Beware of vanity metrics in public relations, here are the ones to be tracking.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and this show is for you if you've got value locked up in your organization, you're just trying to find some ways that are simple and cost-effective to communicate that with your various stakeholders. I've been running my own public relations company for over 25 years. I've also set up 8 companies on 3 continents, so what I share on this podcast are tools and technologies and strategies that I know will work for companies big and small. Now today I'm going to look at metrics, and I'm looking at metrics because what gets measured gets done. But also we need to know when we're running our public relations programs how we're doing over time. And this is the essence of the K in the Speak PR Mastermind that we have, which is to storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. So today I'm going to talk about knowing the stats for your campaign. Now there are a number of different terminologies that are used when measuring, especially for social media, but I'm going to start off first of all with one of the public relations metrics which clients always like, and that is share of voice. Share of voice can be measured by tools like Karma, for example, and share of voice is measuring the volume of of content that you have against other companies. And now with digital, it's extremely easy to do that because you can pop into the system your own keywords, your own brands, for example, and the brands that you're tracking against, and any key topics, for example, product names or personalities, executives, and so on. And the, the software will now go out and look for you and bring that back as a report. It used to be in the old days that we used to scan and read the magazines and manually count and put into Excel each of the occurrences. I would have to list down which publications we had read and which target articles the individual words were mentioned, and then tabulate them into Excel. But now the software can do it, which is fantastic. And share of voice is important because it's showing a company, how well it's doing in competitive terms. What we can also measure is sentiment. Sentiment is important because it's one thing to be mentioned a lot, but if you're mentioned negatively, then of course that's not good news. It also gives an indication of whether there needs to be some remedy, maybe crisis management communications to be put into place, for example. So looking at sentiment, we can start now to use AI to identify whether not only words but sentences are, are negative or positive, and also whether the context is negative or positive. Technology's moved on massively here and really made tracking in real time much easier. And so one of the big trends really in public relations over the last couple of years and going forward will be our ability to track in real time what people are thinking about us. This is, of course, the whole essence of what's called social listening. Now, another part then of the metrics that we can track will be the referrals and conversions. Referrals means the referrals, for example, from public relations, social media, Articles, trade print, YouTube. Some platforms like Vimeo, for example, if you upgrade to the video package, the Professional, you can leave end frames with calls to action. So we can start to now see with these hooks and these tags which pieces of media content are delivering us the greatest referrals. We can also see this on Google Analytics. Of course, we can see which websites have sent us which leads, or which info— which sites and which content have given us the greatest referrals to our website, to our web page. The next element of that will be conversions. If there's a call to action from this page, then there'll be a conversion of some kind. And this, of course, gets us into the whole area of funnels. And a big belief that I have is that public relations activity now really is the head end of a sales funnel. There used to be a detachment between the public relations that someone would read about in print and the activity in the company, but this has all become joined up because now when people are reading an article or watching a video or seeing for example, um, a TikTok video, they can then click directly to the brand itself. And especially when it comes to platforms like WeChat, people are then finding that content and sharing it, and could be part of an affiliate program, for example, but it could just be a straight share. So the referrals and then conversions on a website or through a commerce store like on Etsy is now a really great way to track all the, the flow from the original article, video, infographic, or meme that's online through to the different referral channels and through to the website and then to the conversion itself. Now on the PR side, now for measurability, I always ask a client to share with us at the beginning of a program the web traffic and the sources of traffic, and also the amount of time and the amount of pages that they view. If you're not doing this, then you should be, because public relations really should be driving people to a website or to a mobile app or some kind of way to monetize that content. So then when someone actually makes a conversion to the product. If there's a referral code, for example, a promotion code, or someone's come from, let's say, a gated website, it's possible to really start to track the impact of PR. So you've got referrals and conversions, and the next element of that can be the customer care and response times. So we often talk about public relations as being upfront, but as you know, in my public relations view, it's what happens after the experience of purchasing that's as important as before the purchase. And that's because people now share and rate. So if we look at TripAdvisor, for example, or Proof the Purchase app, When we now have Trustpilot as well, these platforms now enable people to make a purchase and then to leave reviews, not only with that company but also with the wider community and public. So response rates and response times, for example, will be part of the post-purchase service, that will become evaluated online. And in one of my earlier podcasts, I talked with Paul Houraghan, who talks about the 6 elements of the customer promise and really talking about the need to deliver on the promise. So if somebody has actually read and seen a review and it's all glowing, but when their actual experience is not good, then they're likely to have this big disconnect. If they're pushed hard enough, they'll actually comment about that and start to make a noise. Now, if we look at some of the traditional definitions of social media, let me just drill down into those. So we have likes, comments, and retweets, and these, uh, shares that people have would be the individual engagement metric And if you look at your Twitter report, for example, or Lately, or any of the other platforms— Zoho, HubSpot— they'll all start to show you the comments and the retweets around a particular comment or post that you've made. So an awareness, which is the impressions and reach, is slightly different. So the impressions and reach are both important metrics. An impression is how many times a post shows up in someone's timeline, but a reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have, which is normally the follower count plus any accounts that they shared your post with. So in other words, it's almost like a multiplier effect, which is why impressions are always a lower number of the 2. So impressions are how many times something appears. The reach is how many times it could have appeared. So what we're looking for is a post that has a high impression. In other words, it's appeared a lot of times, but also that the reach is great. We're also looking for account mentions because mentions, especially organic ones where someone's mentioned something that we've created as a post, means that we are getting some traction, we're getting some engagement. Now, a post-engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the impressions. So a high rate of engagement means that most people, or many people, find it interesting. So I just want to have a look now and explain to you where we're doing with some of ours to give you a guide about what you might have on yours. So to give you an example, for the East West Public Relations I have here two Twitter accounts, a Facebook, an Instagram, a LinkedIn group page, and my YouTube video account. So if I look at my ESO SPR Twitter, for example, in the last week I've had three shares, 22 likes, 25 engagements, 68 posts with 2.9 thousand impressions and 44.5 k reach. Okay, so my engagement rate— well, I've got 25, I'm quite happy with that, and I've made 68 impressions. So that means that actually I'm getting quite a high rate in terms of nearly half of the posts I've made have had some kind of engagement, and 22 of those were actually liked. So we want to be looking at the quality of the post that we're creating, and those we can use platforms like Headliner, for example, or the Trylately, which is the AI-assisted creation. And there are many tools out there that we can create content with. Now, as part of our Speak PR program, I'm creating a new metric, and I'm working with Ian Morrison at GKIM, and we're working on a new set of metrics around the Active Communications Index. Now the reason I'm doing this is because all of these measurements of engagement, post impressions, and reach are great, but in a way they are only the outcomes. And what I'm doing with the Active Communications Index is I am looking at the inputs, and I'm also working to create a comparison as well as the absolute number. So with the Active Communications Index, we're working on the following. One is we're looking at how many pieces of content we've actually created, how frequently we are issuing those pieces of content, and over how many channels. Because it's one thing to be measuring the engagement, but what we also really want to know is how productive are we being as a company. And I'm doing this because as a business owner I'm as interested in the full engagement levels that show me how effective my content is, but I also want to measure my work rate because I want to get to a certain altitude or a certain work rate and then lay off on the gas a little bit, but then know that each week I'm creating how many posts going across how many channels and how frequently am I issuing those. And there are platforms like Lately, for example, which enable you to repurpose one piece of content across multiple platforms multiple times. So it is possible now to repurpose one piece of content multiple times, and that'll increase the, if you like, the utility of the content. So the ACI is measuring the productivity of my team, and that currently is not one of the metrics that's share, like, engage, and so on. Now the other thing I'm working on with Ian is helping people to track how they are doing against other companies of a similar size. So we're just working now on a metric where people will be able to go online, enter their details, enter their company size and how often they are active on social media. And if we get enough people to enter this data, will be able to help people to benchmark themselves against companies of a similar size in a similar industry, uh, in a similar country. The second element that we're working on then is this idea of taking people from ignorance through to evangelism, which is part of the Speak PR program. So I believe that we're trying to convert people from being unaware of our brand or our company or our product or service to ultimately making them into evangelists because they become then part of the company. So what we're doing is we're working on the, uh, the questionnaire and the reporting tool that will generate for the people that put their content in, the data in, will be able to show you where your audiences are on this 5-stage progress from ignorance through to evangelism. We have 3 audience groups: our internal, our partners, and our external. So we'll be asking people to put data in across a number of different areas, and by entering that data, we'll be able to give you a visual representation of where your company is most likely to be within those 5 phases of awareness. Now, why I'm quite excited about this is because I Often companies have no real view on where they are at with their different audience groups and the different avatars within those audience groups in terms of awareness. And often, especially with international marketing, a company may be very well known in one market but completely unknown in another market, and yet they apply the same messaging across all markets. So in order to deliver appropriate messaging, it's essential to understand what people currently know about you, not just your external but also your partners and your internal. So with this new graphical representation driven by the data that people put into it, we'll be able to represent back to people where their company is at on the 5 stages and therefore give recommendations on the kind of work that they can do to storify, to personalize, to engage, and to amplify, and then to know their public relations program. If this sounds of interest and you'd like to get involved, then please do email me to jim@eastwestpr.com, and we'll be putting this methodology and this new metric tool on the speakpr.co website very shortly. And as soon as it's ready, I will be promoting it and sharing with it across my social media channels as well. So public relations, the big trend in the last decade has been around the digitalization of public relations. The next decade is going to be about measurement because the data is available. We can now measure the performance of PR and we can also measure how people feel about our companies. Social listening is doing that and that's fantastic. With the ACI, I plan on measuring your productivity, but also on helping you to understand where you are on the journey to having your audience groups become evangelists for your business. So thank you for listening to me, and I hope that some of these metrics will prompt you to think a little bit more about public relations, not as just a press article or an event, but a core part of your business strategy. Because what can get measured can be improved, and if it's being improved, it can only help the performance of your business. And as a business is just there to create profits ultimately for the shareholders, public relations that's measured and managed will contribute to the bottom line. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like this, please do rate it and share it with anyone you find that you think would be interested. And also come to the East West Public Relations website at eastwestpr.com to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for free. Thank you so much for listening, and until we're together again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on measuring what you're doing.