Don't spend anything on public relations until you've listened to this podcast. It tells you how ...

Hello, my name is Jim James, and I'm your host on the Speak PR Podcast. On this podcast, I'd like to help you to unlock the value in your business with free and effective communications. I do this by sharing my experience as an entrepreneur and a PR agency owner for over 25 years, serving over 500 clients, large and small, around the world. Now, today I'd like to talk about measurement. Because we've actually just conducted a global launch of a product called the Grenadier, which is the new INEOS 4x4. And my agency, EastWest PR, was involved in the Asia launch. So we did the work in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. And so historically, clients have always wanted to see the press clippings for the work that's been done. And one of the challenges now in COVID times is that no one can actually show the product all come together. So we had at one stage 20 people on a Zoom call. We had my team in Singapore and me in the UK and the client in the UK and the journalists in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam all dialing in and watching a video and having a live video call with Mark Tennant, the client. Now the feedback by lunchtime is that we've already got some coverage. But I was able to then use a platform called Talkwalker, or talkwalker.com, and it has a free social media monitoring tool. And within 4 hours, I was able to identify that there were some 1,500 conversations taking place, 4,300 items of engagement. In other words, people resharing. A 10% positive sentiment with over 20 billion potential reach. Now, how can we do that? Well, products like Talkwalker are monitoring launches. Today's launch happened simultaneously. We did Asia first, and through the day, then it rolled into Europe and then into the States. So as the day went by, we were able to use Talkwalker as one platform to track not only the, the way that this news was spreading, but also the sentiment about it. So public relations isn't just about getting noticed. We need to also identify whether we're getting noticed for the right reasons and whether we're getting noticed in the right places. Now, I'm reminded of the, the old story. In fact, I was reminded at a conference of the old Gerald Ratner story. And Gerald Ratner and the Ratner jewelry store, which actually he had inherited as a family business, is really a case study in what happens when public relations goes wrong. So Gerald Ratner, for those of you that don't know, was a jeweler. And at a press conference at the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall, of all places, on the 23rd of April 1991, he said We also do sell cut glass sherry decanters complete with 6 glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. And people say, Gerald, how can you sell this for such a low price? And I say, because it's total crap. Now obviously there might have been a murmur there, but he compounded this by going on to remark That one of the sets of earrings was cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich—that's Marks and Spencer's—but probably wouldn't last as long. Now, funny as that might have seemed at the time as a sort of a party piece, he was just entering the period when, of course, news was getting out quickly, and of course, people had a field day. The media had a field day. Now, after the speech, very quickly the group value plummeted by over £500 million, which is, you know, 30 years ago was a lot of money. So Gerald Ratner is just one case study of how a carelessly worded statement, no matter where it is, and even more so now in light of the social media that public relations can be taken for granted. Good brand reputation can be taken for granted unless something like this happens where all of a sudden the business is back on the line. And we've seen recently where people have said things that were in government have led them to have to resign because what they said was deemed to be socially unacceptable, even though it wasn't a policy, it was a comment they made on social media. So public relations is something that we need to monitor. And as Francis Bacon, the philosopher, once said, knowledge is power. But we might now say that actually measurement is knowledge. So it's no longer enough just to track the amount of clippings. What we need to do is to look at also the nature of the tone of what's being said. And also, now that people can share and reshare, we have to look at what we call engagement. Now, how can we measure all this? Now, I, I personally like to start a little bit earlier on. I like to start at the input. So I've developed a formula called the Active Communications Index, and this is a formula, very simple. It says the amount of content Times the number of channels, times the frequency, will give you an indicator, an index. And it's going to be an indicator of how much coverage you're likely to get. And I have this because clients often worry about the scale of the coverage on the other side of the activity. But much like saying you're going to go to the gym and be looking at your cardio performance after the exercise, what we really need to be looking at is what exercises you're planning to do in the gym, because the cardio results are going to be the byproduct of the exercise that you do. So the Active Communications Index that I've created, which is on the eastwestpr.com website under Speak PR, is to give companies and entrepreneurs a guideline so that they can start to create consistent, well-distributed media content across multiple platforms. So we start there. Now plainly, PR is a, is an industry that people are investing in. It's about an $11 billion industry. So companies are absolutely investing in public relations. And in the old days, say old, when I started the agency Southwest PR in Singapore back in '95, clients used to ask for what we called AVEs, which are advertising value equivalents. What we had to do was to measure the clippings, get the rate card from the publication, and then to multiply the advertising value times 3.5, because the view was that 3.5 times the advertising was the credibility ratio of a paid ad versus earned editorial. Now, in 2010, a group of PR experts met in Barcelona, and they came up with what they call the Barcelona Rules. And the Barcelona Rules were then updated in 2015. And what they've— what this group of PR experts have done is to identify a number of principles, of which the number one is about goal setting, and that measurement really is a byproduct of the goal setting. So often we have companies who want to measure something, but actually they haven't really set any goals at the beginning to determine what would be a positive or negative metric. So a bit like sort of setting off on a journey and measuring how fast you got there, but not identifying at the beginning whether you needed to get there quickly or by the most direct route or by using the least fuel. So we need to start with goals, and once we've got those goals— and those goals could be, for example, web traffic, they could be inquiries, they could be attendance at a showroom launch. It could be, in the case of COVID-19 communication, it could be getting people to social distance properly. So if we haven't identified what our goals are for the PR activities, then the measurement is bound to be flawed. So let's start there. Now, I think that we need to also then look at if we've got public relations What are we going to be doing and where are we going to be getting the results? Now, in public relations, of course, what we're doing often is sending content— press releases, editorial, infographics, videos— out to various media channels, our own and the public ones. We use one tool out of the UK called coveragebook.com, and CoverageBook is a measurement and evaluation platform, which we find very good because what we do for the online coverage is that we put the URL link in and their software will then troll from actually SimilarWeb and aggregate for us the combined total readership. And what it also does is has a score, what they call a, a domain authority score, And the Domain Authority score, higher and lower, means that you sort of get a rating. Because it's one thing to have a website with massive traffic but has a low, if you like, quality readership or a low rating. And obviously what we want to try and do is get a website or a news outlet that has a high Domain Authority but also has high traffic. So CoverageBook is very good for consolidating both the numbers and making a wonderful presentation of all of your clippings if you need to export it then to PDF, for example. Now, one sort of move beyond that is to look at the sentiment. So I mentioned earlier on the launch of the INEOS Grenadier. So it's not enough to be spoken about, you know, it's, it's about whether we're spoken about in a positive or negative or even in different way. Talkwalker.com has a free social media monitoring tool which actually also tracks sentiment. Now, it's using AI for this by looking for which words and which keywords your coverage is displaying. Now, obviously, if it's your own press release, it's going to be positive, but if it's being picked up and retweeted or reposted on Instagram or Facebook or on any other channel then of course it may or may not be positive all the time. So deciding to track both the frequency and the range of coverage is important, but so is the sentiment around it. Now there is a very large group called Karma, which is a global organization dedicated to measurement, and they have— if you want to go to the sort of the really big-hitting machine. They've got a global media intelligence product or platform, really. Now they've got over 1,200 clients and they monitor over 100 languages and have 5 staff on 5 continents. So if you're managing a global launch, for example, and you really want to track both the amount of coverage and the sentiment, then karma.com would be— and that's with a C would be a great platform to use. Now, there is actually an association, amazingly enough. It's called the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and this group has dedicated itself to the measurement and the practice of measurement in the public relations industry. So they have a number of tools, one of which is called the Integrated Evaluation Framework. And this is a free and online available framework that we can use as entrepreneurs, agencies can use, organizations can use to start to create a measurement for the ongoing PR, talking about things like reach, sentiment, engagement, and so on. So we also have, uh, through the AMEC what they call the Measurement Maturity Mapper. Which again is looking at how you're progressing over time, because your sentiment in your analysis isn't static. The more work you do in the market, the more detailed it becomes. The more one-on-one interviews that we hold, for example, for this new 4x4 from INEOS, the more depth, the more synthetic will be the analysis. So measurement's important. But it does start with planning. AMEC has got some frameworks that you can use. CARMA has sort of a global standard, but there are some lighter weight ones like Talkwalker and CoverageBook that will help you get there. Now, for, for my money, one of the things as a running a small business, what I like to see is clicks through to my website. And I'm amazed at how many companies that I work with that do not somehow track the analytics on their website. And those that do, that's great, but then even fewer of them have online chat. Now it's the equivalent to making a beautiful showroom or a beautiful store or a beautiful restaurant and having no sales assistants or no maître d'. So I'm always amazed when I go to a website and it just says contact us. There's an email form. At this day and age, when there are platforms like Zoho, but also Zendesk, for example, is a very good one, that enable you to go online and talk directly to the customer support or the technical support. In, in Asia, I found that companies are very much switched on to this, and I've talked earlier in the week about people selling on Taobao and actually bringing people to the website and selling directly from the website using these interactive chats. And you can use chatbots if you can't be available all the time, and you can use manned ones. And services like Zendesk will actually provide the staff who can respond to scripted responses that, that you have as a company for them. So public relations for me fulfills many functions, but a large one is to get people to come to my website to find out more. And then it's essential that we use some of these tools that actually make our website interactive, because public relations is only part of a journey, a digital customer journey, as I shared just on the podcast about the sewing. And the sewing tribes. So back in 1996, I met a man called Jim McNamara, who at the time was starting a business called the Mass Communications Group of Australia. And Jim and I had a very pleasant conversation because in those days we really didn't have the internet, but he was talking about the impact of measurement and how it was going to be more and more important. In our industry. Now, Jim McNamara was of course prescient, because as digital came in, not only could we start to measure the, uh, the advertising value equivalent by getting at our rulers and chopping up pieces of paper and scanning them and sending hard copies to our clients, what Jim foresaw was an age where in digital everything can be measured. Everything can be planned. And I was delighted to see that in fact the AMEC integrated evaluation form has actually been authored by Professor Jim McNamara, who's now at the University of Technology in Sydney. So 30 years ago, Jim was sharing his vision for measurement, and now he is still leading that. And I think what that shows us is really that Measurement has always been part of public relations. It's not that it's new because it's digital. The industry has always had a desire to understand the impact that it's making on the well-being of the organization. So now, as we plan our weeks ahead and the public relations, if you think about your Active Communications Index, how much content are you going to send through how many channels at what frequency, because without the input, you won't have the output. The input can be measured and planned, and with those inputs, then you can start to measure the outputs. And that'll give you a ratio of how effective you're being, how much investment are you making, and how much reward are you getting. If you're doing great PR, then of course the reward will be more people coming to your website, and you're receiving them gratefully and generously, you're welcoming them to come and listen to the story of your brand. So this is a little story about measurement and a long time ago meeting a great man, Jim McNamara. And I hope this has helped to maybe shed some light on what you can do with your company when it comes to measurement for yourself or any agencies that you work with. Remove the fear and the anxiety about public relations, what it does for you. Start with a plan Identify the objectives and put in consistent effort, and you will get great public relations. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Jim James. This has been the Speak PR Podcast. If you like this, please come to our website eastwestpr.com. We have a newsletter you can subscribe to, or subscribe to this podcast and rate it and share it. In the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you Great health. I wish you a profitable business and that you keep on measuring your public relations. Thank you.