1. Do you want to be seen as drivers of PR campaigns (after decisions are made) or PR counsel (as a part of decisions) – Presenting measurement data is often a historical look at campaigns.  However, it can also be a forward looking process that shows how PR can play a critical role in making better business decisions.
2. Three rules to follow  – Take an audience research based approach to presenting to your CEO (it’s harder to ignore the audience than it is the PR executive’s advice), use business language and provide business counsel.
3. Make your counsel actionable – Don’t wait for the CEO to ask what to do; let your data show what the options are to consider and why.
4. Present data driven business counsel – Valued PR counselors are that because they are presenting business (not just PR) counsel backed up by data (not opinion).   In the idea situations, business decisions consider the PR impact as part of the decision making process.
5. Focus on audience data – Even for CEOs that love to see their name in print, it’s the audience data that is critical to business decision making and, by extension, draws you closer to them as a trusted business counsel.
6. Look forward, not back – Measurement systems and presentations often focus mostly on what has been done.  CEOs, however, are always looking forward.  So be sure to measure what has been done, but then quickly and substantially focus on what the company can learn from the measurement data and how that data can help steer better future decisions (and communications).
7. Let the visuals present a data driven story – Measurement dashboards should not simply be some dials reflecting PR metrics but a series of charts that tell the CEO a data driven story – one that can be used to make business decisions.  As an example, I showed a dashboard that started with news share of voice and ended with data on what search terms consumers were increasingly using.  This showed an upward trend on what topics people were interested in (and what language and brands they used to look for those topics).  This type of information can be used for anything from product development to marketing decisions.

Bulldog PR Measurement Summit_Translating PR Results to Business Results

The research looked at 100,000 Facebook users as well as the location 4,500 e-mail messages received.  As noted by the chart below, the more local the sender-receiver, the higher the density of messages. 

This is consistent with what I’ve seen in every day life.  People connect online with those they know offline – and people tend to know people locally.  Not to say there are not global benefits as the tale of lower density of messages may reflect that valuable global reach we did not two decades ago.  However, this type of data is an important reminder that when reaching many audiences, having a local, geographic focus is an important part of being targeting the demographic.

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.