ImpactWatch Blog

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is working on a set of recommended metrics and approaches for evaluating public relations’ influence on key business outcomes. An outline of the draft guidelines is below.

The guidelines cover the impact of public relations programs on financial, reputational/brand equity, employees/internal and public policy goals.

PRSA intends to release a final set of standardized methods this fall, after compiling feedback from industry. Comments can be made via PRSA’s blog – comPRehension.

Michael G. Cherenson, PRSA’s 2009 Chair and CEO said of the effort:  “Our fundamental goal is to change how the industry talks about what public relations accomplishes. Instead of meaningless catch phrases, such as ‘create buzz,’ our recommended approach focuses on identifying meaningful expressions of business performance, suggesting more appropriate measurement metrics and recommending proven tools for demonstrating how those metrics were impacted.”

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The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and the Institute for Public Relations are sponsoring a study of communications practitioners to benchmark Best Practices in the field of PR measurement and management.

It is part of a research project for The First European Summit on Measurement, to be held in Berlin June 10-12th, 2009. Results will be compared to a previous global study conducted 5-years ago. The results will be presented at the European Summit on Measurement and provided to all attendees.

Collaborators on the study include:

• Donald K. Wright,Ph.D. -Professor of Public Relations, Boston University, USA

• Richard Gaunt MCIPR–CEO Benchpoint Ltd, London, England

• Mike Daniels- CEO Report International and AMEC board member, London England

• Barry Leggetter – Executive director, AMEC, London, England

• Ansgar Zerfass, Dr- Professor of Communication Management, University of Leipzig, Germany

Barry Leggetter, Executive Director of AMEC, said: “During a recession the role of measurement in public relations practice has taken on a new sense of importance in order to demonstrate proof of performance. We therefore hope ICCO members will take a few minutes to complete the study.   We are working with other international trade bodies as well to give the study international scale and substance.”

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The 6-12 minute survey is available in French, German, English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Please click here to participate!

Thank you for your support!

Well not me, but Save Chuck! That’s the call to action that fans of the NBC television show Chuck are promoting on the Internet. With Jay Leno taking up five hours of prime time this fall there isn’t much room for shows that are on the ratings bubble. NBC announced their lineup of new fall shows on Monday but didn’t say which shows were going to be canceled.

Enter the Internet.

There’s a SaveChuck Twitter account. There are at least nine Facebook groups trying to save the show from being canceled, with the largest group boasting a membership of 18,014 currently and an online petition with 11992 signatures. Interestingly, the online campaigning is working in concert with offline campaigns as well. One effort encouraged Chuck fans to go to Subway, one of the shows biggest sponsors, and buy a footlong and put in a comment card asking for the show to be saved. Folks from TheWB.com drove around L.A. in Nerd Herd cars, if you spotted one and sent a tweet to @thewbdocom with the #savechuck and #chuck hashtags you had a chance to win prizes. The candy maker WONKA even sent Nerds candy to NBC execs as well.

Another idea that is just plain awesome was to donate to the American Heart Association in the name of Chuck Bartowski, the star character of the show, and acknowledge Ben Silverman, an NBC executive in the donation. In just three days there are almost $4,000 in donations. Have a Heart – Renew Chuck!

There seems to be a lot of momentum, show actors Zach Levi and Josh Gomez were even on CNN yesterday to talk about the shows renewal possibilities. Hopefully that momentum will carry over into increased viewership in the fall as well.

Save Chuck campaigns on CNN

Last week was an interesting week to be monitoring social media. There were several examples of consumers’ feedback running rampant on the social web and companies scrambling to keep up. Here are the big ones.

• Amazon.com delisted thousands of books from general search results, including many gay and lesbian themed books, prompting accusations of sudden policy change against such topics.
• Employees of Domino’s Pizza posted a video on YouTube of them defiling food while making it.
• Time Warner Cable revealed the details of its metered internet usage plans being tested in four major cities.
• Ashton Kutcher and CNN were involved in a challenge to be the first to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Only it turns out CNN didn’t even operate the CNNBrk Twitter account that was in the race.

All of these events created a massive amount of social media buzz, and the companies involved varied in their responses.

Amazon apologized and basically said the problem was “a glitch” but since then seems to be hoping that the buzz will go away leaving all of those who were outraged without much satisfaction.

Domino’s created a YouTube video response and set up a Twitter account of their own to answer any questions people might have showing that while they might not have been ready for something like this, they can certainly roll with the punches and respond appropriately.

Time Warner Cable backed off and has delayed plans to implement metered billing, presumably to polish up their PR and marketing machine before giving it another go. We’ll have to wait and see what the final outcome is.

CNN embraced the idea of the race to 1,000,000 followers while behind the scenes they hired James Cox, the owner of the CNNBrk account, as a consultant to run it for them. This well-played maneuver was a great way to make the best of the situation and let the hype about the race overshadow the possible branding nightmare.

The speed at which these story lines unfolded illustrates just how important it is to be monitoring your brand. But that’s only going to give you a fighting chance. The way you address the concerns of your consumers is going to mean the success or demise of your reputation in the long run.

Jennifer Leggio of ZDNET has published the results of a survey to gauge client satisfaction with their PR firms – generally and with respect to social media programs. The majority of the respondents were in-house PR/Marketing Directors from companies with over 1k employees.

• 63% are satisfied that agency communications are “informative and timely”.
• 60% are satisfied with the quality of coverage achieved by their agency.
• Only 38% feel that pitch promises made are being kept (33% were neutral and 29% unsatisfied).
• Respondents are evenly split over whether they have had an overall positive experience with their agency.

The biggest complaint of PR clients (51% unsatisfied) is with agencies’ failure to tie PR initiatives to general business objectives, focusing instead on simply producing coverage. Jennifer points out that part of the issue may be the involvement of junior account managers who lack an understanding of basic business. A bigger issue may be the ease with which traditional media coverage can be measured and thus used to prove ROI. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Let’s look at the social media responses:

• 79% (!!!) say it is “extremely” important for an agency to understand social media strategy.
• 70% say they themselves have an adequate grasp of how social media relates to business.
• 84% would attend a social media workshop offered by their agency – but over half wouldn’t pay for it.
• Only 22% say their agency has recommended a social media program beyond specific tools (twitter, linkedin).

The survey comments also suggest that agencies might be more successful rolling social media elements into current offerings, instead of adding a social media add-on or upgrade package.

What struck me about these survey results is that clients want two things 1) a comprehensive program that goes beyond traditional PR targets and 2) a clear accounting of the success achieved by their agency.

Understandable. The complication is that often, the more successful you are at 1, the more difficult 2 becomes. Social media initiatives are a perfect example of this.

Many companies are anxious to get involved in social media, both to build a presence and to engage their customers. They want to see how their PR campaigns are translating into social media buzz, respond to customer concerns from a corporate twitter account and figure out how many sales leads resulted from a blog post. But how do you measure message penetration on Facebook? How do you track lead generation from a blog? How do you calculate the value of a retweet?*

Expanding PR programs (out of coverage-chasing and into social media) requires a new level of engagement for PR firms. To avoid the type of dissatisfaction expressed in the survey results, agencies must:

1. Be the expert. Only 37% of clients said they fully understand social media for business.
2. Be the guide. Work with clients to develop a strategic plan – who and why? Not just how.
3. Be the evaluator. What metrics will you use to measure success?

See the full survey results.

*The answer is: one client at a time.

You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again. Monitoring the jumble of user-driven media is essential for the health of any brand. A few days ago, Jeremiah Owyang highlighted the importance of this on his blog entry about a recent brand-jacking involving Exxon Mobil. Apparently, a user account “ExxonMobilCorp” was created on Twitter, and a user known only as “Janet” posed as an Exxon Mobil spokesperson. This is not the first time that brand-jacking has been been identified as a problem within social media.

Analytics aside, it boils down to a matter of tipping points. Most organizations spend countless resources building their brands, and the reality is that these intellectual positions can fall at a moment’s notice. Trying to calculate ROI, tracing overall trends, semantic analysis — all of these take a back burner to public relations emergencies within the realm of new media.

Being aware of attacks on your image, misrepresentations of fact, and negative opinion from top influencers is simply necessary when positioning your brand.

With only three days left before things kick off in Beijing, our ImpactWatch demo has made itself clear: within the media, China is being portrayed at a far less favorable rate than that of the actual Olympic Games. Even with widespread buzz addressing athletic performance enhancers, coverage of China’s human rights record, air pollution, algae blooms, and authoritarian domestic policies have been pushed to the forefront of western media. While glittering articles about athletes’ preparations boost the favorability of the Olympics, China is struggling to find its own crutch topic under the strain of relentless criticism and unfavorable press.

The graph below illustrates what I’m talking about:

 Even from this raw graph of daily average favorability, the difference is quite noticeable. When I visualize by month to show overall trends, things get interesting:

These trend lines highlight the discrepancy between the two topics. While the Olympic Games’ average favorability has had its ups and downs, its average favorability has both remained positive and increased in positivity from May to August.

China has not fared as well in its coverage; while enjoying two relatively neutral months (May and June), its favorability rating began to falter in July (-.13) and August (-.29). Quite the opposite of the Games’ coverage, China’s trend line indicates both a negative rating and an increase in negativity from May to August.

As the Games’ opening ceremony nears, a new chapter in our ImpactWatch demo begins. With Beijing as a stage, the world — and our demo — is all eyes…anything could happen.

In the most recent volume of Communique Magazine , TBG’s Gary Bivings authored a featured article. “Watching the Web” is a great piece about how PR and marketing techniques are changing to incorporate the monitoring of various new forms of media, primarily the Web. The article cites several examples of how the Web has affected PR and customer involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, and discusses how content tracking platforms can be an effective addition to any PR firms strategy (this includes our very own ImpactWatch !). Among other issues, Gary listed the Top Seven Online Media Monitoring Practices in his article:

1. Get involved sooner rather than later
2. Implement a platform that will track online media for you
3. Categorize online activities of target markets/information seekers–blogging, message board posting, etc.
4. Make a list of the top sites to monitor per public/target audience
5. Track site statistics (eg, how often the site is visited)
6. Track bias of various sites with regard to your product
7. Decide how you will respond to the circulation of negative information about your product

You can read the article in its entirety here.

We’ve mentioned our media management and analysis platform, ImpactWatch, several times (in passing) on this blog. Last night, at the 2006 Sabre Awards Dinner in Manhattan, we learned that we had won the Iron Sabre for the Research/Evaluation category, beating out Hill & Knowlton’s Wal-Mart Media Day Analysis case study. H & K has won the category for several years in a row and is quite the formidable opponent. Thanks to tablemates Stanton Crenshaw (received the Bronze Sabre for Best Media Placement: Television) for their hearty congratulations and Denver-based MGA Communications for their kindness and their spirited applause.

We are very proud of our ImpactWatch product and also our work in assisting corporations and public relations agencies with continuous measurement and analysis of their programs and initiatives. The media landscape has been evolving rapidly in the past few years and we have been developing the system so that it reflects emerging media trends and represents each company’s communications goals and objectives, while staying consistent with best measurement practices. Measurement, as so many communicators know, is not very easy and it’s important to assess program measurement in context. Anyway, we sincerely appreciate the honor. (more…)