Paul Armstrong, in his blog Don't Fear the Firehose for PR Week, this week debates whether PROs are becoming 'glorified community managers'.

My view, for what it's worth, is that good community management is a highly skilled, specialised job that is separate from the role of PR. It may be a skill PR teams buy in, or work with, but it is not a core part of PR. PR does more to drive the discussions within the community, than manage the community itself. What do others think?

Measuring digital PR

The PRCA invited me to give a short presentation for one of its series of ‘Expert Briefings’ yesterday, this time on measuring digital, hosted by Ketchum Pleon. Up in the firing line with me were Fernando Rizo, head of digital at Ketchum Pleon, and Kristin Wadge, a director at Metrica. Although the three of us have quite varied clients, we all pretty much said the same core things:

• Metrics have to have real meaning to the business: they must be things we can learn from, and feed back into the development / strategy process.


• Online measurement must tie in to offline measurement. We set audience strategies ahead of channel strategies, and the ways to reach those audiences will be online and offline.


• AVEs are completely meaningless in these days of digital communications and two-way engagement.


• It is almost impossible to demonstrate a direct financial ROI for clients on their PR spend because of the difficulty in tracking action arising from PR. But, PR does have a clear business value which can be measured.

I was surprised at the reluctance of people to discuss the issue in a public forum (although I know sometimes I talk too quickly, which makes it hard for anyone to get a word in – the result of years working with Richard Houghton!). But a number of people did come up and ask questions after the event – these are the ones that dominated:

How do we pre define ROI? (ie what do you say to a client that says “If I spend 10k with you, how much will I get back?”)

Sadly, I don’t think we can pre-define financial ROI at all, in isolation from other marketing disciplines. We can do it in conjunction with others – Kristin talked about ‘econometrics’ that charts trends in sales / action against different marketing activity peaks (taking into account buying patterns such as seasonal trends, for example). She made the very good point that often this research is done with the ad and DM agencies, but PR just gets left out. Action: make sure PR is plugged into the research along with the other marketing disciplines.

I do think there are measurement criteria you can pre-define with clients. Set clear objectives, and set KPIs (not spurious ROI figures) against them. That might be reaching the right kind of audience (do some proper research into which media will influence buying decisions, rather than which will impress the CEO’s neighbours); and metrics against media placement and engagement within that audience.

What if your client’s product just isn’t very good? How do you manage social media response?

(Actually the problem was more precisely: “my boss has promised my client a social media programme for a product that I know people are going to hate”).

I think that digital is the death of spin. All the adjectives and shiny pictures in the world aren’t going to cover up that people just won’t buy rubbish. You won’t be able to manage the social media response; better to change the product, or turn down the client.

We need to give better advice to our clients – and this means either senior people having to do the work (that’ll stop them promising stuff that’s not deliverable) so they understand what will and won’t work; or letting the people who are going to do the work in on the planning conversations. Or walking away from clients who won’t listen.

There are some things we do for clients that we know lead to an increase in sales / activity etc. They have clear financial ROI – do we set targets for these and charge bonus payments for them?

There are always some ‘milestone’ articles that will see a short-term sales peak (for example). But those sorts of placements aren’t sustainable – if you know that getting into the Sun, or onto Reuters, has a positive financial impact on your client then of course you should target it – but you can’t achieve that every week.

Good PR is a combination of achieving these big goals that have short-term impact, and building gradual change in reputation / attitude / awareness to achieve a long-term goal. If you want to be bonused on the big hits, fine – but remember that you’ll focus more on that than on building the long-term stuff. So you may find you have a short-term client.

It was an interesting event, and many thanks to the PRCA for organising it. I wondered whether people were coming along looking for a magic metric to demonstrate ROI. But each client has different requirements – value means different things to different people. The key is setting clear objectives, and understanding what you can (and what you can’t) prove with measurement.

I’ll post the presentation points in more detail over the next few days. PRCA members will be able to access all three presentations from the PRCA site in due course.

Can PR drive sales?

We're always being asked to demonstrate what return on investment we can promise to clients - and from various conversations I've had with colleagues in the industry, we're not the only agency to be asked. If a client spends 5k with us, what will they make back?

It's an almost impossible question to answer - and trust me, I've tried as hard as anyone to come up with a metric that shows the direct impact of PR on sales. Note here that I'm talking about a direct link from PR to sales rather than the things we can track rather more easily (reputation, awareness, positioning etc).

The problem is that mostly we have no real control over the end product we're promoting. We can choose not to get involved, or we can spot problems and feed them into the R&D process - but ultimately, we rely on our clients to produce things that people want.

Recently, we've worked with a company that lets people compare the best prices and buy stuff from their mobile phones. It launched a very clever iPhone app, and we thought it might fly. We drafted the launch release, got some great photos, and talked to a lot of journalists. A half-page in The Sun later, and the company was top of the paid apps list on iTunes, with 30,000 people paying to download the app the first three days (it was then used 400,000 times in the first week). Did PR influence the sales? Absolutely.

Six months ago, we did something similar for another company, operating in the same sort of market. It too produced an iPhone app, we helped the company gets lots of exposure, and... nothing. Very little impact on sales. And yet, the coverage was just as good - the journalists and we all thought it was a decent product. Did PR influence sales? Not at all.

The difference was that people wanted the first product, and they didn't want the second one.

While media coverage is great at bringing a good product to the attention of potential customers, it won't persuade them to buy something they don't want; and it won't gloss over something that doesn't work. Which is why I'm yet to be convinced that it is possible to guarantee a direct sales return on a PR investment. I'd love to know what others think.

Does PR 'own' online reputation management?

It’s great news that Centaur is investing in the new Reputation Online project (launching end September). How to manage your reputation online is one of the biggest issues facing brands today. It’s also one of the reasons that companies can be so reluctant to get too heavily involved in the social media space. It still takes a brave company to entrust its brand’s reputation to its users.

PR at its core has always been about managing a company’s reputation. In the old days when print, broadcast and radio were separate entities and the Internet wasn’t a consideration, you had a fair chance of making a bad news story go away if handled right. I’m old enough to remember when managing an issue meant pulling in favours from journalists, fronting a credible spokesperson, and diminishing a bad story – often by creating another one to cover it. Spin, in other words. If you could weather the immediate storm (not everyone did), you’d probably be ok.

But these days, online engagement and user generated content means brands lose their control of a corporate message the minute they hand it over to their users. (You could argue that they always did – who can control what someone says about you in the pub? The difference is you didn’t know about it, and it wasn’t public. Or visible forever). Your spokesperson is no longer your CEO, it’s the customer who’s really, really cross. And is setting up a hate site, is smarter than you at SEO, or is leading a Twitter ‘fail’ campaign.

The only really meaningful way to make sure that the majority of what’s said about you is positive, is to make sure what you’re doing is right to start with. (That’s not to say there aren’t effective ways of managing an issue once it strikes – but that’s a subject for another time.) PR now needs to get much deeper under the skin of a company if we are to give real advice on reputation management. We need to get away completely from ‘we’ve just done this, can you promote it’ and take up a much more strategic role within a client company. We need to be involved in understanding how a company works from top to bottom. Not just marketing, but sales, business development, product development, HR, customer service and even SLAs.

Some clients just won’t let you get that far into the business. Some are just too huge, with marketing and PR team structures that don’t let you near a board director. But if the teams who supposedly manage reputations aren’t getting into the boardroom, then what they’re doing isn’t important enough to the company.

I don’t think there are many companies left that don’t consider reputation management or communications to be an important part of their business. Which means agencies that aren’t connecting with their clients at board level aren’t doing a good enough job. I expect that’s down to two things: the agency reporting to a PR or marketing manager who themselves don't get near the board (so don't really know what impact they're making); and the (connected) age-old problem of agency margins being squeezed, so cheaper, less experienced people are put on the client account, which means they can’t consult, which reduces the value of the agency, which squeezes margins.. and so on.

Reputation management is the core remit of PR. And yet this downwards spiral means the PR industry is consistently fails to manage its own reputation. Let’s take our own advice. If what we do is effective, our reputation will improve. If our reputation improves, we make more money. If we make more money, we invest in the best people, who give the best advice to our clients… and so on.

The biggest challenge facing brands online is managing their reputation. In PR, we manage reputations. It’s a huge opportunity if we choose to grasp it.

Is PR dead, or just changing?

Publicly, the PR industry is claiming that it is stabilising after a difficult 12 months, and that new business is on the up. I think this is true, although privately I’ve heard concerns that the quality of leads is reducing, the pitch process is becoming even more random, and resources are being squeezed harder than ever. This means lower fees, lower turnover, lower profits. Which means lower-grade people, and so lower fees…

We can reverse this, if we understand how our industry is changing. Smaller, smarter clients are investing more, not less, in getting their communications right across the board, in order to differentiate in a tough market. To me, this is taking PR back to its roots – building relationships with a company’s public audience – through direct communications, not just through third party media endorsement. Traditional media circulation and influence is in freefall (reflected by low ad rates). The greatest influence is coming from the media you can’t buy: social sites, word of mouth marketing (what your mates down the pub think), bloggers, online communities and so on.

Creating influence that supports business growth is about more than persuading increasingly cynical journalists to write about your client. It’s also about direct communication with a public audience (you know, public relations). This marks a real shift in how PR has been seen over the last decade. Web 2.0 (user-generated content, citizen journalism, blogging, online communities, social media, digital content creation etc) has meant that the third party endorsement by journalists that clients have always sought is just one way of influencing user behaviour. In an online world, users influence each other directly, making traditional media just one in a number of influence channels.

This has two major implications for agencies.

1. Our clients’ products have to be up to the job. If users are going to recommend something to each other, it has to work. No-one’s going to take our word for it any more. I’m old enough to remember the days when you could mass mail a press release and a dodgy photo and see national coverage from it, but those days went with the dot com crash. Journalists are observers, not changers, of behaviour. Some client-side marketing and PR heads - many of whom started their careers during the dot com rise – are taking a long time to realise this, not least because they’re getting bad advice from their agencies. So, we have to learn to consult to our clients and not just take direction. This means putting people with experience onto the job.

2. Agencies need to understand the fundamentals of communicating directly to public audiences, not just through a journalist filter. Although journalists hate wading through marketing jargon, they’ll do it if they have to (ie if the story’s important enough). But client customers won’t bother. If you want someone to explain your product to their mate, you’d better be able to explain it to them first. (To a consumer, a coffee maker is a coffee maker, even if it makes hot chocolate. It’s not a beverage solution). And if you want to retain control of your company’s message, you’d better make it so simple and self-explanatory that it will be remembered and repeated. Agencies need to be able to take a complex message and simplify it, to make it compelling.

I suspect this will be a battle with some of the bigger clients – those who delegate communications to a junior PR manager with little experience (and whose low fees only buy a junior exec at the agency). For every smart client-side marketing manager out there, there is another who’ll refuse to let go of their ‘multi-platforms communications device’ in favour of a ‘mobile phone’.

But clients will only change if agencies give them good advice. Which means investing some of our most senior people to consult, in order to increase the value of communications – in its broadest sense - within the client company.

The result? Spin may well be dead. But communications has a bright future.