The first part of this post is a guest post by Gary McCormick, APR, Fellow PRSA, president & CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).
The second part is my take… with the exceedingly original sub-head, “My take.”
Measure me this
How many times have you been asked, “Well, what is the value of public relations?” or “Can you really measure that?” when working with a client, or trying to get a bump in your department’s budget?
Probably quite often.
At PRSA, we’ve been keenly focused over the past year on re-establishing and enhancing the strategic value of public relations.
From our Business Case for Public Relations, to a revamped advocacy program, we recognize the need for clearly demonstrating our profession’s value, and at the same time, developing the next generation of successful practitioners.
It’s with the latter in mind that we were delighted to establish a partnership in October with NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies that will enable cooperation between PRSA, NYU, its students and the professional on a number of vital initiatives.
Gary was kind enough to sit down with me over Skype to chat a little about this initiative. Here’s a clip.
One planned initiative will involve the development and advancement of a comprehensive set of standards to measure results of public relations campaigns.
PRSA has been one of the leading proponents of the Barcelona Principles, which seek to establish new metrics for practitioners to measure the value of their results.
With that in mind, we’re thrilled to be able to tap into the insight of NYU’s public relations professors””many of whom are considered leading experts in measurement””to establish stronger and more widely adopted measurement standards throughout the profession.
Gary said this initiative aims at bringing measurement best practices into the classroom. He elaborates a little in this video.
The development of standardized evaluation and measurement techniques has been a topic of ongoing research, discussion and debate for years. The advent of digital and social media has made this challenge far more complex and vital than ever before.
Some areas of measurement and metrics we’re excited to collaborate with NYU on include:
~ Social media measurement: best practices, industry standards and techniques
~ The elimination of AVEs (advertising value equivalents) and the establishment of new value metrics for public relations
~ Focus on educating professionals, clients and the business community on outputs versus outcomes
I asked Gary if, by knowingly or unknowingly generating misperceptions of what “PR” is, we as an industry have helped perpetuate why measurement still isn’t standardized across the industry.
What are some core objectives of public relations measurement you and your colleagues are focused on?
Gary McCormick, APR, Fellow PRSA, has been active in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) since 1985. He currently serves as the Chair and CEO of the 22,000-member professional association. McCormick also serves on the board of directors for Plank Center for Public Relations Leadership at the University of Alabama and the University of Florida Department of Public Relations Advisory Council; served as the president of the PRSA Foundation in 2006 and 2007, and has been a co-chair of the Champions for PRSSA since 2005. He has been recognized for his contributions to public relations education as the 2006 Honoree of the Educators Academy David Ferguson Award.
Title image: Edgely Cesar via Flickr, Creative Commons
My take
Measurement should be, but still isn’t, the jewel in the crown of PR. I haven’t been studying or talking about it nearly as long as gurus like Katie Paine, Don Bartholomew, or Richard Bagnall, but even I am sometimes exhausted by what seems to be the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back syndrome it suffers from.
We’ve had the Institute for Public Relations talking about best practices for years. This year we’ve seen the adoption of the Barcelona Principles at AMEC’s European Summit on Measurement, IPR coming out strongly opposing AVE (ad value equivalency) as a PR measure, and now an AMEC-PRSA partnership.
Given how long everyone’s been talking about this, you’d think something would have changed by now.
I do think part of the problem is that measurement isn’t really focused on, or at best, glossed over, in the classroom.
Don’t take it just from me. Take it from Nick Lucido, a PR student, and a very smart one at that.
On his blog, Nick says:
“Students are not taught about new practices, since proprietary tools and techniques often remain with hidden with the agencies and companies that create them.”
This problem is self-evident when students enter the professional world and have no clue as to what smart measurement is. So boom, they latch onto what their senior colleagues – and oftentimes the “marketing” folk – think is “good” measurement.
So by the time they realize that they should be focusing on outcomes, it’s too late.
They’ve been sucked into a vortex of bad measurement, and now they can’t change their habits, even if they’ve changed their thinking, because now their jobs depend on spewing numbers that don’t mean anything.
The other part of the problem
is that many organizations still think that AVE is the gold standard for PR measurement.
I can’t tell you how many Very Smart People I’ve talked to – including some at firms providing measurement solutions – who know that AVE is crap, but whose clients insist on using it as a measure of success.
When your job – or one of your largest clients – is at stake, would you refuse to give them AVE? You tell me.
Utopia aside.
Image: Felipe Venâncio via Flickr, Creative Commons
The solution really comes back to education, doesn’t it?
It’s not that folks don’t get what “good” measurement entails.
But if it hasn’t been ingrained in you from the get-go (school), and you’re constantly battling those who can’t – or won’t – change their views, especially if they don’t fully understand what the practice of public relations entails, you get tired.
And you stop battling.
Maybe the PRSA-NYU partnership will be the catalyst we’ve all been yearning for.
Maybe it’ll be change we can believe in.
Maybe this time it’ll stick.
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[…] that much later, we landed in Knoxville, where Gary McCormick, former PRSA Chair and who has made an appearance at WUL, very kindly picked me up at the airport and drove me to HGTV headquarters (he works there, and did […]
[…] that much later, we landed in Knoxville, where Gary McCormick, former PRSA Chair and who has made an appearance at WUL, very kindly picked me up at the airport and drove me to HGTV headquarters (he works there, and did […]
This really is an awesome program and I wish it could be more accessible to students. It’s a great resource that I wish could be more widely used. I have done some of the blended learning ( http://www.tegrity.com ) and that has also really helped my students.
Wow, great conversation. And thanks for the shoutout! Shonali, you are partly right, it IS about what is taught in school. Too many graduates come out bursting with words and not a clue about how to create a pivot table or do a regression analysis. However, Nick is dead wrong about the lack of tools. SAS provides all of its tools free to universities http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/04/15/sas-broadens-free-access-to-academic-analytics-tools.aspx — and there is no better analytical tool on the marketplace. KDPaine & Partners provides its tool free to qualified courses — just ask Craig Carroll at UNC. His students produced about 15 fabulous measurement reports to non-profits.
No, the problem is that most people gravitate to PR because they are “word” people and not numbers people, so metrics scare them. They can’t get passed their fears to find out just how useful and fun measurement can be.
And the other problem is the lack of teeth in the various “standards.”
The only way to change bad behavior is negative reinforcement. SO if PRSA and all of the organizations would simply make a statement and throw out every award entry that used AVEs — or didn’t have a link between the objectives and the results — we’d get somewhere. And, if more agencies like Weber stood up and said that they would adhere to the Barcelona Principles and eschew AVEs we’d see fewer clients demand them. And,if more clients defined success in terms of business outcomes rather than outputs we might actually rise to the level of respect that Gary would have us command.
But of course, Your Majesty. :)
I do think we have to give Nick the right to his opinion and experience. I know that you’ve been trying to help students for years, and I was lucky this year to be able to offer my students at Hopkins (though that’s their MA/Communication course, I don’t know how the undergrad program works) a trial of Radian6’s dashboard.
I honestly don’t know if this is standard practice at schools around the country, and it seems that might be one of the elements that the PRSA-NYU initiative is trying to introduce, but of course, I don’t know that for sure.
Hi Katie,
Thanks for passing this along. I didn’t know about it, but I’m definitely going to pass thing along to some of my professors–hopefully this can integrate with the curriculum. However, I stand by my belief many students won’t see or have access to these tools. Even though the opportunity might be out there, students depend on their faculty to be the ones integrating this in the classroom. I think there’s a two-way street in that students should be getting the internship experience that exposes them to these tools, but we need to encourage classroom changes.
Not every student is as lucky as Shonali’s students in having a professor who is ahead of the curve. I’m absolutely not faulting every single PR faculty member, but I do think we can all do a better job encouraging faculty to take advantage of these free opportunities.
PS, how awesome is it I get to chat with some awesome measurement rockstars? Thanks for including me in this conversation!
Thanks for the shout-out, Shonali. At the undergraduate level, I don’t think proprietary tools or metrics is the issue at all. It is that measurement really isn’t taught. I am not aware of any university that has a full course in PR/social media measurement or accountability. When I was teaching, it was one research-oriented course and measurement was a single lecture. Compounding this, new graduates will not find a lot of measurement education and training once they begin their careers. Most measurement ‘experts’ are self-taught. Until the industry invests more thought, time and training to the subject, we will not solve any of the really big issues. -Don B @Donbart
Don, I think you’re absolutely right. We really need to see measurement incorporated into courses in a much more holistic fashion, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that PRSA’s initiative will start to seed that.
Your point, Shonali, about education really being one of the biggest factors in whether new and old professionals truly understand and embrace new measurement standards is spot-on. And Nick Lucido’s anecdote from his own experience is a bit disconcerting, especially since a point of pride for many agencies is that they develop several of the new forms, techniques and tactics in PR measurement, and yet, how can they expect to bring many new hires who are competent enough to immediately understand and utilize those measurement techniques if they agencies themselves aren’t doing more to share the wealth and help the whole profession learn from their success?
In a way, it becomes a never-ending cycle. And in that regard, we, too, at PRSA greatly hope – and firmly believe – that our partnership with AMEC, and on the new professional/education side, our new partnership with NYU, will engender a far better understanding throughout the profession of best practices in measurement, while helping to forge career-long understanding by all professionals in standardized measurement practices.
@Keith Trivitt
Associate Director of Public Relations
Public Relations Society of America
Thanks, Keith, and thanks again for your help in facilitating my chat with Gary. I had a great time and he put up with my dogs barking intermittently, so he gets a gold star just for that. :)
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