The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

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

Greater Transparency Is the Key to Building Greater Trust

Trust Measurement

Trust and Transparency
Go Hand In Hand
Brad Rawlins' research shows that doing things right isn't nearly as important as doing the right thing.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

About five years ago, Linda Hon, Jim Grunig and I wrote a white paper about measuring trust that set out some pretty clear steps as to how organizations could do it. At the time, we gave some general advice on what to do if you found that trust in your organization was less than what you wanted it to be.

To be honest, most of these recommendations fell somewhere between "duh," and "of course," and mostly had to do with doing things right:

• Articulate a set of ethical principles,
• Create a process for transparency that is appropriate for current and future operations, and
• Establish a formal system of trust measurement.

And they are all perfectly acceptable things to do.

However, new research by Brad Rawlins (he is our Measurement Maven of the Month for this month), shows that doing things right isn't nearly as important as doing the right thing, and that being transparent is a driving factor in the fostering of trust.

In a recent presentation at the Universidad Del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, Dr. Rawlins outlined his findings, and we summarize them below. (You can read the whole paper here, excerpted from the IPRRC proceedings of last spring. Read my blog coverage of that presentation here.)

The overall results of the study demonstrate that transparency and trust are highly correlated, and, "one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent they will also become more trusted." Although the study was limited to employees, the results are strong enough to imply that the correlation between trust and transparency will hold for other stakeholder groups as well.

Definitions

For definitions of trust, see our paper above, since Rawlins uses the same terminology. For transparency, Rawlins starts with the 2005 Mirriam-Webster definition:

• Free from pretense or deceit
• Easily detected or seen through
• Readily understood

He then supplements it with one from Anne Florini of the Brookings Institution:

The opposite of secrecy. Secrecy means deliberately hiding your actions; transparency means deliberately revealing them.

According to Rawlins, there are three aspects of transparency:

1. Informational Transparency means openness, making publicly available all legally releasable information -- whether positive or negative in nature -- in a manner which is accurate, timely, balanced, and unequivocal. Information must be substantial to meet stakeholders needs. Disclosure by itself does not equal transparency, in fact some forms of disclosure can defeat the purposes of transparency.
2. Participatory Transparency is what separates transparency from disclosure. Transparency cannot be successful unless you know what stakeholders want and need to know. So, to ensure that the information shared is relevant and useful, stakeholders must be allowed to identify what they need to know.
3. Accountability Transparency. Transparency holds people accountable for their actions, words and decisions. Rawlins cited The Naked Corporation: If you're going to be naked, you'd better be buff. In other words, if you want to shine, you have to clean up your act.

In addition, Rawlins suggests that each organization might experience differing levels of transparency:

• Active transparency, where transparency is simply part of the culture;
• Forced transparency, in response to Sarbanes-Oxley or other legislation; and
• Pseudo transparency, in which an organization obfuscates through disclosure and greenwashing, which is self-promotion disguised as transparency.

Methodology

1200 employees of a large regional healthcare organization were surveyed on issues of trust and transparency. 385 surveys were completed for a 32% response rate. Twenty-four surveys were deleted because they were incomplete, leaving 361 surveys for analysis. The sample demographics matched approximately those of the healthcare organization's population.

Conclusions

1. Trust and transparency are significantly and strongly correlated.

Trust was closely connected with transparency and the two are positively related. According to Rawlins, "As employee perceptions of organizational transparency increased so did trust. Additionally, the three components of trust (competence, integrity, and goodwill) and three components of transparency (participation, substantial information, and accountability) are positively related."

2. Regression analyses indicate that employees found integrity and goodwill more important to overall trust than competency.

Employee participation that leads to an organization sharing information that employees find useful and substantial, and that holds an organization accountable, is the strongest predictor of overall transparency.

3. Employees see sharing information as a sign of integrity.

Sharing substantial information and being accountable was tied to employee perceptions of organizational integrity.

4. Employee participation and willingness to be accountable was tied to perception of goodwill.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Rawlins is the only speaker I've heard of late that closed his presentation with a quote from the bible that I actually found to be entirely relevant to the presentation.   Would that more of our corporations heed these words:

And this is the condemnation. That light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil, for everyone that doest evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved, but he that doest a Truth cometh to the light that his deeds maybe e manifest, that they are wrought in God.  John 3:19-21

Can the Votes of a Panel Measure Trust, Reputation, and Other Tricky Things?

How do you measure trust? I just read about an innovative social media approach as applied to news media, (thanks to PR Watch.org). NewsTrust, now still in beta, is "...a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources..." So, as I take it, news sources will be rated by many readers to result in an overall score that roughly translates to "trustworthiness."

And that brings up an interesting thought: If you can derive a useful measure of trustworthiness by having a bunch of people just vote on it, then why couldn't we measure all kinds of tricky things by having people vote on them? Could we compare the trustworthiness of companies or politicians just by combining ratings from enough people?

And if so, then why go to all the media analysis effort of compiling a Reputation Index for big companies when you could just get a bunch of people to rate the companies? Hey, maybe there's already a social media site called YourRep.com or something where everyone can rank companies to provide an overall reputation score.

I guess if we can use Wikipedia to provide accurate information on, say, Total Quality Management (which I happen to have looked up there just a little while ago, and I feel more or less confident that what I read was accurate), then perhaps we can use a similar consensus-of-many approach to defining (or at least getting a handle on) more nebulous concepts as well. --WTP