No More Excuses!
Measurement is good stuff, it works, and it is affordable.

I am truly humbled by the presenters at our recent Measurement Summit, and by the level of sophistication that the measurement field has reached. Whether it's Kathy Collins at GM trying to tie reputation factors to car sales (and admitting her first attempt failed due to collinearity), or it's Col. Mike Daily implementing PR measurement while dodging bullets in Iraq, or it's Andy Lark looking for correlations between message communication and customer preference scores, they've put to bed forever the notion that there is no good way to measure PR.

No doubt the Summit attendees have been at it a bit longer than most communicators, nonetheless it is clear to me that we truly have moved beyond counting clips. The fact that 69% of respondents in our global survey said that they were doing some kind of measurement and 23% were doing opinion surveys is surprisingly good news.

Of course the bad news is that 40% of communicators worldwide think measurement is a good idea but impractical and expensive, but that's a perception problem not a reality. The speakers at the summit clearly demonstrated that there is nothing impractical about measurement. In fact, most of them indicated that far from being impractical, measurement has resulted in better decision making, more resources, greater credibility, and greater respect for those who do it. And as for expensive, the days when it cost tens of thousands of dollars to do measurement are long gone. Many of the measures of success – Web site traffic, sales leads, sales – are available for free. Do-it-yourself tools, like our own DIY Dashboard, are available for under $5000 a year. And survey tools are now free or almost free.

The burden is now on us, gentle readers, to get out there and spread the word that measurement is good stuff, that it works, and that it is affordable. No more excuses! Don't waste another minute putting "thud factor" reports together, or generating pretty power point slides that don't have qualitative as well as quantitative measures. With good data, decisions get made faster and you'll have much more time to do the stuff that you really want to do. -Katie Delahaye Paine

Stock your reference library at the Measurement Mall, where you'll find books, Buyer’s Guides, Complete Handbooks and a selection of white papers.
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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 measureable.

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