THE NEWS, ANALYSIS, RECRUITMENT, EVENTS AND INTELLIGENCE NETWORK

Why it's time to prove your worth

Measuring up: Benchmarking can prove PA value

The impact of digital and social media are huge agents of change affecting traditional communications.  If business is to be smart it should engage with the community, the workforce, the market and the environment.

It is an uncomfortable truth that money well spent may not always appear so at face value. From vaccines to bullet proof glass, preventative measures often prove their worth by what does not occur. And that leads some, mistakenly, to put the expenditure in the discretionary column.

In communications and public affairs, measuring outcomes can be fraught with difficulty - and often leads to a degree of nervousness amongst practitioners still unsure about their value to the corporate body.

According to Upstream's managing director Paul Mottram measurement and ROI have "never been more important to corporate communicators across the region".

He tells PublicAffairsAsia: "In our experience, far too many companies are confusing coverage with results. We see two challenges with this. The first is that, in many cases, public affairs objectives are to prevent something from happening, or minimize its effect.

"How do you measure non-coverage? Second, objectives are frequently long term, or at least beyond the quarterly or six-monthly attention-spans of the one-dimensional ROI brigade."

But as financial pressure mounts, PA and PR practitioners will be asked to prove their worth and in most cases should be able to show a significant return on investment.

Fortune Magazine's publisher Ralph D. Paine got the measure of communications in 1960 when he said that measuring outcomes should not be so difficult – but will remain so.

"If we can put a man in orbit, why can't we determine the effectiveness of our communications? The reason is simple and perhaps, therefore, a little old-fashioned: people, human beings with a wide range of choice. Unpredictable, cantankerous, capricious, motivated by innumerable conflicting interests, and conflicting desires," he said.

At a time of immense economic uncertainty the focus on companies successfully achieving return on investment in any area has becomes critical as red pens hover over budget expenditure lines.

The tendency to see promotional spend as “soft money” which can be targeted for attack by budget planners and senior managers is a familiar one during downturns with marketing, advertising and public relations often seen as discretionary - even when it actually mission critical.

This is no less in the area of corporate communications and public affairs, where activities often seen to be remote from the core functions of many businesses and in many organisations are even more poorly understood than traditional PR. The pressure to justify this expenditure becomes more intense even at a time when total budgets are shrinking due to the recession.

The pressure to measure

The pressure to measure is not new. According to Tim Marklein, Weber Shandwick’s executive president of measurement and evaluation “the search for effective evaluation in public relations and public affairs has been something akin to the search for the Holy Grail".

The last five years have seen a significant shift in both the amount and type of measurement undertaken. The application has often varied between companies, industries and markets, according to their level of sophistication and commitment to communications as a function. While some are using tools like Biz 360 to measure output, many still rely on older and more contentious techniques such as ad value equivalency.

Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is a measure that has been used in the public relations industry to "measure" the benefit to a client from media coverage of a PR campaign. AVE's would commonly meaure the size of the coverage gained and calculate what the equivalent amount of space, if paid for as advertising, would cost.

Old techniques under new strain

Within the PR industry the use of AVE's has been the subject of continued controversy and deemed unethical by some of the industry's professional bodies. A number of criticisms of AVE's have been made including that the amount of space a story covers is irrelevant if the article is critical of the client or if the client’s competitors are favoured or even just included as well.

According to Jeremy Woolf, China director of Text 100, in North Asia "many still rely on character counting and the volume of clippings as opposed to more sophisticated action and message or tone oriented metrics".

It’s not all doom and gloom however. As more and more sophisticated marketers, corporate communications and public affairs professionals come into management roles there has been noticable change. Many agencies are proactively undertaking to offer more rigorous evaluation as an integral part of their consultancy services.

Woolf says: “The large global measurement companies are improving their double byte character support and this is making global best practice measurement possible in Asia. This is leading to better analysis and forcing communicators and agencies to demonstrate a better connection between their programmes and their business as a whole.”

Evaluation becoming more popular

More positively more and more Asian companies are measuring not just their own output, but also assessing their competitors too. Evaluation techniques using free web tools are becoming ever more popular.

The future is more assessment conducted in real time with online dashboards. These will replace monthly clippings books, allowing for campaign decisions to be made quickly, as opposed to waiting for a monthly or quarterly review. With better data and analysis there will be more intelligent assessments made available.

So, just as the entire world of corporate communications and public affairs has been heavily influenced by the massive explosion of new social media, so has the process of evaluating such activity.

The digital revolution

Ian Rumsby, Weber Shandwick’s vice-president of strategic development, says: “The impact of digital and social media are huge agents of change affecting traditional communications. If business is to be smart it should engage with the community, the workforce, the market and the environment. ”

As a response to this radically altered and changing environment, Weber Shandwick has developed over the last three years, a new range of measurements (ARROW) encompassing over one hundred and fifty separate indicators to help clients evaluate their campaigns.

Adds Rumsby “it’s not a proprietary methodology” and its “open architecture” helps clients obtain a more complete picture across a range of functions, agencies and campaigns.

This renewed emphasis on measurement and strategy is designed to provide methods that measure a campaign’s progress, helping to benchmark performance, assess market trends and engage with stakeholders.

According to Rumsby, the changing nature of the social media has radically altered the way people consume and process information. His insight is that traditional spend could be about to be turned completely on it head, with the traditional ratio of 80 per cent spend on reach and 20 per cent on content suddenly being reversed,

“Traditional functional silos may continue to exist in organisations but the much larger marketing and media vehicles are breaking down the silos,” he added.

It is now generally accepted therefore that the growing volume of corporate communications and public affairs work across Asia, and particularly in China, will continue to add pressure to developing more rigorous and quantifiable methods of assessing corporate communications and public affairs activity.

Growing markets, expanding volumes of public affairs work combined with a keen eye on budgets will result in evaluation becoming an integral part of any campaign. The time, therefore, has come for everyone to measure up to the new demands.

And as senior industry insiders predict, this process is likely to prove the case for corporate communications and public affairs, rather than diminish their importance to corporations still trying to assess how to navigate the current economic turmoil.

According to Mottram: "In many ways the future of evaluation is with us right now: online and social media give communicators many more opportunities to listen to their markets than ever before, and not rely on conventional coverage reports.

"But the real value here is in tweaking communications to better meet business objectives, rather than devoting more resources to counting the uncountable. Evaluation is more important than ever: the trick is to understand the whole wood, not get lost in counting the trees."