How can you measure the work your team is doing on PR? This tool is free and effective way to man...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the PR podcast for business owners. Now today, I'd like to talk to you about a tool to measure the input so that you can track how much work you and your team are putting into your public relations. It's what we call the Active Communications Index. Now, the reason that we've built this tool is because there's lots of talk about engagement and amplification. And thousands of millions of viewers and so on. But actually, a bit like going to the gym, what really matters is how much effort you put into the public relations. So the Active Communications Index is a tool to help you, much like you might an acid ratio for your cash flow, to monitor how much work is going into the public relations activities in your company or organization. Because as we know, If you have a great workout, it's because you put a lot of energy in. The feeling afterwards will, will be with you as a function of how much work you put in, just in the same way that your profit at the end of the day will be a function of how much work you put into the business during the day. So the Active Communications Index is a tool that we have built here at Isos Public Relations. I'd like to just take you through that. Because we're finding it a really useful way of simplifying the amount of work that needs to be done, but also to enable business owners to create a consistent activity level in the market. Because often public relations is an activity that gets undertaken in a flurry. There's a new product launch or an award won, or a new member of staff joins, or a factory opens. And after that, the cadence drops off. Now, the Active Communications Index is here to help companies to find out what would be for them a natural rhythm of engagement in activities of public relations. So I'm going to talk you through this model, and it's also available on our website at eastwestpr.com under the Speak PR tab, and I'll put a link to that So basically, there are 3 different elements to the Active Communications Index, and I'm going to take you through each of those. And the basic formula is content times frequency times channels. So that's content, what you produce, the frequency, how often you produce it, and the channels, where you send it to. So let's go through how you can build a dynamic and consistent Active Communications Index for you and your organization. Now, the first document that we have— again, this is available on our website— is what we call the Story Planner. Now, the Story Planner is for the content. Now, what we've got here is a basic premise that we need to storify our business. Now, I talk about storification in our SPEAK model, which stands for Storify, Personalise, Engage, Amplify, and To Know. The first part then is to storify the business. And what I've done is I've created a day-by-day planner for you or your team to enter in stories. So we have 4 weeks, 1 week for each of the month, of course. And in week 1, We have 7 days, so you can decide how often you want to publish a story. But some businesses will have more story days and some may have less. But the idea is each day we think about what could we say. Now it comes back to an earlier document which we talk about, uh, under personalization, which talks to the messaging of the business. But for now, I'd just like to concentrate on the content. So story 1 on a Monday, on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday if you'd like to. Now what we do is each day we plan out a story. Now it could be that, for example, if you run a facility or a restaurant, you could have a different story which could be a different dish of the day, a soup of the day. If you have a store, it could be a new sale item. For the day. It could be deliveries in a certain location. So let's just try and think about something that's going to happen every day in your business that you could share about. And at the top then of that, we will have a total. Week 2, we do the same. Week 3, we do the same. And week 4, we do the same. Now, if we start this out at the beginning of the month, we've planned out already our daily stories. Now, anyone that has trained for a marathon or any other triathlon or any other sport will know that the secret is to plan your exercise well in advance so you don't give yourself a chance to not feel like it on the day. So by creating the stories in advance, mentally we're already prepared for the day when it needs to be prepared. And also, if we're teeing up something, then we can have that already ready. For example, we already know that we're going to be going to a certain location. We know that we're going to want to carry a camera or a microphone or take someone with us for a photo opportunity or take a prop or a piece of signage. So what we'd have then at the end of the month is maybe 20, 24 stories all lined up in advance. Now, the next thing that we're going to be looking at is frequency. Remember, content times frequency times channels equals Active Communications Index. Now, we're talking here then about looking at the 3 different audiences that we've got and when we're going to send them the information. So as we know from our Speak PR, under personalization, we talk about 3 different audience types the internal, and which are predominantly your staff. Then we have your partners or your allies, so suppliers for example. And then we have our external, often considered to be the customer group. So what we've got in this table is we've got 3 different rows and then we've got 7 different columns, because each column then has a different day of the week— Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday— and gives a total. So the idea is that what we've done with our story is we've decided to decide which news we're going to create, and on the frequency chart, we're going to start to determine when we're going to be sending out that content. Okay, so you could end up sending out one piece of information to your staff, for example, on a Monday and maybe a Friday, because you number of 2. You might want to send something out once a week to your allies, or maybe only once a month to them, to your partners or your suppliers. And then to external, you might want to have a higher frequency, for example, and sending out, say, on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Maybe you've got specials coming up, or you want to announce something special for those people. So that'll also give you a total. And what we do then is we'll have a total number of times that we are going to reach out and send information proactively to our 3 different audiences. So we have a combined number. Now the 3rd document is for the channels. Okay, and the channels then are the different places that we're going to be sending the information. So in the template that we've got, we have in the first column, channels. Then the second, we have internal, which is the internal audience. We have the external audience, and then our allies or partners in the third column. Because obviously we might have a staff newsletter, we might have a company newsletter for our, for our customers, we might have a blog which is good for just our customers, we may have just a Facebook group For example, now there's Facebook Teams. We might have communication there. We may have a YouTube. We may have that just for external, and we may have a podcast just for external. We may have SlideShare just for partners because that's business information. So you get the idea. So what we're going to do then is we're going to start to determine how often we're going to send information across those different channels. And that'll give us a number again. So if I send 1 email a week to my team plus my partners plus my allies, that gives me a total of 3. If it's the same email, of course, then it's just a number of 1. But if we're going to actually create person-specific content, then we're going to increase that number. Okay, so what we've got then is we've got a matrix which is showing number of channels by the different audiences, and that's giving us a total. Now, this is the fun part, and this isn't really done normally by, by anybody as far as I know, which is why I created this Active Communications Index, because we often talk in large numbers about how much engagement, how many page views, how many likes, and so on. And that's all great, but I think it's also a little bit of vanity And if I'm trying to manage the business, I want to know how much resource and effort I'm putting into the activity, because that's going to be a good judge of what I'm going to get out of it. If we send out one piece of news and we get lots and lots of hits and a lot of pickup, that's great. But if we send out one piece of news, we get none the next week, then we're not really getting much indication of the consistency What we're getting is how well that individual press release performed, but not how well the team have performed or the agency have performed. So the Active Communications Index is really an indicator of how much effort is being spent on the public relations activity. And the way it comes out is it gives the business owner a number. It gives the business owner a number that they can use which is sensible and can be repeated on a weekly basis to get an idea of how much the team is doing and if it's doing it consistently. Because public relations is about consistent engagement with the market, it's not about a one-off activity. So what we'll see then is a trend for the business of how much it's communicating and seeing how well it's doing. It's also an indicator of how many channels the company is leveraging in order to get noticed. And this is important because one of the key learnings from the Active Communications Index is that it's about not only the amount of content and frequency, but the number of channels that you use to leverage the content. So I'll take you through, if you like, an example of a month where— so in week 1, let's say we have one piece of news and we send it one time across 2 channels, that gives us an index of 2. Pretty simple, right? If we have one piece of content, let's say a press release, and we— but we send it out twice and we use 2 channels, we get an index of 4. So in other words, just by sending the same piece of news twice across the same number of channels, we've got 100% higher index. And that could be, for example, you send a press release out on a Monday and on a Thursday because people might have missed it on the first time it went out. You could send it again. Now let's say on week 3 we've got 5 pieces of content because we've got a story ready every day, and we are only sending those stories one time each, but we're using 2 channels. Let's, for example, say Twitter and Facebook. Then the 5 times the 1 times the 2 gives us an index of 10. So you can see there, by just increasing the content just 1 per day instead of 1 per week with the same number of channels, we've got 5 times the uplift in the actual energy going into the marketplace for the public relations of the company. Finally, let's say in the final week we have 5 pieces of content, in other words, 1 per day going out, but going twice. So you're sending the same piece of content, say, on a Monday and a Wednesday and a Tuesday and a Thursday. So you're repurposing existing content and you're using those 2 channels, let's say using Facebook and Twitter again. Well, that gives an index of 20. So you've got 10 times the index from week 1. But all you've really done then is to send something out once every day instead of once per week, and you're repurposing the same content. Remember, it doesn't have to be fresh content, so use the same content but twice a week, and you're sending it across 2 channels. So you can see the Active Communications Index is an extremely simple tool, because frankly, I'm not a mathematician. I'm a PR person and entrepreneur. And the goal of this is not to make it complicated. The goal of this is to keep it simple, because if it's simple, it can be used by everybody in the organization and becomes part of the terminology. A bit like, you know, how are our sales leads? What's our conversion ratio? What's our acid ratio? What is our Active Communications Index for this week? So when we look at the Active Communications Index, the learnings are pretty straightforward because the maths means that if we can generate more content using the Story Planner, if we can send it with more frequency by using automation, If we can send it across more channels, again by using social amplification tools, what we get as business owners is we get a multiplier effect. So it's not about getting hundreds of agency staff or lots and lots of people doing lots and lots of work. It's about using the tools, using the content, and using the technology to, to leverage the story in your business. This is the essence of the Active Communications Index. And of course, the idea is that if each week you track it, much like if you were working out to get fit for a marathon, if you track how fit you are, you track your cardio, then you know that each week you're getting fitter. And you have to keep this relentless pace in order to build a great brand in the marketplace, just as you'd keep that relentless pace if you were training for something or saving up for something in the markets. The Speak PR program is a program that I've developed to help business owners who may not want to have an agency for whatever reason, but do need to find ways to unlock the value in their business. The Active Communications Index is the measurement device that I've devised with my experience of over 25 years of building brands using public relations, so that business owners can have a, a free and effective and easy to implement and manage tool so they can see just how likely they are to get noticed. And as we know, like with business, the more we put in, the more we're going to get out. So let's track how much goes in and what comes out Will I'm sure be terrific. If there's anything here that I can help you with, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can find me at jim@eastwestpr.com or on LinkedIn as Jim James, and you can also come to our website eastwestpr.com and send in a form. In the meantime, if you like this podcast and this methodology, please do subscribe, rate it if you can in, uh, in iTunes, and subscribe even to our newsletter. Which is again at eastwestpr.com. So I thank you very much indeed for your time. If you'd like a copy of the Speak PR template, it's actually available at our website at eastwestpr.com/speakpr. Thank you so much for listening. Now, I always like to say at the end of this show, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you measure your communications.