Places were proposed and discussed. We were all drooling and yes, we wanted to go to all those cool-but-not-too-far places. Night safari, indoor theme park, and rafting. Errrggghhh, wait, what? What? Rafting? More than half of us shouted “Yesss”   to rafting. Rafting is simply in our blood!

We were hungry for challenging activities. Besides, a research listed rafting as one of the top 25 fat-burning workouts to get you in shape. Rafting down the river burns an amazing 300-350 calories per hour!!!! Well, we needed to burn more calories and put ourselves in more stunning shape. Hahahahaha well, to have the endurance and strength, too!

One key message:  Keep fit and don’t go during the off-season, but if you’re one of those people who have slacked off a bit and don’t exercise much, you should go rafting.

Our choice fell on Cisadane River because it is located in Bogor and we need only one and a half hours to reach the site. So, on Saturday, we started off from the office at 11 a.m. and drove 1.5 hours to Gurmiyati Camp to spend the night there and go water rafting on Sunday morning. We arrived earlier because we had to work the weekend shift first.

The last few miles were really bumpy, but the camp looked nice, almost out of place in the middle of nowhere. At night, we played some silly sweaty games, singing, corn grilling, and went to bed at 3 a.m., forgetting that we were to go rafting at 8 in the morning. (-_-“)

Amazingly, woke up at 6:30, took a bath, had breakfast, and by 8 we were ready. Then they loaded us up into the back of pickup trucks like cattle and drove us about 15-20 minutes to the launching area. Gurmiyati Camp provided us with the proper rafting gear with international safety standard.

If you’re a diehard rafting fan and just can’t wait to get back onto that flowing, crisp, cool mountain river, Cisadane River is perhaps a good choice. You’ll be paddling down the river that gives you a view of beautiful mountain scenery and of course something we can hardly find in Jakarta, FRESH AIR!

The rafts were kinda small, and the rapids weren’t dangerous (still had a lot of fun), but that’s ok because it was our first time to go rafting, and we didn’t want to take on intense rapids just yet, weren’t really rowing too hard.

So, that’s Gauge happy story. We all believe that whoever is happy will make others happy too because happiness worth sharing…

Within a couple of hours the city was abuzz. Those who received the coffins told of their macabre present on Twitter. Online news portals reported the increasingly number of people being sent coffins.

As it turned out the gimmick backfired. Critics lambasted the marketer for being insensitive and downright silly. Sumardy harvested tons of ill will, but one thing he did succeed in doing was to generate lots of publicity.

Patently, Sumardy failed in generating the right publicity for himself and his book but, ironically, if he was judged by the standard that most marketers use to measure the success of their campaigns in generating publicity, he would be a great success.

That’s because most marketers still go by the ridiculous measure of Advertising Value, which is what you would pay for an advertisement if it appeared on the same page and size as the story.

It makes no sense from a communications point of view because it makes no distinction between positive, neutral or negative publicity. It also doesn’t take into account the prominence of a brand or company mentioned in the story – they could be the focus of the story or a mere passing mention.

To be fair, some marketers have moved away from Advertising Value to come up with Public Relations Value, where they assign a multiple to its advertising value. The reasoning here is that editorial copy is more valuable and credible than advertising so a news story that has, say, Rp1 million Equivalent Advertising Value would have Rp3 million PR Value. Photographs and front page stories get multiples of five or more because readers tend to look at them first.

While this is an improvement over Advertising Value it still has the same weaknesses: no distinction whether it is a positive or negative story; a disregard for the prominence of the brand in the story and also a disregard whether the key messages or a brand have been delivered. All this has led marketers to take media monitoring less seriously than they should. This is a pity because if media monitoring is done right it can be a wealth of competitor and industry intelligence for the marketers to tap into.

In the media monitoring system that we have built we try to do it right. Every news item that we pick up from the 100 plus publications from all over Indonesia are coded and entered into a database. We assess each item according to its tone (positive, neutral or negative), prominence (focus of story, part of story, passing
mention; placement in the newspaper), presence of key messages and other parameters that are then filtered through an algorithm to get what we call a PR Index.

This, we feel, is probably the most accurate measurement of publicity that
you can get. But we do more. We also trap information about persons quoted, issues covered, competitors mentioned and even the journalists name. All this is captured in our database that comes with a powerful search engine that allows our clients to slice and dice the data whichever way they want.

It is by doing this – accumulating and filtering the data – that information that you get publicly is ordered and become a useful tool for measuring the return on investment for your publicity efforts, keeping tabs on what your competitors are doing and which emerging issues to pay attention to.

So publicity can be measured, analyzed and used as a tool to provide you with a competitive edge. It only takes diligence and a systematic approach to quantify the reams of information and make meaning out of the ocean of data.