A New Public Relations and Social Media Metric: The Kick Butt Index (KBI)

What do you really want from your PR or social media?

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Forget engagement, affection, influence, and whatever other social media or mainstream media scores you’re debating. What we really need for a public relations measurement metric is a Kick Butt Index (KBI): Did that article or mention kick butt, or not?

My KBI idea grew out of a conversation I had last week. A former client of mine described his measurement needs as follows:

“I want something so that when the business development guy or the product manager storms into my office and says “Lockheed just kicked our butt on this one!” I’ll have an answer.”

What does "Kicked Our Butt" really mean?

The crux of his problem—and similar problems for most of the rest of the PR world—is that no one agrees up front what “kicked our butt” means. How do you really define success? Does it mean more front page headlines or better message communication? More fans on Facebook or more retweets?

Just about every organization I deal with has different PR / social media programs, with different goals and audiences, which means that every organization I deal with has a slightly different definition of what Kicking Butt really means. And then within every organization there are probably seven different definitions, depending on whether you are in sales, marketing, finance, competitive intelligence, or PR.

Kicking Media Butt

If your definition of Kicking Butt means more coverage than the other guy, then you need to define what that coverage should look like. Are key messages most important? Headlines? Positive sentiment? What?

At KDPaine & Partners, we have been using our own version of the KBI for some time. We call it the Optimal Content Score (OCS). (Our OCS is just one definition of "Kick Butt," based on media coverage. What works for you might be based on web analytics, relationship scores, or other measures.)

The OCS gauges the success of articles based on what the client considers to be the ideal article. To implement OCS for any particular client, we define an ideal article based on their coverage goals. So, for instance, an ideal article for Client X might be one that:

contains several key messages,
leaves a reader more likely to purchase,
mentions the brand in the headline, and
appears in the Wall Street Journal.

If an article includes all these attributes, we give it the maximum score, ten out of ten. To determine the score for any given article, points are deducted from the maximum based on how far an article is from ideal, taking points off, for instance, for negative positioning and minor mentions.

Develop your own Kick Butt Index

So, to develop your own KBI for media (traditional or otherwise), decide what a perfect 10 mention looks like for your program. Then determine what your worst nightmare mention looks like. Of course, most bloggers and journalists rarely deliver either your ultimate fantasy or your worst nightmare, so what does a solid “average” mention look like?

But maybe mentions don't matter at all? Maybe “kicking butt” really means "more unique visits," or some other metric. That's up to you.

In the process of figuring this out, most organizations do one or more of the following:

List the desired outcomes of a program, department, launch or whatever it is that you are promoting.
List their key messages and rank them by importance.
List their strategic initiatives and rank them by importance.
List their most influential media sources
List their key target stakeholders.
List the key competitors.

Not only does this process get you a clear, agreed upon definition of “kicking butt,” but it also sets you well on the way toward a perfect measurement system. By getting everyone to agree on a standard definition of success, you can far more easily judge your performance in the marketplace, relative to your competition.

Happy measuring:

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