When we talk about results, we have tended to concentrate on the volume of publicity achieved. Yes fragmenting media is changing that and increasingly campaigns are being engineered to target commercial outcomes, but fundamentally a lot of targets that agencies work to are to get high quality and quantity of media exposure.

Chance and best guesses

So the flimsy fib upon which PR is based is that getting stuff about you in the papers, on radio and on TV will actually make a difference to you or your business. Because we have, ultimately, no way of knowing whether anyone is going to read it, see it or believe it. We don’t know whether it’ll be of influence and what they’ll think.

PR has always been a game of chance and best guesses.

But before I get my coat having completely done myself out of a job, let me qualify those brash statements a little. Of course publicity can have an enormously positive effect on brands and their reputations otherwise PR firms wouldn’t exist. And of course PR agencies can’t be taken to task when publicity campaigns don’t have the desired commercial effect because these things can’t be guaranteed.

Indeed I have successful argued that last point in court on more than one occasion.

Fantasy footfall

Yet the PR game has always been over reliant on its supposed ability to influence people. We talk about it being more effective than advertising because of the power of third party endorsement, and that is probably true. We have even dreamed up daft ‘industry standard advertising value equivalent ratios for measuring PR output. Because we had nothing better and had to do something to justify ourselves.

The lie, then, is that we’ve been planning PR activity and telling people that the topics or content we pursue will be effective ‘because that’s what will convince people’ or ‘because that’s what will inspire the audience. Guff like that. When we have no real way of knowing that, or didn’t until relatively recently, beyond a smattering of largely unrepresentative focus groups.

And yet PRs and those paying for their services were always happy (or mostly happy) to pursue the illusion, knowing that their competitors were all doing the same thing and they had to do what they could to influence the market through the established media.

Now though the lie is being undermined by the very thing that lies get brought down by: the truth. Because the transparency of two-way digital media – not just social media, but conventional media publishing online, and branded media assets too – means the audience can actually tell us what they think of the content they’re presented with.

They can answer back

When we undertake a campaign, carry out sustained communication or even answer a question posed by a customer or critic, we can actually see what that person thinks. It’s direct, visible feedback, and it’s typically provided because they really care about the topic. For better or worse, as we heard at Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week. Providing they’re being truthful of course.

What’s more, this level of engagement enables brands to actually learn from their audiences over time – not just about what might influence them better, not just about their purchasing habits and views on issues that might impact them, but about how to better tailor products and services to what customers actually want. Over time, we can even get them to participate in the brand’s story.

So why haven’t more PRs woken up and realised that, while it may be imperfect at the moment, the possibilities for finally measuring what we do more accurately, using direct feedback from the audience we want to reach, is obvious and we should start to change the way we plan and deliver our work accordingly?

We could start to put an end to the intangible nature of PR, start to think about how we could offer consultancy that has a more clinical commercial outcome, and stop coming up with daft, unsubstantiated statements about why the results we achieved were really good. We could fill our boots with this.

Growing up time

Instead, while more progressive agencies are investing time, money but most of all energy in enhancing how they measure their work, a lot of firms seem to be burying their heads in the sand.

PR’s days of being a game of chance are numbered. It’s a really good thing for us. We can devise clever long-term communication strategies and deliver on them. We can be braver in pushing the boundaries of how brands can plan and create influence, because it’s no longer built on foundations of fudge.

Let’s man up, grow up and say goodbye to guesswork.

If you answered yes to any of these, you’re not alone. In fact, there was probably a unanimous yes to all three.

So does the way your marketing budget get allocated – the money you have to do this stuff – reflect this modernisation, or has it not really changed in many years? A lot of organisations, if they’re honest, probably say no to that one.

What’s my point? Well it’s that despite PR going through enormous growing pains as it both modernises services hurriedly and capitalises on modern media, the way budgets are planned and apportioned is too often a drawback. It stifles change, at a time when it should be enabling it.

I’ve been having conversations with lots of prospects recently, as tends to happen at this time of year, about budgets for the next calendar year. Of course requirements vary widely, but the common threads are that:

- There is a marketing budget, and within that there is a line item for PR which is largely intended to cover media relations and monitoring. This convention has not changed for a long, long time. This does little if anything to help the person signing the cheques to understand what the money goes on

- As PR changes and its potential expands, money ends up being ‘borrowed’ from other pots in the marketing budget. This has always happened, but now it’s rampant. Research, events, integrated projects, you name it – there are lots of line items being pillaged to support PR’s march beyond media relations (which, I’d argue, is bang on the money as PR comes full circle and is all about building successful relations with publics again). This is making a mockery of the way in which PR services have been bought for the past few decades, and highlights why a change is needed in how budgets are drawn up

- Everyone wants to do more sophisticated kinds of PR. Most want more integrated planning. All want more scientific ways of measuring the spend, where feasible. Yet ask how they can fund it and they’re tied to what amounts to a media relations line item in a budget

- Digital is both forcing this and making this worse, as some marketing budgets have digital line items that are shared across several areas of marketing but risk being rudderless, while others have digital fiefdoms that are equally unhelpful. Before long, it will all be pretty much digital so slapping it as separate line items onto an outdated budget model is folly (a wonderful word, that)

All too often, the parameters of the budget spreadsheet inhibit the development of a more successful PR programme . By that I mean more sophisticated one, where a more integrated approach to influence can be taken with a better-targeted audience and improved measurement. And it’s all because the old line item can’t cover the scope of the new approach. Sometimes because there’s not enough money to cover it, sometimes because it will cause political problems elsewhere. Tim Dyson had some good insight on how to work out what to spend on PR, but the problem is that the way in which the budget is drawn up can sandbag the intentions of the PR team.

In recent times, smart marketers have begun to realise this and are changing how they do things. Those unable to make changes that quickly are pressing on with new kinds of PR regardless, and retrofitting their budget models to it.

But it’s a pain in the arse we can all do without. It may seem like minor bureaucracy in the scheme of things, but a new broom would clear out the obstacles that exist, and show the people paying for PR that it’s not just all about getting stuff in the (conventional) media any more.

I’ll be covering this in a future blog post or two, with some ideas on how PR budgeting should be changed, and how to go about it. Do let me have any ideas or share experiences.

So why do I keep hearing boasts about how such-and-such a campaign was “one of the most downloaded things on YouTube this year”?

Simple, I suggest: because too many social media mouthpieces get too excited about the outputs of their endeavours rather than the outcomes. While there does need to be some licence for simply trying things – because we don’t yet know what combination of digitising media will be most powerful in then future – if we get too carried away with volumes then we’ll miss the point about the potential of two-way digital media for public relations.

Yes a funny or outrageous video on YouTube may get millions of downloads. Because YouTube is on the internet, as are millions (make that billions) of people. What a shock.

But just like those fat piles of potentially meaningless press clippings, all the downloads in the world will not help you if none of those viewers want to buy your product or service. Or, worse, they’re just laughing at you.

Of course there have been video-based campaigns that have had fantastic success. My point is not that video is bad – quite the contrary. More PRs should be thinking about how they can use the moving image to embolden their clients’ messages.

The point is that if we start foaming at the mouth about volume of downloads without bringing some clear financial outcomes into the evaluation mix, it’s not going to help the PR business modernise or PR work to become better valued.

Mind you, ‘donkey farting opening bars of Ukranian national anthem is YouTube sensation’ doesn’t seem to have much of a commercial ring about it does it?

That’s how PR forefathers Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays once described what we do. Have we changed that much in the past near-century? And might our value be on the wane?

In a forthright defence of PR’s value in the FT – A good PR consultant is worth the money – entrepreneur and former Speed parent Loewy chairman Luke Johnson gives a sparkling summary of why every business should spend on PR, take it seriously and work closesly with agencies to succeed at communications.

He trumpets commercial value by saying the PR industry has moved on from spin to critical management of communications with “investors, regulators, politicians and other discreet audiences”.

But the standout was his take on why the digitisation of media holds greater potential for PR than any other area of marketing, including advertising.  Fragmentation of media outlets and the consequent surge in opportunities to comment (editorially) have substantially broadened the scope of how PR can help organisations to communciate, he says. Advice on navigating media change – give the pace at which online and offline media are evolving – has also never been at more of a premium, he argues.

Equally, success rests with finding the right adviser. Which makes me a little smug that Speed has spent this year investing in ensuring all staff understand and can counsel on communication across all forms of media, rather than creating a digital ghetto alongside a group of have-nots.

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.

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.

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.