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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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PR measurement and math-challenged communicators

It’s an amusing sight, a group of PR practitioners at dinner trying to figure out the check and the tip. Most communicators don’t do math. It’s a right-brain left-brain thing. Lack of math skills led most of us to writing as an avocation to begin with. I’m always glad when Angela Sinickas is at dinner with us. She’s a math whiz. But you’d expect her to be, since communication measurement is her area of expertise.

Angela’s not alone. Tudor and Ryan Williams also specialize in measuring the effectiveness of communication efforts. Both Angela and the Williams boys are excellent at what they do. I’ve often lamented that their businesses have not grown to the point where they need offices in multiple cities, but I haven’t been surprised. Measurement just isn’t important to most math-challenged communicators or budget-conscious companies. Communicators would rather churn out cool-looking and brilliantly written collateral while companies see measurement as an effort by consultants and agencies to squeeze a few extra dollars out of the project.

I’m equally unsrurprised by the lack of attention given to Andy Lark’s December 18 post about the reults of a Holmes Report “survey of more than 100 PR Agency principles—the results of which point to some of the problems that continue to make research and evaluation a major issue for the industry.” Measurement…math…yawn…

Only three comments were submitted to the post—one by Auburn academic Robert French. You expect the professors to have a better grasp of math than practitioners. But the simple fact is that PR efforts will never gain the kind of respect we crave until we can quantify the results in terms that resonate with the people who hire us. Lark quotes from the survey:

“In general, their responses suggested that an failure of commitment- rather than the absence of necessary tools and techniques???is behind the industry???s poor performance.”

Lark’s conclusion mirrors precisely my own beliefs about measurement:

I just don???t understand how any PR department or practitioner can operate without a measurement program in place. Measurement isn???t monitoring. Monitoring isn???t measurement. What I am talking about here is a deep understanding of how communications impacts business outcomes. An understanding based on research not just of what occurred in the media, but also in the minds of your customers. Without that you shouldn???t expect resources, budget, even a job.

Still, there’s only one PR measurement blog that I’m aware of—the one from Katie Paine—and it isn’t updated nearly enough. What will it take to make measurement an integral part of any communicator’s planning process? I admire the hell out of Steve Rubel’s effort to get agency honchos talking about practical implementation of new media in their efforts. But maybe they need to worry about the fundamentals before they scurry on to the Next Big Thing. Whether it’s a traditional media campaign or a blog/wiki combo, it’s not complete without the measurement component.

12/21/05 | 21 Comments | PR measurement and math-challenged communicators

Comments

  • 1.When you DO measure, or play with numbers in any other way, you should at least have access to a math-savvy advisor. Sooner or later someone will ask you to report that something is 37% faster or reduced by 82%, and when that happens you REALLY need to check the math, especially with percentages.

    (I may be the world's only "B. Math, ABC")

    Tim Hicks | December 2005 | Victoria, BC, Canada

  • 2.I work at a large R&D driven company and it wasn't until we started measuring our comms performance (especially internally) that leadership started to take us seriously. Any number of humanistic theories meant little to the leadership, but show them a multivariate analysis and we're talking!


    Since then our comms organization has nearly doubled in size, management are aware that they need to do much better in their personal presentations, we are more often on-message, we have better focus on our channel management and finally we can follow long-term trends in the organization.

    I would suggest in any large organization where R&D counts, measurement is your best way to comms success. It doesn't hurt in other organizations either! Measurement and documentation is simply part of being professional. Now to convert HR too.

    Mark | December 2005 | Sweden

  • 3.Thanks for the real-world validation, Mark!

    Tim, we don't really need to DO any math (thank God), because plenty of PR measurement tools exist. We just need to start using them, and not as an add-on but as an integral part of the program.

    Shel Holtz | December 2005 | Concord, CA

  • 4.I wish there were more discussions about this in PR blogs, Shel. Yes, the respect for the discipline is required and why practitioners don't (more often) employ depth in their pre/post evaluations, I still don't understand. It is one (or the) path to acceptance and respect.

    Your reference to math made me smile a bit. I imagine you can envision the looks I receive in classes when we discuss "Points and Picas" (conversions) in Style & Design or crosstabs, t-squares and margin of error in Survey Research.

    I also agree that measurement - alone - isn't enough. The efforts should run the gammit (pre/post) including everything from audits to focus groups and surveys to standardized tests. And, those just scratch the surface. All in reasonable application, of course. Where it makes sense. Yes, the tools exist. Why aren't they utilized more often?

    KDPaine's blog is a good one. One thought is that she has so few PR/Marcom specific examples to write about. I refer to the (a) minimal amount being discussed, (b) the minimal amount probably being done, and (c) the claim (albeit legitimate) of it being proprietary information.

    Now, there is a transparency discussion I can get my mind around. Why isn't more public discussion of these practices taking place? Hmm? Another student blogging exercise?

    All the best.

    Robert French | December 2005 | Auburn, AL USA

  • 5.We're working on something up here in Toronto. What started as an ad hoc group of colleagues in the Toronto industry has led to the Canadian Public Relations Society making us a full-fledged national committee. While we've made a little local noise with our peers things will really get rolling in the new year.

    Now, don't expect too much on the outcomes side just yet. We're keeping with the nailing down some of the fundamentals to begin with. We've come up with a tool to effectively measure media coverage effectively and consistently with a CPRS-endorsed methodology and a centralized data resource.

    The hope is that this gets the ball rolling and we come up with new tools that measure other outputs i.e. blog relations, street teams, internal comm and the like.

    What's exciting is that we're pushing this out as an ope-source, user-driven tool. We'll have a blog that I hope will stay current with measurement info, white papers, examples, etc. and an old-fashioned discussion board where users can share best practices, ideas to make the tool better, rant, complain, whatever.

    I'll keep you posted.

    David Jones | December 2005 | Toronto

  • 6.Some of you may know that I’m involved with a group of PR agency and corporate communications folks that have been trying to figure out a way to standardize measurement for media coverage.  Since we started meeting more than two years ago, ...

    http://www.thornleyfallisgroup.ca/prworks/index.ph | December 2005

  • 7.>>Tim, we don?t really need to DO any math (thank God), because plenty of PR measurement tools exist.<<

    And yet, it wouldn't hurt communicators to be forced to do so. My father is an electrical engineer and his response to my questions about why I should take math, algebra, calculas, etc. when I had no plans for a "hard sciences" career was simple.

    "Because it teaches you how to think," he said. "It teaches you how to find solutions to complex problems which will be valuable to you regardless of what field you go into."

    He was correct, of course. While I did go on and take business courses in college (which should be REQUIRED for anyone who wants to call themselves a "business communicator," but that's an argument for another day) it was the thought discipline learned by taking math in grade and high school that has been the most enduring benefit to me throughout my career.

    Craig Jolley | December 2005

  • 8.Hey Shel. For the record, math was always my worst subject.

    You may have noticed a brief exchange in the IABC Caf? between myself and someone who was suggesting that, "There?s better things to spend your money on than research, if you?re any good and money is tight." My response was that research should be a basic component of any communications initiative.

    Too often, as practitioners, we have not fought the good fight with our employers or our clients. As a consultant, I spend considerable time and energy convincing clients that it is simply bad practice to 'skip the research part'. Fortunately, having spent most of my career in the public and not-for profit sectors, I have the speech down pat. Even if money is tight, research is critical. Otherwise you are simply shooting in the dark and more than likely throwing good money after bad.

    Warren Bickford | December 2005

  • 9.Hey, Warren.

    So there are three elements to consider here: research (up-front), monitoring, and measurement (to assess whether outcomes were met). If those were split out in the kind of research Holmes did, I'd bet the results came out the same -- people aren't doing them.

    Shel Holtz | December 2005 | Concord, CA

  • 10.You're only partially right, Shel. Yes, I don't update my blog nearly enough, but that's partly because I'm too busy fielding calls from all the people out there who are starting to get "measurement religion" and want to know how our dashboard system works. Seriously though, the number of calls we're getting has skyrocketed in the last six months. The good news is that at least as far as my narrow little world goes, there are twice as many people measuring now as there were a year ago. Even the state department has announced a "culture of meausurement" so there is hope out there. Where Andy is dead on is that PR Agencies, with the exception of a handful of really forward thinking folks like Kaplow and TechImage, are still in the 19th century, viewing measurement as something they have to do to keep the account, rather than something you need to do to make better decisions.

    KDPaine | December 2005 | Durham, NH

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