Turning News Into Knowledge

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.

No matter how many times my dad tried to explain the concept of twice-removed cousins, I never quite got it (sorry dad). However, when I think about the relationship between PR, Marketing, and Advertising, it just seems to fit. PR seems to be the cousin that’s twice removed from Advertising in most organizations. But it still doesn’t seem to make much business sense.

Wouldn’t it be more strategic if PR, Marketing and Advertising acted as one cohesive unit? Right now it seems one rarely talks to the other, unless they happen to bump into each other in the hallway.

For example, if CompanyX has identified it really needs to be in the National Post to reach its demographic, the more cost-effective route of PR could lead the charge for coverage, and if that fails, Advertising could then kick-in for guaranteed coverage.

On a larger scale this can be done by combining real-time PR data and Advertising data, mapped out by date and publication. Advertising is already responsible for providing this type of information, so what we really need is to have PR step up to the plate with readily available statistics on its successes and failures.

I realize that there is a place for both Advertising and PR at the same time, but I really believe organizations would be much better off if each department knew what the other was up to. We’re already seeing more and more organizations create marcomms groups…hopefully we’re not too far off from admarcomms (perhaps we need a better name than that!).