Measuring the value of PR - the values that make relationships

Over the next few days I will be working on development of tools that allow me to look at corporate and brand values.

You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.

First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.

My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.

This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.

These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.

With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.

Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.

But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).

We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.

The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.

Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.

We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.

The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.



That's the theory.



Now to see if it works.....

The Clip Book

Working part time in an agency gives an insight into how far they have regressed.

In the 1980's and 90's I ran a PR consultancy. We had a sister evaluation company (Media Measurement) which did all out work on clip book production as well as evaluation to meet a range of client needs. In those days we used a lot of trees in PR.

The evaluation team were specialist, had all the software and equipment to deliver product on time and right first time.

Professional PR people and awesome writers were not wasted on clip counting and mounting.

Easy.

Now, a decade later I find that agencies are still using PAPER! The Clipbook carbon footprint in the PR industry is massive.

Because clients want it?

Now, I don't care about the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) demand for huge amounts of money to force organisations to knock over more trees. Its time to face them down.

I am not a person who believes that you can't read off the screen. We all do it.

I don't care about size for size Advertising Equivalents spreads and all that complete AVE rubbish. That was invented to satisfy the 20th century egos of Marketing Directors. In those days they had secretaries who typed letters!

Paper guard books offer so little information compared to digital ones. Today, would professional managers accept cash flow forecasts without drill down?

But what I resent most is the complete an utter waste of intelligent people’s time and on every count. Cost, wasted skill, environment damage, encouragement of lazy, typically innumerate, PR practice are all reasons to move away from paper.

Partnering with a professional evaluation company is the right direction for agencies (and I mean partner – not supplier) and this needs to be a three way, transparent relationship with the client.

In cost saving alone, it makes sense.

Search v Value

In recent weeks I have been working for Publicasity. They are developing their online skills - and the new web site, blog Twitter etc. is due in a few weeks (of course).

But we have been working on audits for a range of clients and companies and one the striking statistics that emerge is search volume.

More than once, we have un-nerved marketing directors with a graph that they recognize as sales graphs.

These search graphs are now beginning to be important. A way of being able to identify the how well companies are doing over the counter and online in terms of sales.

It struck me that there are more applications for these kind of data.

Knowing that search volume tells us about the commercial success of an organisation means that these data could also be useful to investors and others.

This conjoin between actual activity and online activity is another way of expressing the value of online work.