I was having a conversation with Fraser. Likely about some of the processes now being touted as ‘PR Evaluation’ concurrently with your contribution. Frustration boiled over.

My frustrations are:

We (in PR) are still talking about the need for evaluation.
(That debate should now be buried. If PR’s don’t evaluate they should take up another profession like digging holes in roads).
The Professional Associations (and I do not exclude my own) are not contributing very much, are prepared to compromise (the IPR was espousing AVE’s – slightly disguised until this year)
Some so called evaluation practices by PR’s are lies, some ill founded, some is misleading and a lot is smoke and mirrors. Much is simplistic in the extreame.
The profession does not stay up with developments despite the threat to their professionalism and credibility.
The Internet and especially the blogsphere is going to expose this charlatan activity which will damage all of us.

Way back in 2000, I published a book with a whole chapter on Internet PR evaluation (Online Public Relations). So Its very old hat that we should add Blogs monitoring and evaluation to the mix.

You say that content analysis is expensive… Not so.
There remains a belief that tonality cannot be automated …. not true.

There is a silly debate about ROI which is pretty inapplicable for a great chunk of PR practice (I blogged about it yesterday) and there are some strange interpretations by PR people who have not yet found Wikipedia.

I am not saying all this is easy. Why should it be. It is, after all our profession which is not easy.

And, as you guessed, this is a rant!

Is it time for a PR evaluation Wiki? likely about some of the processes now being touted as ‘PR Evaluation’ concurently.

In your reply you note your work on “(tracking) editorial coverage against a range of corporate intangibles like staff turnover, cost of recruitment, (etc.)” I applaud such efforts!! - but I also suggest that we need to not only leverage new communications technologies but ALSO take full advantage of new CRM and Web analytics technologies to tie PR results to Sales results - i.e., let’s measure the tangible results, too.

I am not saying to ignore all other methods. I am issuing a call to add bottom-line considerations to our portfolio of measurement options. To your point: we lost an opportunity with Usenet, et al., and it would be a shame if we lost the opportunity today to explore new technologies that can help us tie our results to commensurate increases in inbound lead flows.

Hope that makes sense! Thanks very much for your comment.

I wrote ‘Evaluating Press Coverage’ (Kogan Page) in the early ’90’s. All this stuff was covered there but with empirical research.

Advertising equivalents belong to Neanderthals. One moment’s consideration will tell any half baked PR person why.

Here is the bacon. The effect of editorial coverage is greater for the value it ads. If you run a strong editorial campaign alongside and advertising campaign – guess what? The ad campaign gets more and better responses. At the same time, the rest of the organisation gets a lift too and out of all proportion to the cost of the campaign.

What really gets better is that a sustained, multimedia and multi publics relations programme has a cumulative effect.

In the late 1980’s I tracked editorial coverage against a range of corporate intangibles like staff turnover, cost of recruitment, product up-time (because customers wanted to buy our after sales care programmes and proprietary spare parts), pre-qualifiers to exhibitions etc.

When PR let Usenet and the theweb slip through its fingers, it did a disservice to the industry. Now we have another chance with blogs, Wiki’s, podcasting, mobile comms and a lot more. I just hope enough of us are are up to the challenge.