The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

This PR Measurement Webinar Brings You Up To Date On Engagement, Influence, And Business Impact

This webinar from Carma International presents Dr. Jim Macnamara, Professor and Deputy Dean at University of Technology, Sydney. He identifies and explores several key concepts of public relations measurement, including engagement, relevant influence, and impact/value. It's really a broad review of what public relations does and how it can be evaluated. It also includes an overview of current standards efforts, and a model of how PR efforts link to business outcomes. --WTP

Tim Marklein on the AMEC Summit: Rethinking ROI for Public Relations

 Please pardon a brief rant: As we have said several times before, Return on Investment (ROI) does not mean “Whatever kind of results you want to measure.” ROI means percent return on a financial investment.

Legions of social media measurement wannabes talk about “ROI this” and “ROI that.” But borrowing the lingo of accountants does not make you a measurement guru. Quite the opposite.

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t (And 3 Reasons Why You Should) Measure PR: Sean Williams

Yes, folks, there are times when you should not measure your public relations. Read Sean Williams at ragan.com: “3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Measure PR.” Including:

“Forget measurement when:

1. You cannot make a difference... 

2. You’re unwilling to do what it takes to make things better...

3. It’s more expensive to measure than the program you're measuring...”

Click here to read the whole article.

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The Single Answer to 10,000 Measurement Questions: Measure Your Business Impact. Part 1: Using Measurement to Link PR and Business Goals

This is Part 1 of The Single Answer to 10,000 Measurement Questions: Measure Your Business Impact. There will be three more posts in this series. Links to each will be here after they are posted:

• Part 1: Using Measurement to Link PR and Business Goals (13 questions)
• Part 2: Social Media (11 questions)
• Part 3: How to Do Measurement With Limited Resources (6 questions)
• Part 4: Measurement Nuts and Bolts (15 questions)

 

by Katie Delahaye Paine

People are always asking me measurement questions: “How do I do this?” “What’s the best way to do that?” Recently, thanks to a speaking engagement at the PR News Measurement Conference, I have come to realize that almost all of these many questions have the same answer.

Prior to the conference, the organizers asked my fellow panelists and I a large number of specific measurement questions to ensure that our comments would be relevant to the audience. As I was working through them, I realized that almost all the questions had some version of the same answer: “Measure your business impact.”

And so I realized that when people ask me how to measure ROI—or how to measure on a limited budget, or how to link PR to business goals—they all are really asking different versions of the same question: “How do I measure what really matters?”

What really matters—and the one answer to most measurement questions—is: “Measure your business impact.”

Below are specific questions and answers (most of them thanks to PR News). For convenience sake they are divided here into four general categories, and are presented in four separate blog posts:

Part 1: Using Measurement to Link PR and Business Goals (13 questions)
Part 2: Social Media (11 questions)
Part 3: How to Do Measurement With Limited Resources (6 questions)
Part 4: Measurement Nuts and Bolts (15 questions)

 

 Part 1: Using Measurement to Link PR and Business Goals

Q: How important is alignment between PR goals and business goals to the overall success of corporate communications/public relations?

A: There is nothing else that is more important.

Q: What are the more universally used measures that link PR efforts to business objectives? It seems everyone does something different.

A: That’s because there isn’t a universal goal. Metrics must be based on the goals of your organization, so there is no single metric. The best metric is the one that most closely relates to your goals.

Q: What is the importance of primary research in assessing ROI of communication efforts?

A: It is critical. You absolutely need to do good solid research on the actual impact you are having on the business if you are going to calculate ROI.

Q: Specifically, what is the universal methodology used to calculate earned media value? At last year's Barcelona conference, it was stated that Ad Value Equivalency was officially dead and gone. So, what do we do now? For example, if one page inTIME costs X amount of dollars for a paid placement, then what is the value of the same amount of real estate containing an earned story resulting from a great pitch?  

A: There is no universal methodology. AVE’s have now been rejected by all leading organizations and most reputable agencies. You should be measuring based on business outcomes, not made up metrics. 

Q: Clients increasingly want to know, “What percentage of my sales can I hold PR responsible for delivering on an annual basis?” This is not what PR historically was measured on - but it's a new day! What do you recommend agencies advise clients (usually in the sales & marketing department) on when it comes to PR measurement. How much needs to come on the tracking side from them, versus what's expected from the agency? What are some examples that other agencies use?

A: No one program or effort is responsible for a sale. Sales is impacted by availability, price, the sales person, etc. PR gets people to the point of consideration, gets them to a website, or builds relationships. You should measure PR based on what it is designed to accomplish. 

Q: What are ways to measure awards, public affairs, speaking engagements, and corporate social responsibility efforts and be able to tie those into all the other efforts a public relations team manages (such as media relations, social media, and the About section of a company's website)?

A: First you’ve got to look at the overall goals of your programs.

• • If your programs are designed to generate leads, then you should look at increase in number of qualified leads, and perhaps the cost of leads.
  • If your goal is message communication, then you should look at message penetration and message integrity in various outlets over time. 

Secondly, you need to divide your efforts into “controlled” vs. “earned.”

• • Your About section, speaking engagements, and CSR programs are all things you can control.
  • Media relations and social media are areas that you can’t control and should be measured by different metrics.

Q: How can we shift expectation of corporate leaders to recognize that qualitative measurement trumps quantitative measurement?

A: Corporate leaders appreciate business results. Tie those qualitative measures back to actual business impact. For example, improved relationships reduce legal costs and increase efficiencies. 

Q: How do you quantitatively link PR to business goals?

A: Use statistical analysis, correlations, and regressions.

Q: I've seen many different ways to measure media relations success, such as impact scores, volume, impressions, ad value, tonality, etc. Which metrics do you consider best practices when reporting to the executive/board level, and why?

A: First of all, we never recommend using ad value under any circumstances. Secondly, the right metric depends on your goals and the desired business impact. Seldom do companies fund PR programs simply to “reach eyeballs.” Generally the goal is to increase awareness, preference, trial or purchase, or to change perceptions. The ideal metric depends on the goal. 

Q: Can you put a monetary value on media coverage? If so, how?

A: Yes, but only if you can do ANOVA or A/B testing of customer response to a media outreach effort. 

Q: How can we validate our PR efforts to the company as a whole?

A: Tie them back to actual business improvements such as greater efficiency in getting your messages out, or shortened sales cycles, or improved customer relationships, or lower customer turnover.

Q: What are we supposed to measure in today's environment and how do we sell that to the various constituencies?

A: In today’s environment, you are supposed to measure outcomes – the real impact your programs are having on the business. You “sell” that by integrating your media measurement with web analytics, business intelligence, and awareness/preference research. 

Q: What are the most realistic tactics to measure traditional (non-social media) PR? What are the most realistic tactics to measure social media PR?

A: For any type of media, you should be measuring your share of desirable coverage vs. the competition, as well as the message content of your traditional PR over time. 

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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.

Charlie Osmond: “Michelle Obama’s $2.7Bn Influence”

Over at Fresh Networks Charlie Osmond has a post featuring measurement of Michelle Obama's influence on the stock prices of the companies’ clothes she wears. It features the work of David Yermack published in the Harvard Business Review. Includes a great infographic with analysis of the Michelle Obama effect on stock prices and the role of the social web in it. (Thanks for passing this along, Katie. And thanks to Clutch Magazine for the photo.)  --WTP

 

How to Evaluate Events: Does Your Show Have Go?

Jim Macnamara’s ‘Measuring Up’

Evaluate events with these sample objectives, measurement metrics, and corresponding measurement methods.

When Web analytics showed that the most popular articles in The Measurement Standard are those about how to measure events, I was a little surprised for two reasons. First, even though events involve creativity and can have strategic objectives, the bulk of event management involves technical and administrative skills rather than strategic public relations expertise. In the typology of public relations roles identified by PR scholars Glen Broom and David Dozier, organising and running events mostly sits within the technician role rather than the manager role. Second, of all the challenges in public relations measurement, event measurement is relatively straight-forward compared with the intricacies of some other aspects of PR.

Still, events such as launches, conferences, seminars, exhibitions, open days, and so on are a part of many public relations programs and, as such, should be measured.

Getting the Show on the Road: Clear Strategic Objectives

At a basic level, those who run events judge their success simply by getting the show on the road and the size of the crowd that turns up. However, at a management level, the success or otherwise of events should be measured in more strategic terms. How?

Like all measurement, evaluation of events starts with objectives. Why is the event being staged? Events should have clear strategic objectives that serve the overall objectives of the organisation. For instance, events may be staged to:

• Create awareness of some new product or service;
• Generate leads of interested people for sales follow-up;
• Build relationships with key stakeholders; or
• Provide experiential contact such as demonstrations and hands-on trialling at trade shows and exhibitions to generate interest.

Without clear objectives, it is impossible to measure the success of events. With clear objectives, the metrics required are clearly mapped out.

What to Measure: Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes

It is important also to remember that measurement can be done at input, output, and outcome levels. That is, you may want to do some research before or during planning of the event to gain information about what your target audience wants and expects:

• Input level measurement helps you plan the event and increases your chances of achieving your desired outputs and outcomes.
• In terms of outputs, measurement can identify the number of attendees and the percentage who were satisfied with the event itself (e.g. was it interesting and useful).
• Finally, and ultimately, outcomes evaluation should focus on attitudinal and behavioural effects such as awareness of products or services created, leads gained, relationship improvement, and so on.

Some sample event objectives, measurement metrics, and corresponding measurement methods are suggested in the following table:

Low Cost or No Cost

What is noteworthy about the possible measurement methods in this table is that a number of them are either low cost or even no cost. Simple survey questionnaires to gain satisfaction ratings can be designed and printed in-house, or distributed by e-mail. Also, some measurement can be leveraged from existing research such as annual brand or reputation surveys simply by including a question to measure the extent to which events contributed to respondents’ awareness and perceptions.

It is necessary to note that outcomes such as relationships are the result of multiple influences beyond your event and even beyond communication. However, effective communication is one of the key ‘antecedents’ (i.e. contributions) to relationships, so quantifying that contribution is important in linking PR activities to organisational objectives.

The more difficult aspects of public relations to measure are its long-term effects; the value it provides in avoidance of criticism and crises; and its contribution to outcomes in integrated campaigns when the contribution of PR is hard to isolate. But as for events, break a leg.

Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC became Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney in 2007 after a 30-year career working in journalism, public relations and media research which culminated in selling the CARMA Asia Pacific franchise which he founded to Media Monitors in 2006. He worked as Group Research Director with Media Monitors - CARMA Asia Pacific following the sale and continues as a Consultant with the Group.

Jim Macnamara's new book, The 21st Media (R)evolution: Emergent Communication Practices is published by Peter Lang, New York. For details, reviews and orders go direct to the Peter Lang sales site, or order through www.amazon.com.

5 Things You Should Do With the 7 Barcelona Principles of Public Relations Measurement

 "We haven't raised the bar, we've raised the floor."

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Editor's note: Welcome to our Barcelona Summit coverage:

• For an overview of the Summit, and links to other articles, blogs and photos, see Everything You Need to Know about the Barcelona Summit. 

• For a practical guide to improving your public relations and social media measurement based on the Barcelona principles, see The Barcelona Principles Checklist. 
  •  
• For a discussion of the next steps after Barcelona, read Barcelona Was a Great First Step: Here Are 5 More Issues to Tackle.

At the recent Barcelona Summit, AMEC, IPR and CIPR presented seven basic principles of measurement. 200 or so delegates voted to approve them:

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programmes.
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality – cuttings in themselves are not enough.
3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity.
4. Social media can and should be measured.
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results.
6. Business results can and should be measured where possible.
7. Transparency and Replicability are paramount to sound measurement.

So what? What does this have to do with me?

It’s a valid question. Many of these principles were probably, for readers of The Measurement Standard, clearly in the “duh!” category. One of my Twitter followers said “Great, it takes that much effort to do something we all learned at university.” He has a point, (although I for one, never studied PR research in college – it wasn’t even offered).

These principles are not a call to arms, and will hardly start a revolution, but they do create a benchmark. They tell the world that if you are a PR professional trying to measure results, this is where you have to start.

AVEs: Dead Again

Without a doubt the most controversial principle -- and the one that should start at least a few skirmishes if not a revolution -- is #3. It drives a wooden stake into the undead heart of Advertising Value Equivalency. And the fact that it passed at all (the vote was by no means unanimous, see the voting tallies here) is a sign of how far we’ve come in just a year. Remember that last June at the Berlin AMEC conference the vast majority of the crowd cheerfully raised its hands when asked if they provided AVEs for their clients. (Read what I had to say about that here and especially here.) This year, most of the same providers are no doubt still offering what I refer to as “the cocaine” of our industry. But at least they admit that it is a flawed metric and want to see it killed off. (Here is a flamboyant reason to say goodbye to AVEs: "General Sentiment Tars BP With AVE Scare-Wash.")

Outcomes over Outputs

The other significant element to the principles is that they make very clear that PR measurement is not just about counting clips. The fact that they clearly state that measuring outcomes is preferred over outputs is significant, because it may mean the beginning of some very significant changes for the people who attended, many of whom make a living selling clips. Not that people will ever stop wanting to know what the media in all its forms says about them, but it means that, increasingly, media analysis will be integrated with web analytics, CRM and Marketing Mix Modeling in order to quantify the value of a public relations effort.

Of Course We Can Measure Social Media

I was also happy to notice that the principles reiterate my assertion that “YES WE CAN Measure Social Media.” The silly notion that just because a conversation happens in a space that's different from what we’re used to makes it somehow “unmeasurable” has always been one of the more ridiculous myths of our time. Since the percentage of coverage appearing in “traditional” media (as opposed to online and social) has dropped from 95% to about 9% in the last three years, we need to change how we define media.

So here are five things you should do with these principles:

1. Read and think about them. Read the coverage on the IPR website and join the discussion. You can get full copies of what was passed in Barcelona at the AMEC or IPR websites. To comment on the Principles, write to [email protected] or [email protected].
2. If you are a member of an organization not represented in Barcelona, contact your organization’s leadership and get them to sign on to the principles – conspicuously absent were IABC, SNCR, IPRA, AEJMC. If you are a member, we need you on board.
3. Stop using AVEs. Explain to your AVE addicted clients and bosses that the all the major industry leaders have pledged to stop using them. So should you.
4. Don’t work with vendors who don’t adhere to these principles.
5. Spread the word amongst your colleagues about The Barcelona Principles and urge them to endorse them.

Continue the Discussion

Most importantly, these principles aren’t the end of this discussion. As someone said in Barcelona, "We haven’t raised the bar, we’ve raised the floor." (If anyone reading this knows who the person is who said this, please tell Katie so we can properly credit them.) The principles are a place to start, a platform from which we can have more discussions about the right ways and the wrong ways to measure PR.

Photo at top from Katie Delahaye Paine's Flickr set.

Don Bartholomew on The Digitization of Research and Measurement in Public Relations

Read this article about a new model of PR/social media measurement by Don Bartholomew, author of the MetricsMan blog, over at Social Media Explorer: "The Digitization of Research and Measurement in Public Relations." Here is the crucial chart from it:

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