Thanks to sophisticated software programs and techniques such as computerized news clip analysis, survey sampling, quasi-experimental designs and attempts to correlate efforts directly with sales, PR pros are making considerable progress in evaluation measurement and the ability to tell clients and employers what’s been accomplished. This coincides with the increase in the percentage of PR budgets (as much as 10 percent, according to some industry analysts) being devoted to this step because of constant pressure for PR to justify its overall budget and prove its value to organizations’ bottom lines.
Among measurements of production, message exposure, audience
awareness, audience attitudes and audience action, the most widely practiced form of PR evaluation is compilation of print and broadcast mentions. Burrelles/Luce, for example, claims it can monitor 40 million blogs and Internet forums and tens of thousands of newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV, and cable stations. National Aircheck searches almost 8,000 hours of news talk radio each week.
All of this electronic research enables PR to do a fairly accurate count of how many media stories are generated by a program or campaign. The number of media placements, however, is just the first level of assessing the exposure of the message to potential audiences.
The potential audiences reached are described as media impressions. While commonly used in advertising to document the breadth of penetration of a particular message, media impressions don’t, however, document how many people actually read or heard the stories and, more important, how many absorbed or acted on the information.
“PR pros who tout big impressions or media value numbers as evidence of their good work without considering competitive share are not adequately advising their management or clients,” said Angela Jeffrey, APR, vice
Angela Jeffrey, APR
president of editorial research at VMS. During a recent PRSA Houston luncheon, Jeffrey provided an overview of her extensive work on how best to correlate non-paid media to business outcomes.
Through hundreds of studies on millions of clips over nearly a decade, Jeffrey explained how the combination of artificial intelligence and human scoring led to clarified insights that were previously impossible to see. In recent years, she has focused on relating the results to paid media and integrating the total results to outcomes.
“Share of communication is what matters, not absolute values,” Jeffrey said. “Your company can earn a huge amount of media coverage or buy a huge amount of advertising, but if competitors are doing a lot more, your efforts will be dwarfed and less effective. So you have to know your share of paid or earned media to understand how your work is stacking up and create strategies to gain share.”
For example, Jeffrey pointed out, smaller competitors may not be able to afford to purchase as much but they can generate earned media if they are innovative enough. “While it is unrealistic to expect a small player to out-shout a mammoth competitor, it is always possible to out-shout it in niche areas, special product lines, geographic areas, or whatever their particular objective,” she said.
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Renee Griffin, MBA, APR
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