KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Spring.. the time of new beginnings

I still have a foot of snow on the ground around my office, but at least the snowdrops are up and the grass is turning green.  Three years ago today, we were just getting The Measurement Standard off the ground and launching the website www.measuresofsuccess.com  -- given that it all came together in about three weeks, it was a pretty amazing time.  And at that point we hadn't a clue that we'd end up with staff and clients and a company that grows 100% every year. I used to always say, be careful what you wish for.. but sometimes you also have to be careful of what you hadn't even thought to wish for.

My other most frequently heard phrase around here is: "You're never wrong you're just early." I'd like to think that we're always just a little ahead of the curve around here...  Especially, when there's a new measurement press release that comes across my desk everyday, gleefully announcing that "for the first time ever, the PR measurement conundrum has been solved for all time."  The latest one was Shift Communication's release that said "Not a misprint, new service tracks sales leads from PR."  Actually, Greg Jarboe at Lotus started doing that back in 1988, and he's given dozens of speeches on the subject ever since. Don't these guys know that dozens and dozens of people, clients, agencies, and research firms have been successfully measuring results for at least a decade or more. It was 18 years ago this month that I started "solving the PR measurement conundrum" for clients like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer.  The only difference between then and now is that we have lots more tools with which to measure results, and it's a lot more affordable for a lot more companies. So the next time one of those press releases crosses your desk, send it along to me, and I'll tell you just how out of date it really is.

Do as they say, not as they do

I just finished my Image Patrol column for next week's PR News (www.prnewsonline.com) comparing how Fleishman and Ketchum handled their respective crises. And the more I wrote, the madder I became. Both of these affairs severely damaged the reputation of honest, hardworking PR professionals everywhere. As if the media wasn't hard enough on PR people to begin with!

You'll have to wait till next week to read the full analysis. but here's an excerpt:

Imagine if your client got embroiled in a major media controversy. Would your first advice be to blame someone else, and then say no to every request for comment or documentation? Hardly! These very pages have been filled for years with highly respected representatives of our industry, some of whom have worked for Ketchum, recommending the basics of crisis communications: Own the problem; Be forthright, contrite, and honest; Give out as much information as you possibly can. Did Ketchum do any of those things? Hardly. As a result, the crisis over Ketchum’s hiring Armstrong Williams to flog the No Child Left Behind issue is in its second month and shows no sign of slowing down. The New York Times has now devoted an extraordinary number of inches and four Sundays covering the declining credibility of the PR industry. Indeed, the Internet today is full of new comments and stories about Ketchum’s lack of transparency and failure to cooperate. And many make the valid point that PR and communications agencies are extraordinarily difficult to get information out of - -only revealing the bare minimum of data like gross billing. One document requested under a Freedom of Information Act request had every single billing amount redacted.  Maybe Ketchum needs to hire a crisis communications firm that hasn’t been taken over by lawyers to solve its crisis.

If extent and duration of crisis is any measure of success, cooperating with the authorities definitely helps. A recent Nexis search showed that Ketchum’s crisis was garnering about 40% more coverage than Fleishman’s, this despite the fact that John Stodder, the partner in charge of the Los Angeles office's "public affairs" practice group, was indicted on federal fraud charges that allege he participated in a scheme that resulted in fraudulent bills being submitted to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Stodder, who only left Fleishman the week before the indictment, was charged with 11 felony counts of wire fraud for submitting nearly $250,000 in fraudulent bills to the DWP. The indictment details communications in early 2003 in which a co-schemer asks Stodder to "pad" the DWP bill by $30,000. In response, Stodder allegedly informed the co-schemer that $30,000 was "more than the system could bear," but that another co-schemer had informed him that they could "slip through another $15k without incurring too much more scrutiny." Ouch, hardly the stuff to inspire trust from your clients. The good news is that Fleishman was cooperating with the investigation.

And while the damage to both of these firms reputation is bad enough, the real problem with both of these cases is that they damage, perhaps permanently the relationships required for the rest of us PR practitioners to succeed. All of public relations is based on relationships – relationships that are grounded in trust, credibility, competency and control mutuality. Imagine a reporter getting a call from a Ketchum employee. How could he or she not help questioning the source and wondering who was paying for that particular piece of propaganda. And if I were about to hire a PR firm, wouldn’t I wonder if they were going to “pad the bills?”

I’ve heard a lot of comments about the damage the New York Times stories have done to our industry, but the sad thing is, it’s not the media coverage of these crises that is causing the damage, it’s our own behavior.

A good idea

I heard a presentation last night and one of the best ideas to come out of it is the notion that you should think of five things you are grateful for every day. So here's my list for today:

1. I live and work in one of the most beautiful places on the planet -- special thanks to my grandfather for buying it 99 years ago.

2. Clients

3. Great friends who are unbelievably supportive no matter how big a mess I'm in

4. Breast Friends -- my breast cancer support group

5. Parents who gave me a really unique approach to life

Bacon's makes its competitive strategy clear in latest press release

I was startled to find a press release in my in-box yesterday that was the antithesis of most press releases. Most releases announce contract wins or new product launches, this one, put out by Bacon's, the clipping company, announced that it was terminating its contract with Vocus, a media measurement company. Apparently, Bacon's is getting tougher in its competitive stance. Despite the usual PR BS in the release, the reality is: Vocus competes with Delahaye and any company who competes with Delahaye no longer has access to Bacon's clips.  Will it set Vocus back at all, probably not. I'm sure BurrellesLuce will be more than happy to pick up the slack.

Overwhelmed and overserved

I think I actually listened to a total of 45 presentations during the last two days, but I kind of lost track sometime around noon yesterday. The most surreal moment was when I was blogging while listening to a great paper analyzing the interaction between bloggers and main stream media. Betsy Plank gave us all a "Caribbean Social" to wrap it all up, and you'll be happy to know that no one fell into the pool or on their face. Or at least they hadn't by the time I went to bed.

I'll be describing and discussing the best of the papers in the next issue of  The Measurement Standard but here are a couple of the more intriguing concepts I heard yesterday.

PR and Social Capital lower transaction costs and increase success

There were several other really good papers that put dollar signs next to the value of PR. Hilary Fussell, Jill Harrison-Rexrose, William Kennan and Vincent Hazleton looked at the relationship between social capital, the cost of doing business and organizational outcomes and found that the companies with higher social capital had a significantly lower cost of operations and better outcomes.

CSR adds more than $2 to your earnings per share

And my personal favorite, Sandra Duhe's of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette's paper that showed that corporations that found that having a reputation for being socially responsible added an extra $2.63 to your earnings per share. She looked at years of Fortune Reputation data and compared it to the financial performance of the companies that made it onto the most admired list.

Companies that keep their mouths shut aren't doing their shareholders any favors

Live from poolside. Just heard Sandra MacLeod's fabulous presentation on the nature of the media in Europe and wish all those international folks who want to measure "Europe" could have heard it. Her point was that the media, and thus reporters expectations, are vastly different. Don't try to wine and dine a Dutch journalist, they're all business. But in France, expect to do your pitching over several 3 hour lunches.

Another interesting conclusion:

Most companies focus their investor relations efforts on institutional investors, arguing that that that’s where the money is and that it is not worth the time to communicate to the individual investor. However, given that 85% of Americans will own stock by 2010, they may want to rethink that premise. With that in mind, Ernie Martin of Virginia Commonwealth University set out to explore the link between PR and the rate at which individual investors bought a company's stock. Looking at several dozen specific companies, he used wave theory to determine what type of investors were investing in a company at any given time. What he found was that stocks stayed up longer when individual investors were involved and recovered faster from slumps. He further investigated the press coverage of the same companies during the periods when individual investors were getting on board, and found that those companies that had aggressive PR programs and high media visibility were more likely to attract individual investors and thus saw greater stock volume. More interesting was that those companies that laid low and had no major press effort had fewer individual investors and tended to take longer to recover from slumps. Talk about a way to justify the investment in PR!

Listen up New Hampshire, Iowa doesn't care about the Primary

According to a paper presented by Angela K. Mak of Iowa State University, when she asked key influentials in Iowa to characterize the identity of the state, most of them mentioned agriculture and family values. Amazing to those of us from New Hampshire where more people watch the debates than some football games and the Presidential Primary is the ultimate sporting event, Iowa ’s primary never even came up. Turns out they see the state as tops in education, farming and small town values, not politics. Can you hear the entire state of New Hampshire sighing in relief?

20 down 53 to go

Having listened to some 20 presentations yesterday, my mind was reeling and it was hard to try to remember all the highlights. But these were the standouts.

1. Silence is far from golden and familiarity does NOT breed contempt.

John Gilfeather from NOP World teamed up with Tina Carroll at the University of Miami and determined that companies that stay below the radar screen aren't doing their shareholders any favors. Using reams of data that NOP world has collected on major corporations they determined that the more familiar you are with a company, the more likely you are to recommend their products and invest in their stock. Even more telling, the more familiar people were, the more likely they were to believe that the company is open and honest, more inclined to believe that they care about their employees and more likely to believe that the company offers the highest quality products. Consumer products companies consistently scored at the top while financial companies and automotive manufacturers were generally at the lower end of the scale on all issues.

Has the Internet killed the grapevine?

According to research by Don Wright, he indicates that the Internet has replaced the rumor mill as the most credible source of internal information. Based on ten years worth of research at two work sites of a major business to business corporation, his research showed a dramatic decline in the use and credibility of the rumor mill/grapevine. Reliance on and credibility of the union and the local media also declined.

Also not surprisingly, the big winners in the last ten years are the Internet/intranet and email. In many ways this change happened because of a change in internal process. Ten years ago if something bad happened, corporate wouldn't say anything and employees read about it in the local paper. Today when something happens, the company proactively announces it to employees at the same time as they tell the media, so by the time they read about it, it’s old news. Seems to me that if unions want to hold onto their influence, they’d better modernize their communications methods.

My favorite new convert to measurement... Saudi Arabia...apparently for the first time in history the government of Saudi Arabia is conducting public opinion polls to measure the effectiveness of its communications program. The program is designed to convince its publics that terrorism is bad. Go figure... 

Politicians and public affairs folks should pay attention

So far we're already only an hour into the IPRRC proceedings and I've already heard some amazing new ideas.

#1: We in PR think communicating in crisis is difficult.. try communicating in chaos. Carl Botan of George Mason University did a fascinating study of communications channels  in Bosnia when every essential structure of civil society was broken. His findings, which have big implications for NGOs and other trying to communicate in Iraq and Afghanistan are fascinating. Botan expected that interpersonal channels would be most trusted and therefore most effective. Instead he found that the traditional, state-run media were in fact most trusted followed by alternative media (and outside Western media) and local officials. More importantly they found that ethnic and cultural differences played an enormous role in determining the extent to which different media were trusted.  Essentially, the huge divisions in the society lessened the import of interpersonal communication and elevated the need for independent third party communications. Additionally, even though they expected people to be highly suspicious of state run media, in fact, they found that "old habits die hard."

#2 Howard Dean and the DNC would be advised to carefully study Len Barchak's ongoing Q-Sort study of attitudes about the war. He and Karl Rove may be the only two who accurately identified the subtle differences between Southern attitudes and Western attitudes.  Ooops.. the second round is starting.. gotta go