Measurement vs. Analysis
Most of the talk around media analysis usually focuses on measurement and not so much on analysis—two terms that can intersect but often go in different directions.
Measurement is usually about providing some sort of scorecard-based result surrounding a proactive media relations activity about your own organization or that of your client—usually highlighting the successes, and often hiding the failures. If you’re benchmarking these results properly against future campaigns it can provide for the makings of a decent measurement program (aside from hiding the failures part).
However, an ongoing analysis program provides intelligence about your organization, competitors, stakeholders, industry analysts and key issues for both proactive and reactive media relations campaigns—knowledge that can help drive strategic communications and organizational planning. Most measurement programs can’t or won’t deliver this type of information.
Case in point, last year in Canada, CPRS introduced a new measurement standard called Media Relations Points (MRP) which provides a score out of 100. From most accounts, PR agencies are adopting this model in droves as a way to demonstrate the success of proactive media relations campaigns. One of the key metrics involves inputting the budget of the campaign—which, from an agency perspective, is easy enough and provides proper benchmarking from campaign to campaign. However, it doesn’t provide the ability to conduct proper benchmarking from a competitive analysis standpoint, for example between Yahoo and Google, since you don’t have the competitive budget data. If you work for Yahoo and consistently score an MRP score of between 75-80 it may look promising. But what you don’t know is Google is scoring 90-95.
This is where an analysis program can kick in. Expanding the reach of your daily media monitoring to include news about not just your organization, but that of your competitors, stakeholders and key issues—will provide a full competitive and issues based analysis that can help compare apples to apples, and provide you with the knowledge and intelligence that’s buried within the news.
2 Responses to “Measurement vs. Analysis”
1 Kevin Foster 1 February 2007 @ 1:12 pm
Chris,
The MRP system can absolutely be used to benchmark and evaluate both you and your competitor’s media coverage.
Any competitive analysis requires the monitoring of a competitor’s media coverage (using your favourite monitoring company). This coverage can then be plugged in to the MRP system to generate an MRP “score” out of 100. Knowing the budget is not necessary for this type of analysis.
The MRP “score”, as referred to by you, is calculated using average tone and average rating; again the budget is not required for this calculation. Budget only comes in to play if you want to determine the ROI or Cost-Per-Contact calculation.
Thanks for becoming a part of the dialogue on MRP. It’s through this type of interaction that we continue to educate the PR industry.
2 Chris Morrison 5 February 2007 @ 6:24 pm
Thanks for the feedback Kevin–makes sense. It sounds like the MRP score could be used as an effective competitive ‘measurement’ benchmarking tool.
I would see a lot of value in cross-referencing and breaking down the MRP score against competitive ‘analysis’ information–such as key issues, reporters, media outlets, stakeholders, and regional breakdowns, etc. I think this would help tell the real story behind the final number being presented.
In the end, I think this illustrates that measurement and analysis do have different purposes–and perhaps the best thing to do is marry the two for a more complete picture.
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