Alan Kelly has a theory that all of PR can be boiled down to a handful of strategies, including 24 different “basic influence stratagems” or “plays” that PR people have to choose from. Not everyone agrees that PR strategy is quite that simple, but he makes some very good points, and provides excellent food for thought.
As I was thinking about all the different ways that I’ve seen organizations use measurement to shape strategies, I realized that those strategies do tend to fall into a few basic categories:
- New product or market entry launch
- Employee engagement
- Crisis (and crisis repair) and reputation management strategy
In this article we’ll show how these strategies can be assisted with measurement and analytics. The good news is that no matter what type of crisis or business opportunity you’re faced with, measurement and data can help shape it. They can help you prioritize your activities and make better decisions. You just need to know where the metrics and data reside and how to use them.
First let’s review where these various strategies fall in the big picture of your organization. It all starts with your organization’s business plan and goals.
The marketing strategy is derived from the overall business strategy, which is typically set annually. Depending on the nature of your organization the marketing strategy may drive the communications strategy, or communications may fall under risk and reputation management. For measurement purposes, ideally, you’d have a single measurement system for the corporation as well as the individual business units in brands. But such integrated systems are more unicorn than universal. You can read about a few of them here.
In practical terms, assuming you have some level of monitoring and measurement in place, here’s how to use it to help you make better strategic decisions.
1. New product launch or market entry strategy
Product launches and events are routine occurrences in most PR professionals’ lives, but all too often the PR is an afterthought and consists of simply “Write the press release,” or “Tweet it out.” But, if you’re the communications person in a company with a solid metrics system in place, you can and should be a shaper of the strategy.
Having good metrics that define success based on business goals can yield a plethora of great data to assist in planning your next launch strategy.
For example:
- Social media listening can tell you what your audience already knows or perceives about the market and any competing products.
- Analyzing your traditional media will inform you on what media outlets or platforms offer the most opportunity to get your key messages out there. Just look back at the last year to see what outlets/platforms your messages most frequently appeared in.
For example: During the recent Ebola outbreak, MSF (Doctors without Borders) found that all words weren’t nearly as powerful as pictures in drawing attention to the problem and raising much needed funds. They switched much of their efforts to Instagram and saw engagement rates jump. Research showed that they were much more effective at getting the message out than were their partners, the CDC and WHO. Download the paper here. - You can prioritize your leadership and spokespersons’ time during the hectic launch period. As a professional communicator you will be asked to make recommendations on which media are most receptive and which ones your customers are most likely to read. With an integrated social and traditional measurement system in place, you’ll be able to identify where the media is going for information, where your customers are most likely to engage with your messages, and make a data-based argument as to why it is important. Many systems will track not just quotes from corporate spokespeople, but anyone who is quoted in their articles – competitors, customers, NGOs, local government officials, etc. With this data you can quickly assess who the media is calling and/or interviewing for details on the topic.
- With measurement you can also figure out what is going wrong. We worked with one client who had overseen a major product launch and received fabulous coverage for the launch. But after 6 months the product wasn’t selling. Of course the product manager charged into my client’s office and demanded that she “Get him more PR!” She showed him the quarterly results which demonstrated that his particular product had in fact received more coverage and more favorable coverage than any other product in the quarter (including products that were selling much better than the one just launched). She suggested that he dig into other potential problem areas, like what was going on within the sales force. As it turned out, the new product was an iOS (Mac-based) offering and none of the sales offices had Macs so they couldn’t do a demo(!)
- If you’re using Google Analytics or some other web analytics tool, it will tell you where your conversions are coming from (read more about how to set up goals and conversions) so you can focus your time and outreach on those sources that generate the most conversions.
2. Employee engagement strategy
Data is crucial when you’re trying to figure out a strategy to make your employees happier, more satisfied, and more engaged. But too often employee engagement is solely measured with a gigundous employee morale study conducted once every 2 years. Fortunately, today’s technology enables organizations to measure employees anytime by tracking Intranet traffic. Once again, turn to your web analytics to determine what programs or initiatives in the last year yielded the highest engagement.
If you’re using Yammer or Salesforce Chatter or other internal social networks, then you have many metrics at your fingertips that will let you know which initiatives employees responded to and which they ignored. Call a meeting with the HR team and discuss why each program worked or didn’t work in terms of getting employees to engage.
Many organizations use their Intranet as a survey platform to do pulse checks of employee morale, attitude, and to test their knowledge of corporate policies and initiatives. By posting a survey every quarter you can quickly get a sense of employee reactions in between those big annual surveys. Use last year’s data to set a benchmark level of engagement and knowledge, and then measure quarterly or bi-annually against those benchmarks.
3. Crisis strategy: Use metrics to avoid a crisis, and if one happens, repair your corporate reputation
Even if the only tools available to you are Google News Alert and Google Trends, you can still monitor what people are saying about your brands, your competition, your industry, and your leadership team. Set up whatever monitoring system you have to detect mentions of all your key leaders, brands, and products in conjunction with key risk terms, such as “lawsuit,” “complaint,” “irate,” “threat,” etc., to make sure you’re not missing anything bubbling under the surface.
Make sure you reach out to customer support, customer service, HR, or whatever is the equivalent at your organization, at least weekly to get a sense if anything might be brewing. Touch base with your legal team, to see if they have a system to check on whether your brand is being misused. If not, then you may want to set one up. You don’t want your corporate brand to become the symbol behind a disaster, demonstration, or a riot.
Remember, the best way to manage a crisis is to avoid it in the first place. As part of your crisis management plan, and certainly part of any formal measurement system, you should have already identified key influencers and groups who are either likely to cause trouble or likely to help you mitigate it. These are the people that hold sway over your customers and key stakeholders, as well as the media outlets that your customers turn to for information. If a crisis starts to simmer, make sure you have those influencers on speed dial. And remember to monitor your brand on a continuous basis. What you are looking for is how those key influencers are positioning your brand and responding to your actions.
The other way measurement can help you navigate a crisis is that you can use results from prior years to know exactly which tactics are most effective in getting messages across, and moving coverage from “negative” to “neutral” or “neutral” to “positive.” Measurement helps keep things in perspective in the war room. Many decisions get made in a hurry in any time of crisis, and most of them are based on gut feelings or legal opinion. However, the media doesn’t necessarily always see things the same way, and so data on what the media does see is vital.
If you have benchmarks in place and are measuring tone and messaging on a regular basis, then you can see how fast the crisis is “blowing up” or if perhaps it is just a tempest in a teapot. You can also see if your actions are portrayed as you intended in the media and if the resulting coverage reflects the positioning you desire.
Another benefit of having good data at your fingertips is dealing with blame. Under the pressure of a crisis, tempers flare, emotions can get out of control, and fingers are pointed in all directions. In many crisis situations, the impact of one or two bad stories can be overblown. All too frequently communications gets blamed for bad press, when in fact the press is just doing its job and exercising its first amendment rights. A media content analysis will frequently reveal that the tone of your media coverage is within normal range. Or, if you have competitive data, you can compare your results to industry averages to better understand how you’re being treated.
If you have benchmarks on customer opinion, take a quick poll of your key target audiences to see just how badly (if at all) the crisis is impacting your image. That’s what IBM did when their media center computer system failed on the eve of the Atlanta Olympics. I’d been monitoring their media coverage for the prior year, so I could tell that yes, relatively speaking, a lot of negative stories resulted. But, as a percent of the total, there were just as many positive ones. Rather than having a raging debate in the board room, IBM surveyed their most important customers. Who almost universally said “Who cares about the media, we’re amazed that you could get any system up in so short a time.” Net net, the bad press didn’t have a serious impact on the business.
Finally, metrics can inform you and your leadership team when the crisis is beginning to dissipate. Most crisis coverage occurs on the first day and then trends downward over time. If a crisis starts to go wrong, you’ll frequently be able to spot it by noting an increase in the volume of coverage over time. And if it starts to regularly exceed that of day one of the crisis, then you know you’re in trouble.
The infamous case of the flawed Intel Pentium® chip is a good example of a crisis gone awry. Intel long denied the existence of any problem, until finally camera crews showed up on their doorstep. The resulting coverage went on for months. For more examples of how measurement can help you through a crisis, read Katie Delahaye Paine’s paper on the topic here.
So as your leadership team starts to make plans for 2016, grab those reports, charts, graphs, and analytics and take your seat at the table. ∞
