Measurement and PR: IABC MN Spring Conference Recap
Category: Blog - May 16, 2011
I spent Friday representing Beehive PR at IABC MN’s spring conference. The focus was measurement and the “goddess” of communications measurement, Katie Delahaye Paine (@kdpaine and http://kdpaine.blogs.com/), presided over a good portion of the day.
For those not able to attend the session, here is a recap of some of my key takeaways. Some of these may just be good reminders of things you already know, some are quotes to hang on our walls and remind us of the value of the work we do and some may be new ideas that provide a spark of innovation for you.
Measurement Tools
There are many tools out there to help us collect content about the marketplace and our communications campaigns. But there is not one perfect tool that gives us all the information we need and no tool can do the synthesis and analysis it takes to get true, clean measurements. All measurement programs need a human element. After all, as Katie Paine said, “Research without insight is just trivia.”
We are often asked, so how much is measurement going to cost? The recommendation at today’s conference: spend 10% of your budget to see if the other 90% is working.
Measuring Employee Communications
Yearly surveys of employees just aren’t relevant. Businesses are evolving, programs are transforming, new programs are introduced and organizational structures change monthly, sometimes weekly. The recommendation is to do quarterly, shorter pulse surveys to get key employee insights and measures that you can act on in a more timely manner that matches how quickly your business is changing.
And in terms of surveys, 10-minute surveys are just too long. Keep it to 5 minutes and see your response rate increase.
Once you do the surveys and implement employee communication measurement, you can make informed decisions about your internal programs. When Thomson Reuters measured their employee communications, they saw differences in the engagement and readership across their global communities. How did they respond? They created a global editorial board to identify and create content that was relevant to employees at each geography.
Measurement for the C-Suite
When the C-Suite is meeting and talking about the bottom line, communications professionals can’t talk about “hits” or “likes,” according to Paine. And we agree. The success of a communications campaign, in an executive’s eyes, has to track back to business results—whether that is tied to sales, cost savings, leads or other business goals. “It can no longer be about how many people you reached, but how the people you reached responded,” said Paine.
What’s next in measurement?
Because companies have been measuring mainstream media for so long, they have historical data that predicts how many leads and sales a traditional media placement can correlate to. Social media isn’t there yet. But Paine said soon we will have that data available to help us predict more accurately what social media engagement can translate to in terms of business results. Our clients are asking for this all the time—we can’t wait for social media to age enough that we can look into its past to inform, and perhaps even predict, future social media campaign performance.
- April Nelson, Account Director
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