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.

Marketing Sherpa's Marketing Fame on PR Blogging

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 !

Your thoughts required….PR Measurement

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?

Free PR masterclass… UK style

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?”

Ethical Blog Relations

I sometimes wonder about our profession.  I really wonder.

Hot on the heels of our last story on how not to pitch blogs another story has emerged but this time discussing PR people hiding their identity in their pitches. Except of course that their identity becomes very apparent from their pitch and their follow up.

Is this the basis of good communication? I don’t think so.

TechDirt has published a thoroughly depressing story entitled “Sneaky PR People Discover Blogs” which details attempts by PR people to place stories as neutral third parties.

What’s going on with that?

PR people must live and die by their credibility.  If you are a credible source it opens great opportunities for you and vice versa.

The problem here is that when these “practitioners” try and be clever, they hurt everyone in the profession through their stupidity.

I think it’s time to call an end to this rubbish. Do your job properly and you’ll find there’s no need for cloak and dagger tactics. It’s “practitioners” like these that make all our jobs harder.

Give it a rest.

“I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the past year or so with PR people discovering – but not quite understanding – blogs. Some have a handle on it, but others miss the mark by quite a wide margin. This all became very clear last month when a PR person tried to convince me to write a story about a company he worked for – without identifying the simple (and important) fact that he worked for them.”  

More from Dan Gillmor and G2Blog.