By Francis Moran
As part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite PR fictions, subtitled “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” I have written a couple of posts on PR measurement addressing the common myth that straight lines can’t be drawn between a company’s PR efforts and any kind of real evaluative yardsticks. I return to the topic today because I am getting some interesting comments on the subject. Clearly, it’s something that people are keen to explore.
Our approach here at inmedia is to measure outputs, outcomes and impact. In my first post, I described what we mean by outputs, which are little more than the critical path, or a list of how much PR stuff the client is buying. While most PR agencies and practitioners will set clear parameters for their outputs, too few are prepared to go any further than that.
We insist that every program go at least one step beyond this minimal evaluation to set, and measure performance against, objectives for outcomes, or the amount, nature and content of the media and analyst coverage our efforts are expected to generate. In my more than 20 years as a communications practitioner, I have found distressingly few others who will commit to being held accountable for the actual results of their programs in clear, unambiguous terms that allow the client to make a rational ROI analysis about whether the promised level of media and analyst engagement is worth the cost of the program.
Fortunately, there is a growing and increasingly sophisticated audience of both practitioners and clients insisting on this. Many are deploying simple yardsticks that go well beyond what I call “thud value,” or the noise the clippings book makes when you drop it on the boardroom table in the hopes the client will be impressed by the sheer number of column inches. These yardsticks, which we commonly use, include determining which media outlets and analyst firms are the most influential — we designate them Tier 1 — and then telling the client exactly how well the program is expected to do in terms of percentage of Tier 1 targets engaged, types of stories, the nature of the messaging, numbers of analyst briefings, speaking engagements, and so on.
Many practitioners go well beyond this to provide granular analysis of the actual content of the media coverage. Although few of our B2B technology clients generate the volumes of media coverage that make such a statistical exercise either practical or meaningful, I am a huge advocate of media content analysis as both a strategic research and a program evaluation tool. I will write more about this topic in a future post on PR measurement because it deserves fuller treatment.
My second post described how even measuring outcomes often falls short of meaningful evaluation, especially in cases, admittedly rare but real nonetheless, where there is masses of coverage but no persistent impact on the client’s business objectives.
Which brings me to the final, most critical, hardest to implement and most elusive category of objectives we strive to track, impact. I will present case studies over my next several posts to illustrate how many of these have been used to help our clients calculate a reliable and meaningful ROI on their PR spend, but here is a range of common metrics that can be used to measure the impact a program has on everyday business objectives:
- Web traffic, measured in hits to a company site, Google mentions, search engine rankings, and so on.
- Demand creation, or what used to be known as lead generation. I like the newer term because it distinguishes between mere enquiries and actual demand for the product or service.
- Sales cycle acceleration.
- Customer interest in the media coverage.
- Investment secured.
- Increased sales, revenues and profit. (Now THAT is what we’re really talkin’ about!)
I’d be intrigued to hear from others as to what they think of these metrics, and also to hear about other yardsticks that are used. Subsequent posts will deal with how the data required to deploy these metrics can be gathered, as well as presenting, as mentioned, specific case study examples.
By Francis Moran
Self-described recidivist entrepreneur Misha Nossik says too many Ottawa technology entrepreneurs who succeed hit the beach and retire instead of hanging around to help nurture the next generation. Speaking at The Ottawa Network’s Start-up Drop-in yesterday evening, Nossik said the rest of the tech community should shun these guys.
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By Francis Moran
The news earlier this week that Transcontinental Media was discontinuing publication of the Halifax Daily News was probably as inevitable as it was unfortunate for the 92 people who worked there. They joined scores of other newsroom and media workers who have been pink-slipped over the past little while in what is probably one of the worst employment periods for the journalism business in decades.
For those of us who worked at the News in what might charitably be called its heyday under cowboy founder and publisher, madcap Fleet Street refugee David Bentley, the news of its demise brought back — shall I say — interesting memories. My good pal Sherri Aikenhead, who was a summer cub reporter on the News the year I started there, recalled for a Globe and Mail story this week the night we ran a sensational scoop under the headline, “Agonies of a princess,” that, contrary to all rules and protocol that prohibited directly quoting one of the British royal family, directly quoted Diana, Princess of Wales, on the pain she felt when the media wrote nasty things about her. You’d think we’d nominated Hitler for sainthood the way the local and international media excoriated us for breaking the so-called rules.
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By Francis Moran
About a month ago, as part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite fictions, I tackled the too-widely held myth that public relations can’t be measured. I described how, at inmedia, we establish a critical path, or set of outputs, for every project and ongoing program that allows our clients to certify that we’re exerting the amount of effort we said we would. This, I said, was a good starting point for program measurement, but a woefully inadequate one.
I went on to describe what we call outcomes, a set of clear and unambiguous objectives we set that tell our clients what they should expect by way of actual coverage by our target media and analysts, with more granular objectives established for specific program elements such as news releases, product launches, contributed articles, speaking programs, trade show support and so on. Applying such an approach turns the whole PR value proposition on its ear; instead of a cost centre that should be managed down to its minimum, a client can now view the PR function as an investment centre, and can answer the question, “Are these results, or outcomes, a sufficient return on the investment my PR agency or department is asking me to make?”
In my earlier post, I promised to go even further than this, to approach the holy grail of ROI measurement. What does it matter, I asked, if we achieve the outcomes we projected but the media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Or, maybe even worse since decisions then can’t be made about whether or not to continue the program, what if we can’t tell whether our clients’ business objectives are being advanced by our PR efforts?
In my practice, it is simply unacceptable that we not be able to measure the impact our PR program has on specific business objectives such as demand creation, web traffic, sales-cycle acceleration, human resources recruitment and retention, share price and, yes, even sales, revenues and profits. Let me share with you a really good case study.
We used to have a client whose managed service allowed large enterprises to inventory all their IT assets; not just desktops, laptops and servers but all peripherals, operating systems and applications, including versions and licenses. As a managed service, our client had a massive database that, in aggregate, yielded highly reliable insight into certain IT-related issues within corporate America. The company’s budget with us was very small, so our program consisted of identifying the occasional high-profile IT issue, commissioning a report that demonstrated how pervasive that issue was, and generating media coverage around it.
One our first efforts was in the wake of the Recording Industry Association of America’s announcement that it would sue not just individuals but also companies whose employees were using peer-to-peer applications to download copyrighted material. Our client’s data suggested that the use of such applications within corporate America was quite widespread, and our news release announced our client was making available a free subset of its managed service that would tell IT managers how pervasive P2P applications were within their environments.
The story went global and the market’s response was nearly overwhelming as our client had to babysit its servers to manage the demand for its little report. Huge impact on our client’s business, right?
Not so much.
While initially overjoyed, our client soon realized that very few of those who downloaded the free application were signing up as paying customers. Here was a textbook example of our level of effort, or outputs, being exactly right; the coverage results, or outcomes, being unbelievably massive; but the ultimate return for the client, or impact on its real business objectives, being negligible.
Now let me tell you about the same client, different story, fundamentally different result.
When Microsoft announced it was withdrawing support for its Windows 95 operating system, we went to work again. Our client’s database told us that Win95 was still installed on a hefty percentage of computers and that migrating to Windows XP, which is what Microsoft wanted its customers to do, might not be straightforward since there were a lot of applications deployed in the environment, many of them home-grown, that would function only on a Win95 OS. Again, our client made available a free download that would tell IT managers something about the pervasiveness of Win95 and its dependencies in their environments, the point being that they could then subscribe to the full service that would help them map a migration path to XP.
Well, as Victor Kiam used to say, Microsoft loved the product so much it bought the company! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Once again, the media coverage of our client’s announcement was truly global. Once again, the demand for its free application was considerable, although less than half what was seen for the P2P app. And once again, very few of the freebies converted to revenue. But one did, and that one was the world’s largest software company, which bought thousands of licenses and gave them away to large Win95 customers specifically so they could use it to map their migration strategy to XP. And, as already mentioned, a year or so later, Microsoft, which previously had been unaware of our client, bought the entire company in a tidy exit for our client’s founders and investors.
Sadly, we lost a client, but we gained a persuasive case study illustrating that outcomes, while a potent indicator of the ROI of a PR program, can be misleading; that only by measuring the impact can the real ROI be authoritatively calculated.
Since not every case produces the kind of clear and dramatic impact discussed here, I’ll come back to this subject in future posts and show many other ways, some quite prosaic but no less legitimate, in which the impact of PR activities can be effectively measured.
By Francis Moran
My colleague Danny Sullivan made the strong case earlier this week in favour of negotiating embargos with trusted journalists that gives them advance access to your announcement and executives so they can do a better job with the story. In return, they promise not to publish or broadcast anything until an agreed upon time and date, usually the point at which you release the news to the rest of the world. The benefit to the company making the announcement is that the journalist has more time and flexibility to deal with the story and, guess what, so does the company. It’s a tidy win-win situation, and something we do whenever practical.
Something Danny didn’t get into, though, is the frequent situation where clients confuse embargos and exclusives, an understandable mixup given that both usually entail giving select journalists advance access to the story. But whereas embargos still treat all media outlets equally in terms of when they can run with the story, an exclusive entails favouring one, or a small handful of, outlets, giving them advance and exclusive access to the story and permission to run with it prior your making a more general announcement.
Journalists love exclusives. Some clients swear by them. We point blank refuse to do them, and here’s why.
In my 30 grizzled years as a reporter, editor and communications practitioner, I have yet to see a single case where, outside the confused and muddy world of political reporting, an exclusive has ever been in the client’s favour. As a reporter, I might have enthusiastically embraced the proffered exclusive, assuring my source that giving me advance access would secure better treatment for the story. The reality was and is that the lineup in any publication generally is beyond the reporter’s influence, often beyond even the editor’s influence. It is, rather, determined almost entirely by what else needs to get into that issue, and space and placement are rigorously assigned according to news value.
Okay, that’s a little black and white, but, in the main, it applies.
As a tech PR practitioner interested in the long-term opportunity to tell my clients’ stories through the media outlets that genuinely influence their markets, I traffic in exclusives at my peril and at the peril of my clients. The outlets I favour with the exclusive simply are not going to give me significantly better treatment while those that I shut out are going to nurse a grievance against me and my client as only the competition-fuelled egos that populate an average newsroom are capable of nursing. It ain’t pretty.
Let me give you an example.
In the more-than-nine-year history of inmedia, there has been only a single client ever that took its business away from us and gave it to another agency, and it was entirely over our refusal to acquiesce to the marketing vice president’s insistence that we play favourites with a piece of news by giving an exclusive to certain media outlets. It was in the hothouse environment just prior the telecom meltdown in the U.S. and a fiercely competitive set of trade and business media was scavenging for any and every scrap of news emanating from the rash of optical systems startups that, like our client, were working on the brave new frontier of optical communications. The announcement was minor, and we simply saw no value in pissing off most of our valued contacts in favour of getting maybe an extra column inch or two of coverage in two or three of them. In fact, we saw it as running sharply counter to our client’s long-term interests, and told him so.
He disagreed, fired us and brought in a replacement agency that carried out his wishes. The wholly predictable result was that the news received the scant line or two it deserved in the publications that were favoured with the exclusive, and I spent the morning fielding angry calls from trusted editors and reporters all across North America and Europe who were understandably peeved at having been shut out.
Bottom line: Exclusives are a betrayal of the mutual trust that needs to be nurtured between PR practitioners and their media targets, they sour relationships that take a long time to cultivate and may never be repaired, and they contribute little or no added value. Don’t fall prey to their seductive but empty charm.
