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Can This Reputation Be Saved?
 Home
Depot
Hypocrisy,
thy name is Home Depot. For
years, Home Depot has been one of those companies that appeared to embrace
Corporate Responsibility for all the right reasons. Now it has either
suffered a major change of heart or revealed its true colors. Here's the
story: A group of appliance manufacturers suggested energy efficient standards
for ceiling fans. A number of state legislatures took up the cause, and
at this moment there are a dozen or so bills pending that would save buckets
of energy. But along comes Home Depot, which sells some 50% of all ceiling
fans in America. It put a sizeable chunk of change behind lobbying to
put language into the new Federal energy bill that would set less stringent
standards, and supercede the state bills now pending...
Proceedings
of the 8th Annual International Public Relations Conference, 3/10-13,
2005 are now available.
Just click here to download this 591 page .pdf file that includes all
77 papers. Yep, it's really big.
With
A Bullet:
Last Month's Top Five Most Popular Articles:
(If these articles
were subscriber-only in last month's issue, you will still need a subscription
to read them.)
 #1:
Three
Easy Ways to Compare the Value of Media Placements
#2:
How
To Pick a Media Measurement Company That Fits Your Budget
#3:
The
Monthly Measurement Maven and Menace
#4:
Blog Measurement Made Simple
#5:
Reputation
Is In
The Mind of An Audience
Local News:
Up
here in northern New England it's not all high tech PR measurement:
Woman
Carrying $47K in Bra at Airport Sues
Giant
Popsicle Melts, Floods NYC Park
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The
articles below require a subscription.
MEASUREMENT TOOLS
 How
To Pick
a Media Measurement Company
That Fits Your Budget, Part 2
How
to make the data meaningful,
and how to save money and get better service
by being your vendor's favorite client.
As
we've said before, research without insight is just trivia. Analyzing
and reporting on the data is just as important as the systems you've used
to gather that data, so you've got to make sure your vendor's reporting
capabilities match your needs. A vendor that is perfect for gathering
your data will not necessarily be the best at analyzing what it means,
so to choose the best vendor you must take both of these capabilities
into account...
MEASUREMENT TOOLS
PRtrak's Secret Marketing Tool
Angela Jeffrey on
the competitive advantages of
instant marketing feedback.
For
many of you, communicating to customer prospects is a significant focus
of your communications. But like so many other measurement challenges,
how do we know when a prospect has been impacted by our message? I'm writing
today to share one of PRtrak's marketing secrets: a special tool we utilize
called Brainshark...
ASK THE EXPERTS
Can You Estimate Opportunities To See For Wire Stories?
How do you estimate monthly Web site
visitors?
Two
questions about circulation figures for wire services and Web sites were
recently put before the IPR Measurement Commission. The long-time standard
within an certain agency has been to use a figure of 10 million for AP
wire stories and 200 million for Bloomberg. The argument is that even
if one doesn't know exactly how many publications may have run a wire
story, 10 million is a good conservative estimate of the likelihood of
opportunities to see that were generated. We at The Measurement Standard
had always understood that it was industry standard to not attribute anything
to the wire itself, but to track the publications in which the story appeared.
We had a similar debate on circulation figures for Web sites: Is it valid
to take daily visitor numbers and multiplying by 30 to get a monthly visitor
count? We asked the experts...
RESEARCH RESULTS
How to Make a Momentous
Supreme Court Decision Mean Something
Levick
Strategic Communications works with CARMA
to reveal six lessons for effective media outreach.
The
recent compromises by the Bush administration in releasing detainees at
the Guantanamo Naval Base suggest that public pressure in the media has
been brought to bear on a government that, last year at this time, showed
no signs of making any compromises whatsoever. Among the recently media
themes is the blatant lack of response by the Bush administration to the
June, 2004 Supreme Court rulings that the detainees were entitled to due
process. Insistent reminders of those rulings in the media suggests that
coverage of the constitutionality issue has run concomitantly with coverage
of broader issues like prisoner treatment – and that the two thematic
threads have played off against and reinforced each other. The sudden
onslaught of editorial support for the detainees likely indicates a strategically
concerted effort to reverse media trends and create a broad base of favorable
public opinion. That effort, evidenced in sample media coverage gathered
by CARMA International during the past twelve months, suggests a number
of pointed lessons for effective public media outreach...
JENNY SCHADE'S MAKING IT COUNT
 "So,
Do You Take Out
Your Own Gall Bladder Too?"
Ten reasons you should hire a professional
moderator to conduct focus groups.
I'm
writing this commentary by popular demand. A number of clients have called
recently regarding why they need a professionally-trained moderator to
conduct their focus groups. They explained that their management or internal
clients are looking to economize, and are considering having a staff member
moderate their interviews...
ALICE BRINK'S OBJECTIVE MEASURES
 Of
Hazelnuts and Gap:
How Effective Measurement
Brought Home the Gold Quill
Two
contrasting communications programs
show how to do measurement right
In
the April column I promised to showcase this month some of the best of
the Gold Quill awards entries that effectively used research and measurement.
Two entries were singled out for IABC’s top awards: the Jake Wittmer
Award for Research and the IABC Business Issues Award. The entries could
not be more different – one is a food promotion campaign and the
other an internal business transformation program – but both show
how effective research and measurement can link communication to business
outcomes...
THE MEASUREMENT MAVEN AND MENACE
The
Mavens:
The
Integrators
Neither
employees nor customers live in hermetically sealed bubbles, so we've
been pushing the integration of external and internal communications for
decades. And over the past year or so, we've been talking more and more
about the need to integrate internal and external communications measurement
for the same reasons. And now, we're seeing more and more communications
teams doing the same thing...
The
Menaces:
The
Justifiers
Too
many communications professionals are still looking at measurement as
a way to justify their existence. They are quick to show off the good
articles and equally adept at burying the bad news. They produce glowing
reports on a regular basis that ignore the most basic research principles
and that are carefully edited to rationalize away any negatives. PR
agencies are the worst offenders; we've seen them fudge numbers, stack
the deck in the clients' favor and intentionally manipulate data to promote
their own agendas. The behavior of their clients is not any better, what
with bogus multipliers, AVEs and sandbagging results. What they are really
guilty of is missing the point! Research and measurement isn't supposed
to be about earning a gold star. It's about doing your job better...
THE MEASUREMENT INDUSTRY
Moves
and Shakeouts
The
second annual Golden Ruler Awards, TEKgroup's journalist survey, NewsGator
debuts Business IQ, Teletrax expands video monitoring, and Millward Brown
acquires Dynamic Logic.
"CARTOONS DRAWN ON THE BACK OF BUSINESS CARDS"
by hugh macleod
gapingvoid.com
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Articles
in this column do not require a subscription.
The Paine of Measurement
What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate
At
a recent conference, three people got up to complain about their CEO "over
communicating." Major corporations send out so much email that employees
don't know what to do with it, and it costs them millions in excess storage
costs. Never mind wading through the spam that we don't want at all. And
then of course there are the burgeoning blogs... The problem is that people
are confusing expression with communication. Everyone wants to express
him or herself. It is human nature to want to be heard, to want to be
acknowledged and want to be loved or admired for what you have to say.
Communication, on the other hand, requires someone to actually listen...
Measurement Quote of the Month:
"The
fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
--William Shakespeare,
"As You Like It"
 The
Institute for Public Relations Forums presents the 3rd Annual
Summit on Measurement, a meeting of the best and brightest minds
in public relations measurement, evaluation and research Sept
28-30, 2005 at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH.
Click here for a brochure
and registration form.
New!
A State-of-the Art
PR Dashboard
You know you need to measure your results,
but chances are there's never been enough money in your budget for evaluation.
Until now.
KDPaine & Partners' new Do-It-Yourself Dashboard system combines a
Web-based application with professional consulting to enable PR professionals
to customize their own PR dashboards. Look
here for more information.
The Measurement Mall
Just
can't get enough measurement? The
Measurement Mall
is the place to shop for all the books, Buyers' Guides, Complete Handbooks
and reference material you can use right now to improve your
effectiveness.
Measurement Trivia:
A
'jiffy' is the name given to a unit of time equal to 1/100th of a second.
A
typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two miles long.
No
word in the English language rhymes with the words 'month,' 'orange,'
'silver,' or 'purple.'
The
word 'news' did not come about because it was the plural of 'new.' It
came from the first letters of the words North, East, West and South.
This was because information was being gathered from all different directions.
source:
corsinet.com
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