One of the best blogs I found on the net about Public Relations' Measurement is http://kdpains.blog.com. Katie Paine from KDPAINE & Partners has many years of experience in Public Relations' measurement. You can find news, techniques and development of Public Relations' industry's research and evaluation as well as many useful links to other blogs. I found numerous quotations of her while browsing other blogs on this topic and some of her colleagues call Katie "guru of PR measurement".
Katie admits the fact that more and more companies realize their need for PR metrics and that this field is becoming increasingly competitive. In one of her interviews she gives her SUPER SIX STEPS TO EFFECTIVE PR MEASUREMENT:
- Define your objective(s)
- Define your audience(s)
- Define the metrics you will use
- Benchmark this against yourself or your competition
- Pick your measurement tool
- Analyze the results
Although it looks quite simple it is obvious that this technique requires an extensive research to obtain a detailed picture of market perception of the company or products and services.
Katie Delahaye Paine gives another simple advice which I like: "If you are under the gun, research can help you: understand what your target audience is reading about you, learn how they are responding, find out if your messages are getting through and track those messages you don't want to see in print".
Following this advice, I looked at what some agencies specialising in PR measurement can offer to their potential clients concerning media coverage research and found many. These below are some of them:
- Incidence of editorial coverage and story pick-up
- Breadth, depth and positioning given to stories
- Circulation, reach and influence of media carrying stories
- Effectiveness of message integration and news packaging
- Accuracy/quality/favorability of editorial generated
- Volume of online coverage generated by PR news
- Competitive PR activity and media play
- Overall comparisons and success ratings on a quarter-to-quarter basis
Among the resources they track there are not only traditional and electronic clippings, but also business monitoring services; newsletters; audience data furnished by media houses like Arbitron, Nielsen, Standard Rate&Data to measure publicity in broadcast and print editions; and monitoring cyber surveillance of online communities.
1 comment:
I think the internet plays more and more a key role in PR evaluation, through all blogs and social medias, where people gives their opinions. That gives more info to companies, but also makes the task harder for PR people: they must know which blogs their target audiences would read, which social medias they would use, and then check them very regularly!
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