The Paine of Measurement
by Katie Delahaye Paine

Just What Part Of "Now"
Don’t You Understand?
The problem is not a lack
of PR measurement tools...
It’s an excess of excuses.

News flash from yet another company jumping into the PR measurement fray (name withheld to protect the clueless):

"Now companies and PR agencies can balance the "clip metric" with a new and powerful methodology for delivering quantifiable results to the boardroom. Our breakthrough FlakTrac(tm) technology enables businesses to directly assess market interest in their products and services. Now you can measure your public relations, and use that metric with media analysis to get a complete picture of the impact of your PR programs and initiatives..."

Let's get something straight here: PR measurement was not born in the 21st Century. In fact it was underway long before most of you were born. And sophisticated measurement tools have been around for at least a decade. Sure, they’re getting more sophisticated all the time. But boardroom-level PR measurement was not invented last week. In fact it was probably invented by Bruce Jeffries-Fox at AT&T several years before the guys that wrote the above text were born. He demonstrated the correlation between PR and customer loyalty and purchase and you’ve been able to read about it in his definitive IPR paper "Toward an Understanding of How News Coverage and Advertising Impact Consumer Perceptions, Attitudes and Behavior" for at least four years.

Twenty years ago, Al Barr started Carma, (arguably the first commercial PR measurement firm) and I started my first measurement company in 1987 after years of doing my own internal measurement for companies like Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu. And I know at least a dozen member of the IPR Measurement Commission who have been in this business at least as long as have. And -- oh by the way -- highly sophisticated PR measurement programs have been running as part of Six Sigma programs at GE, Sun and Bank of America for several years. (For a review of the history of PR measurement, download and read this paper: "Putting PR Measurement and Evaluation Into Historical Perspective" by Dr. Walter K. Lindenmann.)

Memo to measurement vendors: If I see one more press release or Web site that touts a new product as "The first true PR measurement system," you will guarantee my enmity for the next decade.

Sure, the vast majority of people practicing public relations today will profess some level of ignorance or innocence about measurement. (See for instance, this month's Measurement Menace.) But that is hardly because there’s a lack of tools. The tools have existed, the knowledge has been lacking. But thanks to the efforts ot the Institute for PR, PRWeek and others, awareness is growing. Measurement is now part of almost every PR discussion.

The other major reason for the fallacy of "no good measurement tools" is that most of them have been unaffordable to the vast majority of PR practitioners. But even that is changing. In 1999 the average PR measurement program provided by any of the leading vendors probably ran about $40,000 a year or about $25 per clip. Today the average per clip cost is closer to $5 and very good measurement systems can be had for under $25,000 a year. And they’re coming down daily. In recent competitive bidding processes, vendors have found ways to bring their costs down by as much as 40-60%. Even more low cost tools are on the horizon.

So tell me again why you think "there is no way to measure PR?"

Of course there are ways to measure PR: there’s content analysis, there are reputation surveys, relationships surveys. Our web site www.measuresofsuccess.com has a dozen papers on measurement tools and a list of some 30 vendors who’ll do it for you. And once you’ve read all of them, you can go on to www.instituteforpr.com and read even more. The problem is not a lack of PR measurement tools. It’s an excess of excuses.

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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