The media coverage and some Out-takes and Outcomes achieved for Foodmek in its 50th Birthday campaign.
Media coverage of your company or organisation can deliver many benefits to it, as I explained in this post previously.
But there’s a common misperception about media coverage I want to address in this post – that achieving media coverage is the end, or objective, of media relations or public relations overall.
This misperception is fuelled by those, including previously me before I learned about best practice PR on my CIPR Professional PR Certificate course, who see media coverage as a metric of PR success and simply display what’s been gained and use its potential or actual reach to readers as a metric of its success.
Why the myth began
The reason for this is that, before 2010, this was the simplest metric of media relations success available to PR professionals, particularly when the coverage gained was in print – easy to measure the column inches gained – and most easily understood by their clients.
As a result, it was commonly cited as the success metric for media relations and very often measured also with Advertising Values Equivalent (AVE) – the cost of buying the coverage space as advertising, usually multiplied by 3 as a proxy for the greater value of media coverage over advertising in being a third-party endorsement by the media outlet concerned. This is what I was taught when I entered PR in 2011.
Why it doesn’t work
The problem with this is that this success metric has no clear link to how this media coverage is helping the company or organisation involved achieve its Business Objectives. So the client, whether internal or external to the PR’s organisation, can very reasonably say, “That’s great, but how is this helping me achieve my targets?”
It was because of that problem, that the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management held the World Public Relations Forum in Stockholm in 2010 to discuss how PR could better demonstrate its value to the people commissioning it.
The result was the Stockholm Accords. One of the key agreements was that for public relations to properly demonstrate its value as a strategic management junction it should be focused on helping the organisation achieve its stated Objectives. So, to do so, the PR professional should ask what they are and work out what PR activities should be done to help achieve them.
How to measure success?
Logically, the next question was ‘How do we demonstrate what contribution the PR activities have made to achieving those Objectives?’ AVE and other commonly-used measures such as Key Messages Placed and Sentiment Analysis didn’t do that.
This measurement problem was addressed at the next seminal PR conference that year in Barcelona. What came out of it were the now broadly-accepted best practice PR measurement standards known as ‘Barcelona Principles’, which have since been updated twice, making Barcelona Principles 3.0 the current gold standard for PR measurement.
At their heart are the simple idea that public relations can demonstrate its contribution to achieving organisation objectives by first setting measurable Business and Communication Objectives which contribute to them and only measuring the things it has done which contribute to the achievement of the organisation objectives, not simply what was done and what came out of that.
What to measure
The principles set up different stages for what could be measured and said that the most important in demonstrating contribution to organisational Objectives are Outcomes – behaviour changes in target audiences as a result of the communication – and Impacts – the results that are caused, in full or in part, by the communication. AMEC’s Taxonomy shows the other stages and example metrics which fall into them.
As a result, best practice public relations now involves finding out from the client what their organisation’s target Objectives and goals are, working out which public relations activities can help achieve those, setting out as part of the PR Proposal what metrics will be used to measure what level of success has been achieved by them and then doing the activities and measuring and evaluating their success using the metrics agreed.
For some, target Outcomes will be increased sales enquiries, for others it will be getting at least a set number of downloads of some information or so many people attending an event. They should be things which can be measured, can be changed via PR activities and will contribute to the organisation’s overall Objectives.
Other Barcelona Principles stages
The other Barcelona Principles stages typically reported on are Outputs – what you put out that is received by target audiences – and Out-takes – what audiences do with and take out of your communication. Outputs typically include Publicity Volume – how many media articles were gained by a piece of media relations – and Media Reach – how many people were reached.
Out-takes are the next step in the chain of causation leading, hopefully, to achieving organisation Objectives and typically include metrics such as Unique Visitors to the client’s website as a result of the communication and Response i.e. change in social followers, extra Likes and Shares.
Means, not End
Which bring us back to Media Coverage. As you can now see, media coverage of a story is an Output, but in itself it doesn’t help you achieve your organisation’s Objectives or goals. So it’s no use as an end in itself.
Instead, media coverage is rightly seen as a means to achieving Out-takes, which in turn hopefully help achieve target Outcomes and Impacts – the things which lead to fulfilment of the desired organisation Objectives. So, for example, media coverage usually leads to new visitors to an organisation’s website (Out-take), which hopefully leads to Outcomes such as more sales and, in turn, achievement of a profit target (Impact).
So when you see a public relations person or agency proudly sharing the media coverage they’ve achieved for their client, ask what the Outcomes and Impacts were – because they’re what really matters, not the volume or reach of media coverage.
That’s why I now share the Out-takes, Outcomes and Impacts of media coverage achieved for clients as well as the volume and reach.
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