The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

SEO Best Practices For PR

Go read this nice little post by Carrie Morgan at Ragan's PR Daily: "3 Best Practices Of SEO For PR." If you are in PR, then you know you are in the business of getting things noticed online. These tips will help with some good basic advice. --WTP (thanks to Atwoodz for the image)

Infographic: What Is Content PR?

Earlier this week we posted links to stats that demonstrate content marketing's effectiveness, and also a guide to starting a content marketing blog.

Today, for your content marketing / public relations pleasure, we have an infographic that contrasts traditional PR with content PR. (Click on the image to see it full sized.) It comes from Calysto, by way of Measurement Matters' weekly PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet. The Cheat Sheet is a weekly list of a handful of must-read PR and social media stories, and we highly recommend it. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor

How and Why to Start Your Content Marketing Blog

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's bonanza of stats on the power of content marketing comes "7 Tips for Making Your Blog a Content Marketing Magnet" from Heidi Cohen at Social Media Examiner. This little post will not only convince you to start a blog, but show you how to plan to do it right. -- WTP
(Thanks for the image to guy.com.)

Katie Paine's Best of 2012 Measurement Events

It was a big year, full of public relations and social media measurement events. Here is Katie Paine's Best of 2012 Measurement:

1. The Conclave and the Dublin Declaration
   If only Congress could work as well. In just 15 months, The Social Media Measurement Standards Conclave has developed, proposed, and in some cases finalized standards for social media content, engagement, reach & impressions. They’ll be getting out the standards for influence, sentiment, advocacy, and value between now and June. So yes, Virginia, there are standards for social media measurement.

Research News Flash: Most PR Pros Are Ethical and Honest

The headline for this article in PR Daily ("Report: Most PR Pros Are Ethical and Honest") may have been written by the staff at The Onion. And you've got to wonder about the validity of generalizing from 30 interviews. Still, the report says some interesting things:

• Senior PR executives would rather get demoted or lose their jobs than give in to pressure to be unethical.
• A common misperception among senior executives is that public relations is the same as marketing, which limits PR professionals’ roles as problem solvers.
• The study found that having a sound relationship with organizations’ legal counsels is crucial, as well as access to key decision makers.

Go read the whole article. --Bill Paarlberg, editor

23 Countries and 9 Languages: The Plank Center Cross-Cultural Study of PR Leadership Is the Largest Ever

The University of Alabama's Plank Center's Cross-Cultural Study of Leadership In PR and Communication Management is the largest study of its kind ever conducted. Nearly 4,500 PR pros participated in the online survey. A second phase involves interviews with 150 worldwide leaders, which will be completed and analyzed in 2013. Visit this page for details, or just download the slides.

The Globally Enraged: 28% of Consumers Believe Business and Government Are Out to Screw Them

% of respondents who feel a lot of anger when thinking about their country today

Recent research on the reputation of large corporations reveals they could use some good PR. At least.

As part of its on-going Global MONITOR research, The Futures Company, the global strategic insight and innovation consultancy, polled 28,000 adults in 21 markets. Among the results:

• 86% think big business maximizes profits at the expense of customers and communities;
• 85% agree that large corporations exert a greater level of influence on government than citizens do; and
• About 50% felt "a lot" of anger about each of these issues.

GAP VII Study Reveals PR Excellence and Best Practices: From Old School to New School

The USC Annenberg Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center has published its seventh biennial Communication and Public Relations Generally Accepted Practices (GAP VII) study. This year’s report is the largest and most comprehensive study of the most senior communicators in public and private corporations, government agencies and non-profits in the United States.

The survey provides practitioners with practical information they can use to better manage the communication functions in their organizations; identifies Best Practices against which they can benchmark their own organizations; and pinpoints trends to be aware of as they plan for tomorrow.

Read about it here. Download it here.

Important results for public relations measurement include:

Old School PR vs. New School PR:

Old School
• Measurement of media outputs
• Believe PR focus is on media relations
• Does not believe social media are pervasive
• Reactive/Short-term
• Worried about control
• Consider media relations the dominating discipline of PR
 
New School
• Measurement of outcomes
• Assign primary responsibility for social media to PR
• Long-term strategic direction
• Embrace multiplying touchpoints, pervasiveness of social media – still with modicum of control
• More likely to believe recommendations are taken seriously

Excellence and Best Practices – Key Insights for Success
The GAP VII findings confirm a set of best practices that were identified in previous GAP studies and are all strongly associated with success variables. Patterns are very compelling and long-lived over multiple GAP studies.

• Integration:
  Champion intra-functional and inter-functional integration and coordination.
• Measurement/Evaluation:
  Invest at least the average percentage (9%) of total budget in measurement and evaluation; focus investment on metrics other than media outputs.
• Culture/Character:
  Beginning within the PR/Comm function, champion the adoption of a culture or character that is proactive, long-term, strategic, flexible, ethical, and people-first.
• Agency Relationships:
  Optimize strategic value over mainly tactical use.
• Reporting Line:
  Assure that PR/Comm has the most effective reporting line, given the nature and structure of the entire organization. In most cases this will be a direct reporting line to the C-Suite. Be part of the Dominant Coalition. --KDP

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Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.

AP Style Tips for Writing Geeks: InkHouse Inklings Blog

For serious writing geeks, not much beats brushing up on AP style. Check out the InkHouse Inklings blog for interesting articles on content curation ("Content Curation is NOT Content Creation"), social media, and PR in general, often from a journalist's perspective. What caught my eye (besides the awesome illustration to the right, which I appropriated because it was so awesome) was "Twenty Five Signs of Spring in Associated Press Style," where you will learn, among other valuable lessons, the way to spell "daylight saving time" (Not "savings," and no hyphen). See also "Words to Retire in 2012."

Don't miss "Twelve Common Mistakes of AP Style," which features "#8. United States, U.S. — An easy way to remember the difference: United States as a noun; U.S. as an adjective. The United States is a country; I travel with my U.S. documents." --WTP

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"I'm a person, you're a person. Say what you've got." --David Pogue

In this short video from Ragan's PR Daily, NYTimes columnist David Pogue explains how—and how not—to pitch a story. Yeah, it's been out for a year, but it's good...

 

What's the ROI of "Merry Christmas?": Measuring the Effectiveness of Holiday Cards

by Katie "Bah! Humbug!" Paine

As I deleted my 100^th electronic Christmas card, all I felt was annoyance -- rather than merry or joyous or whatever it was supposed to make me feel. A good 50% of these mostly cold and soulless emails were from PR firms I’d never heard of. I assume they got my name from Klout or Cision or Vocus or any of the other list peddlers that bring as much joy and relevance to the season as Jacob Marley did. Which got me thinking...

Does anyone measure the effectiveness of these silly things? 

The ROI of the Corporate Holiday Card: Making Your Season Blight

I posed the question on Twitter and the answer was a definitive "no." Xmas emails are perceived as a cheap way for companies to “touch” people on their mailing list. I did discover that the ROI calculation for them is inherently flawed: Because most of these cards are created in-house, the time spent to create them is viewed as basically free, (probably because the employee(s) have nothing better to do in the month before the holidays).

A more accurate ROI calculation is probably something like this: 

Investment:

20 hours of designer time @ $50 per hour = $1000

5 hours of editing, proofing and copy review @$50 per hour = $250

Cost to email to 5000 names @ $0.03 per name = $150

Total Investment: $1400 

Return: 

Assuming a 6% click-thru rate, that's 300 clicks, for a cost-per-click-thru of $4.60. Which isn’t too bad. 

But what is the value of a click-thru? Since there is no call to action, and god knows it would be in terrible taste to say, “Merry Christmas, now click here to set up a demo!” it is difficult to calculate any real return. So the ROI is essentially $0 at best, but probably somewhere between -$1400 and the value of your reputation. 

Now let's look at a more personalized approach. 

KDPaine & Partners' Holiday Cards

For years, my company KDPaine & Partners has sent out a holiday card featuring an image of our offices. I actually have almost all of them framed in my hallway. Bill Paarlberg -- yes, the Bill Paarlberg, the editor of The Measurement Standard -- does the artwork, and we write a bit of copy that relates to both the card itself and the year we’ve had. In prior years we would also include a piece of locally-made pottery and a recipe for something that could go into the pottery. One year it was chowder for a chowder mug, the next year it was salsa in a taco dish.

Now, I don't expect the whole world to love our holiday cards. And, yes, there's a bit of self promotion in the concept. But the point here is that these cards have some thought and personality in them, and they express feelings in a unique, creative, and heartfelt fashion.

Over the years, we probably spent $35,000 on the cards and pottery. Invariably, after they go out, I hear directly back from clients and prospects who say, “Thanks for the card, and I was meaning to get in touch...” And, return-wise, I know they've yielded at least $200,000 in new business.

ROI = 471%

Value of a better relationship with customers: Priceless

Calendars, Anyone?

This year, I was contemplating the absence of calendars in my mailbox, and asked Twitter and Facebook where they’d all gone. The general response was that, with electronic calendars being ubiquitous, companies have decided that they weren’t worth it. Which in my mind leaves a huge gaping blank space just waiting for me to fill it up with my logo and message. Especially when I got this response from Jim Fetig, (one of the planet’s ultimate Measurement Mavens, and someone who has been getting my Christmas cards for at least 13 years): 

“How 'bout a KD Paine and Partners' Measurement Calendar? I'd read my daily best practice with gusto.” 

Now, I'm not sure I can come up with 365 days of measurement thoughts, but 12 month's worth certainly seems doable. Let's look at the ROI:

Cost of artwork and design: $1000

Cost to print 100 calendars: $1000

Total investment: $2000

Cost of keeping Jim Fetig happy (given that he’s been our client for 14 years) = Priceless. 

And so, my big question here is: In an age when the personalized touch is increasingly preferred -- where we shop local, eat local, and invest locally -- why is it that the majority of organizations take a mass-market approach to communicating sentiments that should be the most personal of all?

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Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. 

Frank Ovaitt Delivers An Elevator Pitch For The Institute for Public Relations

The other night at the Social Media Measurement Standards Conclave at Katie Paine’s house in Durham, NH, Frank Ovaitt and I got to talking. We loitered near the hors d’oeuvres table and had a drink.

Frank is President and CEO of The Institute for Public Relations, commonly called the IPR. (He also, by the way, just received the Public Relations Society of America’s 2011 David Ferguson Award.) Frank is a smooth conversationalist, and before I quite realized it, he had delivered an eloquent elevator pitch for the IPR. So I’m passing it along to you. Here, in a nutshell, is what you need to know about the IPR.

The IPR, with offices at University of Florida in Gainesville, is a non-profit organization that prides itself on its independence. Its focus is on supporting research to improve the practice of public relations, and to that end has published more than 500 research papers since its founding in 1956. Its motto is: “The Science Beneath the Art of Public Relations.”

Frank Ovaitt was the also the President and CEO of the IPR two years ago when he retired, passing the IPR reins to Bob Grupp. “I retired for about two months,” he says, ”then George Washington University asked me to come and teach and within a few months I was working with Makovsky & Company. Then last spring the IPR asked me to come back, and so nothing about me is retired any more.

“Things at the IPR are a little different this time around. Our emphasis now is very much on promoting research with more practical applications. Less academically oriented, more business oriented. Research that matters to the practice. We also want to broaden our range of partners, so we need to think about what resonates with CEOs and CFOs.” 

Frank goes on to say,

“There are, generally speaking, three kinds of research in PR (and this division is based loosely on one introduced by Jim Grunig):

1. In PR — About programs themselves: Planning, measurement, and evaluation;
2. On PR — Benchmarking and best practices: What we do as a field and what is excellent public relations; and
3. For PR — About the underlying social sciences of what we do. Our trustees believe this is the most distinctive and, unfortunately, least accessible of the three, and that it should be our strongest focus.

“The IPR supports public relations research in five different roles:

1. As an aggregator — We find the good stuff and point people to it.
2. As an interpreter — What does it say? How can it be used?
3. As a grantor — We sponsor research and awards programs to stimulate research.
4. As a partner — With other organizations to promote what the field needs.
5. And, finally, as a convenor of conferences and programs, mostly with a research component.”

By this time the other guests at the Conclave had arrived and lobster dinner was being served, so we moved into the dining room.

Learn more about Frank’s vision for the new focus of the IPR by reading his posts on the IPR website.

Read more about the Conclave, see the attendee list, and see some photos here.

--WTP

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Why Are Sex in the City and Ragan’s PR Daily Alike?

Sex in the City and Ragan’s PR Daily receive our Measurement Menace of the Month Award for promoting make-believe public relations.

I read a disturbing post the other day on the Samantha Effect. It suggests that a surge in applications for PR programs in higher education is driven by interest in the glamorous life of Samantha Jones, a character on Sex in the City.

Thousands of the show’s young fans have been Carried away by the alluring yet utterly fictitious career of Samantha, who owns her own PR agency. To them, the PR profession appears to be a series of fun parties and events, requiring only a pair of Jimmy Choo heels, a little black dress, and a “people personality” for success. 

How do you measure that? AVEs, according to Ragan’s PR Daily.

I’ve never met Jessica Epperly, but judging from her recent piece in Ragan’s PR Daily, her role model is Samantha Jones. “Advertising vs. PR: How to measure the value of editorial coverage” has no more credibility than Samantha’s career. 

Need more proof? The very first comment on Jessica’s piece was from Lauren, a journalism student at the University of Missouri, who says, “This article has taught me more than most of my professors.”  Shame on those professors if a publicist’s puff piece full of inaccurate information can replace classes at a leading educational institution.

What is up with Ragan running such a piece? You know and I know that AVEs are bad, and that every reputable organization, PR firm, and measurement provider has signed onto the Barcelona Principles (which discredit the use and practice of comparing PR to advertising). So why did Ragan run it? Don’t they vet anything?

In fairness to the folks at Ragan, the brouhaha that erupted in the comment section did prompt Ragan to solicit an oped from my colleague Shonali Burke who urged us to consign AVEs to the graveyard. (See also Chuck Hemann's response to that article, with many excellent comments. And if you’d like to learn more about AVEs, we have plenty of coverage here at The Measurement Standard. Start with “AVEs Are Porn for PR,” then see the list here.)

Finally, this issue raises an interesting question about the media that cover our industry: What is—and should be—the role of the media in the coverage of PR? Is it to follow the guidance of the leaders of the industry and help lead the profession to a higher plane? (As PR Week did when they banned the use of AVEs as a metric in their annual award submissions.) Or is it to serve the lowest common denominator by recommending a fictional measurement tool?

Our purpose here at The Measurement Standard is to encourage people to base decisions on reality. And so we award both Sex in the City and Ragan’s PR Daily our Menace of the Month Award, for promoting make-believe public relations.

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Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

10 Questions Every Communications Professional Must Be Able to Answer Before Beginning a Measurement Program

This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Measure What Matters, the new book by Katie Delahaye Paine from Wiley Publishers.

Read more excerpts at the Measure What Matters blog. Or just go ahead and order the book from Amazon for $15.60. That’s an amazing 45% off list price.

 

From Chapter 2 of Measure What Matters, “How to Get Started”

10 Questions Every Communications Professional Must Be Able to Answer Before Beginning a Measurement Program

Before we get into the specifics of measurement, you will need to have at hand some basic information about your organization. Work though the following 10 questions and do your best to find the answers if you don’t know them already. What’s most important about this exercise is achieving consensus among the people who will be using and/or contributing to the measurement data you will be collecting. Getting everyone on the same page is an absolute necessity before you can begin to implement a measurement program. 

Question #1: What Are Your Objectives? 

While it may seem facile and simplistic to actually put this question on the list, I am amazed at the number of people I’ve met with who cannot answer it. Or, even more frequently, they have objectives that are not measurable. You must start with a thorough understanding of your company’s or organization’s business objectives. And if they are not written down somewhere, ask your boss—you might have a very interesting conversation. 

I sometimes help my clients through the process by asking them to shut their eyes and imagine that it is the end of the year, and they are celebrating enormous success: Corks are popping, champagne is flowing, and bonus checks are being passed out to everyone. What is it that they are celebrating? Another way to define your mission is to frame it from the opposite perspective. Suppose your department was wiped out tomorrow, how would the business suffer? Later in this chapter you will find a detailed step-by-step procedure for working with a team to develop measurable objectives. 

Question # 2: Who Are Your Program’s Target Audience(s)? 

This is another question that may be pretty obvious for some companies, but it never hurts to get it in writing. The important thing is to define the audience as specifically as you can. No matter what your business or organization, the answer to this question is not “Anyone with a pulse.” There is always, within any market, a set of customers who are the most profitable, the most valuable. These are the ones you want to target. 

Question # 3: What Is Important to Your Audiences? 

Once you’ve defined your audiences, you can go about determining what issues matter most to them: What inspires them? What scares them? What are they most passionate about? Where do they go for information? The closer you get to identifying an audience’s passions, the closer you are to understanding why they are loyal to your company or brand. 

Question # 4: What Motivates Them to Buy Your Products? 

This is perhaps the most salient question for your measurement program; the answer will determine what you measure. You need to connect your actions with the ultimate purchase decision. If you sell a commodity product and what motivates purchase is price/value, then you need to measure the extent to which this concept is being communicated to your marketplace. However, if you are selling a service and what motivates purchase is the long-term relationship with the brand and/or the salesperson, then you need to be measuring relationships or brand engagement. 

Question #5: What Are Your Key Messages? 

If you haven’t articulated them yet or don’t know what they are, do research to figure out what messages will resonate most forcefully with your target audience(s). Key messages should reflect what makes people buy your product or services, or what distinguishes you from your competition. 

Question #6: Who Influences Your Audience(s)? 

Who else influences your target audience and what are the secondary influences on your business? Enumerate all the traditional media, websites, online publications, politicians, nongovernmental organizations, peers, educators, discussion groups, industry gurus, and so forth that your customers take into account when they decide to do business with your company. 

Question #7: How Do You Distribute Your Product or Service? 

Through what channels do your customers purchase your products? Which do they prefer? Which does your company find most convenient or profitable?

Question #8: What Are You Going to Do with the Information You Get from Your Research? 

Never ask a question to which you don’t want to hear the answer. Make sure you can act on all the information you get and can make changes and improve performance as a result. If your report is going to the CEO, you will have 20 seconds or less to get your message across, so your report must make an impact like that of a billboard. If it is going to marketing, the report should be short, but detailed enough to include brand data as well as corporate data. If it is for market research, you’ll need to provide cross tabs, verbatims, and other supporting data. If it’s for the VP of communications, you’ll want to make sure your results provide a big-picture corporate overview as well as the details as to why certain results are what they are. 

Question #9: What Other Departments or Areas Will Be Affected? 

Who will be involved in implementing changes as a result of your measurement program? This is one of the most important questions, because without buy-in from all departments to change their behavior or strategies, your measurement program will be a waste of effort. Whoever might have to change as a result of your measurement needs to be involved in the process of designing the measurement program. Without their buy-in, change will not happen. 

Question #10: What Other Measurement Programs Are Currently Underway? 

What data do you have access to? What metrics are already being collected? You may be able to tailor new measures to complement existing ones. For instance, sales or lead tracking data could be compared to marketing activities and measures.

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Read more excerpts at the Measure What Matters blog. Or just go ahead and order the book from Amazon for $15.60, an amazing 45% off list price.

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

PR's Reputation Up Thanks to Washington Media Group

Public relations is an incessantly maligned and abused industry—right up there with oil companies and lawyers. So it's a real delight, let me tell you, to see Gregory L. Vistica, president of the Washington Media Group, featured as the Quotation of the Day in today’s New York Times:

“We basically decided on principle that we couldn't work for a country that was using snipers on rooftops to pick off its citizens.”

(Washington Media Group dropped Tunisia as a public relations client after that nation cracked down on protesters.)

Bravo!

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

 

The Public Relations Excellence Theory of Grunig, Grunig, and Dozier: A bibliography.

The excellence theory of public relations is a fundamental and defining statement about what effective public relations is. The excellence theory is the result of a 15-year comprehensive study to determine what are the characteristics of excellent communications and of the companies that do excellent public relations. This study was done in several phases by Jim and Lauri Grunig and David Dozier, and funded by the IABC.

I wrote to Jim Grunig to ask for a definitive summary and bibliography for the excellence study and theory. Jim pointed me to “Excellence Theory in Public Relations,” a three-page article from the Encyclopedia of Communication, published by the International Communication Association. Click here to download “Excellence Theory in Public Relations” from the Encyclopedia of Communication. It includes a summary of the project and the theory, and a list of the most important publications. Here is the official citation:

Grunig, J. E. (2008). Excellence theory in public relations. In. W. Donsbach (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Volume 4 (pp. 1620-1622). Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2008.

Other sources on the Excellence Project:

• Click here to see the IABC excellence project bibliography. (The IABC calls it the excellence “study.”)
• Click here to read Bob Grupp's comments on “Excellence Theory 2010,” the Third Annual Grunig Lecture given by Jim and Lauri Grunig. You will find a link there to download the text of the lecture.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

5 More PR-Related Things We Need to Get Rid Of

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Last month's article “Five PR-related Things We Need to Get Rid Of” sparked many excellent comments, both here and when it was reprinted in ragan.com. So we thought we’d follow up on the feedback. Plus I’ve got five more things to get rid of.

First, it was amazing to learn how many people are still convinced of the efficacy of some old fashioned techniques...

Still In Love with the Press Release?

I was stunned to find how many people are still in love with the press release...

Jim & Lauri Grunig’s Lecture at PRSA International 10/17/10

The Institute for Public Relations, PRSA, and the University of Maryland hosted the PRSA International Conference on 10/17/10 in Washington DC. At this conference the Third Annual Grunig Lecture was given by, yes, Drs. Jim and Lauri Grunig and entitled: “Public Relations Excellence 2010.”

As many of you know, Jim and Lauri Grunig are developers of the Excellence Study and its principles for excellent PR, which they explain and elaborate on in this lecture. They are strong proponents of relationships as the foundation of public relations, and have developed techniques to measure relationships as a way to measure the effectiveness of public relationships. (Their work forms the foundation of much of Katie Paine's book Measuring Public Relationships, and also her new book due out next spring from Wiley Press Measure What Matters.)

Click here to read an introduction to the lecture by Bob Grupp (President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations) on the IPR website.

Click here to download a transcript of the Third Annual Grunig Lecture by Jim and Lauri Grunig.

Five PR-Related Things We Need to Get Rid Of

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Now that the AVE is going the way of the dodo bird, what else can we put on the endangered species list? 

Here are my suggestions: 

1. Media Lists

Not that they weren’t useful back in the day when you hired someone to smile and dial and do nothing but “pitch” stories all day long. But in today’s media-rich but topically niche environment, media lists are essentially spam enablers. All you have to do is read the Bad Pitch Blog to get an idea of how damaging these lists can be to your brand. 

2. Impressions (aka opportunities to see, aka reach, aka circulation figures)

Just think about it: What really constitutes “circulation” these days and how much of it can you really count? If I pass along via email an intriguing story, no one knows whether I‘m sending it to one person or 100. If you post a link on Twitter, sure, you can track how many people had the opportunity to see it by looking at the number of followers and all of their followers, etc. But honestly, how many of your followers really respond to anything you put out there? I figure it’s only 10 or 20 out of the 330,000 people I allegedly “reach” according to most influence analyzers.

3. Direct mail

 Please take this away sooner rather than later. It kills me to see a forest of dead trees in my mail box that I just have to take to recycling every week. Above is a typical week’s haul for me and it all goes straight from the mail box to the recycling bin to the Transfer Station. Why? Has anyone noticed that the cost is going up and the effectiveness is going down? Are direct mail marketers that insulated from reality? 

4. Press releases as a tool to reach the press

Now I’m not saying that a press release isn’t a great vehicle for putting your messages and ideas and facts in one place. But it has no impact on the press. If you want to reach the media these days, you send them a link on Twitter or Facebook. And it better be to something more interesting than a press release. So let‘s drop that title all together and call it what it is: The official organizational statement which most people will ignore. 

5. Advertising inserts

In my book they are just the uglier first cousin to direct mail, but again, is anyone measuring their impact on a business? Are they really cost effective or is someone not looking at the right numbers? I love this shot of the kiosk for the local paper at the end of each day. All the ad inserts are right there at the bottom, left behind because no one wants to read them. 

Those are my top five, what are yours? --KDP

--Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

 

PR Blocks the Flow of Information

So, what you measure are one-way messages -- meaning advertising.

by Jack O'Dwyer, odwyerpr.com

If you look practically anywhere, from Tiger to Cablevision and its fight in NY to the U.S. Government you find information being blocked, often by PR people. How do you measure something that was never told?

I think what you are measuring is sales promotion. PR is dialogue. Press conferences and other forms of dialogue have just about disappeared.

Most PR people are in hiding these days from any face-to-face encounters with reporters (or even telephone conversations). Press conferences are almost non-existent.

Blockage of information flow is a big reason for the current economic malaise. The last time any of the big PR firms of the conglomerates gave out any information was 2001. Shut down by the financiers.

What ails the U.S. is evasion of government/press oversight by organizations with the help of their PR people. PR is a bulwark against communication. This is a big reason we're in the Great Recession.

PR people at organizations are censors, making sure no one talks to the press unless authorized and blocking reporters from CEO access. The CEOs are making so much money they don't want to talk to anyone and don't want to be held accountable.

Also, lots of companies and organizations don't care what anyone thinks as long as the right laws are passed and enforced or not enforced, depending on what they want. The lobbying community in D.C. is about 230,000 people. That's where the action is.

Most PR people most of the time are blocking information flow. They're in hiding -- not one PR group allows the press access to their membership lists. PRSA used to give out hundreds of its membership directories.

I think what you're measuring are one-way messages meaning advertising. What Tiger Woods did is the way most organizations behave today. What bloggers are going to do any sort of investigating? They will cave soon as the first door is slammed in their faces. What about the new FTC rule that requires any blogger to disclose payment for any sort of communication?

Jack O'Dwyer
Click here to subscribe to any O'Dwyer publication.