flow and instead grind to a shuddering halt…) through social systems. It's an acknowledgement that people do not operate, think or make purchase decisions in isolation; an acknowledgement also that effectiveness can only really be assessed through observing/measuring impact between human connections.

The network audit technique, whether carried out face-to-face, via telephone interviews, online or social media tracking, whether quantitative, qualitative or a combination thereof in approach, basically focuses on recruiting networks of friends, friends-of-friends and work colleagues. This, of course, ought to be a blindingly obvious way through which to establish influence and advocacy but one that is rarely conducted in research. Yes, it takes more work and greater attention to detail in terms of project design, but reaps powerful results when deployed with specific objectives in mind.

We've conducted network audits involving over 200 participants and involving more than 600 interviews, others with just ten participants responding via Twitter. What's consistent and advantageous to the research objectives across all has been that the surface level emphasis of the work has been more on understanding friendships and relationships, something people are generally happy and willing to discuss, and less obviously about influence, who has influence and whether the participants themselves are influential (points which people are often far less willing to discuss candidly). In the network audit, the dynamics of influence and advocacy are peeled away at (if 'peeling away' at a dynamic is indeed possible!) rather than tackled head-on and far greater insights are derived as a consequence.

Similarly, the network audit gets away from the shortcomings of exploring influence solely in terms of that which is self-reported (plenty of people tend to overstate their own influence; some even downplay it). A network audit tactic allows for different perspectives to be cross-referenced and compared.

There's plenty that we've discovered about word of mouth that we don't believe we would have (or at least not as crisply and saliently) had it not been for the network audit tactic. These include -

• Status bargain – we've discovered that people who are willing to modify their opinion based on receiving new information and differing views score very highly with others as influencer

• Bridging capital – we've learnt the significance of those people who possess the ability to contextualise and make ideas relevant to others; similarly how and why some people who have expert knowledge of a product, idea, service etc may not be best suited to transferring their knowledge to others

• Filter skills – influencers have good filtering skills, be these social media/digital tools or just a heightened ability to cope with information overload and consequently to pinpoint new discoveries

• Impact of spontaneity – it's not quite consistent in impact across all categories but spontaneity of comms/event has a significant effect across many in terms of propensity to share branded messages positively and persuasively

To find out some more about work in word of mouth, do drop us a line andy@crowdDNA.com

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