The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Public Relations Measurement Now Includes the Future

Yesterday, Katie Paine blogged about the idea (from Jeremiah Owyang) that PR measurement should be thought of as a GPS device, rather than a dashboard.  The concept is that the GPS unit shows you where you want to go in the future, and assesses your progress toward your goal. As opposed to the dashboard, which just tells you how fast you are going.

She said: 

"Essentially, what I’m suggesting is a complete rethinking of the measurement process from one that gives increasingly accurate data about what happened in the past to one that helps forecast what impact your actions will have in the future."

And I'd like to point out that public relations measurement has always had a forecasting purpose or component, it's just that we don't usually express it. It is just assumed. I mean, lurking somewhere behind all our measurement efforts -- no matter how simple or complex  -- is the thought, the hope, that the information will enable us to do something different in the future. 

Really, the concept behind any measurement effort is: Study the past to learn how to affect the future.

And my point is that we already do this, in a very primitive and intuitive way. We are always thinking, in the back of our minds, how we could tweak this or that to make things come out this way or that way next time. We measure the effectiveness of a press release and a press junket, so that we can decide which program will work best next time. We just don't usually try to quantify "next time" as part of the measurement process.

What Katie has done is to call for measurement programs to explicitly include predictive components. Of course, as she says, the math and the tools and other resources aren't widely available yet. But that's no reason not to start thinking big.

We can now expand our whole concept of measurement to include the future. Measurement grows from the study of "What happened?" to include the study of "What will happen if?" 

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard

The Interpretation of Dreams: Dreams as Public Relations Measurement -- I Dream of Hillary, I Dream of Barack

Many public relations professionals find that media analysis or survey research are tools sufficient to measure their programs. The more adventurous bring in external data and more esoteric measures of success like donations or number of new memberships or even lives saved. In politics, KDPaine and Partners has recently used YouTube video counts to predict primary results, and our Ms. Paine has ruminated on the possibility of using the number of political lawn signs as an election predictor. Not until now, however, has anyone used dreams to measure political progress.

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath writes about Sheila Heti and her new blog "I Dream of Hillary... I Dream of Barack." This blog, a repository of reader-submitted dreams about the candidates, can be interpreted as a rough poll of interest in those candidates. As Mr. McGrath says, "...what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people's dreams were meaningful in the aggregate?" As of the writing of the article, "..Obama's edge in the over-all dream count... was roughly equivalent to his lead in the latest Gallup poll."

Ms. Heti's blog has been so successful she plans to open an I Dream of McCain section, so in the future we will have bipartisan dream data to go on. --Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard

Recent Public Relations Research Sets Up Conflict Between PR Professionals And The Old School Bottom Line

The Paine of Measurement

The Old Bottom Line Collides with the New Public Relations
New public relations research -- old corporate mindset.

Rumor has it that there is an ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.* If "interesting" can be translated as "full of conflict," then there is no doubt that modern Western business is now feeling the full effect of this curse. PR people in board rooms all over are headed for a confrontation that makes recent skirmishes between presidential candidates look like scuffles in the proverbial sandbox.

For years, the vast majority of organizations have been driven by a single bottom line, profit. This was relatively easy to calculate. You added up what it cost to make something, plus a bit extra for administration and overhead, then subtracted that from what you charged the customer and you had your bottom line.

But life in the 21st Century is anything but simple. Recent research has demonstrated that the old bottom line is not the whole story. First we found out that the way to make bigger profits is to have more loyal employees, and that we have to do good deeds to gain employee loyalty. Then we found out that good communications is a leading indicator of an organization's financial performance.

And now, most recently, Brad Rawlins has demonstrated that in order to best win the trust of our employees, we have to open our kimono to the world and be completely transparent. (See the article in this issue, and my blog post.)

So here's the conflict: Today's diligent and capable PR person walks into the board room urging better communications, more transparency and open, honest conversations with stakeholders. But the room is full of Machiavellian power brokers who believe in secrecy, stonewalling and the single bottom line. This old-fashioned corporate mindset still insists that the only reason to do something is because it makes money or gains a competitive advantage.

We now know that such an approach is outdated, and those who are stuck on it will soon find their businesses as dead as the dinosaurs they resemble.

The reality is that good communications does make money, it just doesn't do it quite as simply and directly as the old bottom line arithmetic implies. Openness and transparency translate into money saved in legal bills, into efficiency gains because information is more readily available, into lower turnover rates and higher customer loyalty. If trust has a value, transparency is its currency in today's marketplace.

Wishing you large measures of success,

* It is supposedly the first of three curses, each escalating in severity. The other two are: May you come to the attention of those in authority, and, May you find what you are looking for.

Isn't it wonderfully paradoxical that those curses are so similar to the job descriptions of most American PR people, and to the results they typically strive for: crisis control, the attention of those above you, and news? And these curses, mind you, are part of the social heritage of the largest, fastest growing and probably soon-to-be-most-powerful society on earth.

How To Measure Public Relations Success for Small Organizations

Measurement Tactics

How To Measure Success by the Gram Rather Than by the Ton
Five simple measurement steps for smaller organizations.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Here at KDPaine & Partners, we've recently seen more and more non-profits seeking ways to measure their marketing success. Organizations as diverse as the The American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the ASPCA are now using KDPaine & Partner's DIY Dashboard as a cost-effective way to track their PR performance. But even these organizations are large and well funded compared to many of the startups and small businesses that we talk to on a regular basis.

Think differently
For these smaller organizations, it's not a matter of counting or analyzing thousands of media clips--getting 10 media clips would be a huge victory. So how do you measure success by the gram rather than the ton? It's actually a lot simpler than you think. You just need to think differently.

In any small organization, public relations and marketing are far more closely tied to business outcomes than they are in large organizations. Can GM measure how many more cars it sells as a result of its CEO's blog? No. But can the owner of a gardening shop track how much more business comes in as a result of starting a blog? Absolutely. The key is in knowing where to look, and knowing what motivates your customers.

Here are five simple steps for smaller organizations to get started in measurement:

1. Understand what motivates your customers.
If you don't know, ask them. Ask them for their email address in exchange for a discount coupon or free gift. Better yet, send them a coupon every month. Email them a survey, and, for people who don't use email, do a paper one at your checkout as well. What you want to know is:

• Why did they walk in the door?
• How did they hear about you: Web site? Blog? Newspaper article? E-mail? Regular mail? Friend?
• What motivated them to stop?
• Did they buy and if not why not?

When you get the responses back, separate the answers into two categories: buyers and just shoppers (non-buyers). Then look at what got them into the store and why they did or didn't buy. You can set up a salesforce.com account for as little as $10 a month to start tracking your customers and prospects. Pay particularly close attention to the repeat visitors. They are the most profitable, so you want to know what got them in the door in the first place, and what keeps them coming back.

2. Make it someone's responsibility to count and measure.
If you're a one-person shop this gets difficult, I know. But if even if there are only two of you, make sure someone owns the job. Without regular tracking of outputs, outtakes and outcomes, measurement isn't possible

3. Know your Web analytics.
With 95% of American's now using the Web and the vast majority of them making buying decisions based on what they find on the Web, this should be where all measurement begins. Whether you use Google Analytics or WebTrends or ClickTracks or some combination of the three, you need to know where people are going on your site, where they're coming from, how long they are spending and what they're doing while they're there.

4. Don't just ask questions, collect data.
Don't just ask someone where they're from or how they found you--write it down! Ideally, you should have a standard form on hand to collect the data. Better still an automated, computerized way to track it on a dashboard. But failing that, at least write it down. Collecting data is the key to knowing what works and what doesn't work. Sure you get busy and forget, but once you realize how valuable the data is, you'll never go back to chit-chat again. As the Victorian genius Francis Galton said, "Whenever you can, count."

5. Report back, even if it's just to yourself.
The big difference between most large organizations and smaller ones is the presence of a board of directors or other governing body that requires regular reporting of data and numbers on your success. Even if you don't have a board, it is critical to the success of any organization to know what is working and not working. Especially if you are a smaller business, because, if you don't have a lot of marketing dollars to waste, you better know just how well each one is working for you. So make sure you spend 5-10% of your time and/or budget collecting and analyzing the data so you can tell whether the other 90-95% of your time and/or budget is working properly.

Public Relations Measurement for Travel and Tourism

Measurement Strategy

How To Measure PR's Impact on Travel and Tourism
Your six-step passport to success.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

The good news about travel and tourism PR is that it is highly measurable. The bad news is that almost everyone does it wrong. The good news again is that we're going to show you how to do it the right way.

The Wrong Turn: AVEs Are a Dead End

The traditional way of measuring tourism PR has been to use Ad Value Equivalency: Count up the number of column inches generated by earned media and figure out what it would cost to advertise in the same publication. What you come up with is a dollar figure that tells you just about nothing useful, other than that you got some amount of ink somewhere.

(Regular Measurement Standard readers know that we frown on the use of AVEs. The very serious limitations of this technique are well documented. See this section of The Measurement Standard Blog Edition for a discussion and further references.)

On The Right Track: Measure Something That Will Get You Where You Want To Go

What you really need to know is how your travel and tourism ink impacts tourists and their spending: How did your PR efforts change sales and meals tax revenue? Butts in busses? Ticket sales? Heads in beds? Once you know how your efforts affect tourists' behavior, you can go on to decide how to adjust your efforts to further the overall goals of your program or department.

As the great guru of measurement Dr. James Grunig of the University of Maryland reminds us: "The main reason to measure objectives is not so much to reward or punish individual communications managers for success or failure as it is to learn from the research whether a program should be continued as is, revised, or dropped in favor of another approach."

The reality is that there are lots of very accurate ways to measure travel and tourism PR:

• Perhaps the most famous case is Southwest Airlines. By embedding a unique URL that takes visitors to a mirror landing page in each of their Search-Engine-Optimized press releases, they can tell exactly how many tickets they sell as a result of each press release they send out. See this Measurement Standard article for more.
• Elisa Camahort, co-founder of Blogger, uses a similar system to measure the impact of blogging on ticket sales for her clients in the theater world. She gets actors to blog about upcoming performances and then tracks the number of tickets sold by tracking the number of unique visits from the blog to the ticket sales page of their web site.
• The State of New Hampshire's Travel and Tourism Department has seen its budget grow every year, in a traditionally tight-fisted state, in part because it can show exactly how much impact its efforts have on the state's revenue. By looking at historic data on the total reach of its advertising efforts in a given quarter, and dividing that number by the number of visitors in the same quarter, it has established that for every 100 opportunities to see a positive message about the state, three people will visit. It also knows that each visitor, on average, spends $81.76 every day they are in the state. (A complete description of how the New Hampshire Department of Travel and Tourism calculates its ROI for marketing efforts will download from this link.)

What's It Worth To Be First In The Nation?

When the people at the New Hampshire Political Library wanted to calculate the value of New Hampshire's First-in-the-Nation Presidential Primary to the state, they started by adding up the direct spending of the various political campaigns and media outlets.

But that didn't account for the long term impact of the press that 4,000 visiting journalists generated for the state. A media analysis of some 5,000 articles revealed that approximately 10% of them were positive – leaving someone more likely to either visit the state or do business in the state. This translated into 22 million positive impressions.

Using the above NH Travel and Tourism formula, and using only those articles that left an out-of-state reader more likely to visit the state, they calculated that the press coverage was likely to generate an additional 660,000 visits and thus generate some $540 million in new tourism revenue.

Additionally, Ross Gittell, James R. Carter Professor and Professor of Management at the Whittemore School of Business at the University of New Hampshire, calculated that approximately 2% of all those visitors would be business owners or executives looking to start or expand a business in the state. That translated into some 13,200 executive visits. Assuming conservatively that just 1% of those executives started or expanded a business in the state, the media exposure would have yielded 132 new businesses. Since the average business in New Hampshire employs 20 people, media coverage would have generated 2,640 new jobs.

Although New Hampshire doesn't subsidize new business, on average, states spend about $10,000 per job created – meaning that the media exposure from one primary had a business development potential worth $26.4 million.

(A complete description of how the New Hampshire Department of Travel and Tourism calculates its ROI for marketing efforts will download from this link.)

In addition to these financial calculations, the NH Travel and Tourism people also keep a close eye on website visits and click-throughs, calculating an average click-through rate for all promotions as well as a cost-per-click-through calculation that enables the department to calculate which promotional efforts are most efficient at generating click throughs. This allows them to better plan future promotional efforts.

Once again, numbers like cost-per-click-through and revenue should not be used to simply justify the existence of a media relations department. The real value of all this measurement is to better understand how specific tactics and strategies impact the overall goals of your tourism efforts.

AVE Gets A Makeover, But It's Still Just Tarted-Up Output Data

We were thrilled to see Erica Iacono's article on AVEs in PRWeek. Ms. Iacono has done her homework carefully and provides a nicely balanced and up-to-date summary of the AVE controversy. And now some of the other blogs are weighing in on the matter, including PRomulgator (who provides a copy of the article).

(As regular Measurement Standard readers know (see our newsletter here), we have not looked favorably on AVEs. Katie Delahaye Paine, TMS's publisher and probably the most prolific writer in the world of PR measurement, has written plenty about their evils, as have others, including Jim Macnamara, and Bruce Jeffries-Fox.)

The gist of new developments is that if you tidy up your media analysis data, "taking into account a media placement's reach, type and prominence of the story, and positioning," then use a conservative ad rate that reflects rates actually paid by advertisers, then what you come out with is a number that is somewhat more accurate and sports a sheen of respectability.

Our take:

1.) AVEs are popular because they appear to be an easy and cheap way to measure outcomes.
A number with a dollar sign in front of it allows somebody somewhere to believe that they can compare PR's results with those of some other marketing effort. They think they are comparing outcomes, but they are only looking at tarted-up output data. There are ways to make this sort of comparison, but for now they are usually much more complicated and expensive. That won't be the case forever. When tools come along that allow quick and easy direct measurement of the effects of any communications or marketing effort on sales (or whatever your preferred outcome), who's gonna care about AVEs?

2.) On the other hand, you can't argue with success.
Angela Jeffrey is one person who has found some darn good results correlating a type of AVE with business outcomes. Hey, if it works, it works. We don't care if your regression equation includes eye of newt and toe of frog: If it works, consistently, then it could be a valuable measurement tool. Here's the text of an article by Paul-Mark Rendon from Marketing Magazine with more on how AVEs can be useful.

3.) Why should PR waste its time using AVEs to mud-wrestle with advertising, when it could be sitting at the boardroom table doing some clean and serious strategizing?
Jim Grunig is the most prominent proponent of the view that PR should set its sights higher than just being a tool to produce sales. PR can provide extremely valuable services that are qualitatively different than those of other marketing tools, but unless we focus on measuring those, we'll never achieve our true potential. From this point of view, AVEs might very well be a costly distraction.

--Bill Paarlberg, editor