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This is the second part of the series on PR Measurement by Deepak Aneja,  communications research professional at a leading global media analytics company and a reader of the India PR Blog. The views here are his. Read on…

Before I get straight into the technicalities of Impressions, let me explain what these metrics are meant for. Media Impressions – the number of people who might have had the opportunity to be exposed to a story that has appeared in the media – usually refers to the total audited circulation of a publication or the audience reach of a broadcast vehicle. I am considering the multipliers such as PR or readership factors here; we can have a separate discussion on multipliers ;)

Identify the media, first.

All media publications are not equal in value for delivering your message, nor are the media publications with the biggest circulations necessarily the best. It depends on your message type and the target audiences. The credibility of the publication needs to be assessed, as does its ability to reach your target audiences. For instance, if a company wants to tell its customers about the benefits of herbal diet supplement meant for low middle class people, it will not like to have its coverage in mainline or business publications that have the largest circulations in the target region. For its herbal diet supplement product, which is meant for low middle class people, the right media would perhaps be the regional / local / language newspaper that might not have the largest circulation but is being read by middle class families.

Beyond Impressions

Does it make any sense for a communicator or a company to know the numbers or the reach of their message? – No. Only Impression number won’t help gauge the effectiveness of a communication. You have to consider the overall positioning of the story or the key message, which takes following factors into account:

1. Placement *
2. Dominance *
3. Headlines mentions *
4. Extent of Mention *
5. Visual Presence *
6. Tonality *
7. Spokesperson quotes * 

* Impact Score can be positive or negative

Where is the key message?

It takes a lot to develop key messages for brands or products, but what if media doesn’t carry the key message, then it becomes a wasted effort.

To measure the effectiveness of your communication, it is essential to set up an assessment method. If one is constantly communicating the correct messages but it is not being reflected in media, it could indicate there are some issues or discrepancies in the media’s perception of the company or its products or services.

Key message: A proposition – in the form of a statement or phrase – that a company wishes to communicate to its target audience via media coverage. There is no tone associated with key messages.

Key Message Penetration – It represents the percentage of total news items including one or more Key Messages.

Key Message Reach: It represents the total potential audience – measured by Impressions – produced by each Key Message appearing in a news item.

Note: If there is no key message in coverage there is no impact.

Let’s simplify it:

Considering, a well written piece on major cola brand in leading business newspaper, say Business Line, has these values on measurement metrics –

Summary: +78.3% or +65353 of Business Line’s readers have been positively exposed by this article, and are likely to recall the details of the story.

Normally, we only consider exact impressions numbers in PR Measurement reports, which is not the right measure as it will only give you a reach. Multiplying Impact score with audited circulation figure will give an exact figure of people exposed to the key message positively or negatively.

Let’s consider this table for a particular story:

You can easily notice only the story has generated 53,00,160 impressions but only 61.65 % of total audiences have been exposed positively.

Media Content Analysis is a important measure to gauge to overall reputation of the company and to know the factors those are contributing to the reputation, negatively or positively.

It would be important to consider Reputation Audit or On-ground research to actually know the change in behavior. This will help company to associate On-ground research results with Media Measurement outcomes. This will definitely prove that PR, influences and has a major role to play.

I came to know about Mr.K Srinivasan, CEO, Prime Point Public Relations P Limited, Chennai from the Yahoo PR groups he managed that are currently one of the best groups of PR professionals online. Beyond this, he is also known for the impressive image audits he conducts for various organisations. Often at times I felt the need to conduct image audits for my clients before planning out any strategy for them or before the annual review to see how our PR campaigns have fared. Maybe I might be working with Mr. Srinivasan soon for my clients. Anyway back to the topic, what exactly is Image audit and how it is conducted? I asked Mr. Srinivasan and he explained:

Image Audit is the study of ‘hidden perception’.  Every human being has some hidden perception, which normally is not revealed.  For example, an employee has several hidden perception on their employer company or management and he does not want to reveal for his own reasons.

How do you get to know what other people are feeling about you? Normally everybody tend to be frank and honest for revealing their mind when (1) they are in group and (2) they are asked to reveal anonymously.

Image Audit is based on this principle.  We discuss with the management and find out the issues to be studied.  We design a questionnaire to suit the situation and test audit with few target sample.  After finalising the questionnaire, we administer the questionnaire to the audience after assembling them together. Then we make them respond without indicating their identity.  All the response sheets are pooled through a ballot box.  In this process, we have found near 100 percent accuracy.

We analyse the data and interpret properly.  Interpretation is more important, otherwise, it may lead to a wrong conclusion. Finally, we make a report and submit to the Manager with our recommendations.

Normally, when the data is analysed, we used to get a clear trend of perception uniformly.  That trend indicates lot of things to the management.

Through Image Audit, managements can understand the hidden perception of their stakeholders, particularly their own employees and plan suitable strategies.  Also, it can forewarn crisis also.  Image Audit will be helpful during crisis time. It can unearth the real root problems.

More details and a live report is available at the Image Audit site. You can also listen to the corporate podcast here. 

We bloggers always try to leave little bit of information of our blogs at popular sites where Internet goers and other bloggers frequent in a bid to get some of the traffic from that site.

This is one such new site that is going to become popular soon, and this is from Blogger itself. Called Blogger Play, this site will stream stream images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. Visitors to the site can also ‘click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it.’

Well well, so if you keep posting interesting pictures with your posts on your Blogger posts from now on, chances are that people visiting Blogger Play might get tempted enough to click on it and visit your site. How’s that for a little thought?

If you use the Blogger ‘Header’ Page element to add an image in your header in your Blogger blog, and your image doesn’t show up in Internet Explorer, a simple placement option choice could be the solution.

For instance, I’m using a logo picture instead of the header title and description in this blog. (See header above).

Remember in the ‘Configure header’ pop up window, there are two options of how you can add an image – from your computer, and from the web. Choose the second option.

I tried this in some test blogs and found that if I upload a logo picture on the blogs directly from my computer, sometimes the pictures wouldn’t show up in Internet Explorer. However, if upload the logo picture on the web somewhere (like Google Page Creator) and link to it, it would somehow always show up in Internet Explorer as well as in Firefox. Maybe this will work for others too.

1. Corporate Voice Weber Shandwick Delhi won the 2007 United Nations Grand Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Relations – The CVWS Delhi team has won this prestigious award for its campaign on sensitizing people on the use of condoms. Read this story in The Hindu Business Line – an excellent case study on the use of traditional media relations, direct mailers, advertising, events, and the new media. Kudos to the team.

2. Shekhar Ghosh to head Sampark PR as CEO – Shekhar moves from R&PM:Edelman where he served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO). Prior to Edelman, Shekhar was the Director, Strategy at Hanmer & Partners for over five years. Read the release here.

3. Ogilvy PR to handle Satyam’s account – To help build Satyam Computer Science’s brand on a global mandate.

4. PR is a noble profession – Public relations, unlike in the past commands respect today as a noble profession like journalism and is meant not just to sell concept or an idea, but to educate, enlighten and empower the masses, chairman of Prasar Bharathi, Dr M V Kamat said.

Free Email Mailing List Managers Annotated

As a PR professional who needs to send out information to many people daily, I find myself in need of an email client through which I can send my emails to many people at one go and yet customise each mail – do the ‘Dear so and so’ in the body of the mail. Also on each of the email that goes out, the recipient’s email addresses alone should appear in ‘To:’ section without disclosing the other emails.

No, I’m not talking about spamming nor believe in that. But suppose you need to send out a news release to your contact journalists, send event invitations to a group of media friends, or send newsletters to subscribers on behalf of your client – such a tool is bound to come in handy. These are emails that the recipients anyway know that you are sending to other people also. So why waste two hours sending individual emails to everyone instead of just getting it done in one go. Of course I can ‘bcc’ to everyone but that looks rude to many people.

Forget about work, think about the time you need to send personal email invites to hundreds of people on a party that you are throwing, or on your wedding. Sometimes, all of us need some technology to simplify our lives, and if if is about reducing the number of email correspondence that we have to make, how nice it would be.

A lot of tools, called Email Mailing List Managers, that handles such tasks are available online. These come as independent desktop applications or as Outlook plugins. Desktop applications are like independent softwares that you need to run on your PC to send the multiple emails, while the Outlook plugins are small programs that you need to install so that you can mass mail from your normal Outlook client itself.

Choosing the right one is though not so easy. Most of those available are paid versions with some costing a bomb. Some are too complicated to handle. Some lack a few features that I wanted.

Some things I look for in my email campaign manager are:

1. Easy to use – I just want to type my message, select a mailing list and click ’send’. That’s it. No other complex stuff.
2. Customisation of each mail – Like I mention before, I want to greet each of my mail recipients with their names, and not send a ‘dear all’ mail.
3. Ability to import and export mailing list – If I have to create a mailing list consisting of hundreds of emails, imagine the pain if I have to type each and every email address in creating the list. Why not just import it?
4. Formatting options on the compose window just like I get in MS Word or Outlook – there are many cool mass email senders that I found but they lack the formatting option. Without that, my mails would just look plain simple text.
5. Templates – Are there some pretty templates available that I can use for my emails or newsletters? If yes, they would be such a delight.

After much experimentation, I decided on two tools – a free desktop application and a fee Outlook plugin.

Desktop application
The desktop application I use is SendBlaster. It has a free and pro edition that costs 75 euros. The free edition allows you to have two mailing lists and you can have 100 email addresses on each mailing list. However what I like about SandBlaster is that it a feature rich compose editor that allows you to format your emails – like the Bold, Italics, font family, font size buttons, etc. I found many other cool free mailing list managers but they lack this feature. SandBlaster even has an affiliate program that I am using :-)

Outlook plugin
This one is called the eAnnouncer. This comes completely free and allows you to send emails to unlimited number of email addresses at one go from your Outlook client.

Both Sendblaster and eAnnouncer have mail merger feature that allows you to customise each mail that you send.
Tags: India, PR, blogging, email, mailing list managers, public relations, social media

Request for proposals (RFPs), or open pitches from multiple agencies that companies seek whenever they want to hire one has been the norm in the industry for decades.

What happens typically in a RFP is that a client company sends out briefs to multiple agencies and invite them to present their recommendations based on that brief. In such RFPs, there can be two three rounds of meetings with the potential client company. The first round might involve say ten agencies presenting their credentials to the client company, which will shortlist around say three-four agencies. Now these three-four agencies will come back again in the second round with their understanding of the client’s business and what they can do for the client. All financials can also be discussed at this stage. Then finally the company chooses which agency suits the best-  creativity and money wise to conduct its PR campaign. Finally when an agency gets selected, it blows the trumpet horn and walks off with the new account in their kitty while the rest had to accept their defeat and wait for another time, another pitch.

This seems alright. May the best win. But there are those who abuse the system. There are companies whose corporate communications departments regularly sends out RFPs to PR agencies only to get a round of fresh ideas without any intention of hiring any agency.

I wonder how much resource do PR agencies put in when they set to work for such RFP pitches. Working on a proposal can be taxing – it requires manpower, time, research, and creativity. All this means money spent. Some agencies even conduct multi-city media polls and put the results in their presentation to impress the potential client.

Many professionals in the PR industry sulk at the idea of toiling for and showcasing creative outputs before a client sign-on, but have given into it because that was the practice everywhere. But is it fair? 

It is not uncommon to see a particular idea that you have suggested in you PR plan being implemented by another PR agency. What does the industry say?