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Articles
in this column do not require a subscription.
Can This Reputation
Be Saved?
 Major
League Baseball
When
my house burned down a few years ago, there was very little left but a
pile of ashes. Among the surviving treasures was a silver bowl, which,
with a lot of elbow grease, I was able to restore to its former luster.
This leads us to Major League Baseball, and its pathetic communications
relative to its players' use of steroids. Here's an example of damaged
goods that you can polish all you want, but you can't change reality.
Or, as they say, "You can't buff a turd." (Read
the rest here, no subscription required.)
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.
Our Back Issues are now organized by subject
matter, take a look at this list:
You will need a subscription to read most of them, but you
can sign up for one month for just
$19.95!
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:
The
Seven Early Warning Signs of Bad Measurement
#2: Benchmarks:
Including a brief review of PR Newswire's new MediaSense
#3:
Four
easy ways to measure the effectiveness of speaker programs
#4:
The Maven: The Center for Media and Democracy; and The Menaces: PR Firms
That Neglect to Check the Research Behind their Campaigns
#5:
Can
This Reputation Be Saved? The Medical Research Industry
Local News:
Up here in northern New England it's not all high tech PR measurement:
Man's
Testicles Padlocked for Two Weeks
Woman
Drowns Boyfriend's Dog: Trial Update
Cops
Nail Man for Unlicensed Manicure
Trivia: True or False?
American
Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad
served in first-class. (true)
The 57 on
the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles
the company once had. (false)
The
first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
(probably false)
The
first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum. (false, but it
was the first item scanned)
sources:
Rumor
Mill
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The
articles below require a subscription.
MEASUREMENT TOOLS
 The
Problem of PR Indexes:
Magic Number or Big Headache?
We take a good hard look at the One
Number from Carma, Precis, PRtrak and Delahaye: Do they measure up?
To
be honest, I think that most index scores are made up numbers designed
to generate pats on the back or slaps on the wrist. I don't deny that
many clients need that magic One Number to convey in 30 seconds or less
how their program is going. My problem isn't with one number, rather,
it's with which number and how you calculate it. In the scramble
to define a "PR GRP" that works for the entire industry, vendors
like Carma, Precis, PRtrak
and Delahaye have developed their own "impact scores,"
all based on different criteria, different math and different assumptions.
Let's take a good look at some of those assumptions...
(Want to read more?
A
single issue subscription is only $19.95!)
MORE MEASUREMENT TOOLS
 Media
Measurement Plays Well With Others
Four real-life adventures in how to
integrate your PR measurement program with everything else in your communications
tool kit.
Many
people have recently asked me how to integrate other communications programs
into their media measurement dashboards. This seems to be a result of
two different phenomena: (1) PR managers are being promoted to head up
corporate communications departments, and when they arrive in the corner
office they find that PR has its charts and graphs, direct mail and advertising
have their numbers, but events, employee communications and community
relations are typically behind the eight ball. (2) The folks in internal
communications, events and other disciplines want dashboards as cool as
the ones that the PR people are now showing off. So now that you've got
a dashboard for one discipline how do you integrate it with others?...
(Want to read more?
A single
issue subscription is only $19.95!)
EVEN MORE MEASUREMENT TOOLS
 The
Design-A-Dashboard Checklist
Twelve questions your must answer
before you design your dashboard.
Dashboards
are the hot measurement ticket. Everybody wants to know how to put together
their own dashboards and what they need to get started. As in any measurement
program, it's first things first. Before setting up your dashboard, you've
got to stake out your territory and learn the lay of the land. Here we've
put together a checklist of a dozen things you need to know before you
start designing your dashboard. If you'd like a more in depth discussion
of some of these issues, you can download
my (free) paper, "Designing and Implementing Your Communication's
Dashboard: Lessons Learned" at the IPR Web site.
(Want to read more?
A single
issue subscription is only $19.95!)
BOOK REVIEW
 An
(Almost) Perfect Primer
for Measuring Media Performance
Ralf
Leinemann and Elena Baikaltseva's
"Media Relations Measurement:
Determining the Value of PR to Your Company's Success"
If
everyone read this book before setting up a measurement program, I'd be
forced to retire. Dr. Ralf Leinemann and I have been talking measurement
with each other off and on for over a decade, so it wasn't at all surprising
to find that his new book, Media Relations Measurement, is an
almost perfect primer for those wanting to learn how to measure their
media performance. I say "almost" because I do have a few arguments
with some of his methodologies, but 99% of the book is absolutely dead
on and is a must read for anyone starting up a measurement program...
(Want
to read more? A
single issue subscription is only $19.95!)
JENNY SCHADE'S MAKING IT COUNT
 If
It Plays in Peoria, Will It Pop in Paris?
Fourteen
Tips on How to Conduct
Global Qualitative Research
There's
nothing like taking a first-hand look at your customers and employees
across countries to really understand your target markets.
Global qualitative research offers excitement and rewards, as well as
incredible experiences. But it's very different from conducting research
in your home country. The right planning and approach will be invaluable
to assuring success when you step out of your element and into another
country where the customs and research are often quite different. Not
to mention the language. As comedian Steve Martin once said, "Those
French have a different word for everything." (Want
to read more? A
single issue subscription is only $19.95!)
THE MEASUREMENT MAVEN AND MENACE
The
Mavens:
 Teresa
Streit and Jill Zieske
of Hewlett Packard
Hewlett-Packard
has had more than its fair share of ups and downs recently, but one thing
has remained remarkably constant: Its absolute commitment to putting in
place a timely, consistent and accurate PR measurement program. Teresa
Streit and Jill Zieske have been spearheading
this initiative for well over a year, and as a result, most of the PR
folks at Hewlett-Packard have at their fingertips an on-line system, always
available, that provides not just real-time data on their performance
(and their competition's) but also access to articles and/or article summaries
in key publications from more than a dozen countries around the world.
(In the interest of full disclosure, KDPaine & Partners, the publisher
of this newsletter, was brought in on the initial design of the program,
and continues to analyze and compile reports for the program.)...
(Want to read more?
A single
issue subscription is only $19.95!)
The
Menaces:
Professional
Speakers Who Tell Their Audiences
That PR Can’t Be Measured
We
should hand out rotten eggs and tomatoes to conference attendees these
days and the first speaker who says, "You can't measure PR!"
gets one right in the schnoz. It happened again just a few weeks ago.
One of my colleagues was at a conference and, sure enough, one of her
fellow speakers got up and introduced his topic by talking about the long
struggle that PR practitioners have had with measuring results and why
it is so difficult. It was all she could do, she said, to not stand up
and challenge him right there. Good thing I wasn't in the audience, I
would have thrown something at him...
(Want to read more?
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issue subscription is only $19.95!)
MEASUREMENT INDUSTRY NEWS
Benchmarks
 Giselle
Bodie Leaves Echo Research, Steps Down as AMEC Chair;
LexisNexis, Biz360 Announce LexisNexis MarketImpact; Biz360 Announces
Auto Discovery; Factiva Launches Reputation Intelligence Tool, and more.
(Want to read more?
A
single issue subscription is only $19.95!)
"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
 Don't
Bother Measuring Blogs
I've
just wasted another hour in the blogosphere, and I've come to the conclusion
that most companies should not be measuring blogs at all. To quote Bill
Murray in Meatballs, "IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!"Okay,
if you are Hewlett-Packard and www.gizmodo.com
is trashing your product, you need to know about it. But there are maybe
a dozen or so blogs out there that qualify as "influential"
and that's exactly .00008% of the total. This brings me to the big picture
point here: Before you measure anything, you need to know what is influencing
your constituencies...
(Read the rest here, no subscription
required.)
PR Measurement Blog
Read Katie Delahaye
Paine's Measurement Blog here.
Measurement Tip of the Month
 Here's
a quick and easy way to set up a simple dashboard, (taken
from the Leinemann and Baikaltseva's book we review this month). Think
of a simple traffic light that expresses the health of your media coverage
by displaying a green, yellow or red light. Green is good, yellow is caution,
red is bad.
For non-competitive coverage:
Green means more than 90%
of articles are neutral or positive or contain one or more key messages.
Yellow means 70-90% of articles
are neutral or positive or contain one or more key messages.
Red means fewer than 70%
of articles are neutral or positive or contain one or more key messages.
For competitive coverage:
Green means your share of
discussion is greater than your market share.
Yellow means your share
of discussion is equal to your market share.
Red means your share of
discussion is less than your market share.
Measurement Quote
of the Month
 "Give
me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.
You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
-- Vilfredo Pareto, Italian economist
 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.
Research Tidbits from PR
Newswire
Movie
Villains Smoke More Than Heroes
Why
Jefferson County, Texas, Is a 'Judicial Hellhole(R)'
43%
of Singles Have Googled Someone on the Internet Before a First Date
Trump
Apartment Better Than Sex With a Celebrity
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.
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