Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award Submission Deadline 8.1.2011

The Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award honors excellence in PR research, measurement and evaluation.  The award's primary objective is to identify great examples of research used to support PR practice and to publish these case studies on the Institute for Public Relations website.

If your organization has used research to plan, execute or evaluate a communications program and you are proud of what you did.  Please submit it to this awards competition.

You can find more information about it here:  http://www.instituteforpr.org/research/awards/golden-ruler/

PRSA Has Its MBA Initiative Backwards

In the Spring issue of PRSA's The Public Relations Strategist there is an article by Ray Crockett, APR, and Anthony D'Angelo, APR, entitled "PRSA's MBA Initiative." The gist of the article is PRSA is trying to get MBA programs to include "strategic communications" in their curricula. They want MBA students to "appreciate the benefits -- and the perils -- of communicating or not communicating to key stakeholders." An additional benefit they propose is "future generations of executives who will better appreciate PR people and what the profession can accomplish...."

While this is, perhaps, a noble effort, I think they've got it backwards. They should be working to ensure that anyone who works in public relations has a basic understanding of business principles. And if PRSA wants its accreditation program (APR) to be meaningful, it should include a full unit that addresses the different parts of an organization that come together to create its business model.

By way of disclosure, I am very biased on this topic. I have an MBA. I also have been a member of PRSA for many years. I served on the Chicago chapter board of directors and have provided pro bono research support to both the Chicago and San Francisco chapters. However, I am not APR (or ABC).

PRSA's APR Study Guide offers all sorts of great information on the practice of PR, including a rather nice chapter on research. However, when it comes to business understanding, the guide offers a "Business Literacy Scavenger Hunt" in which the authors ask a number of questions regarding the organization for which the student works. This is a nice start, but it doesn't really get at what the components of a business are and how they work together to create the overall business model.

Instead of a scavenger hunt, the curriculum should include a unit on:

1. Business strategy and policy
2. Accounting and finance
3. Research and development
4. Organization behavior and/or human resources
5. Marketing
6. Production
7. How these all fit together to make a successful organization

What initially provoked this entry is an underlying concept that comes from marketing, which was one of my majors when I was getting my MBA: The job of marketing is not so much to educate a target audience about what the organization offers, as it is to understand the target so the organization can develop and offer the products and services the target wants and needs. Even if the organization's product or service is immutable (which suggests the organization will not survive), the goal then should be to find the target audience that wants or needs it.

So it's great that PRSA thinks it should get MBAs to learn about communications. But if PR wants the influential seat at the table we talk about so much, PR people need to understand business and help business managers achieve business goals.

The problem is not MBAs who don't understand communicators, it is communicators who don't understand MBAs.

Real Data on How Best To Manage a Crisis or "No Comment" No Good!

In past articles I've suggested that we, as communications and business people, should question our assumptions rather than blindly building programs and campaigns based on common knowledge or our gut feel.

However, I do not mean to suggest these necessarily are wrong, only that we should test them.

The last few months have provided two very high-profile examples of brand reputation crises: Toyota and Tiger Woods. For those of us in the public relations and communications profession, common knowledge is to get out in front of the media as soon as possible to tell them what you know and what you do not know and to apologize for any potential wrong doing and then to keep the media updated as new information becomes available. For those in the legal profession, common knowledge might be closer to "say as little as possible to avoid liability."

Kellogg Insight, an eZine published by the Kellogg School of Management, recently ran an article (http://tinyurl.com/yzatvsu) based on research that tested these two assumptions. The research was conducted by Eric Luis Uhlman, George E. Newman, Victoria L. Brescoll, Adam D. Galinsky and Daniel Diermeir.

They ran five experiments. Three examined a range of responses to crises and two explored how a crisis affected perceptions of a corporate logo and water product usage. The following is from the Kellogg Insight article:

Participants in all studies reacted more positively when the company involved in the crisis gave an engaged response. When the company involved in the sexual harassment case firmly stated that inappropriate behavior was not tolerated and that allegations would be taken seriously, participants thought better of the company, drank more of their water, and said it tasted better than when the company gave a defensive or “no comment” response. In the harmful food additive case, the results were strikingly similar. ....

.... Executives believe a “no comment” statement will inspire the public to reserve judgment until all the facts are made public, Diermeier thinks. .... But “the moment you say something as a company, the level of trust you have is much lower than if you say it as an individual,” he adds. “Companies are really not trusted a lot.” ....

... Many legal departments will advise executives to stick with “no comment” to limit their company’s liability. But by giving such a statement, executives may lose far more in brand value than they could gain in minimizing legal risks, Diermeier says.

“There is a clear sense that a crisis strategy that’s engaged and reaching out works better than one that is self-justifying,” Diermeier says. “And most important is that saying nothing, being quiet in these cases has basically the same effect as if you are confrontational.”

Now, PR and other communications professionals have some real data to present to their CEOs when the lawyers are saying to keep mum. And, in this case, our assumptions, based in large part on a body of professional experience, appear to have been right.

How Much Should You Spend on Media Evaluation?

PRSA-SF Presentation
For those of you in the Bay Area, I will be giving a presentation on Developing Messages at PRSASF’s luncheon meeting April 24th. If you are interested, here is the link: http://www.prsasf.org/phoenix.zhtml?c=200502&p=irol-monthlyProgram.

How Much Should You Spend on Media Evaluation?
I recently received this question from a colleague: How much should a Fortune 200 company spend on media analysis?

This is a really good question. Having been asked it many times in my career, my experience is that those asking generally expect me to say 5% or 10% of the PR budget.

I never do.

It is an easy answer, but not the right one. The way to determine how much to spend to evaluate media relations, or even the entire PR department is to determine what you intend to do with it and, as a byproduct, how much the information is worth. This is a business-based approach. Your organization makes an investment in communications based on the assumption that it gains some value from that investment.

So, to answer how much to spend on content analysis, it depends on what your company spends on media relations and how it values the media results your efforts generate. (I say media relations, not PR, because content analysis looks only at media coverage, and not at all the other things you might be doing in PR.)

Media Relations as an Investment
Looking only at how much your company spends, you could consider that amount as an investment. If the organization “invests” $1 million in media relations, the question is how much is it worth to ensure that investment is being well spent?

First, I'll explore what well spent might mean. If we make the following assumptions:

• The purpose of media relations is to communicate messages about the company or its products and services
• You already have tested your messages with your target audiences, so you know they have the desired effect, when the target audience receives the messages

Then your media relations evaluation should look at:

• How close the messages that actually appear in the media are to those you intend to deliver
• How many members of the desired target audience the media reaches and how frequently
• What is the overall tone of the coverage pertaining to your company and its products and services
• What is the amount and tone of the coverage members of your competitive set received during the same time period

These last two points are important, because even if your messages appear word for word in the media, and you are reaching a high proportion of your target, your competitors may be completely overwhelming your message with theirs. How effective your efforts are is relative to how effective your competition's efforts are.

If you think of your media relations as an investment in this way, and you invest $1 million, perhaps it is worth 5%, or $50,000 to insure this investment. Perhaps more, perhaps less. But that's the way to think about it.

Media Relations as a Strategic Tool
Some organizations use media relations as a strategic tool. They use it to understand different strategic topics or discussions, how much coverage they and competitors get in these discussions, what percentage of their coverage and their competitors’ coverage is positive or negative and so on. Then they use this information to position their company positively and deposition their competition. The value to the organization of media relations done this way might be much higher than the $1 million invested.

In this second case, what you pay for when you do media analysis is an instrument that not only enables you to evaluate, but also to make decisions and design communications programs that will improve your organization’s relative position going forward.

If you look at it this way, the question becomes: how much is it worth to your company to be able to run its media relations as a tool to position the organization strategically in the media? How much might this stronger media position contribute to increase sales or share price. How much might it reduce the costs of recruiting talent? When you look at it this way, the contribution of media relations may be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. In this case, spending $1 million for very sensitive media evaluation that provides insights into developing discussions and competitive positions might be a no-brainer.

How much should you spend? I can’t answer that for you, in this article. However, if you don’t know how to make these assumptions about the value of media relations to your organization and calculate them yourself, you probably can find someone who can help in your strategic planning department. If your company doesn’t have a planning department, the person in charge of finance can probably help. You also can get in touch with me.

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Forrest W. Anderson works with organizations that are going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholder (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong or confusing messages. After working with Forrest, they have a clear understanding of what their message strategy should be, but also recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

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The Institute for Public Relations (IPR) is dedicated to the “science beneath the art” of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you’re there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.