You’ve probably been wondering where the #measurePR Twitter chat recaps are.

Well, once WTHashtag went down, all of us who moderate chats on a regular basis were scratching our heads a little… ‘cos where were we supposed to get the chat transcripts from?

I recently started using RowFeeder and, fortunately, had set up a search for #measurepr there. So that’s where I pulled these transcripts from. I apologize for how late the recaps are, but better late than never, right?

On April 26, Steve King aka @smallbizlabs returned for a second engagement, to talk more about research. Some of his nuggets:

  • On explaining “confidence interval” or “margin of error” (terms we see often, and sometimes get wrong), Steve said it’s “the plus-or-minus figure reported in newspaper opinion poll results.” It tells you how sure you can be (of those results), and is expressed as a percentage, with 5% being generally used. Steve also recommended Raosoft’s sample size calculator, which will do the math for you (and which Narciso Tovar was quite happy about).
  • During Steve’s last visit to #measurepr, he’d mentioned that one of the potential problems with online surveys is their lack of statistical significance. This time around, he elaborated, explaining that online samples can be biased. For example, “about 15% of Americans not online, so online surveys cannot include them.”
  • However, Steve conceded that online surveys have advantages too – they’re quicker and cheaper. So the key thing is to be aware of their limitations before you decide to do one.

Steve also chatted about the up- and down-sides of doing qualitative research online, and you can see the entire chat via this link to the transcript of #measurePR with Steve King, Round 2.

Then last week, we had Eric Peterson of Twitalyzer on. Given how much we’ve talked about influence recently, I figured this would be quite the chat… and it was. But one of the nicest things, for me, was the gracious and upfront way in which Eric dealt with questions, some quite tough. Among others, he shared:

  • The one quality that he sees in the “top influencers” as ranked by Twitalyzer (a question from Matt LaCasse) is that there is “honest engagement and commitment to Twitter as a communication medium.” Of course, this got folks talking about what “real users” are, influence, and so on.
  • On Twitalyzer as compared to Klout, Eric said,”Klout is to Nielsen/comScore as Twitalyzer is to Omniture/Google Analytics… our identification of ‘influencers’ is a byproduct of the system, not the system.” (I like that!)
  • What Twitalyzer focuses on: “helping businesses & professionals work to improve their use of the medium.”

These are just a few of the nuggets from the chat with Eric; again, you can read the entire chat via the transcript of #measurePR with Eric Peterson.

Well. Two chat recaps/transcripts in one post. Isn’t today your lucky day?! And if I were you, I’d subscribe to both Small Business Labs (Steve’s blog) and the  Twitalyzer blog, they’re chockfull of good stuff.

The next #measurePR chat is next week, Tuesday May 24, from 12-1 pm ET. Since I will be at BlogWorld, Jen Zingsheim of CustomScoop has very kindly agreed to sit in for me. She’s killer-smart, so don’t miss it!

Image: haleysuzanne via Flickr, CC 2.0