Does enough company do enough PR? Take our test to find out.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm on a mission to find out whether companies are doing enough to convert their employees and their customers and their partners into evangelists for their brands. And I'm doing that by creating a metric called the Active Communications Index. Now I'm doing this because in public relations, we're often accused of really not having any tangible results. But I think that's not true. I'd like to change this and move away from just sentiment analysis to actually tracking what people are doing within the company and outside of the company, and what a company is doing proactively to manage the amount of work that it's doing to get noticed. Now, I'm doing this because for over 25 years, I've run a public relations firm. I've also built 8 companies on 3 continents, and the old saw is that public relations can't get measured. But I believe that it can, and the Active Communications Index could be the solution. Now, I've built a website called speakpr.co, which is where I'm hosting the mastermind, the training part of the public relations business. The public relations business is eastwestpr.com. It's really helping companies big and small, mainly in tech but also in education, to spread their message especially into the Asia-Pacific region. And I've been doing that for 25 years from my Singapore, Beijing, and Indian offices. But now I'm working on how I can train and share the knowledge to those companies that don't need an agency or not ready for an agency, but would like to be able to have access to some of the tools and the tips that we agencies have at our disposal. So I've called it the Active Communications Index, and what I'm trying to measure is how much work it takes to get an individual to move from being aware and receptive to a company to actually becoming an evangelist. And we've defined that as being 5 stages. So in our Speak PR program, we talk about having the need to storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. And the 5 stages of engagement with a brand are that people are receptive to a brand, so they've got a need, that they're aware of a particular company, so they have started to pay some attention, they're interested in the services that company's offering and make inquiries, The fourth stage is that they become engaged. They receive value from that company. They become a customer, or they become a member of staff, or they become a partner. And if they're really happy, they become evangelical. They tell others. That applies equally to staff, to customers, and to partners. So I spent today working on a survey. What I'm calling the evaluator with my CTO Ian Morrison, who's based in Vietnam. And Ian and I know each other from 1997 and '98 when we had an internet business called goevents.com together. So Ian's a bit of a whiz when it comes to the technology, and frankly, uh, he's much better at spreadsheets and maths than I am. So I've got the idea and he's got the technique and the technology. So what we've done is created an Active Communications Index evaluator test. Now this is at speakpr.co/evaluator, and I'll put this in the notes. But what we want to do is we'd like to reach out and invite everybody that's running a company or working for a company and managing the marketing to take part and fill out the answers to 3 sections of questions. Each set of questions are related to the different audience groups. So as we mentioned, our Speak PR, we talk about the personalization and really the 3 different audience groups, which include the team, the partners, and the customers, both current and future. We've had a bit of fun trying to work out the questions, and I've got questions that are trying to find out, for example, How often a company celebrates the success of its members of the team? How often do customers refer other customers to a company? Do the partners actually make suggested decisions or suggestions to the company on how to be better? Do the partners invite that company to take part in joint events and joint promotions? Do the company's clients appear in their marketing material? Do customers post social media that is posted by the company? And conversely, does the company post social media from its partners? So I'm working to try and get a number of data points which will help me to identify for a company that according to each individual audience group— the team, the partners, and the customers— at what stage in this 5 stages of engagement their different audience groups are at. So if that sounds a little bit complicated, it is a little bit complicated, which explains why I've got Ian Morrison involved, because he's good at helping with all the data that we're going to try and gather. But we're basically trying to ask questions that will identify whether people are receptive to the brand, if they're aware of the brand, if they're interested in the brand, if they're engaged with the brand, and if they're evangelical about the brand, regardless of whether they are a member of the team, a partner, or a customer. And I think this is important because when we're counseling companies on public relations and on marketing, and in fact when they are looking themselves, one of the great unknowns is how much should be done. Clients will ask me how much budget should they spend, and as a, as a rule of thumb, different industries will allocate different amounts of money to the different phases. For example, for launch, a software company might launch a new product with 5 to 10% of future sales. But heavy industrial companies may be spending less than 1% on marketing, and that includes events, advertising, and PR. So what's currently happening is that by and large, the budget for public relations and marketing is a function of revenue, not a function of the stages of engagement with the brand. So I think that we can address this in a, in a fundamental and a data-driven way, which is by identifying the amount of work that needs to be done for a company to move individual team members or partners or, or customers along this scale of engagement, from receptive to aware to interested to engaged and to evangelical. I think this is important because actually in some cases too much marketing can be a waste of money. There is a different emphasis as well. If you have a customer group that's already evangelical about a brand, then it's a different kind of work and a different amount of budget and also a different kind of reward. So the reward, for example, I, I worked on the Brompton bikes account when I was in Singapore. We created a video for the Brompton Owners Club cycle around Sentosa in Singapore. Now the owners of Brompton bikes created their own event, and what Brompton needed to do was to celebrate that by creating a video, for example, and publicizing and giving that video to each of the different user groups in Indonesia and Singapore and Malaysia and Thailand, for example. Now, in another market, for example, in China, when Brompton was being launched, there was no evangelical audience. People were beginning to become receptive to riding a bicycle, but folding one was another issue. And the amount of marketing and the amount of work to be done to get Chinese to be interested in a folding bicycle from Britain that was 5 to 10 times the price of the normal bicycle was entirely different to the group in Southeast Asia that were already adopters and had built their own community. So I'm working to try and build this evaluator so that we can come up with an Active Communications Index. And the index is going to be a way for companies to start to measure the ongoing work that needs to take place in their marketing. I think this is important because the PR department often doesn't get as much budget or credibility as it could do because it can't justify the amount of money being spent because it hasn't really determined what the value is beyond coverage. And I think this is, uh, a shame. And there are lots of great and talented people in the public relations industry and the advertising industry, but that's changed because of the digital nature of advertising and now the, if you like, the trackability of digital advertising. But public relations, I read still in the industry press, is struggling with metrics and this sort of angst about PR is useful, but how useful? If you don't do any, then we know that's a calamity. But if you do lots, how much becomes too much and a waste of money? So with the Active Communications Index, I want to move to a place where we can help clients to decide how much content they should distribute through how many channels at what frequency. And because the different communities will need different platforms and they'll need different community content and the frequency for each audience group needs to be changed, and it needs to be changed according to where they're at along those 5 stages, which again were to be receptive, to be aware, to be interested, to be engaged, and then to become evangelical. So I'd like to invite you to help me to help you, because this tool that we put on the website, the evaluator, will give companies both an absolute and relative position and then some recommendations. So the absolute will be telling you how much work you're currently doing, and by the activities of the 3 stakeholder groups will give you an indication of where they're at along the 5 stages of engagement. Now, because we're gathering data from people around the world, in fact, about the company size and the number of channels they use and the industry that they're in and the geographical location, we're going to be building up a database which will enable us to start to tell a company how it's faring against similar companies, just in the same way that LinkedIn has got its Social Selling Index, and it tells an individual how they're doing within their own network in terms of their Social Selling Index and how they're doing against other people with the same job title, job category. So it shows me my absolute position and my relative position, and that's useful. It tells me whether I need to do more or less. So with the Active Communications Index I'm hoping to be able to share with you how much work you're doing, which you'll know to some degree, but by answering some of the questions, we hope to give you some extra insights. But second phase will be that by collating information from lots and lots of people, we'll be able to start to give people reassurance or encouragement that they're either doing the right amount of inbound marketing, that they are maybe spending too much time and money on inbound marketing and the ROI is declining, or that actually they need to get their skates on because their competitors are doing a great deal more. So I'm working to try and introduce metrics into public relations on the productivity side, not on the coverage side, because it's the productivity side that we can control. And as a business owner, knowing how much you've done and how much you've invested is actually more important than some of the vanity metrics about impressions and retweets and likes, because actually those metrics don't translate into anything really. They're a sort of a popularity rating of some kind. But as the algorithms are fickle, they can get changed. 2 equivalent posts on 2 different days can receive entirely different receptions from the social media universe. But as we're trying to use social media to generate leads and inquiries, actually the, the vanity metrics don't really give us an indication of future sales. Because they vary so wildly. But just like any sales activity, we all know that it's the routine and the constant approach to the market when it comes to selling, and really that it's a numbers game. I believe that that's also the case with public relations. It's about a constant communication with those 3 audience groups to ensure that you're staff are fully engaged and are evangelists for the brand and for the business, that the partners know enough about your company that they could sell your services to either their customers or to other customers, and that your current customers are so happy and know so much about what you're offering that they're actually also helping to become part of your extended sales force. So the Active Communications Index is the underlying index that I'm working to introduce with the Speak PR program so that business owners will have a number that they can use to measure the activity levels of their teams. I'm not there yet. We're at the beginnings of me working out how this all works. So if you've got any ideas, please do join me by writing or find him on LinkedIn. But we do already have the framework. We do already have the list of 40 questions that Ian and I have put online. Invite you to come to the website speakpr.co/evaluator, take the test, and work with us to change an industry for the better so that we can all get some metrics and get more productivity out of our public relations. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like this, please rate it, do share it. We have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Friday, and we're up to issue 25 this week, I believe. And the podcast here is now up to issue 203, and we've got past our 6,000th download. So we're working hard here in the studio shed and appreciate that you are taking the time to listen. And hopefully you've learned a little bit of something that helps you and your business. So my name is Jim James. Thank you for listening, and I wish you the best of health, that you have a profitable and surviving business considering the current lockdown situation all over the world, and that if you're interested in getting some numbers into UPR, you'll come across and take the evaluator test.