PR evaluation provides an opportunity for ongoing improvement and helps guide future campaigns in a successful direction, but more importantly, evaluation and measurement builds trust between client and agency and demonstrates the value agencies provide. Evaluation is what will keep public relations firms relevant in a world where blogging, tweeting and do-it-yourself reporting are the norm.
With the advent of social media, public relations agencies now have competition from places where there was never competition before, such as interactive agencies and engaged individuals. With predictions that social media will replace television and the main news sources altogether, where do public relations firms fit into that equation? In his recent article on AdWeek.com, Joseph Jaffe asked “how ‘relations’ between corporations and journalists equate with real people hanging out with other real people.” In other words, if corporations and journalists are now speaking directly to each other, how is there still a need for public relations?
While I disagree with Jaffe and believe that the public relations industry is not going to vanish, public relations practitioners will need to adapt to survive, and those who don’t will not be in existence for much longer. In a world where journalists are speaking directly with corporations, public relations practitioners now more than ever need to show their value. Part of that value is measuring relationships. Public relations measurement is a way for practitioners to put hard numbers and solid data in front of C-suite decision makers. The value that measurement provides clients is invaluable for public relations firms’ survival.
The authors of the USC Annenberg Gap IV study found that the public relations profession is not doing enough to demonstrate its value relative to other disciplines such as advertising and marketing. It is imperative for public relations practitioners to demonstrate quantitative means that go beyond simple numerical counts of media clips before even considering getting a larger share of the total communications expenditure.
In order to make this happen, public relations practitioners first need to get educated about measurement. In their analysis of the increasing impacts of social and other new media on public relations practice, Wright and Hinson found that while more than 90% of the study’s respondents encourage the use of research to measure various aspects of how blogs and social media are influencing their organization, only about one-third say their companies are conducting this measurement. The same study found that more than 90% of respondents very strongly agree that measurement and evaluation about blogs and social media should focus not only on outputs but also on content analysis and outcomes; however, in reality, most measurement is directed only at outputs. What’s interesting about the results of this study is that while public relations practitioners are aware that measurement is important, very few are actually conducting meaningful measurement, and are still just counting outputs.
Public relations practitioners need to think beyond outputs as evaluation and realize that for public relations to remain an item on the marketing budget there needs to be a direct link between programs and achieving the objectives of the corporation. Building measurement into proposals for services should be the norm and building evaluation into budgets should be essential.
This is a change that those in the public relations industry should embrace. Social media are actually putting the “public” back into public relations, and who better to measure relationships with the public than the practitioners who have been influencing them for years?
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