3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Measure PR
Excerpted below is a great article from Ragan Communications about PR measurement. Check this out then click on the link at the end of the excerpt for more.
Being a measurement evangelist feels like really hard work sometimes. On the one hand, I haven’t been at it long enough to complain […] But aren’t there situations where measurement is unnecessary?
Take Walmart, for example. Its stock is suffering, there are employee lawsuits, and one of its stores has been destroyed by a tornado. How much measurement does it need to know media coverage is, well, tortuous? It’s likely that no amount of proactive management is going to turn the story around, at least not meaningfully.
[…]I’ll give you three reasons why you should not measure—and three reasons why you should.
Forget measurement when:
1. You cannot make a difference. Sometimes business will hand you a dirt sandwich, and you have no choice but to eat it. There’s no need to weigh the sandwich, examine the types of dirt, evaluate the sandwich-maker, etc. Just eat it and move on.
2. You’re unwilling to do what it takes to make things better. Often, the worst media situations are when you’re making tough choices: layoffs, facility closures, relocations, or hiring more executives. The path to turning the story around leads through the organization revisiting its management decisions—deciding not to outsource, keeping the plant open and operating, renovating existing headquarters rather than pitting your incumbent city against somewhere else. See #1, above.
3. It’s more expensive to measure than the program your measuring. Advanced statistics are miraculous. We absolutely can measure the specific impact of public relations/communication activity on the bottom line. We just need a lot of data to isolate our impact from everything else that influences the bottom line. That costs money not as much as you might think, but still, so let’s spend wisely.
Click the link below to see when to do measurement:
