Marketing Sherpa’s “Fame” newsletter has listed seven PR blogs on the Internet. They kindly include PR Opinions as well as Flacklife, G2Blog, Dan Gillmor, Marketing Wonk and PR Studies.
They also list PR Bop a new weblog looking at the interesting stories coming over the wires.
PS: A small correction on their listing. I’m actually not based in the UK, in case your interested my primary co-ordinates are: Latitude 53,20N and Longitude 6,15 W !
No more to say then you’ll find it here…
Jay Porter from SS+K was in touch with me with an interesting question on metrics on performance and ROI from Public Relations.
From Jay’s e-mail (with kind permission):
“Our firm is always searching for ways to provide clients with metrics on performance and ROI that are both actionable for them and fair to us. For a particular client, we have settled on a scorecard approach that looks at both quantitative and qualitative measures of activity and results. As we refine this, we are searching for a simple way to weight coverage from trade, business, and more general media (for this client, generally print). We use a set of subjective guidelines to rate stories, but a great hit in a small newsletter obviously isn�t as powerful as a mostly positive write-up in BusinessWeek. Do you of any established tiering system for print media that takes into account relative influence as well as circulation? Or, to the larger point, are there established best-practices for coverage scorecards that you would recommend?”
I think this is a good opportunity for you kind reader to contribute something. I’ll kick off with some thoughts, please feel free to add you two cents either via the comments below or you can e-mail me your comments directly if you prefer.
OK, so here are some of my thoughts:
Audit
The first step is to identify what media “moves the needle” for your client. In my experience a well targeted story in a low circulation publication that is tightly focused on your clients’ business can generate a lot more noise than a story in “Business Week.”
How do you do this? Find out what the client reads, if possible find out what some of their customers or partners read. What publications have historically driven business?
Grading outlets
I think you’re on the right track with the tiering system.
The most basic form of this style of measurement is using circulation figures, though as I’ve already stated this doesn’t take into account qualitative coverage.
So step two is to decide what media outlets (print, online, live media etc.) will make a real difference to your client and weight them accordingly. There’s a wide range of methodologies on what weight or scoring you should use.
Grading coverage
You can further analyse these results by grading the type of coverage; e.g. a product story, inclusion in a headline, client quote in a feature, quote in competitor’s story etc.
Automate it
At this stage it’s clear we are developing a model, so an application like Excel can help to automate much of the entry and analysis of these figures.
Extend the measurement
The next step is to get the client involved. By analysing trends over time such as web hits, online registrations, whitepaper downloads etc. it is possible to begin to see how successful PR tactics is driving traffic which although not an end in itself is a useful gauge to what coverage is contributing to the company’s objectives.
So, what are your thoughts?
Rupert Goodwins over at ZDNET UK is providing a free masterclass for any UK PR pros who may have forgotten good media-relations practice over the Summer. The series which runs all week has the added spice that he’ll name the culprits at the end of the week but you’ll have to match the Vendor/PR with each “crime”.
His kick-off lesson is as follows:
“When a publication runs a story saying your client is Number One by a long way, and then talks about the changing fortunes of numbers two and three, get on the phone to the journalist responsible and complain vigorously about how they didn’t say enough bad things concerning number three. Of course, this in no way alerts the journalist to any company you might see as a particular threat, nor does it encourage them to contact the object of your affections and ask, “just what is it between you two?”
The folks over at Up2Speed have re-launched the site as MarketingWonk. It seems there was a trademark issue with the name Up2Speed.
I like their response to what could’ve been a crisis, it happens to us all at some stage.
Murphy's Law 