PR Needs to Measure Its "Beautiful Snowflakes"

Many PR people view the articles written about their organization like snowflakes - each one beautiful and unique. But, in many ways, that shouldn’t be true if they’ve done their job correctly. A journalist may take some license in how they present the information but you should be able to look across multiple articles and see some consistency in message, spokesperson, products, tone, etc.
Increasingly PR pros need to understand that articles need to be treated like data points that add up to something much greater than their “feel good” impact that comes from seeing the company's name in print.

The basis for good PR measurement comes from finding ways turn words into data. The modern PR team needs to get comfortable with topics like database management, meta tags and correlation if they want to show the business value they deliver.

Key to this effort is setting up strong systems and tools that allow teams to look at individual elements like message pick up, executive presence, tonality, performance on key competitive attributes and other elements of the earned coverage and correlate them to marketing and business data like web traffic, brand perception, net promoter score, MQL, AQL and even sales.

 Here's a couple ways to get started with that process:

•  Database your and the competition’s coverage - every piece if possible but at the very least a representative sample from key publications, websites and other outlets. Only by looking at coverage in a consistent way over time will you be able to identify the factors that have the greatest impact on your business data. Capturing your competitors coverage gives you a way to benchmark yourself against industry performance.
  Databases can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or a more complex online system but be careful to distinguish between content collection or monitoring systems and a measurement solution. Content collection systems can help you populate your database and may offer some services to meta tag that coverage with message pick-up, tonality, competitor mentions, etc. but unless you have customized your database to align with your communications goals, you’ll be overwhelmed with data that offers very little value.

•  Meta tag based on how you are spending your PR program dollars. If you are spending money to drive product reviews or executive visibility or trade show briefings, you'll need a way to evaluate what coverage resulted and the quality of that coverage based on the goals of those programs. Your database should allow you to identify the factors that drove coverage so you can gauge how those programs are performing, not just in driving coverage but also where they contribute to business performance.
• Start integrating your data into marketing reviews. Only by taking the time to review what you've collected against business data will you start to uncover the impact. It may take several review cycles before patterns emerge as you isolate various factors. Don’t over commit to how quickly you will be able to show value from the measurement program. You may need 6-9 months to get the database structured correctly and find correlations with other marketing and business data.
• Value quality over quantity. Many measurement projects start as an attempt to perform a coverage census – namely, capture every single mention of the company or organization. Instead, look to perform a survey by capturing a representative sample of coverage and focus your resources on improving the quality of insights you are deriving from your database. That could mean improving the meta tag structure to allow for better correlations or spending more time teasing out insights or streamlining the project to focus on only the high value programs so you can better tie those results to the business impact.

While PR will continue to be an art, applying science to how we portray our results can help ensure that the winter wonderland our beautiful snowflakes create get just as many “oohs” and “aahs” from our colleagues as the coverage itself.