KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Podcasting -- Force or Fad?

In the "I told you so" column today comes the news from the Dallas chapter of IABC
that while most communicators are familiar with podcasts as a concept,  four out of five don't listen to them and only 8% have done one.  What really intrigued me was that 8% didn't know what a podcast was.  That's right 8% of professional communicators in the Dallas region who answered the poll and didn't know what a podcast.  Given the hype that the term has been subject to you have to wonder what cave are they working out of, and who are they working for? 

Only if  someone comes up with a "TimePod" that will give us more time to listen to this stuff, will podcasts really live up to their potential. 

The Canadian Contrarian

It seems not all Canadians are as enthusiastic about the CPRS's MPR system as you might think from the initial press hoopla.

My favorite Canadian Measurement Pioneer and Potentate, Andrew Laing of Cormex, had this to say:

"  Canadian PR practitioners with larger companies and government agencies (we can do that here) have been in tune to getting media measurement reports for over a decade, but the Canadian PR companies (like their U.S. counterparts, as you know) have resisted measurement.  Media measurement techniques themselves have been around decades.  It's only (as one PR measurement committee member put it) a "watershed moment" for the PR firms, not the PR profession.

- By its name, likening MRPs to GRPs is disingenuous:  GRPs are calculated using a pretty straightforward mathematical calculation, while MRPs involve a considerable degree of subjectivity to compute.
-MRPs are simply a way to let the Canadian PR firms continue to grade their own homework.  PR firms determine the tone of the articles covering their own campaigns, as well as whether the brand message is truly present and other qualitiative elements.  There is no working definition for these terms (and I mean 'working', because they define tone as "any sound in relation to its pitch, quality or strength." -- hey, can you imagine telling your readers/coders that one!!!).  Every spreadsheet I've seen come across my desk from a PR firm on their media coverage ranks almost everything as 'positive', so its like an automatic five points.
Measurement should be about improving our understanding of the profile of an organization or initiative, not simply giving it a grade.  [See Jim Grunig's comments] Cormex would be out of business long ago if we took a box of clips and tapes, reviewed them and came back with an 8.9.  Sorry, but it feels like ice dancing.

David, you're half right

David Phillips raises some interesting ideas in his comment about the Canadian MRP system, but I have to take issue with one thing he said in his comment

"I think a lot of this media evaluation stuff is just not worth the effort. It is being done for people who, because of their very demand for it, will be disintermediated out of a job in a few months."

I think he's wrong on two counts. First of all, I think a lot of managers today are demanding results, not for justification purposes, but for the purposes of making better decisions. Face it, there are just too many options out there these days to rely on your gut instinct. To blog or not to blog, to blog or to podcast, to Search Engine Optimize? To pay for placement or not? These are the questions that PR people face every day and you can't make decisions this important without data to back them up.

And David you're also wrong about people asking for measurement being out of a job. Most measurement wonks I know have used their PR research programs to get raises, promotions, more responsibility, better jobs, and in some cases retirement packages that enabled them to afford mult-million dollar coastal homes.

The Guru has spoken

In downtown Durham, NH, there’s a wonderful little display in a store window called “Introduction to Measurement” It contains pictures of a first grade class learning the basics of inches, ounces and degrees. One of the sections is “measurement with blue, red and yellow blocks.”  I’ve run by this display about a dozen times now, and it finally dawned on me – that’s what the whole CPRS discussion is all about. It’s assuming that most PR practitioners are only able to calculate at a first grade level.  I would certainly hope that they are interested in and capable of going beyond measuring with blue, red and yellow blocks.

The PR MRP Discussion is both interesting and frustrating. We love the fact that we’re engaging more and more people in the conversation, and we are thrilled they are getting away from ad value equivalency, but its very frustrating to think that MRPs is all that PR people really care about.

The great guru of Public Relations research, Univeristy of Maryland's Jim Grunig chimed in most eloquently on the topic in an email exchange among Institute for Public Relations Measurement Commission members.

“The dismaying thing to me about the discussion of the Canadian MRP system and the paper on ROI that we are currently evaluating is the seeming willingness of a large number of [IPR] commission members to relegate public relations as a profession to media placement and marketing support. Both of these activities, of course, are part of public relations. However, I think we are setting public relations up for a minor role in the future if we argue that we “prove” the value of public relations by providing evidence, for example, that media placements increase sales by 5%. This increase may be cost effective and the ROI might be 200-300%.... However, 5% still seems inconsequential to me in the larger scheme of things. Do we really want to argue that public relations is important because it adds 5% to sales?

I believe that “proving” the value of what we do is a minor reason for doing research in public relations. (I put the word “prove” in quotes because philosophers of science have told us for many years that research never proves anything; all it can do is provide evidence to “support” our hypotheses—e.g., that PR has a positive ROI. Sometimes PR activities have a positive return and sometimes they don’t—success depends on a lot of other factors.) The major value of research is in the planning, evaluation, and improvement of what we do. The AT&T research [done by Grunig and Jim Tirone at AT&T in the 1970s] showed that advertising had a positive ROI. More importantly, however, it suggested the best time to place the ads and the kinds of messages that would be most important.

Bottom line of all of this: A measurement system whose purpose is only to show the purported ROI of messages or impressions in general (without distinguishing among them) and is not designed to help the organization learn how to communicate better with its publics has minimal value. I would make this judgment about the Canadian MRP system.  <>

Thank you Jim, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Naked conversations

Reading

Naked Conversations is a lot like  great sex, a case of good wine and a box of godiva chocolates. You know they all have to come to an end eventually but you keep hoping against hope that it won’t. Every chapter is chock full of good ideas great stats and a healthy dose of inspiration. My staff is getting  a bit sick of me coming in every morning with THE LATEST BIG IDEA but the ideas are pretty hard to resist. You'll have to read the full review in the upcoming Measurement Standard or listen to my PRSA webinar on New Rulers for New Media to get the details, but if you're smart, you won't wait for the cliff notes, you'll pick it up and read it yourself.

As Canada goes.. .. well maybe not

In response to David Jone's comments and invitation, I' ve had a chance to poke around a bit in the new Media Relations Points web site -- the proposed standard currently being pushed by the Canadian Public Relations Society and I kind of like it --  as far as it goes. It's simple, relatively customizable to an organizations specific needs and you can't argue with a template that is free. The circ data provided by Canadian News is provided at a good discount. The rejection of multipliers and the emphasis on standardized methods of counting eyeballs is laudable and you  can' t quibble about the price when something is free.
While I don't take back any of my rant against the simplification of PR measurement to media terms, if you want to measure media, this isn't a bad way to do it --IF (and that's with a very big IF) you're a Canadian organization. As one of my fellow measurement commission members just pointed out to me --the number of different publications in Canada is a tiny fraction of what it is in the US, never mind the rapidly growing influence of on-line publications and blogs for which we really don't have good numbers yet at all. So don't expect a US version of the MRP standard anytime soon. That having been said, there are several standard metrics in the MRP that we've been using for years and would love it if everyone adopted them.
We thank the CPRS and all the people involved for doing this and adding to the measurement conversation. Now what are we going to do about standards for on-line eyeballs?

One more time, there is no "standard" for public relations

There's good news and bad news in yesterday's announcement of the Canadians new standard for PR Measurement.
The good news is that it shines the publicity light on measurement once again. And, I suppose its good news that all those people came together and agreed upon something.  And they do a very good job of explaining the various criteria used in media analysis.  And to their credit, they don't mention Ad Value Equivalencies anywhere. And, they do take the industry beyond the concept of just counting clips and column inches. And, if I take off my industry hat and put on my CEO of a measurement company hat, it's a great standard because most of the metrics are ones that we already incorporate and our software.  Okay in the interest of full disclosure, their template costs about half as much ($725 per year) as ours but ours is customized and much more intuitive than the template they offer.)
So what's not to like?
First of all, it leaves most people with the impression that PR measurement is the same as media measurement and its NOT. The goal of public relations is to nurture, develop and build relationships. And you can't measure that with impression figures and clips.
It assumes that PR programs have similar goals and objectives and can be measured by any one standard. I defy them to compare results between Walmart's PR and the PR for the Susan B. Komen Foundation. All programs have different audiences, goals and objectives so any program purported to be "standard" is bogus to begin with. Another problem is that when you start adding multipliers chosen by the organization being evaluated, you run into issues of bias and bad data. Finally this new "Standard" requires you to subscribe to News Canada's services for $725 a year.. I've got nothing against News Canada, but essentially this body has gotten together to endorse a particular vendor of data. Is that right? Would love to hear opinions.

National Public Radio -- still the best value

For years I've used this slide  in all my speeches that shows how one organization compared the effectiveness of different marketing tactics.It compares earned media (PR) to an ad in the Wall Street Journal, a trade show, a blog, a web site and underwriting on NPR. To get a message across in a paid ad in the Wall Street Journal is about $50 per thousand. By conrast a blog is about $9 per thousand and an earned media article is about $10 per thousand. What I discovered today is that even ten years after I first found this data, by far the most cost -effective medium to communicate your key messages is NPR underwriting.  Now in the interest of full disclosure, I did used to sit on the board of New Hampshire Public Radio, so I'm probably a bit more enthusiastic than the average marketer. But if you're trying to get your message across in the most cost effective manner possible, you can't beat NPR underwriting. And if you're wondering (Procter & Gamble) why that ever-so cost effective "earned media" category doesn't fare so well -- just try getting your key messages into a story about your latest crisis.  When all is said and done, it's alot harder to get key messages across in the media than anyone thinks it is. This is when I tell my clients to go reread the second amendment -- the one that says Press is "free."

The times they are a changin...

If anyone needed further proof that we are at the end of the world as we know it, look no further than Ad Age and the Wall Street Journal for word of how marketing is changing.
Ad Age has a great piece by Al Ries on focused marketing and the "Halo Effect." Here's the gist of what he had to say:

What you advertise and what you make money on can be two different things. ...

Focusing your marketing message on a single word or concept has been our mantra for years. But taking this idea one step further can also produce dramatic results. To cut through the clutter in today's overcommunicated society, place your marketing dollars on your best horse. Then let that product or service serve as a halo effect for the rest of the line.

Okay, may its not the most revolutionary idea in the world -- smart people have been saying something similar for awhile. But the fact that Apple, Motorola, Sirius Radio and a bunch of others are doing it and seeing huge success tells us that notions about how to allocate marketing dollars are certainly changing.

Today's Wall Street Journal echoes this theme. It's front- page story about how consumer package goods companies are dramatically increasing their investments in on-line advertising since so many more people get their news and entertainment on line. DUH! But I guess the Wall Street Journal has to say it before it becomes reality.

The basic truth is that direct mail, email, network TV -- all the things that we grew up with that WERE advertising and marketing -- are obsolete in 2006.  They are less effective or less measurable and are therefore dying a rather quick death. Do we know what will replace them? There are a bunch of us betting on blogging, networking, two-way dialog and "naked conversations.  All we know for certain is that marketing as we knew it won't ever be the same.

Why didn't I come up with that?

I've always suspected that women get far less than their fair share of press coverage, but the good folks over at re:invention have provided us with proof.  I'm just annoyed with myself for not coming up with the data myself. According to them:

The world needs more women media spokespersons. New research from The Global Media Monitoring Project shows that women constitute 52% of the world's population and only make up 21% of people featured in the news. Men are the majority of news subjects in all story topics. Even when women do feature in the news, they are more likely to be found in 'soft' stories such as celebrity and arts and least likely to be found in 'hard' news stories about politics, government, and the economy. Men dominate as spokespersons and experts: 86% of all people featured in new stories as spokespeople are men. Men also make up 83% of all experts.