This presentation from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA)  was discussed on the For Immediate Release Podcast- The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #484: September 17, 2009  (Download mp3 file. 25.2Mb, 62:48).

Slide 4 asks some simple questions:

• Whom are you seeking to affect?
• What about them are you seeking to affect?
• How much must they be affected to be successful?
• By when does this need to occur?

Do you ask these simple questions? Better still, do you answer them?- or do you launch into the tactic saying in an ideal world, sure we'd do this- but we don't have time or some other excuse that conveniently skips this step? Unfortunately many PR professionals fail to challenge established measures of "success". One part of PR - media relations (and in some companies PR means Press Relations, not Public Relations), companies measure the medium and not the impact- the number of clips & whether coverage is positive, negative or neutral - and of course Advertising Value Equivalency.

Slide 5 covers your role and responsibilty if you work in PR. To a large extent these apply to anyone in communications. We need to show how communications/marcoms/PR/brand ambassador programs and so on drive business performance.

For social media, it's fine at the beginning to say we are experimenting- trying to understand the space and so on. But at some point, there needs to be measurable objectives and page views on the blog and number of views on YouTube says nothing about business performance.

Worth checking-out the presentation (and the discussion on the For Immediate Release Podcast).

Documenting The Business Outcomes