The Marketplace Needs
a Good $500 Solution
Research folks:
Research your market!

by Katie Delahaye Paine

We in the measurement industry today (and I include KDPaine & Partners) are so busy telling everyone about our new partnerships, new alliances, new technology, and new services, that oftentimes we don’t hear what our customers are saying. I’ve been teaching the Ragan Measurement Workshops of late, and as a result I’ve spent even more time than I normally do hearing about PR programs and their need to be measured.

These are not the megabuck multinational accounts that our advertisers seek to service. They are the everyday ordinary programs that everyday extraordinary PR people are hired to conduct. ‘Extraordinary’ because the people who attend these programs have clearly chosen to be more accountable and more disciplined about their work than many of their colleagues.

These are the PR folks from diverse organizations: sports leagues, housing authorities, colleges and universities, local school districts and startups. They all share a common desire to do a better job communicating their messages and to develop real, valid and actionable measures of success.

In six days of teaching, I’ve only heard about a couple of programs that would be appropriate for any of the big names in research. Most are too small to make computer-aided analysis worthwhile and too poor to hire an outside firm to read articles or conduct a survey. Even more to the point, most are not interested in measuring "media" or "opportunities to see." They want to measure relationships with their various constituencies. Whether those constituencies are their local communities, Capitol Hill staff, members, contributors or alumni, these PR people know that in order to be successful at what they do, some form of research and evaluation is necessary.

Here’s my point: No one is really listening to the marketplace. While everyday ordinary people are trying to find affordable tools to accurately measure their success, suppliers are focusing on the inevitable “Fortune 1000” (a misnomer—there is no Fortune 1000, there is only the Fortune 500 in a variety of different categories). The small accounts—who in my book are heroes for wanting to do PR and PR measurement right—are ignored by the media, the awards programs, and agencies and vendors alike (with the exception of the Institute for PR, which offers all of its research and white papers for FREE!).

And I know perfectly well the allure of the big accounts, because I used to chase them too. There's nothing like landing a $250K job to get your blood going—and to keep your CFO smiling. Believe me, when you run your own company with 35 employees and a six-figure nut every month, those little accounts just aren’t worth picking up the phone for.

But my rough guess is that for every one $50K measurement account out there, there are a hundred little $1K accounts. It’s time that we as an industry shouldered some responsibility for listening to, and ultimately serving, the needs of the little projects that aren’t grabbing the big headlines. I’m starting today. See the sidebar on the Do-It-Yourself Dashboard.