May 2008

They feed you, they clothe you, they burp you…then they blog about you.  The blogosphere has a new face in the crowd who isn’t afraid to jump in with both feet.  As a recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out, mommy bloggers like Heather Armstrong of www.dooce.com are quickly becoming a major force to be reckoned with, and their growing influence with marketers demonstrates just how wide the sphere of influence for mothers has expanded in the Internet age.

As marketers have long been aware, moms control the all-important family purse strings.  They are the superheroes around the house, but also the financial decision makers in the family – so it matters a great deal what mommy bloggers have to say.  Consider this, U.S. women spend more than $3.7 trillion annually on consumer goods and services and control 85 % of household spending.  With that kind of clout, we can’t afford not to notice Moms.

Before blogs, a mom’s sage wisdom was confined to the four walls of Junior’s nursery, but the blogosphere has given mothers a more vocal presence in the community, offering them an ever expanding and powerful avenue for communicating their vast wealth of knowledge.  The tech savvy mother can now leverage the Internet for proliferation of their wisdom.  These mommy blogging forums and sites feature a veritable army of moms transferring “in the trenches” advice and experience to others, and serving as a support forum for those overwhelmed with the greatest responsibility imaginable. 

Marketers have been cognizant of mother’s dynamic and influential role for years.  Now that their voices are louder and wider reaching than ever, 87% of Moms read blogs, everyone needs to take note of this community.  They have the power to inspire and affect increasingly large groups of people.

Not a day goes by where the topic of PR measurement doesn’t pop up in some conversation. It usually comes in the form of my colleagues spending hours plowing through print clips, looking up ad values on Bacon’s, and calling VMS for impressions. And at the end of the day, we deliver an impressive looking, nicely bound book of charts and clippings…and we all breathe a sigh of relief and wait for the client to be impressed with the shear volume of his company’s mentions in hundreds of newspapers. Now, my issue with this is that most companies don’t truly understand PR (heck, I have to explain it to my parents at least twice a week) and when we explain its intricacies, they realize just how complex the PR machine can be. Yet, knowing the complexity, they somehow think that simple charts with numbers and clips are an effective way to measure the value of PR.

So the question becomes – how do we measure PR?

The more traditional methods of measurement involve circulation, impressions, ad value equivalency and PR value. And, as an industry, we’ve somehow decided to apply arbitrary formulas in order to determine impressions (circulation x 2.5 or 3.1) and PR value (ad value x 3). But what exactly do these types of measurements prove? That maybe, best case scenario, our client was mentioned in 2.2 million printed copies of USA Today and possibly – but not likely – seen by 5.5 million readers. Or that it maybe would have cost $30,000 for our client to purchase equivalent ad space? Ok, but what does that mean?

As a side note before I continue, PR’s effectiveness cannot be directly compared to advertising effectiveness. The two forms of communication are drastically different. Advertising messages are very controlled whereas most PR messages are not (which is why they’re seen as more credible and valuable).

The newer methods of measurement suggest a look at quality over quantity. So this means when our client is covered in a newspaper, we rate the story and the quality of the outlet. Was it positive, negative or neutral towards our client? But the question is, once again, so what?

Did any of these measurements prove the value of PR? Sure, we got the client’s name out there (not to entirely discount brand awareness), but how does all of this affect their bottom line? After all, that’s ultimately what matters.

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I am more than thrilled to tell a client our PR efforts garnered 4.2 billion impressions. It sounds impressive, right? But the reality is that most of us PR professionals resort to these measurement tactics because we’re constantly pressured to justify PR dollars. PR is a fairly intangible communication strategy, so we feel the need to quantify its value in the hopes it makes it easier to digest. Companies don’t question the value of advertising – and they’re only too happy to spend five times the amount of PR on media buys.

The answer to how we measure PR is this – it’s a combination of tools. You can’t effectively measure a program by any one tool. You need to factor in the overall communications objectives and how those tie back to the company’s business goals. PR effectiveness can best be measured if a company’s key messages, target audience, and desired channels of communication are clearly identified before implementing a program. Second, the PR measurement process should never be carried out by focusing only on the PR components. It needs to be factored into the larger equation of how all programs – advertising, marketing, promotions, PR –are contributing to the bigger picture.

In closing, PR IS valuable. It has a far greater impact on a company’s brand than advertising. Sure, advertising has its place, but PR is one of the most effective branding tactics for a company. In the long term, PR can build, change or maintain a company’s brand reputation by shaping consumer attitudes and perceptions which ultimately lead to a healthier bottom line and consumer loyalty. Shouldn’t that be justification enough?

To the pr/marketing firm who will almost certainly co-opt this ploy to launch a viral campaign for an energy drink/videogame/R-rated cartoon and inevitably be forced to face nightmarish backlash all for trying to come across as edgy.

 Dear PR/Marketing firm, 

I know you think that this stunt will be the guerilla campaign that puts all other guerilla campaigns to bed.  I know you think that staging a fake kidnapping will be cool.  Maybe you’ll create scratchy, blurry videos to go along with it and hide clues across various websites and, for all I know, it might work.  But don’t.  Just don’t.   

Sometimes marketers can get caught up in the race to be the most cutting edge.  Sometimes marketers like to think that by creating the illusion of danger or adventure that they’re really connecting with consumers on a gut level.  And they might be.  But sometimes there’s something to be said for the good old fashioned techniques that PR and Marketing are built upon.  We can’t forget the basic building blocks in the race to be the next big thing.   

Sincerely,  

Your Audience

Attention all PR people!

Social media is not a panacea to all your company’s or client’s PR problems.  I repeat, if you employ social media programs, do not expect all the cool kids to come running, embrace your brand and evangelize about you and your products to anyone that will listen.  Infusing social media ideas into your PR plans also cannot help you find your one true love, cannot cure cancer and cannot even help you save a bundle on your car insurance.

Just because social media is out there for the taking (and it’s generally cheap to implement), it doesn’t mean you need to take it.  While it’s easy to watch new movies or brands like Nike and Burger King gain incredible traction with MySpace or Facebook, lightning in a bottle is just that – something that can’t easily be replicated for any old campaign, program or event.  Too often, we hear our clients ask what we can do with blogs and Twitter and Facebook and a million other trendy names, but just as we counsel clients on when and how to send a press release or announcement, it is imperative to help our clients understand when – if at all — it’s right to go with social media programs.

When an organization is overzealous, ignores common sense and refuses to take a step back in order to take a real, hard look at the online landscape, the results are never good.  Putting a MySpace page up just for the sake of it is asinine and dangerous.  A boring page about a boring product or company is worse than nothing at all; the only result is scorn, vitriol, laughter and maybe even worse — zero return on investment.  A good example is The Los Angeles Times’ Twitter page – it’s been updated nearly 2,000 times with breaking news since the account was created.  Too bad it only has an audience of 98 followers.  And you wonder why they say print is dead.

The problem:  social media is really nothing more than a new venue to share news and communicate with key audiences.  This isn’t to say companies and organizations should avoid social media entirely.  To the contrary, there’s little doubt that social media will continue to integrate more and more into our daily consciousness.  From PR people to CEOs, it’s important to keep a vigilant eye on new developments. 

But it needs to be understood that the shotgun approach to social media – blasting everything in your arsenal against the wall and seeing what sticks – is simply not going to bear any PR fruits.  So the next time you’re in a meeting, brainstorm or casual conversation and someone starts bringing up all these brilliant ideas about how to use MySpace and Facebook, take a step back and ask if you have something new, unique and valuable to offer.  After all, you wouldn’t embarrass yourself, your company, or your client with a press release announcing you just scratched your butt.  Because social media can offer new frontiers, it doesn’t mean that butt scratching story is any fresher just because it’s distributed via brand-new Web 2.0 tools. 

There’s great promise in social media for the PR industry, but we need to embrace social media for what it is…and what it isn’t.