Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

If you keep up with the PR trade world, you may have noticed that the O’Dwyer organization did not include our agency, Capstrat, in its new annual rankings of PR firms. Jack O’Dwyer publishes newsletters, a magazine and maintains a Web site covering the public relations industry. Capstrat has been ranked among the top 25 U.S. firms for several years.  

This year, Jack was very clear: if we wanted to be included in his rankings, we had to pay $3,000. The $3,000 could be used to buy subscriptions or advertising in his publications. But no money, no ranking.

I admire anyone who does what Jack has done for a long, long time – cover an industry objectively while seeking advertising revenues from those he covers. Journalistic integrity inevitably has cost Jack some advertising dollars through the years.  

That’s why Jack’s ultimatum is disappointing. We don’t advertise Capstrat’s services very much in trade publications. Much of Jack’s readership is our competition. Why advertise to them?

Jack complained that we were willing to pay dues to the Council of Public Relations Firms (I’m a board member), but unwilling to support him by purchasing advertising or subscriptions. That comparison is nutty. CPRF is a professional organization. Jack is a publisher.   

But if you want to go there, I’m not sure we’ve ever gotten a lead from a client who saw our agency in the O’Dwyer rankings. But we sure have gotten hired as a result of the Council of Public Relations Firms’ “Find a Firm” search engine.  

A couple lifetimes ago, when I covered political campaigns for The Charlotte Observer, I would ask candidates questions about integrity or judgment. Oftentimes, the candidate would reply something like this:  “I haven’t done anything illegal, immoral or unethical.”

My usual response: “Yeah, but you know, it just looks bad.”

Jack, your ultimatum just looks bad. 

In surveying the morning news coverage of the John Edwards debacle, the only sympathetic figure I saw was my longtime friend and sometimes competitor, public relations pro Joyce Fitzpatrick. Joyce ended up being a spokesperson for Edwards.

In Friday's News & Observer: "I don't have any plans to return to public life," Edwards said through spokeswoman Joyce Fitzpatrick late Wednesday. "I just hope that I can find another way to serve."

And then, later in the same article: Edwards said through Fitzpatrick, the spokeswoman, that he had lied so long, in part, out of concern for his wife, Elizabeth, who has an incurable cancer, and their children.

Oh, brother. For those of us in the communications world, a client like Edwards is a nightmare. It brings to mind the old joke, "How can you tell when (in this case) John Edwards is lying?" Answer: "His mouth is moving."

It is hard to be a spokesperson or an advisor for anyone in a position of power or authority - even when they're telling the truth. Mainstream media and much of the blogosphere view it as their mission to reduce them from larger than life to smaller than life. As Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago humorist, once wrote, "My business is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted."

Not only does John Edwards fall comfortably into the comforted class, so do CEOs of most U.S. corporations, university presidents and heads of nonprofit organizations.

So my dear friend Joyce Fitzpatrick surely knows that being a spokesman for John Edwards is as precarious as being a landmine sweeper. For better or worse, when you become a spokesman for someone, you put your credibility on the line, too.

You always hope that clients will be honest with you if you're their public relations adviser. After all, you can't give them your best advice if they don't level with you. But some people - apparently Edwards is one of them - become separated from the ability to even know the truth, much less tell it on an ongoing basis.

Having known Joyce for as long as I have, I know her advice to Edward was: Tell the truth. Tell it all. Don't shade it. Get it all out and keep on keeping on." If only for Joyce's sake, I hope he takes it.

The previous post in this series detailed that effective Public Relations (PR) efforts -- like any campaign -- must start with a clear objective, metrics, and baselines. This post focuses on the actual measurements and techniques you can use to measure the effectiveness of your approach. 

In doing research on the topic, I came across posts from Don Bartholomew, who writes eloquently about measuring Social Media on his blog, Metrics Man. While his posts focus on Social Media, much of his thinking is relevant to Public Relations. Either way, it's really good and you should definitely check it out for ideas. 

What are the measurements you need for PR?

If you've ever tried to measure PR, you've probably come across Advertising Equivalents (AE). Unfortunately, AEs don't really tell you anything useful. I liken it to the age-old marketing metric of "Impressions" sometimes called the "eyeballs metric." The problem with this approach is that it doesn't measure outcomes and measuring whether those "eyeballs" really saw it or not is an iffy proposition.

Another common PR metric is the number of mentions. While it's not a bad idea to try to grow mentions, it again doesn't really point to an end result. You don't do PR to simply get mentioned, you do it to serve a purpose like grow sales, change perception, or avert crisis to name a few goals. Now if you can correlate the number of mentions with tangible financial gains, I'm all for measuring that way.

So after bashing those two metrics, what's my approach?

While the best strategy depends on the specific campaign objective, I'll try to outline the most common objectives and my thoughts on suitable metrics for each: 

1) Grow Sales/Leads

What to measure: 

• • Percent change in sales/leads during times of PR or after an acceptable amount of time (in order to factor in latency, especially companies with long purchase cycles). 
• • Market Share Growth - again factoring in latency
• • Conversion Rate Increases - the theory being the more PR you do the more the awareness and perception should increase and aid in the conversion funnel. 

2) Change in Perception (i.e. Awareness or Opinion)

What to measure: 

• • Web Traffic Market Share against competitors - use tools like Hitwise or Compete to see how your traffic matches up against your competition during times of PR. 
• • Keyword growth - especially branded keywords as volume should increase based on more PR, assuming the PR is successful in driving interest. You can use your own web analytics tools or Google Trends to measure growth and even contribution to conversions.
• • Web traffic increases - Focus on visitors directly accessing your site and SEO visitors to see if the needle moved during periods of PR.
• • % Change in Awareness/Perception - based on pre and post surveys. These can be targeted to specific audience segments such as customers, non-customers, former customers, etc.
• • Net Promoter Score increases - Are customers more likely to be advocates of your brand?

3) Avert Crisis/Government Interventions 

What to measure: 

• • Does your Market Share take a hit or rebound after a crisis (be sure to factor in latency)?
• • Does your stock price take a prolonged hit after a crisis?
• • Legislative voting - Does it favor your company?
• • Measure negative sentiment - based on repeated surveys over time. Does it stay stable after crisis? 

I've only scratched the surface with potential objectives, but I think you get the idea. If you have other objectives, please feel free to send them to me for further discussion.

Techniques to prove PR had anything to do with those measurements

In looking at some of the metrics above you're probably asking yourself, "OK, those are great, but I am not sure how I can actually relate the PR efforts to these results." I'll grant you some of these are more proxies than direct cause and effect. In fact, causality is likely impossible, instead we are looking for correlation. You could simply look at your baseline results and your post-PR results and make a judgement on effectiveness, but you run the risk of overlooking whether PR was a significant factor in determining the effect. In order to gain some level of confidence in these correlations, may I suggest the following approaches:

1) Statistical Analsysis To connect your efforts to specific results, you will need to conduct statistical analysis using correlation, factor analysis, and regression. Using those terms I've probably just scared off about 90% of the audience reading this post. But if you are still reading, these statistical techniques you ignored during your 2nd year of business school can help you figure out if you've indeed moved the needle in a positive direction, especially if you've adopted the idea of using baselines (as mentioned in my first post). 

By peeling back the variables (marketing campaigns, prices, economic factors, etc) and running regression you can figure out which factors had a higher level of significance in driving the behaviors. While it sounds scary, you can actually do this in Excel assuming you have called out the right variables, have decent data, and someone on hand who can help you interpret the results.

2) Isolation is one of the best ways to go about doing the statistical analysis and determining whether your PR effort was significant in driving the metrics. There are a couple of ways to use isolation:

• • Do your PR in isolated geographies and measure the effect of the experiment versus a control sample. For example, you could run a PR effort in Virginia and do nothing in North Carolina. By measuring the differences in perception for those geographies you can isolate the PR effect (assuming other variables are constant). You can do similar things with other metrics such as sales based on geographies or keyword growth in cities where you did PR.
• • Do a survey that includes equal amount of people (or a statistically valid number) who saw your PR versus people who hadn't seen it and measure each group's perception. Surveying is not free but neither is wasting money on efforts that yield no value.

3) Use Tracking Codes in online PR efforts or even offline ones that point to the web as a way to directly understand traffic and conversions based on PR efforts. Example, when you do a press release with a url, add campaign tracking codes to the resolving url to see what these visitors end up doing on your site. Same goes for Twitter or shortened urls. This is the one way where we can see true end to end results based on behavior. 

For other insights on how to track PR (and social media), some blogs that I found to be useful:

MetricsMan

KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog  

Journalistics - How to Measure PR

If there are other blogs that folks have found insightful, please post in the comments to share. 

So this concludes Part 2...the other scheduled parts will include some further drill-down into using web analytics to measure PR and some hypothetical case studies. But are there other topics you want me to explore? I'd love to hear any suggestions for further topics in this space, so please let me know! 

 

Twitter is a part of my daily life - work and play. So is "The Associated Press Stylebook."

The AP  announced today on Twitter that they will be providing assistance to folks with style questions.

For me, this is a big deal. Oftentimes, the AP Stylebook isn't clear on some items. So all I have to do is send a tweet and include the hashtag #apstyle and my question will be answered.

Beautiful... 

BTW, I'm @Lilyn on Twitter.

L. 

 

Working inside an agency like Capstrat presents a whole host of new analytical challenges. A thorny, but recurring, one is "How can we measure the effect of Public Relations (PR) efforts?" This blog post below is part of a series that details some on- and offline approaches to measuring PR's ROI, reflecting the increasingly blurry line between New Media and traditional communications.

1. Create an objective tied to a business goal - As with any strategy or tactic, you have to define what you hope to accomplish and you have to define it in terms of things senior management thinks are important.  You can't just do PR aimlessly and expect good things to happen. This is true with any marketing campaign, web page, collateral, etc., and PR is no exception. For example, suppose you have a growing problem with negative sentiment towards your brand/company/persona. Your objective is to combat that negativity through proactive PR. It may seem like a trivial exercise, but we often find ourselves in execution mode before we've even accurately defined the problem we are trying to address. Take the time and define the objective.

2. Agree in advance on how you will measure the objective - Without this, you are going to have problems understanding if you have been successful and securing future funding to do this kind of work. You might propose web analytics to determine how often people are searching for your brand, or you might turn to surveys if you want to assess your brand's reputation. Think through what you need to measure and choose the right tool for the challenge at hand.

3. Establish a baseline - You need to have an idea of where you currently stand in order to determine if your efforts have had the desired impact. Don't solely rely on intuition or an apparent consensus among the powers that be. Start with a real number on your organization's current performance, whether it comes from surveys, sales or lead generation. Keep in mind that the bottom line for the C-suite is, well, the bottom line. Financial measures can be difficult to tie to PR efforts directly, but people will really sit up and take notice if you can find a way to do that.

4. Be sure your PR campaign strategy and resources align with your objective - This may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how often organizations get caught up in silos, fall back on "how we've always done it," or just get lost in tactics at the expense of carrying out a comprehensive strategy. Be sure your strategy aligns with what you already know: what customers have told you they think is important, how geographic differences come into play, and what you've learned from demographics and marketing research that your company has probably spent a lot of money to accumulate. You may have to invest in surveys for questions that are new to the organization, but don't neglect the low-hanging fruit: existing customer data, web analytics, and data on competitors from tools like compete.com or Hitwise. Using the data to craft the PR strategy will help ensure that your message reaches the right audience. 

Part 2 will explore the next steps: How to Measure and What to Measure...stay tuned later in the week.  

 

Remember Katrina? Remember Michael Chertoff? Remember Michael Brown? Of course you do. I remember a colossal failure of communications and flow control. And I remember hundreds of thousands of people displaced - millions more directly or indirectly affected by the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. I cannot unequivocally condone or condemn the actions of any party involved, because I was not there. I can only report on what I saw and heard from my trusty media outlets, and, perhaps more credibly, from the handful of relocated friends I have since and often spoken with about the subject. But it's got me remembering something one wise man or another once told me: perception, my friends, is everything.

In the wake of Katrina, the U.S. government found itself with a PR belly ache of monumental proportions. Scapegoats were scrounged, press conferences called. Blame was at once gallantly accepted and deftly shifted. Contrite, demonstrative hierarchal shake-ups were laid at the feet of The People, in an unprecedented effort to save face. Did it work? Weeell... I don't think anyone has forgotten the dropped balls of August 2005, and poll numbers don't seem to show any trends of resounding confidence among Americans in their governmental agencies. But crisis management teams within these various agencies are now battle-tested, that's for sure.

If you Google the phrase "crisis management", you will find yourself confronted with a veritable who's-who of the fallen celebrities of our time. Michael Jackson, Lindsey, Britney, Michael Vick - politicians and dignitaries of all persuasion - all followed the same basic rules of engagement in attempting to restore their good name:

1) Immediately assess the situation, and clearly identify the depth and extent of your involvement.

2) State your position clearly and confidently to the press.

3) STOP talking about it, and quietly and contritely go about your business and wait for things to cool off.

4) Get to work rebuilding your image.

Now, I'm no public relations expert - though I do spend my workdays surrounded by them here at Capstrat - but I believe in the power of the apology. Will Michael Vick ever play in the NFL again? Too soon to tell. He's still working on rule 3, awaiting his court date. Will Britney ever reclaim her pop diva status? I'm starting to have my doubts; she seems to be having some trouble with rules 1 and 2. And where in the world is Lindsey?!? Looks like she finally decided to commit to the program (sorry, couldn't resist), and I find myself with nothing more to say about the subject. She's got a shot! And Michael...well, Michael just moved to Dubai, and the world keeps turning.

So I find myself here again, glued to CNN, awaiting the full-force rollout of the local, state and federal aid and reassurance that must surely be on its way to California. It IS coming, isn't it?? Surely it is. Lessons were learned. Inefficiencies eliminated. So why, then, do I have this nagging doubt? And, if aid comes pouring in from all directions in an unprecedented fount of good will and systemic lubrication to the seemingly homogenized hills of southern California, how is that going to sit with the poor souls still trying to piece together their lives in the Gulf Coast? I think perhaps I'm still looking for a little more of good ol' rule #1.