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Companies are failing to capture vital information in terms of how PR affects their reputation, according to new research published by Harvard Public Relations. Although nearly a third of PR practitioners claim that measuring improvements in their reputation is one of the primary drivers for undertaking evaluation, just 16% of these are actually capturing this information.
According the to survey, conducted among 185 PR practitioners, the vast majority of those monitoring their reputation are doing so by evaluating media coverage in one form or another: measuring the volume and tone of coverage, analysing the positivity/negativity of coverage, making comparisons with a competitor’s media mentions or monitoring the messages that are being reported. Only the minority are measuring the impact on stakeholders via such activities as perception audits, customer surveys and brand awareness/recognition surveys etc.
“Can media coverage alone be a true reflection of a company’s reputation?”, asks Harvard MD, Chris Cartwright. “Can evaluation of this intermediary audience provide meaningful feedback, or can one only get a true picture by talking directly to the ultimate audience - ie existing and potential customers? In an age when companies’ reputations (and customer retention) depend more and more on asking their customers a simple question: ‘would you recommend us to another customer’, it may seem surprising that perception audits are so little used in the sphere of public relations evaluation.”
However, there was plenty of positive information in the report:
- 7 out of 10 PR practitioners agree that PR evaluation is an important part of their role
- Qualitative evaluation has been used for over three years by 34% of companies compared to 19% two years ago
- Companies that have never used qualitative evaluation has dropped to 12% from 22% two years ago
- The use of third party agencies has increased to 31% from 17% two years ago
The survey looks into a number of areas of PR evaluation including the main measurements being used, the qualitative measures in place, the aspects of the media being watched, opinions on the range of evaluation products/services currently available and what issues are holding companies back from doing more evaluation.
“One of the other fascinating results to emerge is the low number rating online PR as a key area to evaluate”, says Cartwright. Only 12% said this was the most important media to measure. “Today’s papers are tomorrow’s chip wrappers as opposed to ‘digital footprints which last forever, so I would have expected this figure to be much higher. However, as earlier research1 revealed, the majority of companies have yet to adopt social media strategies, so perhaps this is a figure we can expect to rise significantly in the near future”
Although the research served up many answers, it also posed the occasional question. Companies that handle their PR mainly via an agency are nearly three-times more likely to view evaluation as essential compared to those that undertake the majority of their work in-house. However, as this is not for the most obvious reason - evaluating the PR agency’s performance, which is low down on the list of priorities – we are left pondering the reasons why.
Click here for a copy of the report “Measurement and Evaluation in Public Relations”.
1. For earlier report “Social media within public relations” click here.
Reputation is one of the most important assets for any organisation, brand or individual, and also one of the greatest risks – and managing reputation, how a company is viewed by stakeholders, is central to the role of public relations. This was one of the findings of a debate hosted this year by our sister brand, Opinion Leader Research, when they gathered together some of the great and the good in the communications and PR world.
How striking then are some of the findings from Harvard PR’s evaluation survey – where we looked at how companies in the technology, telecoms and media space measure the effectiveness of their PR.
While many companies went much further than the clichéd concept of counting clippings, and focused on qualitative measurement of messages in the media, very few in our survey focused on managing reputation as a whole – in other words, positive penetration of messages to all stakeholders.
Why is this? Is it because reputation is only vaguely defined? Is it because reputation touches on so many unmeasurable areas? Is it too large an undertaking to measure reputation management programmes? Or more worryingly, is it because most companies have no systematic programme in place to manage or measure how they’re viewed by manifold stakeholders?
Maybe it’s a little of all of these.
We live in a rapidly changing world, and the job of the communications director is getting harder. While it would be an exaggeration to say that ten years ago, managing reputation meant handling the newspapers, and a bit of dabbling with the City analysts, it is certainly true now that a head of communications has a worryingly large stakeholder group to deal with: newspapers with vastly extended reach via their online editions; blogs and user generated content, from YouTube to Facebook to Second Life; customers and customer groups; staff; financial and industry analysts; shareholder activist groups; special interest groups; legislators…..the list goes on, and on…….
Nevertheless, however hard it may be, the PR industry needs to be more fleet of foot in proactively seeking to manage and measure its success in the wider and tougher arena of reputation management. Two examples: as we move from the age of deference (valuing the opinions of experts, management, newspapers, government etc) to reference (taking more notice of ‘people like us’, consumer feedback, blogs etc), PROs absolutely need to prioritise digital communications. In our survey only 12% said that measuring messages in the online world was the most important media to measure. Not only is it vital that PROs manage communication to editors in the online world, we also need to ensure our organisations are well-represented in all influential blogs, And, like it or not, we need to ensure that in any Google search, our business is the one that comes up first in the results - so Search Engine Optimisation will soon cease to be the terrain of the webmaster, and will fall into the role of the Communications Director.
Lord Bell, the chairman of Chime, defines reputation as ‘what you do, what you say, and what people say about you’, and in this respect, managing and measuring reputation therefore touches on everything a company does - from strategy to management style, where and how you make your goods, who sells it and how, how you treat employees, in essence all corporate strategy falls within its purview.
So, in focusing so much on media relations, PR professionals are massively limiting their area of influence. The industry must do more to measure its success in reaching all stakeholders: focus groups and audience research, customer satisfaction surveys, staff engagement surveys, environmental audits, influencer perception audits, customer recommendations, web traffic, SEO - all of these are true measures of PR effectiveness.
We believe there is a lot more to the communications role than ever before and a real appetite for more definitive measures of reputation that will help organisations to understand what they need to pay attention to and how to improve their reputation management. In the Opinion Leader event, 83% of participants agree that a single, easily understood measure of reputation would be a significant advance.
Harvard’s next step in moving the debate forward? Having looked at the bare statistics on evaluating PR in our sector, we want to go a step further. We have embarked on a second, more substantive study on managing reputation in the technology, media and telecoms sector, where we will be looking in depth at how leaders in this field are managing and evaluating success in reaching varied stakeholders. We believe this report will be a significant step forward in redefining the communications role and its goals in our sector – and we look forward to sharing the study with you imminently.
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