Measuring PR: Clients like it, PR people ought to love it
I recently attended a conference on PR measurement put on by the Institute for Public Relations. Hearing what’s working for other PR people is always interesting, but this conference was particularly welcome because it brought together people who are doing the deep thinking on probably the hottest topic in PR: evaluating PR’s impact.
Measuring PR is rough for a number of reasons. Just a few include the difficulty of tracking changes in perception of a company or product to editorial coverage (as opposed to advertising, opinions articulated by colleagues, etc.), the sometimes prohibitively high cost associated with measurement itself and, not least, the desire PR people have to defend their budgets.
Conference presenters included a senior director at Microsoft who’s working to represent the effectiveness of PR for that company’s product lines and executives with a single number. There’s an appeal to the simplicity of a single-number score. But I didn’t understand why obliterating the nuance associated with, for example, media reports on Vista, was a good idea. Nevertheless, good to know that Microsoft is playing with the idea of measuring PR with one number.
At Schwartz, we work with entrepreneurial companies that are looking to grow very quickly. In the past, many of them “just knew” when PR was working. They’d report more in-bound calls, greater willingness of potential customers and partners to take meetings, and so on. We liked to hear anecdotal evidence that our programs were working, but it was only partially satisfying.
A few companies found it meaningful (some still do) to look at advertising equivalents. This is okay—if nothing else, it makes the case that PR is cheaper than advertising—but ultimately not that useful.
Here’s what I’m seeing a few small companies do, and do really effectively over the past couple of years. It’s cheap, it gives the PR team instant feedback they can use to tailor the PR program going forward and it doesn’t require that we ask inane questions like “what’s the ad equivalent of an Associated Press article?”
A couple of my clients care only about software downloads. Those companies like their Google Analytics and they track, to the number, visits to their websites stimulated by editorial coverage. I love to get their updates on what’s working. Hearing, for example, that an article in Dark Reading brought nearly 100 highly qualified visitors, but one on another site stimulated maybe 10, helps our team place a premium on the sites that deliver visitors (many of whom then download the software, white paper, etc.).
A while back, a client told us that a cover story in a well-read IT journal barely caused a blip in traffic to their site. They liked the article, they were kind enough to say, but it didn't, well ... do anything for them. I was glad to get that feedback, too, because it told us that the publication barely mattered for the client. The cover story was a nice vanity placement, but not much more than that.
Ability to focus programs—to fine tune them over time based on results and not only focus on what’s working, but discard initiatives that show little return, and all for little to no expenditure on measurement—is something both clients and PR people can be genuinely pleased about.
Next up: Measuring thought leadership campaigns
Tags: communications, public relations
Posted by Laura Kempke on October 30, 2007 at 2:17 PM
