June 22nd, 2010 by Steve

AMEC 10 and the glass ceiling of measuring reputation value

I posted a comment to this effect on PR Moment, but one thing that strikes me about the AMEC 10 PR evaluation discussions and grandesque declarations (though the intention is spot on) is that if the PR industry begins a gallant guest to put pound signs in front of everything it does to enhance reputation, it will fail.

The Barcelona Declaration of Research Principles represents baby steps, so this is absolutely no criticism of what last week’s debate aimed to achieve. And it’s absolutely agreed that outcomes and business results are what need to be measured.

But in the interests of modernising the long view of PR evaluation, we need to recognise that quantifying, in a clinical and pound sign-oriented way, precisely what PR investment does for brand value and hence shareholder/stakeholder value will always have limitations.

Commercially, reputation’s value lies in its ability to get customers to spend or recommend. And the only way you can truly measure reputation levels in order to gauge that is to go and ask everyone who could potentially be a customer what they think of you and whether they will buy/recommend. And do so frequently. Even then, there are no assurances they will give you the right answer or any degree of clarity.

Further point: AVEs dead? Not dead, no; but of increasingly limited value in the modern media world. It may be useful to know what the equivalent ad exposure would have cost. But it does not allow you to measure PR value, and anyone who ever claimed it did that was grasping at straws in the absence of something better.

Comparing bought media costs to what earned media costs only helps you to highlight that they’re different beasts, rather than drawing some sort of comparison that allows relative value to be assessed. That in itself is an aide to better understanding how PR has value and how it can be used as a commercial asset. But it’s a crude tool and only useful as an aside to the quest for better, grown-up measurement.

The main thing that PR agencies need to be when modernising their evaluation, and that the industry needs to be in pulling people together to crack this, is honest. Just because media is digitising and the resulting audit trails give us far more to go on does not mean that we can put pound signs against everything and be absolutely convinced that we’re right. PRs need to be clear with clients on what can be measured, what can’t be measured and why you’d even want to measure some of these things in the first place.

We need a single approach to unequivocal proof, not just a way of winning the case through sheer weight of argument and personality.

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April 23rd, 2010 by Steve

Near-illiteracy buggers social media measurement, innit?

Conversations that steer opinion, driven by the power of your social network.

Online buzz.

Sentiment measurement: what do people feel about your brand, as well as ’say’ about it?

All very sensible discussions (nay, conversations) for the PR industry to be having as practices modernise and media digitises. Many are involved in the quest to make the broader remit of PR, and in particular the value of social media engagement, more commercially tangible. To apply science, for once, to the way PR is measured.

Yewd fink dats cool. Nuffink cd be fuva frm da troof, p’raps.

Coz, like, it’s like that some people, yeah, aren’t like too understandin’ in how dey’s talkin’ an’ that, innit, d’ya knowaddamean?

For me, social media’s huge power to the PR person is that it can digitise word-of-mouth influence, and that can have (if we get all of this right) a measurable, commercial impact on brand reputation. Yet we don’t seem to have considered that many of the people we hope will ‘engage in conversations around the brand’ are barely able to hold a conversation in the real world.

How can you measure sentiment, and begin to gauge its impact on brand reputation, when you don’t understand what someone is saying?

Sarcasm may be a poisoning factor in the quest for greater sophistication in social media measurement. Illiteracy (and by that I refer to the inability of people to speak – and, in the case of social media, type – clear English) may simply render measurement models impotent for certain digitised conversations.

You wince in the street when you hear strangers speaking such poor English that you want to slap them? You don’t understand what the kids are saying? Think yourself lucky you’re not having to read their writing.

Innit.

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February 4th, 2010 by Steve

The PR person of the future will be an utter know-it-all

It used to be that certain media stereotypes befitted the PR industry. We worked hard to get away from them, talking about being consultants rather than suppliers, bigging up our strategic significance.

Today, the PR person comes in all manner of shapes and sizes. In many ways, we are a symbolic reflection of the diverse, fragmented, rapidly evolving and somewhat nervy media we work with.

We now have these types of PR people, amongst many others:

- Moderately experienced female PR, invariably blonde, lives Fulham, very comfortable with conventional media and tries hard to play lip service to social media

- Young digital pup, of-the-moment trainers, the hair of the commercially innocent, social media slurper but does not read the papers really

- The experienced senior director, a fondness for expensive moisturisers and knows PR is changing, but looks in the mirror each day and really wishes it wasn’t

- The overworked agency stalwart, dabbles with social media, sometimes surprises with digital acumen, but employer does not give them time to really learn the digital ropes so conventional remains the bread and butter

- The extreme digital enthusiast, made a personal vow a year ago to practically abandon conventional PR and bathe in the heady waters of digital, often tweets about pets and weather

You may recognise some or all of these.

Not clones, but better skilled
But in the future, the PR person will become much more of a standard item. Of course agencies will always look for diversity and range of experience when building the right team and the right culture. But the set of skills will become more regular across the team. And those skills will be a good deal more sophisticated, as well as comprehensive.

As Speed people covered at a Social Media Week breakfast this morning, our view is that PRs of the future are going to need to be experts in all corners of the media, and how to use editorial techniques to do commercially-valued things for clients. Social, print, broadcast, all types of media. Animal, vegetable, mineral, as The Bishop of Bath and Wells (pretend) once said in Blackadder.

The PR person of the future will need to be a complete know-it-all. We’ll need to know how the newspapers work (and boy is that changing fast), how social networks evolve and what has greatest influence at any given time, how ripples effects can be created and PR’s role in a rapidly changing marketing mix.

PR and advertising: let’s sort it out
Danny Rogers at PR Week has picked up on the latter point. He has also touched on why PR may need to hire people from beyond PR. My view on that is that is only one part of the picture: too many PR people have simply not been given encouraged (or had the foresight) to learn the skills they will need in the future, which is why some agencies may be thinking broader. The bigger picture is that PR must grow up and work with advertising to establish the mutual value we can create for clients.

Face it: PR must stand up and be counted
But first, we need to upgrade PR. How we gather insight, the ideas that will really work across diverse media, who the right influencers are now and for the long term, and how we can really, honestly, properly, confidently, unashamedly measure impact.

And the answer to the last point is not just about the latest slightly-better-than-previous-versions social media monitoring tools. It is more like what blend of tools will be more effective for each client, and above that how we can truly tell whether audiences have been influenced to act to our benefit, and when they will do so.

Speed’s approach to the skills challenge we now have in PR is bootcamp-like, but we feel the only way to ensure everyone across a PR business has the skills they’ll need for the future and that clients are coming to rely on. We make no apologies for this. We do not see how half measures or half-cock schemes will cut the mustard. We are working to ensure we are the consultancy that really cracks where PR – all of PR – is going amidst a diverse and fast-changing media.

We are not know-it-alls by any means, but – within the confines of public relations, and how the industry is changing – we aspire to be that. If you know what I mean. PR people who are experts across the new, broader remit of PR, rather than those who stick to our traditional knitting or cling to trends.

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