The Paine Of Measurement

Stop teaching people
to write press releases:
Teach them how
to measure instead.
For the sake of our profession,
we need to turn this situation around.

In this issue, our review of several Miami conference papers will give you a taste of the breadth and scope of ideas in PR research that are bubbling around universities and college campuses across the country. The annual conference includes pretty impressive stuff and is well worth the trip to Miami—and certainly worth reading about here in The Measurement Standard. (Click here to download a large pdf file with the conference schedule and abstracts of all 71 papers presented there.)

The most important lesson that came out of the Miami conference is that PR research and education is a vital component in the success of every PR professional. This was the focus of one of the more intriguing papers presented there: Don Wright's discourse on the state of PR Education. He makes the excellent point that despite the growing popularity of public relations as a field of study and the dramatic increase in the number of PR students currently in school, there is woefully little in the way of formal professional recognition or funding for PR Research.

Wright describes an environment in which only a small handful of schools have recognized PR research programs, existing in an orphaned limbo between speech communications and journalism. There are few endowed chairs for public relations, and a chronic shortage of PR professors. As a result many of the students who sign up to take public relations courses are taught by people who at best have no formal training in the field, and at worse come from the journalism perspective and consider it an evil necessity. What kind of lessons about managing relationships can they teach, we have to wonder.

The alternative educational opportunities are programs like the communications management courses at Syracuse that take experienced PR professionals and teach them research and analysis techniques. Some of the best training in the country today is being done in such programs, where hands-on research is a required part of the curriculum. The problem with those programs is that they come too late in the process.

Trust me, I love it anytime that people discover research, but I've always followed Andy Grove's advice and believed that when it comes to improving the process, the earlier in the process the better. And that means training people at the beginning of their careers, not in the middle. The sooner you teach people to rely on data rather than their gut feelings, the sooner you have PR people getting seats at the management table, and having their advice taken seriously.

Wright makes a very convincing argument that for the sake of the profession, we need to turn this situation around. We don't need more people who can write press releases. We need to be turning out more students who understand research and metrics, who can look at data, draw conclusions and make strategic recommendations base on that data. To do that we need PR education programs that focus on disciplined research, the likes of which were presented in Miami last month.

I would take Wright's advice a step or two further. I would urge all PR people who have anything to do with hiring and recruitment of staff make an understanding of data analysis a prerequisite for the job. Ask all applicants about their understanding and knowledge of PR research as part of the job interview. Call your alma maters and get them to wake up and smell the reality. You don't need students who know how to distribute a press release, you need well trained students that can help you make better decisions based on data, not gut feeling.

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