Reading Charlotte McEleny’s latest piece on www.nma.co.uk (‘Until we stop measuring social media by Likes, spend will remain negligible’), it got me thinking about the similarities between the evaluation challenge facing social media and that age-old misnomer that ‘you can’t measure PR’.
McEleny references some research by Forrester:
“The research found that, while the majority of marketers will soon be investing in social media, the majority of those didn’t know how much budget to allocate or were allocating only a small proportion (nma.co.uk 19 September 2011). The issue highlighted by principal analyst at Forrester Nate Elliott was that brands do not have the tools or know how to translate social media success into a metric that budget holders are convinced by.”
So, it’s not that you can’t measure social media ROI, just that it’s not cheap or easy. Tools do exist and are being used by trailblazers like Dell and Cadbury, but the reality is that most companies are not making that investment. After 15 years in PR, I can confirm that there’s a similar attitude towards ‘proper’ evaluation in our discipline, leading to the misconception that PR can’t be measured.
It’s pretty straightforward to find out the reach of a PR campaign (measured by circulation or opportunities to see), and with a small investment and a bit more effort, it’s possible to look at key message delivery, tone, share of voice versus competitors and other useful insights. However, if you want to find out how many sales derived from a PR campaign, or measure any shifts in consumer perceptions or brand awareness, you usually have to do some proper campaign tracking, which doesn’t come cheap.
It seems to me that this all comes down to scale. When a client invests in an advertising campaign it’s an expensive exercise. Not surprisingly they need to know if it worked, so they almost invariably commit to campaign tracking, not least so they can prove to the board that it was worth the money. Because a PR campaign is almost always less expensive than advertising, maybe the imperative to measure just isn’t as urgent. So clients don’t commit to investing in independent evaluation and rely on a combination of spurious ‘PR value’ measures churned out by PR agencies and good old ‘gut feel’. Funnily enough, this isn’t a very convincing argument for a finance director.
A few years ago the PR industry started a campaign to persuade clients to invest 10% of their PR budget in evaluation, but sadly it was largely unsuccessful. We’re lucky enough to work with clients who take PR seriously and several of them do invest in evaluation. When independent research tells us that a PR campaign delivered 20 times the return on investment of an ad campaign that reached a similar number of people, or that a piece of our PR activity boosted brand affinity more effectively than a seven-figure TV and cinema ad campaign, it really gets the board’s attention.
As PR is fast working its way up the food chain the pressure is on for us all, clients and agencies alike, to get serious about evaluation. There are concerted moves afoot in the PR industry to develop better tools, but without a willingness among clients to invest in measurement as a matter of course, we’ll be no further on in the next 15 years.
