PR measurement, evaluation and analysis: a guide

Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 27, 2010 under Measurement | 2 Comments to Read

PR people from around the globe recently met in Barcelona for a conference on measuring public relations.

The professionals in attendance came up with a seven point measurement standard for the public relations industry.
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The initial reaction from the blogosphere was that these points didn’t offer anything new and told PR people what they already knew.

My guess is that the PR Week article didn’t reflect the depth at which each of these points were discussed. Instead it inspired me to write this post on measurement.

So, just how can you measure PR?

Prior planning
What seems to be missing from most PR blog posts on this subject is that measurement should begin before a proposal has even been written.

Public relations experts use planning tools, similar to those used in advertising, to find out about:
- Markets, products, services, demographics, media and attitudes, e.g. TGI data or Caci for example
- online media profiling, e.g. using www.google.com/adplanner or Metrica’s http://www.metrica.net/ tools, which I have used.

Note, I promised to blog about Metrica because I used their great planning tool but fatherhood distracted me, sorry lads.

By undertaking planning, PR consultants can target campaigns, but also help to inform objective setting. More on this later.

Set public relations objectives
The first important step is to set SMART PR objectives
- e.g. achieve a three per cent sales increase on an e-commerce site by targeting the travel media.
Without SMART KPIs you can’t measure. Don’t be scared to set PR objectives which link directly to business outcomes, rather than media coverage objectives. However don’t neglect media objectives too.

What to measure?

Impact
It doesn’t matter if an article had all your key messages in and was 32 pages long if it had no impact with your target audience. To measure impact you can:

- Use sales or footfall data. Have you seen a return on investment? What was it?
- Monitor behavioural change. Read this post on behavioural economics
- Undertake opinion tracking studies of customers.
- What do they think?
- Has it changed?
- Research the views analysts and industry experts
- Survey your staff.

Competitors
Don’t just monitor yourself. Monitor your competitors PR activity.
- As a percentage has their share of voice decreased?
- What is the impact of their campaign on yours? What do your customers think of them?
- Demonstrate client and competitor social search visibility.

SEO
PR has a huge impact on SEO so measure it. Too many PR agencies fail when it comes to measuring online coverage. IT IS SIMPLE TO DO.
- Use Yahoo Site Explorer to measure backlinks.
- Map out when press coverage was achieved and overlay it to Google Analytics data on site visitors.
- Is there a correlation?
- Referral sites, where did visitors come from?
- Compare news content ranking with competitors.
- Run a keyword ranking report and compare to a competitors.
- Set keyword ranking goals and overlay any changes with PR coverage.

Interaction
Has your campaign created interaction with a community or group, both on or off line? Radian6 is good for online but expensive. In the real world, maybe monitoring the impact on third parties is a job for a community relations officer?

Coverage measurement
Don’t forget that nothing makes the client happier than clippings. Although the real power of public relations is shown with its impact on the business, a managing director loves to see physical results.

- How many clippings, articles, bookmarks, retweets, reblogs, readers or viewers have you achieved?
- Group the media based on importance. Is this a tier one, two or three title (one being most important)?
- Regionality: are you reaching all the right places both globally and locally.
- Photography: it’s a metric for print media, but a picture can really improve page impact, and readability.
- Advertising equivalent value (AVE): Firstly contrary to the CIPR, AVE is OK and is not “dead”, it is just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
- Key messages: create key messages and measure their number, prominence and effect on the overall tone of the article. This can be done:

o quantitatively (e.g. how many times these appeared in the article.)
o qualitatively (e.g. was the theme of the article consistently on or off message?)
o by analysing use of spokespeople: where they quoted?
o Favourability.

- Journalists/ analyst/ blogger tracking: what are they saying and why and has it changed over time?
- Social-economic penetration: has the coverage reached your target audience?
- Reach frequency and opportunities to see.

There are lots more different ways to measure, but I am stopping now. I could go on and on and on. If you want to know more about PR measurement, drop me a line or visit AMEC.

Public relations – links: 23 June 10

Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 22, 2010 under Links | Be the First to Comment

Here are some top links which put the PR into Public Relations.

1. Measuring SEO for PR

2. Another cool news curation tool

3. A tidy post on geeky digital media presences

4. A CIA problem solving check-list- ideal for pitches

Public relations and the ‘inclusive’ World Cup

Posted by jameswdcrawford on June 8, 2010 under Media | Be the First to Comment

Public relations is all about targeting. Sometimes PR professionals chose online media for their campaigns, other times broadcast is a better channel to get a communications message across.

In a recent PR post about online media and the world cup, it was suggested that FIFA has missed a trick with social media for this year’s World Cup.

My take in this public relations conundrum is that while FIFA has ‘dropped the ball’ with online media, it might have decided to:

1. ignore social media on inclusivity grounds
2. avoid the complex task of running a pan-global social media campaign

Firstly let’s look at point 1. Why would FIFA ignore social platforms on inclusivity grounds? Social media is the most inclusive form of media ever created, right?

My answer is simple. While I can afford a smart phone, a laptop, broadband and other modern luxuries, fans in North Korea or even in parts of host nation South Africa probably can’t.

Would moving parts of the World Cup experience into social media be excluding large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of football fans, from enjoying the tournament on an equal level to the rest of us?

I think it is very easy to argue “yes”. Just look at this map as an example, and look how many missing countries there are with no social platforjms at all.

Fig. 1.1. Click on the image to make it large enough to read on screen

Some might say that a true pan-global campaign should be tailored per country, allowing for use of social sites in some countries and not so in others, but I am not sure that this would be the right thing to do in this instance.

Football is a unifying force, so why exclude people from the experience? We are already seeing poor South Africans being priced out of tickets to matches, and this exclusion doesn’t need to be made any more prominent.

TV is still the number one medium globally, so let’s not forget that. I have been to rural villages in Asia and Africa and found families with TVs. It might be that during the tournament an entire village is crowded around one TV, but at least most villages can access a TV. Therefore a broadcast campaign should be the favoured platform.

Now let’s consider point 2, i.e. that a pan-Global campaign is just too difficult for FIFA. It is a slightly depressing consideration, but probably quite likely.

This presentation below starts to illustrate how difficult FIFA’s task would be. The presentation looks at which online media is popular in different countries, but even this very comprehensive study has lots of gaps, where there is no data, or possibly internet usage, i.e. Africa, parts of South America etc. Again, making a social media campaign is difficult to say the least.

Even in the ‘developed’ world some social platforms are more important than others. In Holland, for example, Facebook is not the number one platform and Twitter is even less popular. The Differences between platforms in other countries is a huge barrier and a complex problem.

Difficulty is no excuse of course for not giving social media a go. To the contrary, but while there are still organisations in the UK, US and elsewhere who are still baulking at trying social media because of a lack of understanding, one can imagine that perhaps FIFA found the task just too challenging.

Social Media around the World