A flurry of new measurement stats at the Measurement Summit earlier this month, sponsored by measurement gurus KDPaine & Partners. The centerpiece of the summit was
the first-ever global survey on measurement, conducted with the support the Arthur W. Page Society, International Public Relations Association (IPRA) and Public
Relations Society of America, among other PR associations. It includes data on measurement practices from 1030 respondents in 25 countries. The findings include some
surprising nuggets of information (there is little statistical difference in measurement practices among countries) and some not so (cost and lack of expertise are still the
biggest barriers to using measurement services).
Perhaps the most interesting part of the study is that in this day and age of automation - when everyone thinks technology has all their work problems solved--two thirds of
practitioners still rely on paper clips to track their results. "And the vast majority of people that are measuring anything, are doing it manually," says Katie Paine, CEO of
KDPaine & Partners (Durham, New Hampshire). "Not only are those who are doing things in 21st-century style with computer aided clip delivery and computer aided analysis few
and far between, but they'll admit that the actual use of these systems is generally limited to just a few people in the organization. Why are PR people--or at least this
generation of PR people--such Luddites?"
A separate study at the summit found that despite all the technological advances of the past few years, nearly 70% of the (1,443) respondents are still manually counting clips
in-house while 62% are still using paper-based clipping services. Below are some of the more salient measurement stats from the primary study. PRN