I love it when I get to read really smart analysis (thanks, Twitter) and love it even more when it comes from two smart people, Katie Payne and Todd Defren.

Todd blogged about this yesterday, but he and Katie had an exchange in which Katie commented on one of Todd’s recent posts about isolating public relations vs. marketing efforts. For those of us who have struggled with this, it’s hard – first of all, from a turf perspective. Marketing will want to claim credit for sales or brand awareness, and public relations will want to say that they are the air cover for the ground war — they created “awareness” which helped the marketing and sales people in the end. In Katie’s newsletter, she commented on Todd’s POV:

“Another popular reason that PR/SM ‘can’t be measured’ is that, ‘You can’t isolate PR from everything else the organization is doing!’ But yes, in fact, you can. It might take some coordination with advertising, or some sophisticated ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) but it can be done, and is being done every day. (Measurement is) hard … particularly for the math-phobic PR folks. It requires calculations and analytics and a bunch of things that PR people hate.”

Yout both are tight. Measurement IS hard. I hate math. Hell, I am adjunct faculty at Georgetown and got a “D” in the one undergrad math class that I took.

Damn Those Obstacles!

One of the texts in my class is the Bible of PR Measurement, Katie’s “Measuring Public Relationships.” All of that mathy stuff can, in fact, get done and made into pretty PowerPoint slides that anyone can understand. The fact that it can be done often runs into the immovable force of it will get done.

For what Todd and Katie are discussing, I see two major obstacles: human and fiscal capital.

By “human capital” I mean you have to find someone who not actually gets this stuff, but who is also committed to the idea that you can indeed offer precise measurements of public relations, marketing and other communications efforts — and isolate each one.

By “fiscal capital,” it’s more obvious, but most of the medium and small businesses (and even some of the large ones that I worked with in my 15 years on the agency side) can’t afford or don’t understand why they need to shell out the bucks for an outside firm like Katie’s. Katie – I have no idea what your billing rates are, so please don’t flame me!

There is astronomical value in measuring communications efforts. The hard part is very much related to a post that I wrote last week: “How To Sell Social Media to Your Dumb-Ass Boss.” It’s frustrating when you see the real value of something — and how it has the potential to really impact your business — and you get the “deer in the headlights” look from the people in the corner office.

In retrospect, maybe I’ll start a series of posts called “How to Sell REAL Public Relations Measurement to Your Dumb Ass Boss.”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Mark

Once again, smart people like Todd Defren write smart blog posts.  I began this Sunday morning (like other propeller-heads out there) by perusing my Twitter feed and my favorite blogs, searching for some writing inspiration ok…ok..it was AFTER the sports section).  It did not take long.

In Todd’s post “Content Marketing: Think MULTI Media,” he lays out some thinking that I believe is at the (”INTERSECTION” – shameless blog self plug) of good social and multimedia thinking overlaid with the new marketing fundamentals that you have to deliver meaningful content to your target audiences in pieces that they can choose.

Summarizing what Todd’s sports-dad buddy said:

In other words, you may need to create a white paper and/or a podcast and/or a videoblog and/or a webcast of the same content because different types of prospects will have different engagement preferences. “

“Engagement preferences,” to me, means a couple of different things.  One of which is some people like to see video (if you are interested in seeing an excellent demo of the Google Android phone, check out what Neville Hobson did), and others like simply to receive the information in a language that they can understand:

It all starts with a “content asset audit.” With an average tenure of just under two years, most corporate marketing executives can’t even find most of the content on file at the corporation, much less map it to a strategy. Think, ‘random acts of content.’

“Once content assets are cataloged, marketers need to map assets into a sequential lead nurturing ‘curriculum,’ i.e., moving prospects through a series of content-focused engagements – each of which signify a higher degree of complexity/value and a closer proximity to sale.”

I read this as, it’s “figure out the information and format that people want, and give it to them in pieces that interest them.”

This is critically important.  Just this week in my day job, I spent quite a bit of time developing a new way of measuring our media coverage.  Thanks to Katie Payne’s excellent thinking, I am basing much more of my analyses on the fact that most people don’t read stuff anymore — they scan. That’s why a headline is more important than the first paragraph which is much more important than the 12th paragraph.

My take-aways?

1. Understand your audiences
2. Segment them
3. Develop multiple forms of content that are likely to appeal to them, based upon some research
4. Spoon feed them digestible forms of content
5. Rinse, lather, measure, repeat.

Another great post, Todd.

Mark

I have been waiting for a post like this to comment on, but in PR Squared’s “Cut the PR Agency? Are You *Sure* About That?” — Todd Defren points out his first client casualty due to the economic uncertainly of the bad economy.  Todd writes:

It happened today.  The economic angst whacked our agency upside the head.  We now have our first example of a client who’s asked to terminate our contract “strictly as a precaution driven by economic uncertainty.”

It seems Sequoia Capital’s “Mandatory All-Hands CEO Meeting” last week, with its gloomy slide deck, has tech CEOs skittering for cover.  But folks who rely solely on the VCs’ slideshow to make crucial decisions do their companies a disservice: it seems there was a lot of other valuable conversation happening throughout the Sequoia event.

It goes without saying that if you are chasing dollars in the relations world right now — either internal or external — now is the time to really “sing for your supper” and proactively and consistently ensure that your value is evident to those who control your dollars, yen or scheckels.

Now I am not a CFO, nor can I really even balance my own checkbook, it it often seems that company bean counters take a dim view of public relations in a economic downturn.  Besides cutting back on internal communications, this is about the dumbest thing that you can do.

Todd sums it up pretty well:

“It is well documented that brands that increase (marketing) during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.”

This is a great, succinct argument, but as someone who worked on the agency side for many, many years (the first to be axed in a bad economy), one that often falls of deaf ears.

I’m curious to know others’ thoughts when it comes to the value of public relations in a economic downturn.  How do you establish and promote its value?

Mark

Todd Defren’s “PR Squared” post entitled “The Value of PR Agencies, Part II of ???” got me all in a lather – again and is largely a reason, why, after 13 years of being on the agency side of things, I packed in it an decided to go in house.  Recently, there have been a rash of postings from bloggers who openly question the value of public relations if you have a killer product.

And it went on…

Many of the blogosphere’s “luminaries,” or as Jason Falls puts it, guys who “blow smoke up each others’ asses,” got into the fray, including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel.   These admittedly a-list bloggers have built followings that I am assuming have grown organically, thus reinforcing the notion that is you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.  I have to admit my own ignorance of Messers Scoble, Arrington and Rubel’s professional provenance, but anyone who has toiled within the recesses of a large public relations firm can knock this one out of the park in about thirty seconds.  This is elitist, perhaps wishful thinking.

Here is a quote that I think sums up their point:

Scoble, Rubel and Arrington basically made the point that PR firms are unnecessary if you have a great product and are willing to spend a lot of time engaging in the blogosphere.”

Confession:  I am biased because I sold these services in for more than a decade, and it puts a real burr under my saddle when people wax poetic or romantic about the “next killer app” that will grow organically and not need good public relations strategy or tactical execution.  I can’t tell you how many times I had to justify my existence on this planet on a regular basis or listen to a client tell me a) he/she is cutting my budget, or b) that a good public relations plan is “unnecessary.”

After smiling politely I looked like the guy in the picture above.

But fear not,Todd jumps into the fray with not one but two good defenses of the public relations industry.  In this first post, Why Hire a PR Firm?, instead of laying things, out, he shows video of a client (and that’s who matters, by the way), detailing out why public relations is important:

Mike Volpe, VP Marketing HubSpot – Value of PR Firms

But as so many things do in the blogosphere, this one kept coming back like a bad meal, or one of the zombies in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Then Todd came back with a wonderful, succinct response from yet another client about the value of public relations agencies:

Samantha Stone, VP Marketing, Dataupia – Value of a PR Firm

As usual, when others say it better than I can, I don’t have a lot to add, except a suggestion that anyone who thinks that a well-planned, intelligently executed public relations (or marketing public relations) plan is superfluous for a killer app, ask either:

1. someone who has worked in a public relations agency and see a client’s (or more likely, potential client’s) product die on the vine for lack of effective public relations; or
2. anyone out there who is sitting on the next Twitter who can’t get exposure.

‘Nuff said.

Mark