PR In Canada

A couple years back I wrote a blog post that may be worth resurrecting. It could almost be the annual affirmation of the PR and communications measurement world.

Much has been written in recent years of the perils of advertising equivalency so, while one might think that it’s not something we need to revisit, it is. It’s frightening how many folks find their way to my blog—and I suspect any other measurement blogger out there—on a daily basis because they’ve searched for a way to calculate ad value.

Correlation and Causality. Words not often used by the communications industry. Initially because we didn’t need to. Now because we generally don’t want to.

Communications and investor relations measurement (in the financial and investment community) is often binary. One-zero; on-off; up-down. Did stock go up? Are analysts recommending our stock? More than before?

Research IS measurement. Measurement IS research. The same techniques and tools. The same continuum. Different times, perhaps, but they are co-dependent and co-enablers. Using research in a pre-campaign, formative capacity can puts us in a more measurement-friendly place post-campaign.

We work in an increasingly ‘direct-to-stakeholder’ world. Stakeholder, influencer, key opinion leader relationships are everything in this business. So if the industry is investing time and money in initiating, building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders for mutual benefit, then there sure better be a way to first diagnose the situation, respond to it, [...]

Most of us have seen Titanic and the source of its demise.  If you haven’t seen it, perhaps you’ve seen an iceberg on the Discovery Channel, on a bottled water commercial, or on one of those marginally corny corporate motivational posters that were all the rage in the late 90s.
In any event, picture an iceberg.  [...]