PRSA Conference NYC

PRSA Conference NYC 

Fang Guo

When the PR industry was first pioneered, it was created as a way to communicate proactively with media rather than always being in crisis mode when the media got hold of a story. Over time it has become a powerful marketing tool, creating awareness and connecting audiences with brands through credible third-party endorsements. Thanks to social media and other tools, today PR is truly about relating to companies audiences and engaging with them indirectly and directly.

Similarly, there was no effective way of measuring the success of a PR campaign in pre-social media era. Today the digital age helps create different measurement tools online and offline, enable companies to precisely monitor the effectiveness of their PR campaigns. The PRSA conference that I had the honor to attend was a three-day education forum where brilliant minds get together, teach and exchange ideas on how to sufficiently utilize PR in this day and age.

The speaker who started the conference off was Don W. Stacks from University of Miami. As a member of IPR Measurement Commission, he is at the forefront of developing and promoting standards and best practices for research, measurement, and analytics that contribute to ethical, strategic, and effective public relations. He opened up the presentation by asking the question: “How do professional associations that deal with public relations research, both academic and professional, express codes of ethics, statements, or conduct regarding the ethical practice of research? If they have an ethics guideline, what principles or values are espoused?” As the public relations profession continues to focus more and more on outcomes associated with campaigns or public relations initiatives the question of standards has shifted to the forefront of discussions among and between professionals, academics, and research providers. Making this shift even more important to establishing impact on business goals and objectives is the fact that standardized measures for public relations activities have never been recognized. Unlike other marketing communications disciplines, public relations practitioners have consistently failed to achieve consensus on what the basic evaluative measures are or how to conduct the underlying research for evaluating and measuring public relations performance.

The importance of PR research and lack of ethics thereof

To varying degrees, research, measurement, and evaluation have been a part of the

public relations process since its modern inception. If one views the public relations process as one of the popular acronyms such as “RACE” then research is involved in almost 3/4 of the strategic planning process (Research, Strategic Action Planning, and Evaluation). Today’s practice, however, has put a much higher value on research of results. In particular, the drive to produce support for public relations’ impact on client bottom lines (as defined in financial and nonfinancial terms) or Return on Investment (ROI) versus Return on Expectations (ROE) has moved the profession towards more sophisticated methodologies and a focus on best practices.

Ethics should be part of those best practices throughout the public relations research process. There is currently no standard guideline for public relations research, data analysis, or evaluation of effectiveness. In the current state of affairs, the ethics of individual firms or practitioner’s guide the research process. That approach is haphazard and leads to a startling lack of consistency in ethical standards across the field. Indeed, very little ethical guidance is offered that is specific to public relations research.

IPR measurement commission research ethics statement

The duty of professionals engaged in research, measurement, and evaluation for public relations is to advance the highest ethical standards and ideals for research. All research should abide by the principles of intellectual honesty, fairness, dignity, disclosure, and respect for all stakeholders involved, namely clients (both internal and external), colleagues, research participants, the public relations profession, and the researchers themselves.

Core Ethical Values

Autonomy

Respondent rights

Dignity

Fairness

Balance

Duty

Lack of bias

Honesty

Not using misleading information or “cherry picking” data

Full disclosure

Discretion

Judgment

Protection of proprietary data

Public responsibility

Intellectual integrity

Good intention

Valuing the truth behind the numbers

Reflexivity (put self in other’s place)

Moral courage and objectivity

Examining Research and Measurement Ethics in Today’s Transparent World: Establishing Standards for Today’s Communications

Ethical standards behind password protection for members only posed a substantial but also telling problem for our data collection. We sought to understand the current state of affairs regarding research ethics in public relations. Empirical research could strengthen our understanding of prevailing ethical norms in public relations research and the possibility of implementing ethics statements.

Another presentation of PR ROI measurement by Molly Borchers is also worth to mention. While there is still no mathematical formula to quantify PR ROI, some methods can be applied to get a general idea. She broke down measurement methodologies into three components PR mentions, social media metrics and PR outcomes.

PR Mentions

Counting media placements: the main role of public relations is to reach out to the media, and to communicate a company's message. Counting media placements is one way to measure the ROI, and quite indicative if you get massive coverage on various publications. Here consider how many of these mentions are main stream or first tier (like TechCrunch, Business Week, etc) and how many are less popular, yet highly influential. Everything that comes after these counts as a media mention, but weights less in terms of ROI.

Assessing quality: after counting, you need to consider the quality of these placements: will they influence behavioral changes in those who read them? Will these changes have a positive impact on their attitude towards your business? Are they credible? Do they feature your company exclusively? Is the tone positive? Do they confer your message accurately?

Viral impact: online, media coverage extends to social media networks, with readers sharing the news, and reacting to them. There are several ways to measure these reactions, beyond number of mentions. You need to consider the number of influencers mentioning your brand; their tone of voice; and the sentiment of the message.

Social Media Metrics

Engagement vs. coverage: it is generally agreed that the most important aspect of social media is the quality of the conversation, and not the "coverage." In other words, when you measure the PR ROI on social media, you need to focus on community and conversation, rather than the number of mentions. Are people really talking about your brand, are there influencers who carry the conversation? Is the conversation affecting your brand's social media presence?

Community growth: as an effect of social conversations related to a specific PR campaign, your brand should experience some kind of growth relating to its own social media presence: more Twitter followers, more Facebook likes, etc. Because likes and followers can be bought, to quantify community, you will need to assess whether the people following or liking something are truly interested in your brand. Are they active users, conversing about issues related to your business? After they follow, do they participate in conversations on your social media channels?

PR Outcomes

Behavioral impact: this one is perhaps the most important PR outcome to consider, because it reflects directly the success of a campaign. How many customers called to inquire about your products/services? Are more people recommending your brand than before? Are you generating more sales? Is your site receiving more traffic from a media placement, and how many of those visitors are taking an action (like purchase, call your customer support number, etc)?

Growth: as a result of everything mentioned above, in an ideal world you should experience a kind of growth that doesn't refer to flash traffic to your site. If you are not selling anything (for example social startups) you should see more user registrations, and unique user growth. Maybe more app downloads if that's what your business is all about. Product sales, if you are in eCommerce and you had a concrete campaign based on a product launch. No matter how you look at it, growth means customer/user retention and revenue growth where this metric applies. If a PR campaign doesn't have this outcome, it has failed.