It’s contract renewal time, do you know who your measurement vendors are?
If the recent conversation on the PRSA forum over the pros and cons of various PR measurement services is any indication, there are a lot of unhappy customers out there. While I could go on at length about the pushiness of the sales forces or the accuracy of the data for any number of the measurement vendors mentioned in that discussion, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to follow my father’s advice: “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
I would argue that a lot of the frustration and dissatisfaction expressed in those comments is due to customers themselves being unclear about just what problem they want to solve. So to help shed some light on that issue, I thought I’d compile this simple chart to make your decision making easier. Here’s a list of 13 typical monitoring or measurement problems followed by strategies to solve them and which vendors are best suited for the job.
The bad news, which I’m sure you’ll realize once you’ve poured over the list, is that there is no single great solution, you’ll probably have to piece together a few different vendors if you want best-in-class service.
P.S. I’m sure I’ve left a lot of vendors off this list, but if you email kdpaine@painepublishing.com I’d be happy to add them. And if you can’t view the table in your browser, you can download it here.
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