Seat at the Table

Professor Louis Lowenstein, a former (now deceased) Columbia University business law professor had a line every senior public relations counselor should remember: “You manage what you measure.”

To those public relations professionals that see themselves as lead reputation counselors – do your measurement reports analyze media relations and social media measurement or do they measure reputation?   If the former, then you are a media relations or social media (or both) professional.  if the latter, then you are a reputation counselor.  Do you measure it all?  Then you are probably a well informed senior corporate communications / public relations professional.

I raise this as I regularly hear public relations professionals talk about managing reputation but then have measurement reports that focus on media or social media measurement.   Measuring media has never been a substitute for measuring reputation.  It has always been a good measurement of the effectiveness of the media relations function, but that is but one function in a communications department (even if it is a central one). 

Lately, companies have tried to use social media to measure reputation as social media is heavily driven by user generated content, meaning it has the voice of the audience.  However, only a small segment of the popular is actively engaged in the conversation (see slide 20 of Accenture’s research which includes how many people are not regularly engaged in the social part of social media – click here).  As a result, if you rely on social media measurement to measure public attitude and reputation, you may be getting a skewed portion of the population and one that does not represent broader sentiment (see an example in this AdAge article on the Twitter outcry to a Motrin campaign here).

So what should those who see themselves as reputation managers do?  Look to measure sentiment wi th the broader audience.  Ideally, companies would regularly conduct surveys.  This can be cost prohibitive so, in that client situation, we look at solutions that at least give us a voice of the audience – small virtual focus groups, short surveys, analysis of search engine data and so on.  This does not replace other forms of measurement but we’ve found it is a good start in knowing, directly, what the reputation of a company is with our key audiences.