March 28, 2003

The Monthly Measurement Maven

Roberta Carlton,
VP of PR at PTC

Roberta Carlton is one of those few people whose interest in measurement actually exceeds my own. When she was my client at business intelligence company Cognos, she was always trying new things, investigating cutting edge methods to improve her program, and pushing us to come up with better ways to get answers to her questions.

I caught up with her recently at her new job at PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation) and she impressed the heck out of me, as usual. Like most of her peers, over the last year she’d gone through layoffs and budget cutbacks, and was now essentially managing the communications function solo. But did she stop being accountable? Absolutely not. Did she stop tracking results? Of course not.

She’s relying more heavily on the Web to drive not just traffic, but leads and sales as well. So she’s carefully watching registrations on the Web site and following them back to actual orders. And rather than eliminate media tracking, she’s looking into automating her media content analsyis program to lower costs and speed up the delivery of results. —KDP

The Monthly Measurement Menace

Clipping Services that Offer AVEs

OK, now we’re really throwing down the gauntlet. I’m calling the clipping services like Luce, Burrelle’s and everyone else who offers “Ad Value Equivalency” as part of their reporting packages a Menace to the PR profession. As long as they continue to provide the “easy” way to tally results, PR practitioners will use it simply because it's there.

What they don’t tell their clients is that Ad Value Equivalency is a number that is in no way based on any scientific proof that an article is the “equivalent” of a similarly sized ad. (Read this article to learn more about the problems with AVEs.) By providing AVEs as an option, they encourage PR practitioners to make false comparisons, draw inaccurate conclusions and make bad decisions based on bad data.

Until they fully inform their clients of the limitations of AVEs—or drop them altogether—they are sabotaging the work of the clients they serve. And by settling for sloppy thinking and bad measurement, they ultimately tarnish the image of the PR profession as a whole. —KDP

This issue is on us!
In celebration of our first birthday, all articles in this issue are free of charge! Here is what is new this month:

Army Intelligence:
Army Public Affairs Gets It Right this Time

Four Tips on Measurement When Your News Is Just Not Getting Out

Five Crisis Management Firms

Seven Experts on Accounting for Extraordinary External Events in Your Ongoing Measurement Programs

Bach to Basics: The Symphony Searches for a New Audience

Report from the Miami IIPRRC conference

Moves and Shakeouts

Can Charlotte Beers’ Reputation be Saved?

...And Found Lacking

The Monthly Measurement Menace and Maven

The PR Weather Report

1. You’ll learn how to use hard numbers to prove the results of your PR efforts.

2. You’ll learn which are the right vendors for your measurement projects.

3. You’ll learn how to design your program right from the start to be easily measurable.

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Struggling to set up your measurement system?
Katie Delahaye Paine can help you at measuresofsuccess.com

133 Islington Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
603-431-6967 www.measuresofsuccess.com