CEOs want to see results, like an ad or a Web site, but such
a sure-fire way of measuring - and then presenting - the
less-tangible PR effort has proved elusive. However, Ed Moed,
managing partner and co-founder of Peppercom,
developed just such a measurement tool, and he detailed it in his
"Business Outcomes" strategy as part of "Open C-Suite
Doors-Communication Keys From the Lumin Collaborative," published
by Aspatore Inc. The following is an excerpt of his
chapter:
Measurement has always been the Achilles' heel of the
public-relations world. Although this is true for many reasons, the
most basic stems from the intangible outcomes of PR campaigns. In
contrast, when a corporation hires an advertising firm, it sees
something tangible for the investment, whether it's an ad, a series
of ads, a direct-mail piece or a Web site. The client may love it
or it may hate it, but it knows exactly what it's getting.
From a PR standpoint, everything we do--the strategy, the
creativity, the tactical approaches, the collective whole--is aimed
at trying to attain media attention, media hits, networking
opportunities, speaking platforms and so on, which in turn will
lead to new business or building the reputation.
The deliverables aren't necessarily laid out. I refer to it as
"gray matter" versus other, more black-and-white marketing
tactics.
These days, what clients and their bosses want to know after
spending x amount of money on a public-relations program is
not simply the number of placements, but the effects that those
placements have on their business. Did the program improve the
client's reputation? Did it increase its visibility and recognition
within the marketplace? Did it generate a substantial amount of new
business leads? It becomes more important to qualify the results
than to quantify them.
There has always been one "silver bullet" for which the industry
has been looking: How to create a flexible measurement system with
universal potential that can measure anything and is easily
verifiable. Such a system would measure how much media attention we
received and what that did in terms of building the reputation of
our client or--based on the campaign, the media, the networking and
the trade show--how that system might help us to measure the number
of qualified leads and what business came from them. It would
create benchmarks using the initial measurement as the baseline,
and it would be flexible enough to use over and over again.
Additionally, that measurement system would be cost-effective
rather than using up 20% to 30% of a marketing budget and defeating
the purpose of the program. It would be very appealing to CEOs and
business leaders who are pressuring their corporate communications
people to give them a return on investment and demanding good
measurement tools in order to see where their money is going.
In response to this need, we offer a flexible measurement tool,
"Business Outcomes," which we developed in partnership with
Goodmind LLC, a market-research and data- analysis firm
based in New York City. "Business Outcomes" provides metrics for
any form of PR marketing or sales. The key adjectives are simple,
cost-effective, verifiable and flexible. What makes it so simple is
that it doesn't just measure media, it can measure anything--from
how media influences sales to whether trade shows are getting leads
to a client's reputation.
The way "Business Outcomes" works is comparable to the way
pharmaceutical companies look at drug development. From a financial
standpoint, pharmaceutical companies can't possibly measure every
single data point when developing a drug; instead, they use the
statistical law of averages.
"Business Outcomes" takes this approach in measuring the success
of a PR program. The client and the "Business Outcomes" team work
together to determine the criteria to be measured and to assign a
relative importance to them. Once this step is completed, media
placements are gathered, numbered and analyzed by a trained
specialist using a precise system that assigns "points" for target
words, expressions, placement and context. Afterward, data is run
through a proprietary algorithm, resulting in a few simple numbers
(scores) that help clients substantiate the overall effectiveness
of a campaign and to identify areas for improvement. These results
then are benchmarked quarterly to measure the overall impact of the
PR campaign and to tweak certain strategies and tactics within the
program as needed.
For example, let's say there are a thousand points of data--in
this case, a thousand media articles. Under a typical system, one
would look at and measure each of these articles to come up with an
overall score for the program. With "Business Outcomes," we can
take a random sampling of a certain percentage of those articles,
sample that data multiple times and eventually come up with a
random sampling that is within a 5% margin of error.
Many companies justify their means by measuring everything and
then presenting clients with a big, thick binder with seemingly
innumerable charts. A binder like that is not CEO-friendly; it's
not even communications-friendly. No one wants to have to sift
through all of that information. Clients want something simple that
they can easily present to their CEOs. Consequently, we created a
simple four-page PowerPoint presentation that is, basically, a
glossary of terms for each criterion, what we evaluated and the
measurement we obtained.
Within this presentation, we provide a matrix that shows how the
client weighs each criterion. They may say, for example, "I want,
on a scale from one to 10, national business media as a nine, and
my top trades as a two." This way, we can determine which
measurements are the most important when we compute the algorithm
to get a score. In the end, we give clients a chart that shows how
they rated everything, what we're measuring, the scores in each
area and a total score. We use a scale of one to 100 to keep it
simple and to create a bar chart that shows what the score means.
The next two pages of the presentation walk through the program,
examining what worked and what didn't. The last page details what
the client needs to change from a prescriptive standpoint.
Our tool is also flexible, allowing clients to measure anything
they want and to add or change anything mid-course. Finally, it's
verifiable because the statisticians with whom we worked created an
algorithm that they can walk the client through to show that this
score really means something and is not comprised of numbers pulled
out of thin air. From what we can tell, this is the first time a PR
firm has gone into the measurement business (instead of using
vendors) to tailor measurement solutions based on a client's
business, marketing and PR needs.
Contact: Ed Moed, 212.931.6100, [email protected]