Digital Aptitude: The Full Story

 This week Peppercom has launched the Digital Aptitude Test in the UK, an offering that's been in development for some time in conjunction with our colleagues in the U.S. 

The Digital Aptitude Test (DAT) is designed to show where organisations are hitting and missing with their digital communications. The DAT starts with a quantitative and qualitative survey that is given both vertically and horizontally throughout a company.  We take those results and look at where internal knowledge and perception gaps exist for clients.  We then have our analysts go through it from both a quantitative and qualitative angle to discover trends and disconnects in the internal perception of a company's digital presence.

 

Yesterday PR Week ran a story about the UK launch of the Digital Aptitude Test.  Unfortunately, the test was painted as a wholly quantitative tool, leaving out its main purpose (identifying internal knowledge and perception gaps), the large volume of qualitative analysis involved in a Digital Aptitude Test project, the checklist that results from implementing the test, and the analytical and interpretive work of multiple communications professionals involved in the process.

What PR Week failed to report was that at the end of the process, the company not only gets an overall score, but they also get:

--subscores that measure the internal perception of the volume and ease-of-access to content on the site (information management); participatory tools that allow visitors to interact with one another and representatives of the company and provide feedback (communication management); and how the company provides support both in terms of financial and human resources for digital initiatives (resource allocation)

--qualitative analysis of the areas of greatest disconnect within the company and synthesis of open-ended answers on the test.

--a checklist of tangible items that need to be fixed within an organization to move the needle with the company's digital presence, based on where these internal gaps are perceived.

We envision this process, in many ways, as an hourglass approach.  By that, I mean we take a complicated qualitative phenomenon like internal perception, measure it through a largely quantitative survey tool, and then build on layers of analysis from experts on the Peppercom team.

After the survey results are in, we have a quantitative researcher who not only assigns the overall score, but likewise, the information management, communication management, and resource allocation scores for a company; the amount of deviation in answers along vertical and horizontal lines; and other pertinent statistics from the results.

In addition, qualitative analysis of the trends is provided by Peppercom's Director of Customer Insights, Sam Ford.  Sam was involved in the design of the Digital Aptitude Test with the Peppercom team for the past year.  He joined our staff full-time this summer from MIT, where he was previously managing the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, a media studies research group. 

Sam is a qualitative researcher with a Master's in media studies from MIT who taught multiple courses at the university.  In addition to his work at Peppercom, he remains a practicing academic and is currently working on book projects involving the state of the daytime serial drama in the U.S. and the concept of "spreadable media."

Finally, a team of PR professionals vet the quantitative and qualitative analysis, working with our researchers to come up with the checklist of internal gaps and areas of improvement to be sure that those areas identified are actionable within the industry and relate directly to issues with impact on a company's communication strategy.

PRWeek unfortunately failed to see the breadth and depth of this offering and asked a digital professional and a fellow PR professional for their comments based on less than half of the real facts. So here is my response to their comments:

For the Digital professional in the story who noted his concerns about a quantitative test to assess the effectiveness of a digital strategy, we want to note that the purpose of this test is to identify perception among one key audience--employees.  This test is designed to help companies close internal gaps in digital knowledge and communication processes in order to optimize their digital communication strategy, not to objectively measure a digital strategy's success with external constituents.

Likewise, for the PR professional who emphasized that a survey could not replace a PR expert's advice, we couldn't agree more.  The test itself is just the beginning of a deep analysis for us that involves the whole team of PR professionals mentioned above.

 

Luckily I have my blog which gives me the opportunity to publicly respond. This is the good side of the digital world but only one part of it for us at Peppercom. We took the test ourselves and are starting to address the areas where we found gaps. If you have any questions about the Digital Aptitude Test, visit our site for the tool at http:/www.digitalaptitudetest.com