Comments on: How Do You Measure PR?

By: sana

sana — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:59:57 +0000

i wanted to know, how can we measure PR on twitter and facebook.
like how can we evaluate the value of PR thats on these social networking sites.they have become extremly important in this era however, i am cluless what and how would it add value for my clients brands.
sana zahid

By: Claire Thompson (claireatwaves)

Claire Thompson (claireatwaves) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:53:41 +0000

It may be useful to some people reading this, but there’s a mixer coming up in London to let people talk about the tools that can help us assess the impact of social media PR activity.
(Friday Feb 5, 2010)

Details here:
http://www.wavespr.com/thupr/thupr2-social-media-measurementmonitoring-tools/

(Hope this will appear helpful rather than spammy.)

By: Jeremy Porter

Jeremy Porter — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:21:48 +0000

It’s me that should be thanking you for sharing. I couldn’t be more excited to see the gurus on this topic chiming in on our blog. Thanks for your perspective.

By: Mark Weiner

Mark Weiner — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:35:23 +0000

I’m glad that I’ve joined this debate in its later stages so that I can read the diversity of opinion. I’d like to add to the mix:

- Most professions — legal and medical come immediately to mind — have standards but their body of knowledge is constantly evolving. The standards for medicine change through research, trial, error and refinement. Public relations is no different.

- PR people wrongly assume that other forms of marketing and communication have acheived superiority in demonstrating and generating a positive return on investment. Nothing could be further than the truth. While TV advertising may use Nielsen as a standard, advertising’s ability to draw conclusive connections with sales, for example, are no better than PR’s and in many cases, worse. We in PR may believe we have a hard time proving value, but imagine having to show a positive return on a level of investment 100 times greater than your own wiht no better tools. I’d rather be in PR.

- Measurement and evaluation are different even though people use the terms interchangeably: measurement is counting…evaluation brings context.

- “Value” and “ROI” are different even though people use the terms interchangeably::

A) “Value” is subjective while “ROI” is quantitative. “Value” changes from organization to organization or even from person to person within the same organization. That’s what makes it so problematic. If PR people took a systematic approach to defining the values within their own organzation, and focused on either deolivering on the organization’s priorities (or educating leaddership on what would constitute more reasonable or more meaningful priorities), the risk of being “undervalued” would be greatly minimized.

B) ROI is a financial measure denoting financial resources which are either attracted to or retained by the organization. The best measurement approach is called marketing mix modeling– used now by almost every major marketing company/brand in the USA. These models reveal the relative contribution of every element within the marketing mix…even when they are occuring simultaneously. In study after study (I’ve been involved in about 40, including P&G, Miller Beer and ATT), PR delivers the best ROI of everything tested. Roughly four times more productive than trade marketing, roughly 40 times better than mass-market advertising and an incalculable amount better than price promotions (which usually LOSE $.25 on the dollar…the worst of all marketing agents). So, to Katie’s point, there may be no difference in terms of advertising of PR effectiveness in terms o f awareness and recall, PR’s much lower cost allows it to deliver the best ROI.

- The PRSA is devoting itself to making “The Business Case for Public Relations.” Working in conjunction with the Institute for Public Relations Meassurement Commission, Katie, Pauline Draper, David Rockland, Don Wright and I, as former and current IPR measurement chairpeople, have produced a paper which will be delivered via the PRSA. Generally speaking, we may not have arrived at a “standard” per se but we have developed guidelines for measuring and evaluating PR in light of meaningful business outcomes.

Thanks for allowing met to share. Great conversation!

Mark

By: Twitter PR Worth $48 Million Last Month - Seemingly Without a PR Agency

Twitter PR Worth $48 Million Last Month - Seemingly Without a PR Agency — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:04:08 +0000

[...] there is some debate among PR professionals over how the value of PR should be measured, particularly the value of publicity, there’s no question that the media’s love affair [...]

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:22:22 +0000

I am a rather junior PR. The problem for the evaluation of PR is that the ROI is directly influenced by the perception of the client or other target group in comparison with the evaluation of sales promotions and advertising for instance.
You can easily measure the ROI of sales and advertising because you have at your disposal quantitative sales figures that you can analyze. In PR, you can also analyze sales figures but it’s not the essential. I think the only rather realistic ROI measurement is to make (face-to-face) surveys dedicated to this issue, to have a realistic view of the ROI. Even phone surveys loose a lot of the study and measurement as body language gives an additional measurement tool. In other words, public relations should be measured with the person that you want to reach, not only with scientific operations and figures.
If PR could be precisely measured, it wouldn’t be public relations anymore influenced by human relations and its unpredictable perceptive factors, different from one individual to another. I think the approach has to be taken as a global impression after analyzing in details the impact in order to take a decision on (how ) pursuing or not of the PR campaign.

By: CharlyLVT

CharlyLVT — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:05:42 +0000

Placed a comment on molblog.nl (Dutch) about PR and ROI. @journalistics really started an interesting discussion:http://tinyurl.com/kjsjrg

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: arters

arters — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:17:12 +0000

Excellent read on measuring PR RT @PublicityGuru My #1 Tweet: How Do PR Pros Measure Publicity/PR Results? http://bit.ly/uUZkJ

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Patrick Rafter

Patrick Rafter — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:28:15 +0000

Jeremy:
Patrick Rafter, Principal of INTRASTAND here…

Enjoyed and learned from your “How to Measure PR” post. Just re-Tweeted it.
One thought on the percieved value of PR in the PR 2.0 world (i.e when blogs, social media muddied the PR>>Media pitch to story cycle):

Public Relations is increasingly about relating to all relevant publics (not just media and analysts). With citizen journalism and free blogs everyone is a columnist, a pundit, an influencer.

TPFKAPRP (“The People Formerly Known As PR People”) will continue to add value if they can help share the value that companies have with people who will be interested in those companies’ offerings– products, services, thought leadership, innovations.

While I don’t know how to measure it yet (because site traffic and Re-Tweets are an imperfect measurement of impact)– PR 2.o is more about “Return on Interaction” than “Return on Investment.”

I blogged about my view of PR ROI as “Return on Interaction” back in January 2009 on my INTRASTAND blog:
http://intrastand.blogspot.com/2009/01/does-blog-buzz-lead-to-buck.html

We live in interesting times.

By: corb21

corb21 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:06:07 +0000

How do I measure PR…that’s a good question it is rather hard these days http://bit.ly/PsUTP

This comment was originally posted on Twitter