When you see Katie Paine is going to be on a panel to discuss evaluation, you know you’re going to get the real deal. Katie Paine is considered one of the true leaders of public relations measurement. Heck, she literally wrote the book on measuring public relationships!
So before she started her Tuesday afternoon presentation about “Reputation, Employee Engagement and Other Measures of PR Value,” I cornered her to talk numbers.
Katie Paine rattled off her 3 favorite metrics in this video in a single take without hesitation:
- Share of desirable conversation as compared with competitors
- Degree of mentions of your key messages
- Cost per leads/mentions/etc. to understand the exact value (return)
With metrics, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each metric must be tailored to the task at hand and focused on what you’re trying to evaluate. Metrics that aren’t tied back to objectives and mere head counts (number of fans, number of followers) without consideration of the audience provide very little value for accurately understanding effectiveness of a message or campaign.
Dr. Kaye Sweetser, APR+M, associate professor, H.W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is a practitioner, a scholar and had the great pleasure of advising the national champions in the 2010 PRSSA Bateman Case Study Competition. Dr. Sweetser is a member of the APR+M Council. Connect with Kaye on LinkedIn and on Twitter @kaye.
For more coverage on the PRSA 2010 International Conference: Powering PRogress, visit PRSA Intelligence, follow #prsa_ic and the Conference blog.
