[Editor's Note: PRNEWS’ final Digital Learning Series event, on Measurement and Data for PR, took place August 14. Prior to the event, we caught up with panelist and measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing, to discuss the latest challenges, tactics and tools for measuring and evaluating reputation. Watch the event on demand here.]
PRNEWS: From a PR and communications perspective, what are some of the greatest challenges to measuring and evaluating reputation?
Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing: Frequency. The only effective way to measure and evaluate reputation is to ask your target audience what they think of you, and few organization have the money to do that on a regular basis. Really good measurement companies like Southwest set up monthly metrics that come in from RepTrak so they can measure the impact of PR (good and bad) on their reputation on an ongoing basis.
That’s the best way to do it. If you can’t afford monthly tracking, you should at least do quarterly pulse checks of your target audience—short, targeted surveys to see what (if anything) has changed.
The other big challenge is all the hype around using social media and/or media monitoring to evaluate reputation. That works if your audience regularly gets information from social media and if you have enough brand visibility to break through all the other stuff that’s out there. Otherwise, it’s probably misleading at best.
PRNEWS: Name a tool you recommend using to assess public perception.
Paine: Qualtrics surveys and RepTrak are both great tools. If you can’t afford them, SurveySparrow is a very good, affordable survey platform—much better than SurveyMonkey.
PRNEWS: Name a tactic for measuring reputation.
Paine: Pre/Post-surveys before and after any campaign or announcement or crisis. Essentially you need to know where you stand with your audience now, so you know what’s normal. That way if there is a big spend on promotion, or a crisis, or a big announcement, you can measure the change in audience perceptions.
PRNEWS: What’s your best advice to PR professionals charged with managing reputation, given the relentless news cycle of today?
Paine: First, do an audit of your policies and people to make sure there are no proverbial bodies buried in the basement of your history. You need to know the landscape well enough to be honest and thorough when you are answering reporters' questions. Next create a crisis communications strategy and rehearse it every other month and update as necessary.
Benchmark against others in your industry to see what share of negative press routinely hits your industry. Then calculate your share of those negatives. If it starts to go up, have a plan in place to counter the negatives.
PRNEWS: How do you recommend PR and comms teams prove their value to higher-ups? How can they not only gain but retain a seat at the table?
Paine: Dump all those vanity metrics. You don’t need to reach everyone in the planet 10 times, which is what many of the social media platforms regularly report. Listening and media monitoring won’t tell you anything without also looking at your web and sales analytics.
Show leadership that you have reached your target audience with the right messages at the right time, and that they responded by either doing what you want them to do (buy something, go to your website, sign a petition, volunteer, donate, etc.) and/or they changed their perceptions and became more aware of your messages.
Kaylee Hultgren is Content Director for PRNEWS.