Our industry…the PR industry…continues to wrestle with measurement. Companies see value in PR, but there are very few tools to actually measure the effectiveness of PR. If you need proof just look a the Strategic Public Relations Center Fifth Annual Public Relations Generally Accepted Practices Study. (hard to believe that people who work in PR came up with the name) The study was conducted by the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California.
The section on evaluation is fascinating. The first finding was “Organizations remain reluctant or unable to allocate adequate resources to PR evaluation, preferring to focus on execution. At a time when the professional is under increasing pressure to demonstrate its value in “hard” terms, this may be a dangerous, self-defeating posture.”
Add to that the following nugget: “The fact that a score of 4.67, on a scale of 7, was the highest earned by any methodology strongly suggests to us a lack of enthusiasm for the currently available measurement techniques.”
All of which seems to say that people want measurement but there are no good measurement tools and no one wants to use their PR budget on measuring anyway.
I believe we are on the horns of dilemma.
OK…everybody back to work.
