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

 

"People don't read entire articles anymore" was a statement that stood out for me in a post titled Social Media Measurement, Part 2: What I Really, Really Want, by Mark Story, a part-time, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Director of New Media at the SEC in Washington, D.C, writing in Media Bullseye. It's not new, but is it not becoming the norm in our continuous partial attention mode?  Aren't we increasingly leaning toward bite-sized pieces of information- fuelled by twitter and Facebook status updates that condenses news into 140 characters? The one minute update on the news, the horizontally scrolling newsfeed. We all like the executive summary- and for some people this is all they want- or can manage.

Mark Story says: "I have often wondered why more organizations don't use this golden statistic of messages communicated" and points out why positioning is vitally important & Chip Griffin in his comment to the post highlights context as another important factor. It's easier to present impressions, page views, visitors and many other simple metrics- and sometimes the numbers impress. Sadly, most organizations don't put the resources behind effective measurement- and are content to continue with "crappy measurement".