It’s been a little hectic here, with Christmas, client work, catching up from vacation and 2-week old puppies, so the blog has suffered a bit. I’m not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions (talk about setting oneself up for failure) but I expect to be back to my regular blogging schedule of at least 3 times per week, starting this week.
To catch up I am starting with the grab bag of stuff in my RSS reader that I’ve just now had a chance to catch up with. I’m sure many of you have already seen these posts, but humour me 🙂
First, Shel Holtz and Andy Lark on PR Measurement. I think Andy has it right when he says the barrier to PR measurement isn’t the availability of tools:
"The barrier however remains a lack of commitment at the top. Too many organizations I talk to are only looking to measure where Executives demand it. "
Shel’s post talks about some of the folks who are measuring PR… successfully. Problem is, these are the already converted…
The first step in solving a problem is realizing you have one, and I believe that many PR agencies don’t want to acknowledge that there IS a problem. The fallacy is that PR is about some intangible called "brand awareness" which cannot be measured. And on the client side, often the marketing teams either can’t (because they don’t get the support from sales teams) or won’t (because they are afraid) tie their PR efforts to sales results.
For my part, I think we absolutely have to look at PR as part of our revenue generation toolkit, and expect as good, or better, results from it as we get from other marketing activities. If your PR agency won’t support the measurements you, the client, want, then get another agency. And agencies, if your client won’t support your desire to measure your results, understand that this is an account in jeopardy. Anyone can come in and attack you on qualitative terms, and you don’t have the ammo to fight back.
Measurement is in all our interests. I’ve written about this in the past here and here. It’s also not that hard. You just have to make the commitment.