April 30th, 2003

The Miami Papers
Part of the mission of The Measurement Standard is to continuously explore the leading edge of research and evaluation. Last March, we gained valuable insight into where the field is going at the Miami conference. Each month we bring you a synopsis of one of the papers presented at that conference, in hopes that it will inspire new ideas and best practices in the industry.

A Study of the Web
as a Political PR Tool
By Margot Opdycke Lamme, PhD, APR, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Relations, University of Florida, and Andrew Paul Williams, Doctoral student, Instructor, Public Relations, University of Florida.

Political campaign managers have for years understood that while the primary means of communicating candidates’ messages to the public may be paid advertising, their actual success at informing voters frequently hinges on what reporters and editors write. Surprisingly, until recently, campaigns have not measured the impact of PR and earned media on their outcomes. What Margo Lamme and Andrew Williams have done in this paper is to examine the role that online news media play in the political process.

The Research
Specifically, they looked at the press releases posted by two candidates for governor in Florida, Jeb Bush and Ed McBride, to determine the extent to which the issues and ideas communicated in those releases ended up in any online news Web sites.

As they explained it:

...both Jeb Bush and Bill McBride attempted to define their own images and issues and those of their opponent through a variety of communication channels, including the controlled medium of the Web, which enables public relations practitioners to shape messages, reach multiple publics through one channel, and control image projection and enhance credibility.

While some prior studies have examined the role of online communication... little research has been done to evaluate the effectiveness of online news releases in generating news coverage. Fewer still have asked about the role public relations may play as a result.

This research focuses on the finite timespan of a political campaign, which lends itself to clearly delineating a segment of media relations activity that may not be so easily defined on an ongoing corporate Web site...

The purpose of this study is to measure the effectiveness of the candidate’s online news releases in setting the agenda of the online newspapers during the general election period. Specifically, through a content analysis, it will examine the Bush and McBride official Web sites and the Web sites of metropolitan newspapers in five key areas of the state (Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee) to determine whether there was a transfer of salience among issues and attributes from the candidate news releases to the online newspapers.

The Results
While their study did not find any correlation between press releases posted on candidates' Web sites and the stories that found their way onto online news sites, it was their other findings that really fascinated us. They found tremendous similarity in content between the releases posted by Bush and those posted by McBride. Even though McBride attempted to position himself as the “education candidate,” Bush had more releases focusing on education. They also found that both candidates took advantage of the Web’s immediacy and apparently changed tactics in the middle of the campaign. After an initial period when McBride had very little press release activity (4 releases to Bush’s 10), in the second half of the campaign McBride posted 31 to Bush’s 32.

The Conclusions
Political campaigns have a long way to go before they fully take advantage of the Web’s capabilities, and there is great opportunity for PR and Web savvy individuals in the political arena.

As the authors state, “Given the fact that the candidates had their own Web sites to craft and disseminate their messages, it is surprising how little they seemed to have used that platform to drive their own messages concerning issues of importance to Florida voters.” In fact, they found that the candidates and the media spent far more time and effort discussing the candidates' various attributes (ideology, integrity, biography, perceived qualifications, and personality) than they did on the issues they stood for.

Lamme and Williams concluded that “practitioners still have a long way to go in terms of tapping into this candidate-controlled medium. In terms of frequency, content, and issue and attribute focus, the ability to harness the power of the Web to more effectively shape messages, time their distribution and influence the... agenda of online newspaper coverage will be a primary factor in effective political public relations.”

New articles
in this issue:

Articles with red arrows require a subscription:

How To Evaluate Public Relationships

Who Needs to Measure Reputation When You’ve Got Fortune? We Asked the Experts...

Sumo Wrestlers and Pivot Sales Prove PR Effectiveness

What Really Is Reputation?

Buyers’ Guide to
Reputation Indexes

Moves & Shakeouts

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The Paine of Measurement

Can Augusta National’s Reputation be Saved?

Ask Dr. Paine

The Miami Papers

Letters to the Editor

The Monthly Measurement Menace and Maven

The PR Weather Report

Measurement Events

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