Measurement
Evolution, Importance & Best
Practice
Mazen Nahawi
Managing Director, Media Watch
President, News Group International

The Evolution of Measurement

How did it all start?
- CFO syndrome:
- Did not accept PR people as just “creative”
- Demanded accountability, results
- CFO’s took the decision for PR pros on how to measure
- The best they could do is liken it to advertising
“CFO’s managed public relations evaluation as if it were an extension
of management accounting – that it was based entirely on quantitative
measures and could only be seen from a financial point of view.”

Timeline
1970s CFOs at Fortune 500 companies demand more value
AVE measures and Clip Counts dominate
1980s PR refines AVE to EMV, introduces multiples
Experts being challenging AVE/Clip Counts
Growing use of Field Studies; borrowed from Ad
industry
1990s Associations formed for measurement
Breakthrough: media content analysis widespread
New terminology, best practice methodology defined

1990s Associations formed for measurement
Media Content Analysis widespread, automated
Several major clients stop using AVE
New terminology, best practice methodology defined
2000s Integrated measurement well defined
Media Content Analysis vastly improved
(messages, favorability)
Engagement, Conversation and Advocacy metrics
Introduction of dynamic + integrated dashboards
Specialized field studies for PR widespread

Why Measurement is no longer
Optional:
• PR at the crossroads of necessity or secondary importance
• Especially true for emerging markets
• Make the case to every client, colleague
Why is PR important?

The importance of measurement
#1 An ethical foundation for PR practice
#2 Creating a balance of credibility
#3 Retention: keeping PR in demand among (clients, practitioners)
#4 The Key to greater budgets and investment in PR

The importance of measurement:
#1 An ethical foundation for PR
• Measurement: business requirement +ethical guide to everything i n life
- Every business social segment is measurement driven (height, weight, medical readings, school
grades, Intelligence Quotient, home value, electric bill, stock values, corporate growth, GDP,
unemployment..)
- Ethical obligation to clients (they are paying for something rea l)
- Ethical obligation to your staff and the PR industry (will we gr ow
Or will we wither)
• Accountability is non-negotiable it is part of every business practice
• If you aren’t measuring, you’re not managing your company’s assets responsibly.
• Clients should choose between data-driven decision making based on one of two I’s - Instinct OR
Intelligence

The importance of measurement:
#2 Creating a balance of credibility
without measurement PR is relegated to:
Artists vs. Accountants
Charm P&L’s
Ideas Earnings reports
Creativity Productivity indices
with measurement:
PR-focused organization
Integrating PR throughout organization on all levels
Respecting PR as a driver of corporate growth
Demanding good PR as a guardian of reputation

#3 Retention: keeping PR in demand
Retention Problems: The Agency View
• Clients do not value work done by PR professionals
• PR professionals are overworked, under-appreciated
• Job role has become mundane, lacking innovation
• PR professionals are leaping to the client side
• Transient nature of PR positions creates skills shortages
Retention Problems: The Client Perspective
• Clients recognize the importance of PR
• Do not trust the organizational depth of agencies; Dislike lack of experience
• Do not respect standard approach to PR problems
• Results too limited and based on simple and ineffective outputs
• Desire is for corporate objective-based objectives
• With poor results and lack of understanding comes less funding

The importance of measurement:
The vicious PR anti-retention cycle
Skills shortage Disenchantment
Bad recruitment Less innovation
Inexperience, less innovation Lower budgets
Reduced credibility, respect Poor results

PR without measurement PR with measurement
Skills shortage Competitive skills
Bad recruitment Expertise-based recruitment
Inexperience, less innovation Planning depth, innovative approaches
Reduced credibility, respect High credibility, demand and appreciation
Poor results Objectives-based results
Lower budgets Greater investment in PR
Less innovation Evolving best practice, constant innovation
Disenchantment PR: indispensable

The importance of measurement:
#4 key to greater PR investment
• PR in emerging markets equal to 2% of advertising spend
• Asia Pacific Ad spending is $24.8 billion (Nielsen) PR spending estimated at $180
million
• PR is seen as a low cost add-on at the C-level
• PR is not yet recognized as the only marketing communications practice that reaches
all milestones on the customer journey from awareness to understanding to intent to
action/advocacy –
MEASUREMENT IS THE KEY TO PROVING IT!

Best Practice Methodology:
What are you measuring for?
• Aligning PR campaigns to organizational objectives
• Understanting the audience
• Measuring throughout a PR campaign
Output, Outtake, Outcome

The pre-measurement start:
Understanding organizational objectives
Aligning PR to organizational objectives
• Understanding organizational objectives
• Understanding organizational needs and objectives, including doc umenting them – making
sure they are defined, validated and practical.
• Comparing your objectives with those of your competitors.
• Positioning organizational objectives within marketing condition s

Building a PR campaign
around organizational objectives
• Documenting organizational objectives in a plan that aims at building relations,
sending out effective messages, understanding market messages.
• Creating a culture of PR and measurement that ensures the organizational objectives
are driving the campaign, not the PR pro or the agency.
• Measuring PR performance by benchmarking against key organizational success
measures: sales, market share, employee turnover, positive reputation and
innovation.
• Defining organizational goals
• Audience research (quantitative, qualitative) and alignment
• Message research and alignment
• Measurement strategy and resources
• Actionable measurement results; responsiveness strategy

Measuring throughout the PR campaign:
Aligning outputs, outtakes and outcomes with your
actions, messages and results

Output measures
Defining output:
“Did you do what you planned on doing, did you do it on time, and
did you get the coverage you intended.”
All actions and volumetric results that are part of a PR campaign, including the preparation
of a number of media releases, the planning and implementation of events,
interviews and other actions aimed at reaching and influencing a target audience.”
ATTENTION

Output measures
Actions Planned Vs. Actions implemented
> Number of PR activities (interviews, press conferences, media releases)
> Timeliness of activities
> Quality of production, dispatch
> Budgeted vs actual costs (including GRP, CPM measures)
Considerations:
Will a lag in actions implemented reduce overall effectiveness?
Take the appropriate steps and adjust: desired outcomes can still be achieved.

Output measures
Reaction Received Vs. Reaction Expected
> Number of media releases accepted, published
> Attendance of events, depth of interviews
> Volume of media coverage
> Distribution of media coverage and associated demographics
Considerations:
DEFINE SUCCESS BEFORE YOU BEGIN:
DID YOU REACH YOUR AUDIENCE?
Have you reached the correct target? Did you get the coverage you needed?
If not, adjust and start again until you get the coverage/attendance you need.

Output measures
Messages Crafted Vs. Messages Received/Published
> Percentage of coverage that included your messages
> Where the messages in full or partly, in context, incomplete, misunderstood or
misrepresented
> Did the correct set of diverse messages reach the correct target audiences, especially
among media, journalists and audiences attending an event.
> What messages did YOU receive?
DID YOU MESSAGES COME ACROSS IN YOU COVERAGE/EVENT?
NO MESSAGE = NO SUCCESS

Outtake measures
Defining outtake:
“Did your target audience see your message? Did they believe it?”
“Measurement of what audiences have understood and/or heeded and/or responded to a
communication product’s call to seek further information from PR messages prior to
measuring an outcome.”
“Audience reaction to the receipt of a communication product..including favorability,
recall, retention of the message embedded in the product.”
PERCEPTION

Outtake measures
Salience: where are you in the mind of your target?
> Your coverage may have been published: but was it seen?
> It may have been seen: was it understood?
> If it has been understood? Was it believed/accepted
> Where are you in the mind of your audience: what are they thinking?
> Are their thoughts connected to your organizational objectives
Considerations:
ARE YOU PERCEIVED THE WAY YOU WANT TO BE?
If yes, continue your campaign with confidence; if no, adjust and start a conversation with
your audience.

Outcome measures
Defining outcome:
“Did Audience behavior to your product or company change? Did
the right people show up? Did sales increase?”
“Quantifiable changes in awareness, knowledge, attitude, opinion, and behavior levels that
occur as a result of PR program or campaign; an effect, consequence, or impact of a
set or program of communications activities or products, and may be either short
term, long term.”
ACTION/CONSEQUENCE

Worst Practice Methodology
• The case against AVE/EMV metrics
• Other critical mistakes

Avoid AVE
Arguments you can use with stubborn clients
 What AVE do you assign to negative articles? Should you pay someone?
 You are mentioned in one line of a full page article: please calculate and AVE?
 Does anyone really pay rate card?
hmmm – have all AVE’s been inaccurate since the dawn of time?
 Does anyone really pay rate card?
 Doesn’t the integrity of the media/journalist impact article credibility?
 I have a stack of clips worth $18 billion – why are my sales not improving?
AVE’s never match up with reality: and CEOs know it

Other Critical Mistakes
 Assuming you know the answer
 Starting a PR effort without measurement (especially objectives, alignment)
 Thinking Measurement begins at the end
 Giving up because it’s time consuming
 I cannot afford monitoring, analysis – I’ll skip it: Some measurement is better than
none, and today measurement is low cost, easily accessible and high impact
 Dashboards are the answer: no, there is no silver bullet – measurement is a process
 Going ‘Deep’ - the deeper you go the more certain it is that
you will drown

From websites to citizen
journalism: how to measure
social media
• Why is this important, how is it different?
• Social media platforms and metrics
• Defining PR measurement for new media
• Measurement strategies

Why is this important, different?
• Marketing communications, PR are no longer exclusively in charge of messaging
• Communications is transforming into conversations: message-based activity is now
a two way street
• Power, decision making and influence are decidedly in the hands of our target
audiences
• Traditional media remains important - but cannot work alone, it must remain in step
with cyberspace
“If you talked to people the way advertising talks to people they would punch you
in the face.”

WOM: viral speed - rapid consequences
• About 67% of the economy runs on word of mouth yet %5 of communications
spending is online
• 80% of companies think they are giving their customers a great experience: only 8%
of customers share that opinion..
• 1,540 people complain before a single complaint is filed to management
• 7% increase in positive word of mouth, or 2% reduction in negative word of mouth
leads to a 1% increase in sales
• 10% of your audience fuels 90% of your word of mouth
• 20% of media we read is CGM (50% for under 25 year olds)

Social media platforms that you must
measureshould we be measuring?Wh
• The Internet Meta Tags, Meta Data, SE cahces
• The World Wide Web Search engines - Google, Portals - Yahoo
Websites B2B exchanges, news sites, company sites
Blogs Corporate, NGO, personal
Social media networks Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace
Podcasts Radio casts via the Internet
• Email/RSS Newsletters, email dispatches, RSS feeds
• Mobile Internet Text messaging, MMS, 3G communications

What should we be looking for? should we be
measuring?Wh
1. BEHAVIOUR
Engagement Contribution Advocacy
Friends Content creation Brand advocates
Conversation by source Voting Recommendations
Wider engagement metrics Tagging Unit of virality (right sections?)
Visiting/reading Conversational index
Downloading Participants
Volume
Topics
2. PERCEPTION 3. CONSEQUENCES
– Net Promoter Score - Sales figures
– Conversations - Enquiries
– Sentiment - Lead generation
– Ratio of positivity
– WOM unit
– Authority

Engagement metrics
Standard metrics on how many people are paying attention
Hits Number of files activated during a visit
Unique Visitors Single human* visitor per site/month
Page views Individual pages opened by visitors
Time spent on site Seconds, minutes on site by visitor
Total time spent per user Tally of all time spent on site by unique visitor
Frequency of visits Repeat calls by unique visitor to site
Depth of visits Measures of contribution, action on site

Essential Tools:
What are you measuring with?
You implement pre-campaign research +
measure for output, outtake, outcome
By using media content analysis and field
studies

Essential tools
Access to a measurement library
- Build a library
- Buy white papers
- FAQ for your clients
Association membership
- AMEC
- IPR Measurement Commission
- MEPRA
Collaboration, training and workshops
- Champion the cause of measurement with your clients, colleagu es and competitors
- Yes, there are measurement companies out there
Internal data
- Financial/Sales information

Essential tools
Media Directories
- Make sure you are up to date with the media
- Media Disk
- Media Atlas Gold
Content sources
- Comprehensive media monitoring (Cision, Durrants, Precise, TNS Media Watch)
- Online content resources (Google news, Technorati, Radian6, Meltwater)
Field Study capability
surveymonkey.com; yougov; Zoomerang
Dashboards
Integrate all your data in a well programmed dashboard that incorporates all data and automates
reporting in the format you require

Thank You!
• For more information on measurement, write me:
mazen@mediawatchme.com
mazen@newsgroup.ae
• Subscribe to the first edition of PR360
• To learn more about dashboards
• http://saliencedashboard.com
• Or call me at 009714-3564100
009714-3902890