Measurement

Six years ago, Carly Keeny had a hard time convincing her colleagues at United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey that social media was anything more than a place to store content. Since then, however, Keeny has led the organization to viewing social media as a powerful and cost-efficient way to promote its mission. Keeny’s team focuses primarily on three social media KPIs: applause (likes), amplification (retweets/shares) and conversation (questions and comments).

Spotify went public and valued the company at $23 billion, but it has been providing value for brands since it revamped the Spotify for Brands program last year. The company utilizes user data in multiple ways to aid brand advertisements, but can it withstand scrutiny over how much data it collects from users now that it has entered into the open market?

Data, data, data. Every communicator’s on top of data, right? Maybe not, according to a new report from The Conference Board’s Society for New Communications Research. The study of 102 public companies finds few are staffing their communications departments with people who bring competency in data analytics.

Does your organization measure results before, or after, a campaign has run its course? For Whitney Drake, who leads General Motors’ Story Bureau and Analytics function, measuring campaigns from the start is the key to more meaningful metrics—not to mention a more insights-driven workplace culture.

As a communicator, you can have a powerful impact on just about every corner of your organization by using the platforms, relationships and knowledge that you and your PR team are uniquely positioned to leverage.… Continued

PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame members have a thing about data or, rather, a thing about the casual disregard of data in the PR discipline. Few things aggravate them more than a PR professional who worries openly about proving the value of communications efforts yet shies away from taking the first steps toward using data to inform their work and show the effect of their work on an organization’s goals.

The final article in this 5-part PR News/PublicRelay series about data and measurement profiles three rising communicators leaders. Each of them is a firm believer in data-centric communications, yet none of them is what you’d call a numbers nerd. They all learned to embrace data analysis on the job, not in college.

Failure, my friends, is the F word I am referring to and the word that so many business leaders tout as the holy grail to get ahead. You’ve heard it so many times: fail fast, learn… Continued

PR pros and marketers are awash in data and the future doesn’t indicate a slowing of that situation. The question then becomes what should you measure? In addition, how do you report insights from all that data to executives who are pressed for time and may have short attention spans? A quartet of PR pros provide best practices to tackle these issues.

Building a dashboard seems easy enough. Make sure it presents relevant metrics and tracks your path toward success. A former communications executive at a major U.S. bank, Peter Osborne explains how it’s a bit more complicated. He also provides step-by-step instructions so you can create a dashboard that links communications metrics to relevant business goals.