INDUSTRY GUIDE
FROM MEASUREMENT TO MANAGEMENT Introduction with Foreword from AMEC
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
Foreword 4 State of measurement in public relations
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The age of ROI 8 The age of insight 10 From measurement to management: the series
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
FOREWORD After thirty years operating at the sharp end of public relations, growing a global trade body is a new career for me. It’s with that deep understanding of PR at the senior level that I joined AMEC and can advocate the importance of measurement. I remember the hard task of keeping clients satisfied and monitoring their satisfaction with the agency’s work. Client satisfaction is where the importance of measurement plays a key role. Measurement provides the in-house or consultancy team with the proof that the campaign is working. Moreover, measurement data and analysis provides consultancy and in-house communications teams with valuable insight that can be used to drive future campaign success and achieve greater ROI. AMEC is committed to the development and adoption of standards for measurement. Our journey began at our annual International Summit in Spain in 2010 when 250 communications professionals voted to adopt the Barcelona Principles. It was the first measurement framework for public relations. AMEC has an ongoing commitment to something we call our Global Education Program - our single biggest investment in 2014. And rightly so. AMEC’s job is to educate the PR marketplace internationally of the benefits of measurement for the benefit of our members. By encouraging the widespread adoption of a set of international measurement standards and techniques, not only will this help reaffirm PR as a credible business discipline, it will also directly benefit brands. More consistency and clearer focus will lead to greater efficiency, both of the measurement task itself and of the tactics and content formats used in campaigns.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
By moving beyond the use of advertising value equivalents (AVEs), having greater focus on outcomes and goals over outputs and proactively using insight to move forward, measurement can create real value and impact business success. Furthermore, with PR firms using uniform metrics and adopting a higher quality standard of measurement, their clients will receive greater results and assurance that they are getting what they are paying for. Our aim is to work with more agencies like LEWIS to support our mission – to raise the standards of measurement in communications. It’s why educational materials, like this industry guide, are so important for our industry. I hope you find it helps you on your measurement journey. Barry Leggetter, CEO
Before joining AMEC as CEO, Barry Leggetter had a 30 year-career in public relations. He was UK CEO for Porter Novelli, FleishmanHillard and GolinHarris and International Chairman of Bite. The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) is the leading global trade body for PR program research, measurement and analytics. AMEC has members in more than 40 countries. Find more information at #AmecOrg and www.amecorg.com.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
STATE OF MEASUREMENT IN PUBLIC RELATIONS The concept of public relations measurement is hardly new. For years, agencies and brands have tried to quantify the return on investment associated with communications. For years, the metrics were shallow, even contrived. The default response for the value of public relations began in the realm of “almost too invaluable to fully measure” and slowly evolved to soft-focus, quasi-mathematic guestimates like advertising value equivalents. For a period of time, a promise of specific clippings counts was even derided as “cash for clips”, and as an unethical threat to the public relations fraternity. Other than these rough measures, it was up to the PR pro’s silver tongue to champion success. Then the Internet punched through the marketing wizard’s curtain with a binary view of result. It assaulted the soft focus of PR success estimation with metrics platforms that detailed in specific counts the effectiveness of web and email content – clicks, leads and e-commerce sales. The rise of search engine marketing platforms like Google AdWords created a new expectation for marketing from the C-Suite: predictable, measurable results
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
– clicks, signups and sales. Public relations professionals were hesitant to become ultimately responsible for such concrete and unforgiving metrics. The even quicker ascent of social networks brought a torrent of new, real-time information and data formats to use to prove that communications programs were working. Metrics like brand sentiment and recommendation became more accessible, and non-sales goals like message penetration rapidly became quantifiable. Now, in many markets, CMOs are awash in dashboards, alerted to the arrival of a new fad metric each day, or a new service claiming to provide the most transparent view of return on investment (ROI).
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
THE AGE OF ROI The recent proliferation of automated platforms that gather and graph metrics from nearly every communications channel means putting together a great-looking results presentation has never been easier. That said, the savviest CMOs are looking for far more than a good PowerPoint – they demand quantifiable ROI. The irony is that the improvement of data presentation has in many cases served to obscure the story itself. When presented with a dizzying array of graphs and visualizations, it’s often difficult to zero in on those that correlate best with outcome. The time for smiling and squinting is over – we’re firmly amidst the ‘Age of ROI’. While the desire for ROI is unanimous, the discussion around that quantification remains incomplete. Many industry professionals will argue that dollars are ultimately the only true metric of business, and they want to measure their programs only in leads or sales. Simply count up traffic to action targets on web domains and you have your metrics, the sales leader might argue. But that assumes that every brand’s top objective is to maximize the current quarter’s sales numbers – a specious conjecture that neglects a range of longer-term brand goals and potentially leaves entire areas of a brand’s impact unmeasured. Many brands have higher missions besides new sales, to include customer care, community expectation legislative outcomes, cause-oriented action or even citizen satisfaction.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
And even for companies with a laser focus on selling widgets, goals are more complex than quarterly sales. For example, among technology titans, industry disrupting trends like cloud computing or big data may in fact demand priority to secure much higher value future customers, versus maximizing the sales numbers for the current quarter around technology moving toward obsolescence. ROI remains more than a reasonable demand from the C-Suite – it’s an important part of commercial discipline and public relations professionals need to be able to prove the immediate impact of their work to secure new budget. But just as content styles have been refreshed in recent years, return on investment deserves also a new visitation – one that seeks to quantify that return over more than a month or quarter at a time.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
THE AGE OF INSIGHT Few public relations professionals likely imagined navigating rows of numbers embedded in CSV files when they entered the supposedly right-brained world of communications. Similarly the first website programmers probably put metrics tools in place only to prove to their clients that people were actually interacting with the websites they had built. It’s only a bit ironic that both sets of professionals ended up conversant in an entirely new language – that of social science. In order to prove the value of their content efforts, and sometimes even to secure their future budgets, PR folks have helped instantiate the use of social networks and marketing automation tools. In doing so, we have essentially helped lay down an intricate array of social sensors for brands and society to access. Communities like those within Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest provide brands with an unprecedented sense of the demographics, opinions and trends within audience. The ability to more quickly gather and query panels and focus groups means granular qualitative data is more accessible as well. Just a few years ago, only the most well resourced organizations - usually consumer packaged goods and media companies - were armed to collect feedback arising from a communications initiative. Most used that information to choose their communications partners, and the most savvy leveraged it to improve communications tactics. Now brands of every size, and even governments are using this feedback to change their actual offerings. Measurement is not just improving the effectiveness of communications campaigns, it’s also leading directly to real world innovation.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
This brings public relations professionals not just into the business intelligence forefront among marketers, but also into a key role among operational decision-makers. In order to understand our campaigns’ impacts, we’ve needed to digest the pre-existing context around our client brands and their offerings. We’ve learned much more than what competitors are saying, which news outlets tout the most readers or even what audiences want to learn about – we’re coming to understand what readers, buyers and citizens most want from their products. It’s not that far afield, really then, to believe that enhancing understanding around public relations measurement is a natural evolution. Refining the definition of ROI within PR can also improve outcomes for both brands and everyday people.
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
Introducing our series of industry guides:
FROM MEASUREMENT TO MANAGEMENT
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From Measurement to Management Introduction
As such, in collaboration with AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, LEWIS is proud to present this introduction to a series of industry guides around public relations measurement. Each instalment will focus on defining metrics and best practices for quantifying success or each of five key dimensions identified by AMEC. They are:
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Exposure - the degree to which a brand is seen - how many eyeballs are on the product, service or issue.
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Engagement - the degree to which a brand is creating interaction with its audience and association with its core value; a unit measure of a contact via social network or other public means.
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Preference - the degree to which a brand’s values, opinions and offerings are selected over those of its competitors.
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Impact - the degree to which a campaign is changing business outcomes. LEWIS uses Impact to comprise the set of goals and measures for creating conversion. Impacts are the most commercially or publically meaningful outcomes that our programs can be expected to drive.
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Advocacy – the degree to which a campaign helps inspire organic third-party support for a product, service or cause.
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White Paper The New Rules of Content
About us LEWIS was founded in 1995 by a former journalist and, since then, it has grown to over 500 employees based in more than 28 offices across the US, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Its regional headquarters are in London, San Francisco and Singapore. LEWIS is known for delivering bold digital communications campaigns that enhance revenue, value and reputation for global brands. Digital communications services span PR and media relations, social media marketing, search engine optimization and digital content production.
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