Public relations and managing reputation

Public relations should own marketing communication because: the traditional one-way communication characteristic of marcomms tools is more effective if applied in a two-way manner; communication is conversation and PR knows these ropes best; direct marcomms can be enhanced by the thought leadership and narrative powers that are embedded in great PR programs.

The campaign starts here! Public relations should own marketing communication, not marketing itself!

But can PR handle the heat? Can it get its head around marketing communication? How come so little work undertaken by PR agencies is in the realm of marketing communication? Why can’t PR get its hands on communication program budget for direct, unmediated communication (social media aside)?

Is it because marketing owns advertising, which is the big budget business communication spend? And direct communication mechanisms get lumped into smaller budgets that go along with the big bucks baby? As the power of broadcast advertising diminishes, along with the collateral power that comes with spending money on it, I wonder whether the ad agencies power will also dissipate.

Ironic, don’t you think?

• Marketing is, traditionally, primarily a one-way communication process, whereas PR is two-way communication. What’s more engaging, monologue or dialogue?
• PR is in for long haul relationships and is concerned about the whole organisation-stakeholder relationship, not just the making money part. Marketing is all about the, primarily, short term concern of making money.

Morality, PR and marketing

Maybe that’s why marketers are the bankers of the communication industry. Take the money and run. No qualms over helping out with the promotion of fast food, leading to obesity, or encouraging poor people to either put their money into the pokies. How do they live with themselves?

Oh yes, alright, PR folk work with Maccas, Pizza Hut etc too. Not for me, thank you.

Does PR deserve to be given the big picture budget?

From what I have seen, the only PR folk who tend to get their hands on some marketing communication budget are those that work in-house and even then they’ll have to fight hard to get it.

But maybe PR people don’t deserve to have the budget. How many great case studies like the NPS’s integrated marketing communication campaign [link to Sue Corlette post] do you hear about? I think PR people are somewhat lazy in claiming marketing communication ground.

Evidence? A few years ago I went to a national PR conference that had an array of very interesting presentations from marketing, marketing communication and advertising professionals. Great stuff.

There were also some of your standard PR 101 heard-it-all-before-boring-as-batshit presentations on topics like ‘how to pitch to journalists’ (Jesus wept!). So where do you think 80% of conference attendees went? That’s right, you guessed it…our own worst enemies.

The value of databases and direct communication with target audiences and – very, very, very importantly – influencers on those target audiences is, I would have thought, incredible. In fact, invaluable.

Potential tactics include:

• E-newsletters or direct mail
• Social media
• Events
• Sponsorship
• Brochures and flyers to complement all the above.

Opportunities for leveraging due to an effective integration of strategy and narrative are immense.  Opportunities are limited only by the imagination of the professional driving the campaigns and what market research has ascertained.

Actually, not limited, they are energised. Because creativity and the information that comes from market research is the engine room and the fuel, inclusively, of any great professional communicator.

I’ve said before that marketing should report to public relations, but maybe PR is too lazy and too short-sighted to actually get off its butt and take this opportunity that is right in front of its eyes.

What about you? What do you think? Have you got what it takes? Or are you in cruise mode? Happy with the status quo?

Or am I wrong? Go ahead. Make my day.

What are your favourite and most effective marketing communication mechanisms? What examples of their effective use can you share? Does it make you mad PR budgets get cut off at the marcomms pass?

PS: I’d welcome you joining networks with me through my LinkedIn profile. Send me an invite! PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

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The excellent reasons for undertaking market research, and including it in any public relations strategic process, include that it generates information to create the best possible comms strategy, it helps determine appropriate benchmarks against which communication activity can be measured and it uncovers a range of issues that can be leveraged in PR programs.

I have written before on the utility of market research, but want to discuss the above elements in a little more detail.

Best possible PR strategy

It is a no-brainer that to produce material of the highest quality the ‘producer’ needs to have information that will educate him or her as to what direction that material should go in and/or what shape it should take. This certainly applies to producing a business communication strategy.

There are three categories of information that are of great utility. They include organisational stakeholders’:

• knowledge
• perceptions
• behaviour.

This can be knowledge, perceptions and behaviour in regard to an organisation or its products or services. The principles remain the same regardless of whether the communication strategy is an holistic organisational one or a strategy for a product or service.

Complementary areas that the research should delve into includes:

1. who or what are the influencers on stakeholder knowledge/views/behaviour?
2. what are the issues which influence views/behaviour of stakeholder knowledge/views/behaviour?

Identifying stakeholder influencers might prompt you to develop stronger relationships and/or forming strategic alliances with them.

Identifying salient issues might influence the way your organisation operates and cause it to modify its approach to certain non-communication related, business processes.

In the area of communication conduits or mechanisms, the research should uncover what communication mechanisms stakeholders rely most on to get information that influences their  knowledge/views/behaviour  (e.g. media, industry associations, websites, conferences, social media – note that the more specific, rather than generic, the information is the greater its utility).

Setting communication strategy benchmarks

The question (or issue) of what constitutes meaningful, business-relevant benchmarks for public relations strategies is a profoundly vexed one. I have seen some discussions on this issue but, in general, I think it is an area that has been toyed with rather than addressed in a thorough, useful manner. And this goes for the academic environment as much as the business one.

Having said that, as I have identified knowledge, perceptions and behaviour as the three core areas of information that are needed to form the best possible communication strategy, it is these areas which will often, similarly, form the substance of strategy benchmarks (or objectives).

The trick is figuring out what relates most effectively to the needs and wants of your organisation (i.e. its vision, its business strategy and its marketing strategy).

The core area of greatest relevance, clearly, is behaviour. Whether that behaviour involves buying a product, voting a certain way, catching a bus rather than driving, not taking drugs or many more behavioural manifestations, it is this area where your organisation wants to see traction more than any other.

A singular beauty of setting benchmarks is that they can be measured over extended periods of time. This allows you to gauge the impact of your communication and stakeholder engagement. Information you collate over time should influence the nature of your communication strategy to allow it to achieve these benchmarks.

One of the biggest mistakes that organisations make is constantly changing key benchmarks. Adding new ones is fine over time, but removing fundamental ones simply does not allow a rigourous, scientific approach to be taken to communication measurement.

I am a big fan of integrating the dimension of advocacy into communication strategy benchmarking:

• Measuring advocacy of an organisation/product etc is a useful means to determine its positioning
• It provides an insight into the behaviour of a stakeholder, not just opinions or perceptions, so it is evidence of a stakeholder’s tangible action (one analogous to actually buying a product, for instance)
• This is particularly important when researching the behaviour of ‘influencers’, as opposed to those who purchase a product, for instance. This is because of the ripple effect, or impact, than an influencer can have on target audiences
• Research around this notion should explore the context/rationale for recommending or advocating an organisation or product etc.

Advocacy is very relevant for organisations that rely on stakeholder support, but don’t actually have any product or service to sell to certain stakeholder groups. Examples of these types of organisations are government departments or NGOs.

The value-add to market research

Sometimes the ability of the market research to uncover information and to deliver statistics that can be used in proactive stakeholder communication is ignored.

It’s pretty simple, really. There are two dimensions I can think of where market research can help you come up with one of professional communication’s holy grails – producing content for your communication activity:

• Identifying salient issues that can be integrated into thought leadership platforms
• Producing statistics.

Thought leadership platforms and the use of statistics to highlight certain issues can be used across a diversity of communication mechanisms (e.g. speaking engagements, website, direct mail and more) but they are very much a media relations 101 approach.

Media LOVES this sort of material. It provides POD (if done well!) and for some reason (maybe it’s human nature) they love numbers and their comparative nature. Maybe it’s the ranking aspect of statistics, or their inherently competitive (us vs. them etc) quality. Whatever, it achieves cut-through again and again and again.

So if your sample is big enough and your questions interesting and topical enough, you can create additional value and impact for your market research by integrating a few questions that will give you some statistical oomph.

Do you always integrate market research into your communication planning and activity? How do you go about formulating objectives/benchmarks? Do you get support from those that run your organisation when setting objectives/benchmarks? What other uses can market research provide a professional communicator? Do you think PR folk generally do market research well…or not?

Other relevant posts on this topic:

• Evaluation is a critical and fundamental element of the profession’s practice
• Market research is a strategic communication must-have
• Tips on best practice market research
• Market research as an important element of strategic PR

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Paul Cheal, Account Director at BlueChip Communication, was the lucky winner of this blog’s free ticket to attend the IABC NSW ‘Measuring ROI on Communications’ workshop, with renowned measurement guru, the very passionate Angela Sinickas. He shares some of the points Angela made in this guest post.

For Angela Sinickas, measuring business communication is all about creating a “chain of evidence”, linking the tactical activities we do on a daily basis to the financial bottom line of the organisation.

This is chain is created by looking at:

• communication activities: messages we send/channels we use
• audience perceptions: did the audience receive the message/do they understand the messages?
• audience actions: what changes, what did they do more/less of?
• The financial impact on organisational goals.

Communicators can move along this chain, from lower (activities/perceptions) through to higher (actions/impact) levels of measurement by simply asking the target audience!

What did they read, see hear? Did it change their behaviour? And we do this through research.

PR crying poor over market research dollars

If you’re like me, especially in the world of PR consultancy, the initial instinct is to be sceptical once the term ‘research’ is mentioned. Who has the time, budget, resources to conduct research?

But Angela reinforces that a lot of our answers can be found in “observational research” – asking a random sample what they thought of the internal newsletter; tracking accuracy of coverage in target media; or using existing research conducted by other parts of the business.

“We’re so creative in everything else we do but we need to be creative about measurement as well,” said Angela.

All about business communication objectives and goals

It’s interesting that, in a workshop on measurement, Angela spent the first half of the session talking about objectives. This emphasis demonstrates the importance of getting the objectives right not just to illustrate the impact and validity of your communication strategy, but also your worth to your organisation.

If we don’t start with the correct objectives, we can’t determine what success looks like. (It doesn’t hurt in helping you win an IABC Gold Quill award either, Angela joked – alluding to her role as an IABC Gold Quill judge).

What business goal does this support? That’s the first question Angela says should be asked with any piece of communication – internal or external.

As a practitioner in the realm of financial services, I understand firsthand the importance of demonstrating value in the language of the client – numbers. For Angela, ROI is simple to prove: “Start with a small project, where changes can only be attributed to communication and prove yourself. Then move on to bigger projects. Communication is usually such a small part of the overall budget of an organisation that we only need a relative small change in revenue – even 1 or 2 per cent – to prove the ROI of communication.”

When Angela got into more granular detail in regard to objective setting, she said we need to examine how we can help achieve the business goal through communication – these form your communication objectives. They should be:

• SMART – how many times do we hear it, certainly, but how often do we do it?
• linked to parallel measurable results
• aimed at changing knowledge or an attitude (that’s how we change behaviour).

Practical takeaways from measuring business communication

Some of the elements of Angela’s workshop that I have taken back to my workplace include:

• Identify audience behaviour (current and ideal) before developing messages. What is the current behaviour and what is the ideal behaviour/attitude/action we want to achieve? Once you understand this you can develop the messages that will encourage this behaviour and from there what are the best channels to communicate this behaviour?
• Don’t only measure media success by volume, tone or accuracy alone. Think about measuring times you ward off negative coverage (sometimes the unsung hero of our roles), as well
• Communicate like every other department – in numbers. How do we calculate it: start with total financial value of new sales/increase in share price, improved productivity etc; take credit for a percentage of the financial value based on the impact your audience attributes to the communication (as identified through research); divide by the cost of communication; the result is your ROI. 

It all sounds so simple and, surprisingly, it is. Some valuable food for thought.

Connect on LinkedIn with Paul Cheal.

What do you think about Paul’s perceptions of Angela’s points and Angela’s assertions themselves? Who can tell me the difference between an objective and a goal? Which one are you able to measure?

Have you read this blog’s interview with Angela? They are on setting meaningful public relations objectives and PR’s lack of measurement holding it back.

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In the first of these two interview posts with internationally renowned public relations exponent and a passionate advocate for the setting of objectives, Angela Sinickas, the areas of behavioral change being of uppermost importance and how to evolve objectives were included in the conversation.  

“Relationships are a means to getting more of the behaviors companies want,” said Angela. “I think most PR people don’t realize this and therefore don’t build the right relationships or build them in ways that will directly benefit the organization tangibly, not just intangibly.”

Angela spoke with me prior to presenting a half-day workshop on Measuring ROI on communications for IABC NSW (sponsored by Ogilvy Public Relations Australia and St George Bank).

She agrees that the lack of consistently applied, and business-relevant, KPI development and utilisation is a key factor in holding back PR from sitting at the executive leadership table.

“We’re not speaking their language,” Angela said.

Marketing and PR: KPI setting comparison

CP: Is there a parallel between the way marketing sets KPIs and the way PR does, or should, set KPIs? What should PR be doing that marketing is already doing and, conversely, what are the mistakes marketing is making in KPI setting that PR should not do? What can the disciplines learn from each other?

Marketing has been doing audience research forever—they take the time to figure out in advance what would motivate people to take the desired behaviors, and they use a variety of measurement techniques afterward to validate what works best.

PR rarely does research before developing campaigns and measures mostly useless stuff like clips and hits and AVE—if they measure anything at all. What marketing can learn from PR is the art of the soft sell, the long sell.

Measuring PR-driven relationships

CP: Much of public relations is about just that: relations, or relationships (a notion emphasised by the relational dimension of social media). By extension, this means it is about brand awareness and reputation, rather than specifically making a sale. Does this introduce a dynamic to PR KPI setting that is unique? How do you go about setting KPIs for reputation/credibility etc and, for that matter, evaluating reputation/credibility?

I completely disagree with a lot of recent writings that relationships are the ultimate outcome for organizations, and most CEOs would too. I have written about this before.

Business relationships are not pursued just for their own sake. As individuals, we don’t pursue relationships just for their own sake either, but to gain friendship and love, which can increase security and decrease loneliness.

Businesses value relationships, reputation and branding as means to various ends as well—yes, more sales overall, but also to:

• keep shareholders loyal
• keep their share prices high
• attract better qualified job candidates and keep them productively delivering results longer before leaving for a competitor
• be able to charge higher prices for what are essentially commodities
• get happy customers to convince non-customers to try the company’s products, etc.

Measuring advocacy

CP: One of the dimensions I have had incorporated into market research for an organisation I worked for (based on excellent advice from leading market researcher Adrian Goldsmith)  was stakeholder ‘advocacy’ (i.e. the chief behaviour measured was how willing a stakeholder would, without prompting, speak positively of an organisation). What are your thoughts on this sort of behaviour providing a meaningful KPI for an organisation?

On customer surveys I usually include an 11-point question on how likely they are to recommend the company or its products to others, with 1 being “Extremely unlikely,” 11 being “Extremely likely” and 6 being “Neutral.” You subtract the percentage of people choosing 1-6 (the detractors) from the percentage choosing 10-11 (promoters). (Those choosing 7-9 are called passives and ignored for the calculation.)

This is known as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) invented by Satmetrix Systems. Apparently it has been validated by the company that developed it as a good measure of overall customer satisfaction.

However, it’s only useful if the survey includes a great many other questions that quantify satisfaction with various aspects of the company so that the company knows what to fix in order to get a better score in the future.

For example, I’m working on a report this week where the business-to-business manufacturing company received an overall negative NPS. However, 74% of customers said the company met or exceeded their expectations for quality. On the other hand, only 56% said it met or exceeded expectations for on-time delivery. These more detailed questions help you understand what to fix and what to leave alone.

PR program evaluation

CP: Are there issues relevant to the setting of different PR programs (e.g. media relations, speaking programs, website communication, social media) that need to be borne in mind and, if so, what are they?

One issue is to be sure, through research, that we understand which channels are working best for different messages, for different stakeholder groups, at different stages of the relationship/sales process.

CP: When there are a range of PR programs being implemented, is it important and relevant to ensure there is consistency between the KPIs and the approach taken to determining what the KPIs actually are? What are the issues relevant to this process?

Absolutely. If we’re going to measure multiple campaigns, survey questions should be parallel in construction, from wording to response scales.

We can’t just ask if people like those communications, but we need to identify how much each one influences different desirable behaviors—from calling the company for more information or to set up a sales call, or to influence the selection of the company for a contract.

For one client, we not only used consistent survey questions for each of their marcomms and PR campaign elements in the customer communication survey, but we also asked their sales force very similar questions about how much influence they thought these vehicles had. While there was a great deal of internal/external alignment, there were many communication vehicles that the customers said influenced their behaviors far more than the sales force believed.

Since the sales force controlled distribution of many of these vehicles, they were shooting themselves in the foot by not giving all their customers access to these vehicles. The company made a lot of changes based on the survey results.

What did you think about what Angela said? Do you set what you consider to be meaningful KPIs for your communication strategies and programs? What are the issues you have in setting these KPIs; what are your challenges?

About Angela Sinickas

Angela Sinickas, ABC, IABC Fellow, is president of Sinickas Communications, Inc., an international consulting firm that helps organizations plan and measure successful communication, including 23% of Forbes’ Global 100 largest corporations. She wrote the manual How to Measure Your Communication Programs and has earned 17 IABC Gold Quills. She also teaches an online graduate class on communication measurement for Northeastern University. Over 130 articles on communication planning and measurement can be read at www.sinicom.com Angela was in Australia presenting a training session on measuring communication straegy ROI for IABC NSW, with the support of Ogilvy Public Relations Australia and St George Bank.

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This is a guest post by Sue Corlette*, an experienced professional communicator and educator.

It’s interesting to observe that the traditional divide between the marketing (paid messages) and public relations (third party endorsement) professions still seems to be alive and well judging by their positioning in most organisations.

Each profession is usually either placed in an independent organisational silo, or PR is positioned as a subset ‘add-on’ of marketing, which as we know inevitably leads to turf wars. However this need not be so in practice and it is worth the effort to step across the silos, as the following case study demonstrates.

Melding public relations and marketing

In 2007, the National Prescribing Service (now known as “NPS – Better choices, Better health”) conducted a ‘Get to know your medicines’ national campaign to educate people on the wiser use of medicines. The campaign featured two x two week TVCs and a direct mail out of campaign resources. The campaign spanned several teams within NPS and the resulting strategy became a milestone in collaborative success.

This was the third campaign of its kind and was astoundingly successful compared to previous campaigns for three reasons:

• We used real people (PR tactic 101 = third party endorsement) in the TVCs
• We introduced a  newsletter / order form  targeting both consumer and health professional audiences. This replaced  multiple letters sent with sample resources  to segmented mail lists of health professional and consumer audiences  marketing tactic 101 =  DM)
• We extended the DM concept by asking third party stakeholders to distribute it on our behalf in addition to us distributing it via purchased mail lists.

The newsletter was key to the campaign’s success because it articulated both the consumer and health professional perspective.

In so doing it straddled the sometimes precarious divide between consumer and health professional organisational viewpoints.

It also ensured that the messages consumers were hearing in the TVCs would be reinforced by their health professional. It included statements from third party individuals and organisations to reinforce messages and reassure readers that the purpose of the campaign was legitimate; and it had an inbuilt ‘evaluation tool’ – a resource order form.

Importantly:

• this was the first time all the resources were aggregated in one simple form that did not require time-poor health professionals to order online through multiple pages
• the inclusion of third party organisations and individuals gave further reassurance to readers who didn’t already know NPS that the campaigns were legitimate and credible
• all people featured were also media spokespeople
• third parties signed off when satisfied the messages were consistent with their perspective and organisational values
• by default, the sign off process ensured that messages were clarified and stakeholders were aligned
• it included ‘a call to action’ resource order form to measure its effectiveness
• the number of orders generated from the form would indicate if readers were willing to support the campaign.

How did it measure up?

235,000 newsletters were distributed (to an estimated 80% of the target audience) at a cost of $23,000.

• 613,119 resources were ordered during the campaign compared to 257, 714 for the twelve months prior
• 8,000 organisations placed orders, compared to 1,000 in the previous 12 months
• The insertion strategy extended reach to 300,000, generating 8,000 orders
• So successful was the response and feedback to the first newsletter, two more newsletters followed to keep recipients informed of the campaign progress and NPS received further funding for a subsequent 2008 campaign, “Generic Medicines are an equal choice”
• The campaign received several industry awards including:

- 2008 International Association of Business Communicators Golden Quill Award for multi audience communication
- 2008 Public Relations Institute of Australia National Golden Target Award, Health Promotion
- 2008 Marketing Institute of Australia state award for Get to know your medicines national campaign.

What do you think about the integration of marketing and public relations approaches in this case study? Is there a clear line between the two professional communication disciplines, or is it pretty grey? What do you think about the way Sue has outlined the approach taken to campaign measurement? I’d really like to know how you set benchmarks for public relations and marketing activity.

About the author

Sue Corlette MA Org Comms, Dip PR, MPRIA

*Sue Corlette is a senior corporate communications and marketing executive with extensive experience in strategic planning and the collaborative implementation of successful, award winning outcomes for a diversity of businesses, both in the not-for-profit and commercial sectors. Whilst working in various corporate communications roles Sue has spent the last six years also writing course curriculum and teaching public relations and marketing for the vocational and higher education sectors.

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Setting public relations objectives that are directly related to an organisation’s mission and operating or business plan is, so it seems, one of PR’s great challenges. It simply does not occur with any consistently applied methodology. But there are ways to create objectives – or KPIs – that are inherently and profoundly relevant to what an organisation is actually trying to achieve – let’s learn some ’secrets’…

Angela Sinickas is an internationally renowned public relations exponent and a passionate advocate for the setting of objectives – that have utility and are consistent in their application. Angela has been awarded 17 International Association of Business Communicators Gold Quills, teaches a graduate class on communication measurement and is widely published.

Prior to her presenting a half-day workshop on Measuring ROI on communications (see below for free ticket if you are quick and have an insight) on 3 August for IABC NSW (sponsored by Ogilvy Public Relations Australia and St George Bank), Angela kindly answered a number of questions on this vexed issue.

A consistent KPI methodology

CP: Is there a straightforward methodology that can be applied to setting KPIs for public relations?

I think so. Start with a business goal.

Figure out which stakeholders need to change their behavior to better reach that goal. Research what knowledge and attitude messages will encourage the changed behavior, and which channels are most preferred for those messages.

Set targets for all of the above. Measure results through surveys and/or pilot/control groups.

Behaviour at the heart of PR KPI setting

CP: Considerable PR discussions and articles talk about PR KPIs being linked to organisational objectives, as well as them being “meaningful, reasonable and quantifiable.”^ To me, a lot of this discussion doesn’t provide anything of real substance and utility. What are your thoughts on the academic and business discussions on best practice meaningful KPI setting and the effective measurement of public relations activities?

I agree with you. They describe characteristics of good KPIs but not what you should set KPIs for. That’s why I always go back to my mantra above of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors—but created in reverse order. First figure out the behavior desired to make sure you’re working on the right knowledge and attitudes.

What are the primary notions to bear in mind when crafting KPIs for public relations strategies and programs?

Focus on measuring the desired outcomes first. Then measure only the activities (inputs) that your research identified as leading to those outcomes.

CP: Evaluation and KPIs tend to focus on the practical manifestations of a communication strategy (e.g. media relations, sponsorship). What are the implications of a relative lack of focus on measuring the strategy behind the tactics? How can we reduce the emphasis on the messenger being examined when, often, it should be the entity that crafted the message?

I don’t think we stop often enough to ask ourselves what we’re hoping to achieve, what will change, because of tactics like media relations and sponsorships. Until we clarify how we want to change the behaviors of people touched by our tactics, we won’t structure the events properly, or have the right key messages.

If we’re not doing the right things with our tactics to create intentional audience changes, it’s useless to measure the tactics themselves.

CP: You have written about how behaviour is the most important of the three potential dimensions resulting from communication-related activity (behaviour, perceptions, knowledge). Do you think this is forgotten in PR KPI setting sometimes and what are the fundamental reasons for prioritising behaviour over perceptions and knowledge?

If you don’t start with behavior, you’ll miss some of the most important key messages.

I often use an example from Malcolm Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, where he describes a university health care clinic where the communicator wrote a brochure will all the key points the clinicians wanted on why students should get a tetanus vaccination:

• They even pretested the brochure, and the students scored very high on knowledge of all the key messages
• However, only 4% actually got a vaccination
• When they asked some of the original students why, with all this correct knowledge in mind, they didn’t get vaccinated, the most common answer was that they didn’t know where the clinic was.

Now that was a key message for the audience, though it never occurred to the internal client and communicator because they worked there. Once they added a map to the brochure, with no other changes, 28% of the students reading the brochure got vaccinated. If they had just asked five students what they needed to know and believe in order to get the vaccination, at least four of them would have said, “I need to know where to go.”

Many of our clients’ key messages are usually totally unnecessary, and they’re often far enough out of touch with their stakeholders that they don’t know what messages might be missing.

How to evolve KPIs on an ongoing basis

CP: Once KPIs are set for PR programs, what methodology should be applied to their ongoing evolution from, for instance, year to year? I think a factor especially relevant to the change in KPIs is that knowledge, perceptions and behaviour can, arguably, only change so much. How do you determine when the change that has been achieved is optimum and from that point it might be more relevant for the knowledge/perceptions/behaviour to be maintained, rather than changed? What are your thoughts on this?

It’s easy when you start from a low baseline to set targets, but as you say, the annual increases will become smaller and smaller as you reach more of your audience successfully. I’ve covered this in more detail in an article.

The “optimum point” would very well be different for different things you’re measuring. For example, if you’re trying to improve the knowledge of employees on something, your best possible percentage score is going to be seriously limited by the rate of annual employee turnover.

If only 75% of the people with your company in January when you start your campaign are still with the company by the next January, 75% would be your maximum possible target (though still not a realistic one). You need to work down from levels that reality limits.

Another way to look at the optimum, or highest realistic, target is to look at benchmarks.

I have clients where we index their success on metrics captured through surveys by determining that they would receive the maximum number of points for an item if they reached the previously highest score achieved by any company on that same metric. They’d be doing an average job if their score was near the norm (average) for that question.

For metrics based on things like online usage, we’ll look at the number of page views or visitors for the previous year. We look at the highest number of visitors/visits for any particular webcast or publication and set that as the top possible score that we could receive the following year as the average for the year.

What did you think about what Angela said? Do you set what you consider to be meaningful KPIs for your communication strategies and programs? What are the issues you have in setting these KPIs; what are your challenges? NB. Angela also talks about a lack of measurement holding PR back in a future post.

 

Attention: a free ticket to Measuring ROI on communications, being presented on 3 August by IABC NSW, with the support of Ogilvy Australia and St George Bank, will be given to the person who provides the most interesting, value-adding comment to this post.*

About Angela Sinickas

Angela Sinickas, ABC, IABC Fellow, is president of Sinickas Communications, Inc., an international consulting firm that helps organizations plan and measure successful communication, including 23% of Forbes’ Global 100 largest corporations. She wrote the manual How to Measure Your Communication Programs and has earned 17 IABC Gold Quills. She also teaches an online graduate class on communication measurement for Northeastern University. Over 130 articles on communication planning and measurement can be read at www.sinicom.com

*The comment must be submitted by 9am Monday 2 August, Sydney, Australia time. I (CP) am the sole judge so don’t moan if you don’t like the arbitrary and subjective adjudication process! The winner must also be able to make the workshop, so unless you are willing to fly from Perth (Australia or Scotland), Southampton or Athens, don’t expect to win the ticket.

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^Guidelines for Setting Measurable Public Relations Objectives: An Update; Anderson, Hadley, Rockland, Weiner; Institute of Public Relations; 2009

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It should come as no surprise to hear that Google, one of the most potent organisations in the world, has trust as one of its positioning lynchpins…yet in a (business) world still coming to terms with the fact that those defining a brand are more often its stakeholders than the brand itself, this is still close to being revolutionary, especially if it is being effectively put into action, rather than simply being pontificated on.

Lucinda Barlow, Google Australia and New Zealand’s Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, put forward this premise at Frocomm’s 2010 New Media Summit. “We all work for and represent brands and brands are all about trust,” Lucinda said. “People have certain expectations of a brand and that’s what we have to portray.”

But are all brands about trust? I don’t think so. Australian Wheat Board? Rio Tinto? Westpac? Not exactly high-performing brands in the trust stakes.

Google are a fascinating entity in many ways, but their confluence of the dimensions of communication, products and societal centrality is one aspect of this. As a result of this it possesses an enormous amount of power:

• The power over people’s ability to access information (including information being organised in a manner customised to people’s varying ‘niche needs’)
• The power over people’s means of accessing information
• The power of influencing government and regulatory regimes.

In summary, this means the company is playing a significant role in shaping society itself.

NB. A full and comprehensive PDF report on the New Media Summit can be downloaded for free.

The power of giving away control

Lucinda (@lucindabarlow) describes Google as having collaboration at its heart and giving up power to its stakeholders. What a breath of fresh air for a public relations professional!

“Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Lucinda. “This means giving our users around the world access to the information they want, from the widest variety of sources, wherever they are.”

And it is interesting to note that, despite its competition being, “one click away,” Lucinda said Google’s policy is not to lock people into utilising the products it develops, but to, “allow customers to move their data out of Google’s services easily.

“We have a dedicated engineering team, working across all products, called the ‘Data Liberation Front’ to make this happen. To keep you coming back, we have to keep innovating to create great services that are important to people and change their lives.”

Making it easy to not use Google has a number of implications for a professional communicator:

• It gives more power to consumers to set the terms of the relationship. In fact, with products like Google Maps, consumers have the power to actually change the parameters of the product itself
• It is empowering the consumer to be a participant in the brand, not an observer
• The numerous listening and interactive posts it has in the online environment reflect the way its business model is profoundly influenced by its stakeholders’ knowledge, views and behaviour.

Analogous to this is the approach that Lucinda said Google takes to its stakeholder communication: “We need to be fast, responsive, open and transparent in our communication.”

Eavesdropping for insights

“There is a large and growing audience of people who actively listen to, distribute and publish their opinions online,” said Lucinda. “This gives real power to the vocal minority. According to Nielsen, in Australia 45% of people online publish their opinions specifically about products, services, and brands online and a massive 86% read them. It’s such an influential space.

“When you probe what the most trusted sources of information are, word of mouth comes out tops followed by online…because online is seen as a way to scale ‘word of mouth’ and tap into it en masse.
“And you’re not just about managing what gets said about your brand in order to effect sales directly. It’s also about consumer insight. It’s like being permanently tapped in to the world’s largest focus group. Our users decide what’s popular and what they want to watch. They talk about it. They debate with each other. Those comments are gold. Just ask United Airlines…”

Social responsibility

The power of Google means it has a more profound, socially pervasive social responsibility than most organisations. Its enormous global reach (i.e. all stratas of virtually all societies) make this more challenging for Google than most, as different societies and their various elements all have differing expectations of organisations.

As long as trust remains central to its business model, however, it has a reliable compass with which to steer itself. Communication, and public relations in particular, is the ideal mechanism to facilitate this journey occurring.

What are your thoughts on this post? What are your perceptions of trust in the business world? Are organisations working harder to earn it form their stakeholders? Are they sincere? Are Google sincere? What impact are public relations professionals having on organisations’ trustworthiness? Is social media making a difference to our ability to make organisations behave in a manner that makes them more trustworthy? It would be great to hear your opinions.

PS: I’d welcome you joining networks with me through my LinkedIn profile. Send me an invite! PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

Related posts

• Free report: PR at war – opinion explosion at social media summit
• Strategic communication with Facebook
• Online content helping public relations manage reputation

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Trust, crowds (utilisation of, communicating to, segmenting of…), integration (or not) of social media and corporate websites, the death of ‘networked’ communication, content generation issues and the challenges of change within social media were some of the primary themes that were either explicitly stated at the 2010 Frocomm New Media Summit, bubbled under its surface or were notable not for their articulation, but by their surprising absence…

For your free report looking into and analysing the 2010 Frocomm New Media Summit, download the FROCOMM New Media Summit 2010_Report. And don’t forget to share it with your colleagues, peers and friends; RT about it; and get your contacts to subscribe to this blog.

Articles in the report feature content formulated in four different ways:

• Reports on summit presentations by speakers
• Interviews with speakers post-summit
• Analysis by Ruci Fixter and myself
• The integration of perspectives and content from other professional communicators, business people and bloggers.

The summit was a gathering of some leading minds of the Australian public relations and social media industries, as well as a large and enthusiastically interactive audience. There was an interesting balance of presentations that took a helicopter strategic view, along with those that were more hands on/tactically-based, with both leavened by plenty of case studies.

But perhaps the most notable message that comes out of gatherings like this is: don’t sit there and vacillate; get in and get your hands dirty; expertise comes with experience, not the endless pondering of ramifications.

Of course, the way we as communication professionals act should depend on evidence-based market research. We should consider all the options and seek to apply best practice methodologies.

But social media is still evolving at a rapid rate. Each strategy and its tactical dimensions need to be customised to the business outcome sought, to the relevant target audiences and to the issue/product/service at hand.

At the end of the day, your communication activity may be the first of its kind. So whilst you can listen and learn and formulate, the best answer to your social media dilemma may just be to do. But don’t dive in thinking you are going to kill it from the start.

Strive to become the expert. But, as many speakers stated or implied, humility and adaptability are valuable. Pack them in your baggage.

Trust your public relations

The notion of trust was elemental to many of the presentations at the summit. That is because trust is what social media is deified as helping generate (if not accelerate). Trust, of course, helps generate positive word of mouth, the holy grail of marketers:

• free endorsement of products, services and organisations
• the viral, no charge (well, sort of…) snowball effect (and especially when exercised through social media)
• extrapolation into increased sales/profits.

Social media platforms, as Brendon Hughes recently wrote, “have changed our definition of friend’.” The interesting question that Brendon posed was: “Is social media making trust weaker or stronger?” His feeling is that social media is not delivering as broad a degree of trust as marketers might like to think.

Social media, corporate website or trad media?

The question of where the greatest influence on consumers will emanate from in coming years was not asked at the summit. This surprised me. Options I put on the table to some of the speakers included:

• Social media sources
• Corporate websites
• Traditional (in both ‘hard’ and digital format) media.

Of course, it isn’t an either/or zero-sum game. Shades of grey are permitted!

But as I discuss in a series of posts from my blog that are included in this report, PR needs to work harder at website communication opportunities. Strategic communication, especially those elements with a digital bent, should be wary about putting all their tactical eggs in the social media basket. The corporate website has an opportunity to:

• provide engaging, useful and credible information to stakeholders
• rank higher in web searches because of this content, intelligent backlinking strategies and appropriate technical IT support
• act as a hub for social media activity.

This thinking has been reinforced, according to Andrew Hughes of Reprise Media, because Google changes means brands need to focus more on content and one of the best ways to do this is, “publish as much relevant content on your own website…”

PR: experts in content generation?

Content. What a hassle. What an opportunity!

But…if you don’t got it, you don’t got nothing to say. It’s the elephant in the room.

Generating content valued by your target audiences takes time and a lot of it. Think of all the social media platforms to feed. Recycling and customisation will work to a degree, but this won’t entirely sate the beast. So where are the resources coming from?

And who can’t love the switch that Matthew Gain pulled on summit attendees, saying we need to think like journos when creating content for our organisations, not like PR pros. This is a favourite topic of David Meerman Scott, the king advocate of corporate website communication.

Behind content are two further themes: creativity and viral. All three work together. A major challenge with social media is getting consumers to advocate the content. For it to go viral. This might occur because it is fun, because it is creative, because it is relevant to consumers’ lifestyles or because it exhibits thought leadership.

Thought leadership works if it:

• provides POD
• adds value to target audiences’ lifestyles
• is relevant to the organisation or brand that is promulgating it.

Networked communication is dead; long live the niche

Dan Ilic said it at the summit. Seth Godin has said it in the context of micro magazines. And Mike ‘Zappy’ Zapolin said it at a recent conference: niche is winning the war. Broadcast, big reach media networks are dead.

But this notion of big-reach communication being almost dead, whether it is in the context of media outlets, social media or other forms of communication, seems to me to be just a tad precious.

PR and marketing folk love reaching as many eyeballs as possible. So do clients and CEOs. (It makes for impressive reading in monthly reports, after all.) And I bet it is likely that a lot of direct mail is undertaken based on stats that underline that though there is a lot of waste, so is there sufficient ROI to keep on cutting down forests.

A very big challenge in going niche, in being very targeted and customised, is the ROI. Smaller audiences should mean, in theory, smaller investment (unless this audience is the influencer on a wider group). But easier said than done.

So whilst I love the notion, I’m not so sure some of the talk on this topic isn’t just a little specious. I fully expect there to be further debate on this topic, with warring tribes fully armed with rationales and statistics supporting their views.

Summary

The change that is occurring in the social media/new media/digital communication/traditional (on and offline versions) environment is intense. In the time it has taken to produce this report, here is a minuscule selection of some of the topics and issues that have arisen:

• Doubts over Twitter’s efficacy for tactical/sales generating communication
• MySpace regaining momentum through Facebook’s perceived privacy failings
• The relentless ascent up the social media mountain of Foursquare
• Apple’s patenting of a Facebook/iPhone app.Who has time to keep up? Can we pay someone to filter this information for us? Social media is forcing the PR professional pay a heavy price for staying on the ball.

In regard to the summit, only a few of its themes have been flagged here. The rest are in the articles featured in the report. Download the report for free, share it around, RT it, get your contacts to subscribe to this blog.

And please let Glen Frost from Frocomm and I know what you think about the content and how we can provide more useful resources for you in the future to help you do your job as a professional communicator.

So, your call to action!

• Download your free FROCOMM New Media Summit 2010_Report
• Share it with your colleagues, peers and friends
• RT about it and get your contacts to subscribe to this blog.

Posts based on the report will be featured on this blog and on Blueblog in coming weeks. All comments, questions, observations and violent disagreements are welcome!

PS: I’d welcome you joining networks with me through my LinkedIn profile. Send me an invite! PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

Related posts

• Free report: PR at war – opinion explosion at social media summit
• Strategic communication with Facebook
• Online content helping public relations manage reputation
• Social media communication generating trust

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Contrary to its positioning amongst the professional communication and broader business environments, issues management is not always inextricably integrated into crisis communication. In fact, its strongest characteristic is strengthening an organisation’s reputation so it is less likely to be negatively impacted on by a crisis.

Issues management is, therefore, both an inherent component of all effective PR and a discrete approach (and even tool) that can be applied in specific situations.

You can almost tear issues management into two themes:

• Uh oh – here comes a proverbial %#@*storm down the funnel; let’s circle the wagons and try to resolve the issue or minimise the damage before we get started into crisis mode
• Party time! – choosing from a range of marketing communication and/or public relations tools (preferably as part of a broader strategy) to create strong, positive, mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders.

Defusing the bomb: proactive reactive PR

‘Proactive reactive PR’? Okay, alright, I know it sounds like spin. But it ain’t.

This notion is founded on your issues management process identifying that there is trouble up ahead. You might find this out through your Google alerts, through your community consultation process, through employees that have enough savvy to let you know about an issue they have come across.

Hopefully, you haven’t found out about it through your media monitoring. By then the horse has probably bolted (i.e. bye bye issues management; hello crisis comms!).

Being proactively reactive means you have identified the issue and are going to do something about it before it impacts negatively on your reputation to any significant degree. The two main responses are to communicate with your stakeholders, or actually do something about what has caused the stakeholder consternation.

Too often public relations professionals will satisfy themselves with sticking to the former (i.e. meetings, consultation, letters to those concerned etc). The more strategic and braver professional will actually seek to attack the second potential response:

• do something about what has caused the stakeholder consternation.

In most cases only this response can actually make a long-lasting impact on the relationship between an organisation and its stakeholders. This response is at the heart of two-way symmetrical communication, the primary theory that underpins and drives best practice public relations.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Sometimes the issue that has been identified may actually simply be (simply? Well, on a comparative scale, yes, just simply) a communication-related problem.

Party time for PR pros

I get the feeling that a lot of PR pros have the view that doing consumer media relations, holding big events, sponsoring fun family days and the like are simply fluffy PR activities. They aren’t ‘serious’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As part of an holistic, integrated communication strategy all of these activities are thinking about the following:

• Who are the stakeholders/target audiences of most concern/importance to an organisation?
• What are the issues of most concern/relevance/importance to these stakeholders?
• What is the timeframe we have in making an impact on knowledge/perceptions/behaviour towards the organisation in regard to these issues?
• What are the communication mechanisms that will enable the organisation to get information on the relevant issues to the stakeholders most expeditiously and in the most influential manner (i.e. a short presentation by an organisation employee before a sponsored school event with local parents in attendance may be a more influential, targeted and quicker way to go than getting a story in a national newspaper on the issue)?
• What or who will influence the stakeholders? For instance, is there a 3^rd party advocate for the organisation relevant to the issue at hand that can communicate to stakeholders in an influential manner?

There are more questions than these (I’m thinking budget for one!), but these five elements are very important.

So the following can all be extremely ‘serious’ and much important communication activities than government lobbying, media relations and crisis management:

• Sponsoring a school fete
• Presenting to the local ladies View Club or Rotary Club
• Putting together a curriculum-relevant schools resource.

But let’s not forget the most import issues management/avoidance approach of all is: behave/operate in line with your stakeholders’ expectations.

The basics of PR

PR pros should never forget that we can change the world through a strategic application of our skill set. We can lobby internally to change the way an organisation operates:

• The processes it uses to manufacture products (i.e. no sweatshops)
• The products it produces (i.e. reduced fat/sugar in products)
• The way in which it responds with stakeholder concerns (i.e. engages and/or evolves and does not obfuscate or avoid).

Communication itself can only do so much. It cannot, in itself, change an organisation or the fruits of its labours. But it can help clarify, enlighten and facilitate engagement.

Perceptions are reality. It is our responsibility to our organisations and to society in general to be honest and ethical in the way we go about our jobs.

Now THAT is issues management.

What do you think about my proposition that issues management is an integrated part of ALL strategic PR activity? Is that the way you look at it? What examples of where you have applied this thinking that had an impressive impact can you think of? And what about the ‘proactive reactive’ model of PR? Also, can you tell me where PR activity has changed the way an organisation operates?

PS: I’d welcome you joining networks with me through my LinkedIn profile. Send me an invite!

PPS. And don’t forget you can subscribe to this blog via email or RSS at the top of the blog’s page, or Tweet about this post using the handy RT button, adding your own editorial two cents worth!

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This is a guest post by Tony Jaques*, an issue and crisis management specialist with extensive corporate experience. He has been widely published in academic and business journals and is a thought leader in his field.

As managers take a new approach to deciding when to launch a product recall, public relations professionals need to reassess how they are communicated. And how to avoid meaningless phrases like ‘abundance of caution’ which hinder organisations from communicating clearly, and effectively positioning themselves, with their stakeholders.

Two recent American recalls suggest companies are raising the bar (or perhaps that should be lowering the bar) when brand protection seems to outweigh the possibility of harm to the public.

Shrek drinking glasses

In early June food giant McDonald’s announced a recall of more than 13 million souvenir glasses in the United States and Canada produced to mark the launch of the new Shrek movie. The recall followed discovery of toxic cadmium in paint used to decorate the glasses. The level of cadmium was within all federal and state legal safety limits, but above new guidelines being developed by the US Consumer product Safety Commission.

As a result, McDonald’s that announced the voluntary recall was determined “in an abundance of caution.” Meanwhile the local producer of the glasses insisted the glasses were safe and, rather unhelpfully, described the recall as “an internal decision by McDonald’s”.

Spaghetti and meatballs

Two weeks later, Campbell’s Soup announced it would recall nearly 15 million pounds of canned spaghetti and meatballs because of “possible under-processing” (whatever that means). The company said there was no information that any under-processed product had reached their mainly American consumers, whilst the US Agriculture Department said it had received no reports of illnesses from consumption of the products.

But Campbell’s announced the recall “in an abundance of caution”.

Now it must be said that the Shrek glasses incident arose just two weeks after a high profile recall of Chinese-made Mylie Cyrus-branded jewellery with high cadmium levels way above the legal limit. Similarly, the Campbell’s spaghetti incident came right on the heels of successive health scares involving e-coli and then salmonella in lettuce.

PR needs to work more effectively

It is important to stress that no-one would question for a moment the need to protect the public against legitimate risk. But maybe corporate communicators need to find a better way to explain when companies are seemingly taking an ultra-cautious approach.

There is no doubt that public expectation about corporate performance is changing when it comes to protecting health and the environment. At the same time the rise of 24/7 news coverage and social media has increased the speed and the corporate risk of consumer backlash.

For example, the Tylenol recall of 1982 is often still held up as a ‘gold standard’ of how to manage a product recall. But in that notorious case – back in the days before the development of the internet and the blogosphere – the company took almost a week to announce a recall, despite seven people dying from consuming deliberately poisoned headache tablets.

Any company today which allowed such a delay would not be praised, but would more likely be pilloried by the media and crucified by the online armchair experts for being slow and unresponsive.

However, given the current speed and brand exposure of product failure – or perceived product failure –corporate communicators need to find much better ways to explain to a sceptical public why products have been recalled, especially in cases where the risk is minimal or virtually non-existent.

Finding a better way

The McDonald’s Shrek voluntary recall announcement was well written and provides a good example of how it should be done. But the news media ignored most of their careful wording and lazily latched on to that idea of ‘abundance of caution’.

But what the heck is an abundance of caution? While some lawyer may think those are useful words, it is really one of those silly formula phrases which have no real meaning – like ’full and frank discussion.’

Corporate communicators need to encourage management not to hide behind clichés, but to speak openly to the public.

My suggestion is: “We are not required to recall this product, but we believe it is the right thing to do.” I am open to any other suggestions or improvements.

What are your thoughts on Tony’s proposition that fear of stakeholder retribution is prompting companies to communicate illogically? What are better approaches companies can apply in situations such as he has identified? What attitudes/mindsets are best for companies to take in situations such as this?

*Dr Tony Jaques is Managing Director of the Melbourne consultancy Issue Outcomes P/L which specialises in issue and crisis management and risk communication. He also publishes the regular online issue and crisis newsletter, Managing Outcomes, which anyone can subscribe to, and can be contacted at tjaques@issueoutcomes.com.au

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