Performance Communications | October 15, 2021
I recently completed the CIPR’s Professional PR Diploma. My final assignment was a management proposal that required me to identify and make recommendations for improvement to an area of PR practice that’s relevant to my job.
The area I decided to look at was PR measurement. Glutton for punishment? Perhaps. I got an excellent pass so perhaps not (second and last brag in the blog)!
There were vast amounts of opinions and research on the topic which was sometimes hard to make sense of.
As a result, I’ve picked a few interesting quotes from far and wide that got me thinking about measurement. Perhaps you may take some of them when doing your next presentation on PR measurement. Or perhaps they may just get you and your team thinking about measurement in a slightly different way.
- “There is more to sex appeal than just measurements.”
Audrey Hepburn - “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”
Peter Drucker, was a management consultant, educator, author - “Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it.”
Amber Naslund, social business strategist - “In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.”
Bill Gates - “Ask your team if they think measurement is boring and the majority will say yes. Ask them whether through their work increasing sales demand, share of voice, brand advocacy, or reputation is boring, and they will say no. We must end the idea that measurement is boring. It’s the opposite. It’s why we do what we do. It’s why we get out of bed.”
Giles Peddy, former SVP EMEA Corporate Development at LEWIS - “The more we can challenge those who don’t measure communications properly the more we can ensure that our profession is ethical, dynamic and a source of great pride. Most importantly we can be assured that we make a difference and increase trust.”
Alex Aiken, Executive Director of UK Government Communications - “Not everything that can be counted, counts. The availability of so much data means that communication professionals often use analytics that are easy to gather rather than the most appropriate and targeted measures.”
Khali Sakkas, Head of Insights, APAC - “Can we all agree that the ‘impressions’ at the end of every case study video means very little. Basically, we’re celebrating that maybe, perhaps, someone, somewhere might possibly have had an opportunity to see the thing that we made.”
Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, VP of marketing at DoorDash - “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”
Mickey Mantle, Moneyball.
Forgive the pun, but this one is a bit of a curveball. If you’re looking for homework that your team might actually do, then ask them to watch Moneyball this weekend and then sit down on Monday to talk about the learnings. Moneyball is a great film for showing people the value of not trying to measure everything or even a few showy metrics, but instead focusing on what counts for your client as a win, and then identifying that one metric which contributes to the win.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
