Executive Summary
PR News Measurement Conference
April 8, 2014 – National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

 

8:30 a.m. – The Wake-Up Call: The State of Measurement

Sandra Fathi, President & Founder, Affect

  • Measurement is one of the most elusive aspects of PR.
  • Measurement proves the value of public relations and social media, and it demonstrates ongoing improvement and performance.
  • 95% of people involved in PR measure social media.
  • But only 9% of people set their social media budgets based on performance.
  • The Barcelona Principles are relevant, but they are not immediately actionable. They were designed for PR professionals, not the C-suite.
  • Know what metrics matter to your business and structure your measurement strategy to meet them.

 

8:45 a.m. – How–and When–to Report Measurement Results

Marla Bace, General Manager, Marketing and Operations Circles, a division of Sodexo

  • More communications professionals should consider themselves marketers.
  • View your reporting as your own marketing campaign for what you’re doing at work.
  • Your objective should define what you measure.
  • If you have customer insights, make sure that they are reliable. Did you ask the right questions to report on what you want to report?
  • To get credibility with senior leaders, you need financial acumen.
  • When presenting what you’re measuring, think about your audience first. Is a simple email, a one-on-one meeting or a group meeting best for what you want to accomplish?

David Hebert, Chief of Internal and Audio/Visual Communications, U.S. Geological Survey

  • One of the most dangerous things in the world is a skeptical boss with misunderstood data.
  • Put measurement in context—statistics vs. the actual truth, cultural factors, functional factors.
  • Look across different platforms and business units to find common threads.
  • Build the right vehicle to show your boss or director your measurement numbers. Don’t expect them to know what it should look like for you.
  • Help your executives or organization respond to their audiences or market.

Johna Burke, EVP, BurrellesLuce

  • If the metrics you're measuring aren’t relevant to the outcome you’re trying to drive, then don’t use them.
  • Beware of vanity metrics—metrics that just make what you're measuring sound impressive.
  • Also beware of ghost metrics—metrics that your organization either won’t believe or won’t understand.
  • Know and understand how your organization makes and spends money. That will give you a credible voice within your organization.

 

9:30 a.m. – Case Study I: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Andrew Bowins, Senior VP, Corporate & Digital Communications, MasterCard

  • Stop talking about social media, digital media, traditional media separately—look at your overall strategy.
  • The truth will set you free; democratize data and insight across your organization.
  • Create a common culture and language about communications at your organization.
  • It’s too easy to buy tools that measure without moving towards insight.
  • Real people don’t talk the same way people talk in the boardroom.
  • Data removes emotion. There’s nothing better than winning an argument with facts and data.

 

9:45 a.m. – Measuring User Engagement in Social Media

Marcia DiStaso, Assistant Professor of Public Relations, College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University

  • Facebook isn’t just about likes comments, shares. It’s also about things like who hid your post, marked it as spam or unfollowed you after seeing it.
  • On Twitter, engagement isn't just about @replies, retweets, mentions and favorites. Think about things like response time, especially if your organization is using Twitter for customer service.
  • Look at Facebook engagement rate by type of post and by sentiment to know if, for example, your audience prefers social awareness posts more than entertainment posts.
  • By tracking sentiment over time, you can track opinions, attitudes, beliefs and behavior.
  • Think about active vs. passive engagement, as there are engagers and there are watchers. Engagement can mean success, but silence doesn’t necessarily mean disaster.

Sebastien DuChamp, Director, Digital Communications & Media Relations, GE

  • To protect your brand, you have to understand stakeholder perception and concerns.
  • With a robust social media marketing presence comes a responsibility to engage on issues.
  • Without consistency and context, numbers—no matter how large—are meaningless.
  • Dashboards should be designed so that they are adaptable and are able to be used by people in your organization who are not involved in PR.

 

10:45 a.m. – What Your Measurement Dashboard Should Look Like

Katie Paine, Senior Measurement Consultant, Paine Publishing

  • Find the most skeptical person in your organization and put yourself in his/her shoes. Answer their “So what?” questions and identify what needs to be fixed.
  • Kill the pie chart—they don't illustrate trends, only a moment in time.
  • Be able to tell your story in less than 60 seconds.
  • You want a dashboard that can show that you moved the needle and eventually helped your organization meet a goal.
  • You will learn more from failure than from success.

Allyson Hugley, EVP, Measurement, Analytics and Insights, Weber Shandwick

  • There are times when we take for granted what it means to know our audience—there’s a strategic level and there’s a tactical, basic one. For example, if you’re representing different sodas in a chart, don’t make Pepsi's part of that chart red.
  • Think less dashboard, more storyboard.
  • Strive for simplicity. Highly sophisticated data visualization can sometimes be unclear.
  • Your dashboard needs to stand alone. Create the dashboard as if you won’t be in the room to explain what appears on it.
  • Make your dashboard look good. Color visuals increase willingness to read by 80%. 

Dwayne Roark, Director, Global Business Communications, Dow Chemical Company

  • Understanding PR from a generational perspective is important when thinking about dashboards. The industry has changed a lot over the past few years, changing the “Who cares?” test along the way.
  • Validating the impact of the message will always come back to the dashboard you use.
  • Focus on measuring what matters. Actions speak louder than words.
  • Your dashboard is about positioning your message for growth. Understanding what growth means for you is a critical step in the journey.

 

11:30 a.m. – Case Study II: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Stephanie Schierholz, Manager of Digital and Social Media Marketing, Raytheon

  • Anecdotal feedback helps you tell a story.
  • Tweets with images perform better—much better—than tweets without them.
  • Promoted tweets are an amplification of what you’re doing on a regular campaign.
  • Get to know your Twitter rep if you’re running an ad campaign on the social media platform.
  • Keep clickable items in a promoted tweet to a minimum.
  • The more specific you can get in your targeting, the better.

 

Keynote Presentation – The Path to Being Brilliant in Business

Lewis Schiff, Executive Director of Inc. Business Owners Council and author of Business Brilliant: Surprising Lessons from the Greatest Self-Made Business Icons

  • Have faith in failure.
  • Wealthy people have coaches the same way that athletes have coaches.
  • Luck figures into all stories of successful people. Building networks that create luck is essential to building wealth.
  • You have to focus on what you do best and have little interaction with the things you don't do well.
  • It’s hard to create wealth when you’re getting paid for your time because your time is limited.
  • Be the bridge between those who need each other but don't know each other.

 

1:45 p.m. – Social Media ROI Mythbusting: What You Need to Do to Truly Prove Social's Value

Cheryl Reynolds, VP, Communications, Advertising and Brand Management, AICPA

  • Social media’s true value is in moving from a communications channel toward a way of doing business.
  • Social media is more than just a communications platform that distributes the message. It creates a new way of thinking about a brand.
  • It’s not about the impact of a brand on social media—it’s about social media’s impact on a brand.
  • Be careful about trying to drive sales through social media—users are very sensitive about being sold to.

Serena Ehrlich, Director of Social Media, Business Wire

  • Move away from social marketing and toward social business by defining your company, program intent and goals. Create a sales/marketing journey map for each customer type.
  • More customer service is better—the customer who recommends will buy more and so will those that take his/her recommendation.
  • When you send out a press release or announce news of any kind, you have to write a blog that answers every question that the media would potentially like to know about that news.
  • Anyone can read the analytics on a bit.ly link by adding a + at the end of the URL.
  • If you’re not using your monitoring platform because you can’t figure it out, eat the cost and get another one that you can understand.

 

2:30 p.m. – Case Study III: PR Measurement at Work in the Real World

Therese Van Ryne, Director of Communications for the Americas, Motorola Solutions

  • Pay attention to detail in everything that you do.
  • Identify and align your objectives early.
  • Set the right expectations so you can deliver a successful event or campaign.
  • Capture results promptly and in a way you can show ROI.
  • Maximize results by widely sharing your results.

 

3:30 p.m. – How to Tie PR to Sales

Mark Stouse, VP, Global Connect, BMC Software

  • Think like a CEO. They don’t think about possibilities; they think about probabilities.
  • Be sure to rigorously manage opportunity cost.
  • Understand your functional performance and be able to announce your target ahead of time.
  • Solve issues for the most cynical audience you have.
  • If your content has a short shelf life, then you have to work harder to keep the content pipeline full.
  • Credibility will earn you a seat at the table.

Angela Jeffrey, Managing Director U.S., Salience Insight

  • Define ROI as payback minus investment, divided investment, multiplied by 100
  • Using results from surveys with questions specific to your campaign, you can compare campaign costs against the amount of improvement.
  • Assigning dollar results to “micro” goals like visits to your "About Us" page can show progress against “macro” goals like a sale.
  • Earned media coverage must factor in quality and quantity, where quality is message, prominence, dominance, tone and quantity is the umber of items or impressions you're tracking.