Torrance, California-based PR agency Power PR has issued a call for performance-based metrics for the public relations profession. In a press release posted to eMediaWire, the agency proclaims, “The day is over when a client can enlist a marketing publicity PR firm for a year, and then be confronted with an immeasurable result for his investment. Progress should be measurable after the very first month through the use of metrics. Our clients deserve no less.”

I’m not aware of anybody in PR who doesn’t use metrics to validate their efforts. Companies like K.D. Paine and Medialink Delahaye do quite well helping agencies with their measurement. While I’m certain there are hacks and charlatans out there doing what they call PR without assessing their results, most professionals take measurement for granted. It’s in every PR book and it’s taught in every PR class. Reading Power PR’s release, you’d think they came up with the idea.

What struck me, though, was the measures Power PR suggests the profession adopt. These include…

• The number of times each week an editor is contacted on a client’s behalf
• The number of editors considering a story about the client
• The number of articles scheduled per week
• The number of articles published each week
• Total published article circulation per month
• Article-generated responses (leads the client got from an article)
• Cost per lead

I was surprised column-inches and Web site hits weren’t included on the list.

No client loses sleep over the number articles generated. One article that produces mind-boggling results is good PR. A thousand articles that produce squat is terrible PR. The goal of public relations—at least, the kind of public relations Power PR is talking about—is not to get ink, it’s to generate buzz. Clients care about outcomes. I’d rather show a client that bozz about the company or a product/service moved significantly from negative or neutral into positive territory as a consequence of my efforts.

I have for years defined public relations as the management of an organization’s relations with its non-customer constituent audiences. (The relationship with customers is marketing communications.) A client can’t determine the quality of those relationships based on how many articles were published. Was the strike averted? Did Congress opt not to impose new regulatory restrictions? Did shareholders vote down the hostile takeover bid? Did positive reaction to the brand increase? Did rhetoric about imagined environmental abuses subside? These are outcomes that matter to clients, the reasons they hire us. The tools we use are just that, tools.  There are plenty of PR efforts that don’t involve article placement at all; public relations is not the de facto equivalent of press agentry.

I agree that the profession could use some standard metrics so prospective clients can perform apples-to-apples comparisons. They just need to be the right metrics.