Seat at the Table

A digital rainforest has probably been destroyed to publish the amount of research dedicated to measuring the success of public relations programs.  I’ve always found this a bit curious as it would seem that only one area of measurement really counts - the opinion of the targeted audience.  Everything else (media measurement etc) is just measurement of tactical output, not strategic success.

I often point to political campaigns as the best example of successful public relations campaigns.  Being a zero sum game, these PR campaigns can’t afford to focus on awareness, media measurement or other indicators of tatical success.  They either impact the opinion and behavior of their audience (i.e., get their votes) or they don’t.  To track how well they are doing during the campaign they don’t sit around and measure articles, they do opinion polls.

For those PR people that don’t follow political campaigns, the methodology can be (over)simplified as follows:

1. Ask people what they think of the company or product before a campaign.
2. Ask them during and at the conclusion of the campaign.
3. If the campagin was successful then it will show in this opinion survey. 
4. If you need tactical measurement, then you can ask what messages, media articles, speeches etc had an impact.

So why don’t more public relations teams do this?  I would suggest several reasons:

• Meaningful reputation changes come with meaningful business change.  PR teams usally just try and communicate around changes already made.  Some more business smarts and a little speaking up might give public relations executives a role in determining business moves such as product packaging, customer service scripts, product offerings, CEO compensation and other public actions that drive reputation.  See the recent Toyota post as a good example.
• To be able to offer business advice the public relations function must have a complete operational and financial understanding of the business as well as be completely audience researched based.  Two areas that are often weaknesses.  Instead, we offer counsel mostly based on our opinion and business understanding tends to be superficial at best (how often do you see business advice counsel offered along with the operational and financial impact).
• To have a true impact, public relations must be a truly integrated discipline that makes strong (read: big spend) use of tools like advertising.  Yes, advertising is still one of the most effective ways of hammering a message and position into an audiences head. 

If public relations ever wants truly business leadership success, it will need to stop presenting senior executives with tactical output like so-called share of voice and media analysis.  Senior management cares about one thing - business success.  They want to know what reputation will get them there, how to get that reputation and, along the road, if they are gaining that reputation.  And, for the most part, they want this based on research, not opinion.  If you’re not convinced, just take a look at what goes into those billion dollar ad campaigns.