I’ve railed recently about the lack of professional standards in our industry and how they hold us back. Another practice element sorely in need of improvement is measurement.

Other departments (operations, finance, sales) are obsessed with numbers and measurement, and guess what? The cream of the crop from those departments rises to the top and gets to the C-suite. Our department, all worried about “relationships” and “awareness” but short on the metrics to prove our worth, is forever stuck in middle management. When was the last time a CEO came out of the communications function?

One of the ways an industry improves in a particular area is to set up a competition and give out awards for industry leaders. And that’s the driving force of this blog post — to let you know that the deadline for applying for the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for PR is coming up soon: August 15. Winners will be feted at the Institute for Public Relations Summit on Measurement in October in Portsmouth, NH.

This award — named for Jack Felton, founder of the IPR Commission for PR Measurement & Evaluation — recognizes excellence in public relations research, measurement and evaluation. The award’s primary objective is to identify superb examples of research used to support public relations practice, and to publish them as case studies on the Institute for Public Relations website. You can see the 2008 winners here, and all the winning submissions can be found at that site on other pages.

How important is measurement? Let measurement diva and IPR Commission member Angie Jeffrey convince you:

“All of us on the IPR Commission are passionate about the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award because it is truly designed to reward practitioners who prove themselves genuine leaders in our field by utilizing research and measurement to get the best possible results for their organizations or clients.

In today’s economy particularly, no one can afford programming that doesn’t hit the right target audience with the right messages to gain the right business outcomes. The only way to really do that is to utilize research both formatively in campaign creation, in measurement throughout the campaign execution, and in analysis at the end to pull ROI.

I wouldn’t be caught dead in PR today without making sure my programs were fully accountable to my CEO!”

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

1. Define the objectives of your PR program, and what you hope to accomplish with a measurement report (e.g., increase your budget, get more internal support)
2. Define the audiences of the PR program, and ask yourself: How does a good relationship with your various target audiences benefit your organization?
3. Prioritize your audiences, and be brutal about which ones are most important to your success
4. Determine a benchmark: what keeps your boss up at night? Keeping up with the competition? Staying ahead? In other words, who or what will you be comparing yourself to over time?
5. Select the right measurement tool to measure your success against your objectives. Which tool will you use, and what will it measure? Will it tell you what you need to know about whether you are moving toward your objectives?

“The authors believe that the profession is doing itself a great disservice by not directing a sufficient percentage of its resources to the development and adoption of more sophisticated forms of evaluation.

This is particularly true when assessing PR budgets relative to their closest rivals, advertising budgets, which are (generally) carefully measured and monitored for effectiveness.

It will be difficult for PR to get a larger share of the total communications expenditure without quantitative means that go well beyond primitive numerical counts of media clips and a hypothetical tally of impressions”

Other key findings regarding evaluation:

• Organizations remain reluctant or unable to allocate adequate resources to PR evaluation, preferring to focus on execution. At a time when the profession is under increasing pressure to demonstrate its value in “hard” terms, this may be a dangerous, self-defeating posture.
• Still, given the average expenditure of just 6% of budget on evaluation, the authors believe that the PR profession is not doing enough to demonstrate its value relative to other disciplines.
• The differences in evaluation metrics used in organizations reporting to the C-Suite versus marketing were striking. The former were far more strategic and organizational in nature, while the latter were far more publicity and sales-oriented.

• Organizations that reported to the C-Suite were more likely to utilize a combination of evaluation metrics that included using:
  • Contribution to market share
  • Contribution to profitability
  • Contribution to salesInfluence on corporate cultureInfluence on employee attitudes/morale
  • Influence on stakeholder awareness
  • Influence on stakeholder opinions

• Organizations that reported to marketing were more likely to use only the total number of clips and total number of clips in top tier media.
• The absence of reliable and widely accepted tools for measuring PR effectiveness (other than those measuring media-related activities) may also lie behind the low percentages of PR budgets dedicated to evaluation.
• The movement continues away from the traditional quantifiable measures of clips, ad equivalency, impressions, total circulation, etc.
• Measuring reputation remains a favored methodology – this despite the lack of any widely adopted method for doing so.
• Measures that financial analysts and senior management most rely on to track progress – such as influence on stock performance, contribution to profitability, to market share and to sales – are ranked very low by respondents, possibly because of the lack of reliable tools that can measure the impact of PR on those vectors.Yet detachment from such traditional progress measures that mean the most to senior management may contribute to any remaining skepticism held by senior management toward the communications function.

The Strategic Public Relations Center at USC has released its annual study of Generally Accepted Practices in internal PR departments, and it is chock-full of insights that should be valuable both to inside communicators and outside consultants.

The study looks at practices across-the-board including budgets, evaluation, reporting lines, use of outside agencies, management’s perceptions of PR, PR activities and integration with other departments. Over 500 internal communicators took part in the study, including participants from public and private companies as well as governmental agencies and non-profits.

The purposes of the study were as follows:

• Assess the effectiveness of PR techniques
• Develop new techniques
• Maximize recognition among senior management of the value of effective, ethical techniques
• Help to define the evolving role of PR
• Elevate the skills of practitioners

It’s a massive and thorough review of current best practices — so much so that I will break it down for you starting next week in a series of posts that summarize the findings and best practices in each of the categories above.

But if you want to get a head start, you can download the whole thing yourself here.

• The rise of user-generated content (‘UGC’) and blogging means that there is a growing need to be able to monitor, engage with, and respond to what is being said about you, your brand, product or service online.
• Another way of identifying the influential voices is to go into online communities and get to know people by talking to them
  • Discussion and remarks in forums and bulletin boards account for a very large proportion of comments made about brands.
• The idea of brands posting covertly on forums or bulletin boards is “a big no-no”. It can backfire spectacularly if company employees masquerading as normal people are identified as brand representatives.
  • The “embarrassing dad syndrome” is also to be avoided (where brands turn up when they are not really wanted).
  • If brand representatives are taking part in forums it is important to get the tone right and to be as candid as possible.

This is a long-overdue baby step by the media to get some credit for its online readership.

For PR, it means that we will have a credible source of circulation figures to show not only the value of print placements, but also how many people also saw the story online (at least in its original form).

KD Payne, the PR Measurement guru, gave a great presentation about “measuring the ROI of social media.” If you’re interested, she’ll be posting her presentation on her website. (free reg. required)

In keeping with the media-specific theme of this blog, here’s the information from her slide about the penetration of blogs into mainstream media coverage:

• 51% of journalists read blogs regularly
• 28% rely on blogs for day-to-day reporting
• 70% read blogs for work-related tasks
• 33% say they use blogs for uncovering breaking news or scandals
• 43% use blogs to research and reference facts