Measurement

How do you tie what you measure with business objectives? That’s the questions we asked of five senior communicators for this month’s Roundtable.

In each edition of PR News we highlight takeaways from select articles as well as important additions to the PR News Resources Center.

For years we composed a decidedly sad picture of PR measurement as Measurement Month arrived. For many PR pros, measurement was an albatross. The tide seems to be turning, with communicators insisting on high-quality measurement that yields insights, according to a new survey from PR News and PublicRelay.

For Measurement Month we asked a quartet of senior measurement analysts to assess the state of communications measurement, including the ramifications of AI for measurement, how to hold your measurement vendor’s feet to the fire and what a company’s budget priorities should be for communications measurement.

Money can’t buy you love and it can’t buy you passionate employees, but it surely can buy you more resources. When posed with the question of “What would you do with a 15% increase in… Continued

It’s critical to measure your communications efforts. Don’t stop there, however. With so much data available, it’s important to be certain you are measuring and reporting metrics that are relevant to your organization and the C-Suite, panelists said during PR News’ Healthcare Social Media Summit.

With all of the measurement options that exist, it can be easy to forget that the social platforms themselves track loads of data—but native analytics should nevertheless be a part of your measurement plan. To that end, here are some tips to best utilize them.

There still are plenty of PR pros who think of measurement as a necessary evil, while others ignore measurement totally. For Dan Beltramo, CEO of PR data firm AirPR, the reluctance of PR pros to embrace measurement is due largely to a false sense of freedom. Ironically, Beltramo says, measurement can be liberating.

AI is getting much better at measuring media, yet many PR firms continue to deploy humans to compile and analyze reports. It’s not a ploy to charge more. Measuring earned and social media entails more than merely evaluating mentions and a human touch remains essential, argues former UBS Canada communications head Graeme Harris.

It’s through listening to the data, selecting your audiences carefully, experimenting and not being afraid to fail that social communicators can figure out what actually matters for them.