Bud Grebey would rather have one great article that reflects his
core messages than 15 mediocre hits - and he wanted a measurement
system that would reflect his focus on quality vs. quantity.
The VP of PR at Siemens USA, like most corporate PR executives,
also wanted to tie his PR outcomes to Siemens' business objectives
and to the marketplace at large.
With 13 operating units in the United States in addition to the
German company's U.S. headquarters, Siemens PR professionals were
using a wide variety of systems to measure their PR results, but
none was offering Grebey what he needed: a tool that would
efficiently gauge the outcome of communications outreach and
simultaneously put it in the context of the industry at large.
So, Grebey turned to the Bivings Group and Brodeur Worldwide to
help him build the right tool. The result is Siemens Watch, a
Web-based, password-protected platform that uses feeds from
Factiva, eWatch and Delahaye Medialink to track coverage. Siemens
Watch, launched in January, has eliminated Grebey's measurement
woes and consolidated media measurement for Siemens USA under the
corporate umbrella.
PR NEWS spoke with Grebey from his office in New York to find
out how he's leveraging Siemens Watch and how he is retooling
measurement overall.
PRN: Tell us about what tools you have built into Siemens
Watch.
B.G.: It monitors press both for Siemens and for our business
units like Sylvania [light bulbs] and Westinghouse. It also covers
our competitors in terms of broadcast, print media and the trade
press.
We use a favorability ranking: Was it a positive story, a
neutral story or a negative story [for Siemens], and we measure it
against our core messages. We track that over time and against
trends in the marketplace.
PRN: What are the big benefits of this program for your
day-to-day operations?
B.G.: It helps us to go back to our executives and say, "You've
asked us to do certain things we don't believe to be effective.
There are other things we as PR professionals think we could do
that would be more effective, and there's more than anecdotal
evidence [to back us up]."
In an engineering company, for example, press releases tend to
be very technology jargon-heavy or very sales and marketing
oriented. We can track a release through our online system and see
where it is being picked up. If we put out 10 releases and nine
don't get picked up, then we have the resources to go back and say,
"This is why this is not being picked up."
PRN: So the tool provides you a better understanding of why a
release, for example, might not have been used in the media?
B.G.: We track key events there, we track our competitors, we
track against our stock and our competitors' stock. We can pull up
any news on what happened in the marketplace [at the time of a news
release]: Did an announcement come out, did a new product come out,
did a poor earnings report come out? We can put in
English-translated summaries of news coming out of Europe -
especially with the political climate right now, it's important to
understand what the media in Europe are saying. We can then look at
how news is influencing parts of our business.
PRN: Tools like the one you have built are being used
increasingly by PR agencies to manage projects and media databases
and to keep geographically diverse account teams on the same page.
Has Siemens Watch had a similar effect for your team?
B.G.: We're a very large company; we have 70,000 employees in
the U.S. For the first time, we're putting together uniform
standards for how to measure. We're trying to share content as much
as possible.
We're spread out not only in the U.S., but we're using this to
also share information with the parent company in Germany. To use a
cliché, it provides a "24/7" way for everybody to access
measurement information.
We can push information to communicators, to key executives, to
members of the sales and marketing force. But it also allows us to
protect certain things even further so that a sales person can't go
through our journalist database, but they can go in and see the
latest news and where items have appeared.
PRN: Tell us a little about the process of getting something
like this off the ground.
B.G.: It took an initial investment. It wasn't ridiculously
expensive. The more this project advanced, the more we realized we
could do with it and add to it. There was an initial cost, but we
recognized that it was going to cost something to do something, and
if we were going to do it, we were going to do it right.
We have 13 operating companies in the U.S. Each one of those 13
companies had its own method of monitoring and measuring [media].
We took that on as a corporate expense that we now provide for no
cost. They get cost savings and we have consistency. That's
important to our business strategy to operate as one Siemens, so
that if we go in to install medical equipment at a hospital, we
also install the lighting, the IT infrastructure. The media
monitoring now allows people to understand what's going on in the
entire marketplace.
Once it was up and running, it has not been all that expensive
to maintain.
PRN: What about the investment of time?
B.G.: It has taken a lot of time. It has been continual light
bulbs going on over people's heads among [Bivings, Brodeur,
Siemens] and our operating companies. We would get ideas like, we
could link the events calendar to the sales and marketing calendar
- great ideas, but how do you do them from the technical side? Or,
when we have a national broadcast story, how do you show what
markets it appeared in on the map?
The key has been to tie all this measurement to the business and
move it away from anecdotal evidence.
Building Your Own Company Watchdog
Not every company can afford the time or monetary investment
Siemens USA was able to pour into creating Siemens Watch. We spoke
with Gary Bivings at The Bivings Group to get more details on how
to build a measurement tool that will work for your company:
- Siemens Watch is built on Bivings Group's Issues Watch
platform. The service can either be built behind a company's
firewall or managed by Bivings Group as an ASP-like solution. - Clients can build as much or as little functionality into the
tool as they like - do you want to track competitors? Spokespeople?
Analysts? - using a variety of feeds like Factiva, eWatch and
others. - Set-up usually takes anywhere from three weeks to six months,
but Bivings advises taking time to work with all constituencies who
might use the tool to find out what customizations would be useful
to them. Clients typically add more functionality as they see what
the tool can do, Bivings says. - Plan to pay for it. The service will start at about $2,000 a
month and scale up depending on the volume of media tracked, the
number of users and the level of functionality. In rare cases where
a client wants a bare-bones model, the service could be slightly
less expensive.
Contacts: [email protected]; Gary
Bivings, 202/741-1500