How Public Relations Measurement Can Win the War on Terror

It's not a new thing to talk about the war on terror as a war in the media for mindshare. But I've never seen it stated as explicitly as in the article "Marketing Osama" which appeared in a recent issue of The Week, and which was reprinted from a story by John Cook originally published in Radar. The point there is that Brand USA and Brand Osama are fighting it out in the media, and this marketing/PR battle is the important front in the war.

Public relations measurement evaluates exactly the sort of metrics that define the strategy that al Qaida has been using to enlarge its support: media impressions, media content, key messages, contributions and new members. Public relations should be not only measuring the war on terror, but, by virtue of tracking the most important metrics, should be defining the war on terror too. (See "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?")

One of the more interesting aspects of the war on terror is that there is, (so far, that I know of) no way to know if we are winning or losing, or how we will ever know if we do win or lose. And that's where public relations measurement comes in: If we can use public relations metrics to define progress in the war, we can use them to define success and failure. Public relations measurement can win the war on terror by defining when the war will be over.

And here's how we do it: Let's say that al Qaida's media and marketing efforts now generate X impressions of their key messages each year, which in turn result in Y dollars of contributions and Z new members. We gather and track this data for the last ten or twenty years, and correlate it against terrorist activity of all sorts. (Yeah, it's a big job.) We then will understand what level of exposure to key messages (or Osama bin Laden videos) is required to generate what levels of recruits. Or to generate one new suicide bomber.

Then we define success in terms of the metrics. So, we could define "winning the war on terror" as when al-Qaida's impressions, contributions and recruits are dropping. And then we define victory as the point at which these metric fall low enough so that al Qaida can no longer function effectively. If Osama bin Laden doesn't get his message out, or if no one believes it enough to do anything, then we've won. --Bill Paarlberg