The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Easy Strategies to Get Started Measuring Your Public Relations

 

Quick and simple techniques to start measuring your public relations programs and impress your boss.

by Katie Delahaye Paine and Bill Paarlberg

If you're reading this and you're not actually measuring your public relations programs yet, then the only New Year's resolution that really counts is for you to get started measuring. Which, as it turns out, is going to be a whole lot easier than those other resolutions you made a couple weeks ago and probably flunked out of already.

Measurement doesn't have to be a big deal. We've rounded up plenty of ways you can get started without spending much time or money at all. In fact, for several of our tips below, the service is free and the data gets delivered right to your in-box. Of course, if you want to get beyond the newbie stuff you might have to click around the Web some, do some reading, maybe break a sweat thinking about what your data means. (Relax -- that's a different article.)

Here is a baker's dozen of quick and painless techniques to get something started.

1. Get with Google:

• Sign up for Google Alerts for your organization or brand, and for at least three of your competitors or peers. Then tell your boss you have installed a crisis alert monitoring system.
• Put Google Analytics on every website that you control. (Yeah, the instructions need a serious usability makeover, but once you get the code, you just paste it into all your pages. Cake.) Then tell your boss you don't need no stinking WebTrends. (Actually, you probably do need WebTrends if you have to do advanced analyses -- it's much more robust and customizable -- but we're talking quick and easy here.)

2. Time for Twitter:

• Go ahead and get yourself on Twitter. See what it's all about, in 140 characters or less.
• And even if you don't want to start Tweeting yourself, you can still set up an RSS feed for a Twitter Search on your brand/s, your competition, and anything else you want to keep track of. Tell your boss you've implemented a Twitter monitoring system.
• And for you heavy Twitter users, see how influential you -- or your boss -- is on Twitter: Go to www.twinfluence.com.

3. Educate yourself:

• Stay on top of social media every day, with a click or two: socialmediabiz.com will send you daily email updates.
• Get to know the Institute for Public Relations website, especially the research and papers on measurement.
• Check out any of the numerous YouTube videos that talk about how to measure public relations and Social Media, (especially, in all modesty, the ones that feature our Ms. Paine).
• Read Katie Delahaye Paine's book How to Measure Public Relationships. OK, it's not free, but measurement gurus got to make a living. And it's the best $29.95 you'll ever spend on measurement. Click here to buy it now.

4. New media meets old school:

• Set up a free Survey Monkey account and start surveying your constituencies.
• Back to basics: Use Survey Monkey to measure your relationships. Send out a survey to assess the level of trust, commitment and satisfaction they feel about your brand.

5. More easy online stats:

• Get yourself a Facebook account and, at least once a week, conduct searches on your brand and your competition. Then tell your boss you are monitoring Facebook. (For more on measuring Facebook, see "Measuring Community on Social Networking Sites: A detailed how-to guide for measuring MySpace and Facebook.")
• Go to www.xinureturns.com and see how your URLs stack up.
• Go to www.compete.com and see how you stack up against the competition.
• Go to kineda.com and use their widget to see how your "bloglebrity status" ranks.

6. All together now:

• Now put together your own dashboard. Whatever metrics from above you actually have, put them in an Excel spread sheet and set up Key Performance Indicators. Repeat monthly. Progress confidently toward success.

The Presidential Candidates on YouTube: Your Interactive Dashboard

 

In this week's The Week magazine, there is a note: "YouTube videos mentioning Barack Obama or John McCain were viewed 2.3 billion times, according to media measurement firm TubeMogul."

Regular readers of The Measurement Standard will recall that KDPaine & Partners has been conducting an ongoing study of the YouTube presence of the presidential hopefuls since January, 2007. This research has been tracking the views and ratings of all YouTube videos that mention a candidate's name and "New Hampshire" in the title, description or tags. (KDP&P is located in New Hampshire, and the Live Free Or Die state is very proud of its first-in-the-nation presidential primary.) You can read our earlier, pre-primary, article about these results here in TMS, and a follow-up post here, in Katie Paine's blog.

KDPaine & Partners maintains an online interactive dashboard of this data, which anybody can use (URL: http://www.diydashboard.com, User: youtube, Password: kdpaine). I encourage you to head on over there and mess around with the data. Help yourself to a few charts. 

Here, for instance, is a chart from that dashboard showing total views per candidate from Jan 1, 2007 to Election Day, 2008 (click on the chart to see it bigger):

As you may recall (and as this chart demonstrates) New Hampshire was strongly enamored of Ron Paul; the popularity of his videos during the primary was so great that it shows up here as if he was a major contender in the entire race.

If we look at the data for just the three months before the election, the ghost of Ron Paul still lingers, but it is clear how the overall landscape changed later in the race (Sarah Palin was not included in this study.) Click on the chart to see it bigger:

--Bill Paarlberg

KDPaine & Partners' DIY Dashboard Gift Helps Students Learn Public Relations Measurement

Educating the Measurement Mavens
of Tomorrow

 

KDPaine & Partners' DIY Dashboard Gift Helps Students Learn Measurement
Research program moves undergrad public relations students from the classroom to the field.

by Peter Kowalski

Between lessons about the history of public relations, the secrets to a winning press release, and how to design a strong community relations program, students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication are learning about public relations measurement in a new program that is one of the first of its kind at the undergraduate level.

Led by newly-appointed assistant professor Craig Carroll, almost 100 introductory PR students have been tasked with the design and execution of measurement programs for eighteen non-profit organizations. The projects use media measurement technology provided by research firms CustomScoop and KDPaine & Partners in a $500,000 gift in kind to the school that help students collect, analyze and report on press coverage.

"Public relations is increasingly a research-based profession. Hopefully this will help demystify a lot of the research these students will see in their professional lives," said Carroll, who specializes in the relationship between corporate reputation and the news media. "By having this program in an introductory course, we are emphasizing that research is not a nice-to-have in public relations—it's a must-have."

Students are working in groups of five to analyze the online press of organizations that include Susan G. Komen For The Cure, the American Cancer Society and the Special Olympics. Each student is responsible for rating fifty articles about their non-profit organization, based on a methodology designed by KDPaine & Partners, CustomScoop and Carroll. "Today’s students are so computer and Internet savvy that it makes sense to give them the leading technology tools as part of their educational curriculum," said Chip Griffin, CEO of CustomScoop.

Teams worked with Griffin's firm and KDPaine & Partners to tailor their projects to the needs of their non-profits after analyzing web sites and press releases to detect key messaging strategies and better understand issues that their organizations may be advocating. Groups built research questions, constructed measurable communications objectives, and discussed the role of public relations in achieving organizational goals.

Understanding the importance of goals, objectives and messages in public relations is a core part of the course curriculum, and the program has allowed students to see the impact of well-designed strategies on media outcomes.

"Seeing how these students have risen to the occasion has been beyond my wildest expectations," said Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners. "They've been able to leverage their classroom knowledge, CustomScoop's collection tools and our Dashboard technology to create world-class programs that are smart, targeted and efficient. With a little help from us, they've really been able to do it themselves."

The UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication is regularly ranked among the top five journalism schools in the nation.

Students have praised the program, but noted the amount of work involved in executing a research program for actual organizations. "Before hand, I was definitely oblivious to the research that went on," said junior Josephine Butler, an advertising major in the course, whose research project has focused on Trout Unlimited. "I wouldn't say the project has been easy, but in terms of real-life experiences it's been very important. Now I'm interested in strategic planning and research with public relations and advertising."

Butler's team is analyzing media coverage of Trout Unlimited, America's leading trout and salmon conservation organization, and two other animal conservation organizations to better understand the public relations tactics the non-profits were able to employ to advocate their causes.

Her sentiments were echoed by Stephanie Nobles, a junior journalism and public relations student whose project examines the media coverage of Girls, Inc. "It amazes me how much we can learn about the public relations of their organization just by taking a look at their coverage in the media. I feel honored helping a non-profit organization, and privileged to learn about these advanced research techniques."

To date, students have analyzed more than 4,000 articles, and are preparing to report their results and make recommendations to their organizations. The studies have also served as a test for a new measure of message integrity developed by Carroll that examines whether a desired message became garbled after undergoing the editorial process.

The final results of this semester's work will be used to support further research into non-profit organizations and the media by future students. This semester's teams did offer some advice to students and professionals considering a measurement program. Sarah Schweppe, a sophomore studying public relations, suggested that green researchers "know what you're looking for before you go into it, but at the same time be open to other things, and willing to change your angle."

Which, by another name, can be considered support for mixed a priori and emergent designs in content analysis.

Peter Kowalski is a Project Manager at KDPaine & Partners. He holds a B.A. in Public Relations and Russian from the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Journalism. While there, he worked closely with Dr. Craig Carroll on projects involving computer-based text analysis for campaign measurement, Weblog taxonomy and editorial-page content analysis.

A Real-time Dashboard Public Relations Measurement People Can Only Dream About, So Far: The World Clock

If you haven't seen the World Clock, it's one of the most amazing examples of a real-time dashboard.

PR Agency Interactive Dashboard

This article ws published in our Feb 8 issue
PR AGENCY REPUTATION INTERACTIVE DASHBOARD
Public Relations Agency Reputation Update
PR’s reputation continues to suffer in the blogosphere.
Here's the latest update from KDPaine & Partners' on-going analysis of the blogosphere reputations of the top ten PR firms (including an interactive dashboard where you can create charts and view the data, agency by agency). New results show that recent negative coverage has eased, but there is considerably more hostility towards PR firms now than there was back in the summer...