Day: September 9, 2003

PR Measurement revisited

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to yesterday’s posting on PR measurement.

First up, the prolific James Horton has a well written whitepaper  on the subject which is definetely worth a read. James includes several characteristics of any publicity measurement tool, including:

  • Measurement should reflect all activitity of a program
  • It should be easy to use and update
  • Measurement should reflect the value of different publicity work
  • It should provide results which can be easily tracked and compared over time
  • Any reporting should be integrated with other PR management tools
  • Stories should be ranked on their content
  • Media outlets should be weighted on their relevance to the client’s target market

I also recieved links to other PR measurement content around the web.  These include:

 Interesting opinion piece from Michael Bland on PR evaluation 

 The Institute for Public Relations has presentations on measurement from companies such as Sears, Roebucks & Co. and Texas Instruments.

 e21’s view on Measuring PR Effectiveness

 Vocus on PR and Measurement  for the New Millenium

 Old (1999) piece from PR News on Measurement

Please feel free to send on any other links or content that might be of interest…

Sympathy for Marketing Wonk

You have to feel sorry for the guys over at Marketing Wonk.  When they launched as Up2Speed (from MarketingFix) they put a lot of time and effort into the site, then after very effectively building a large audience, their worst nightmare comes true and they have to change the name of their site.

Their response was a clever press release which following all the best lessons of crisis communications, came clean about how they didn’t do a trademark search.  But to add insult to injury, the newswires refused to publish the release.

Now while the release is tongue-in-cheek and may not fully conform to the “Headline-Intro Para-Quote” format of the traditional press release, I don’t see any reason why PR Newswire or BusinessWire would refuse to distribute it.  But there you go.

Needless to say the MarketingWonk team are unimpressed. Read more.