PR Measurist

Putting Employees First Enhances Communications Execution

Guest Column by Warren Egnal

Engagement Strategies

PR practitioners speak to the value of communications activities as business drivers that enhance reputation and build positive brand identity. Ad gurus talk about brand as a promise and advocate advertising to reach customers. Marketing is constantly seeking that special promotion to connect the company with the target audience on a one-to-one basis. All are effective tools in a disciplined, integrated strategic communications and marketing program.

Yet companies often miss a key opportunity to consolidate and leverage these results in a regular, consistent and natural activity—employees interacting with the target audience. When customers and other stakeholders directly engage with a company, they most often do so through an employee touch point.

All outbound communications set expectations with an audience as to what their experience and expectations should and will be—best product, fastest service, superior customer care, etc. Communication professionals, be they internal or agency, spend the lion’s share of resources focused externally ensuring the story gets told and that it resonates. However, when we fail to adequately communicate the story to employees, ensuring they are fully aware of the promises that have been made and what the consequent customer expectations are, then the company has set up an inherent disconnect that may be costly to a carefully crafted and maintained reputation.

Significant aggravation (not to mention cost) in customer support and managerial involvement to resolve issues that arise from this disconnect could be saved if we simply explain to employees in advance what we intend to communicate to customers and other stakeholders, what the story is, how it ties to corporate strategy and what employees can do to live the brand in every interaction they have with customers and other external groups.

Too often, employees hear about changes to corporate strategy, new products, and even major financial news after the fact, and at the same time as the general public through an article in a newspaper or TV broadcast. Google Alerts now ensure that employees will see company news as soon as it hits the Web, and in the worst cases before they are told by their managers.

As a rule, communicating to employees via the news media is not effective and will undoubtedly breed resentment among the rank and file that “management doesn’t care about its people.” The unfortunate byproduct of excluding employees from previews of outbound communication is a lack of engagement. Employee engagement is a recognized and proven indicator of efficiency, productivity and competitive advantage. A key factor in improving engagement is regular, open and consistent communication.

           Finally, any competent journalist who covers your industry probably has sources inside your company already from whom they hear off the record comments and deep background information. If news is coming out of the company and your staff doesn’t know the timing or the context, just imagine the fallout if the response is, “I don’t know about that, but let me tell you what’s really going on.” 

The bottom line is: Don’t forget about employees. They can make or break your communications strategy and program outcomes based on how engaged they are in the process.

About the Author:

Warren Egnal is the founder and principal consultant at Engagement Strategies, a consulting group that supports executives in accelerating the achievement of corporate goals. The company’s expertise is in change management and communication programs that drive stakeholder engagement, from customers that buy more products to employees that are inspired to better performance.

Connecting PR to Business Success at On24, Inc.

I asked the dynamic duo of Kim Ryden (marcom/lead gen) and CeCe Lee (PR/marcom) at ON24 to give me their perspectives on how that company integrates PR into the marketing mix and tracks its contribution to overall business success.

Kim Ryden: The important thing is that PR is involved. You want to make sure that the messages are consistent with the PR efforts. At ON24, the marketing and PR efforts aren't siloed like it would be in other large companies. When I'm working on a new lead generation campaign, I'll brainstorm with Cece and see how the messages resonate. Sometimes, marketing messages aren't going to work in PR and vice versa.

Cece Lee: That's true. I think that's one of the most difficult things from a PR perspective, how to get transparency into what marketing does. Yeah, it's not a set "process" per se. I think it's important to stay in constant communication. The weekly marcom meeting with our CEO helps us to review and reevaluate the priorities we have. I think it's good for Kim to know what media opportunities I'm working on for possible media buys or other lead gen activities.

CL: The question is then how do we measure the impact that PR has on business. As a high-growth company, I graph a very specific set of numbers, such as mentions vs. features, circulation numbers (the easiest way to get a sense of "eyeballs") and now blogs vs. online/print publications.

KR: And if there's a specific call to action, such as requesting a white paper or webcast, we can give certain outlets a proprietary tracking code. That way, we can determine if a person came from magazine A or B.

CL: But not all of our news can be tracked in that way. The tracking code is great for things like a webcast or white paper when you can request registration information.

KR: Another stat that we occasionally look at is the number of clicks that an article drives to our website.

CL: That's really important because when I can sync up traffic spikes to when media coverage appears, then I am fairly certain that the two are related.

KR: Another way we measure is how new sales leads learn about ON24. This one is difficult because a prospect may have touched your company through a press release, media coverage, banner ad, tradeshow, etc. So one of the things I do is pre-qualify each sales prospect and ask how they heard about ON24.

CL: This helps us to start narrowing the funnel of what PR directly contributes to our company - magazine A drives X amount of traffic and X number of sales prospects mention magazine A.

KR: But we have to be careful about assigning too much value to this. Numbers are great, but we have to remember that PR also helps with building intangible value such as brand awareness and thought leadership.

CL: That's true. In the end, PR is one component of a larger marketing strategy that drives the business forward.


Kim Ryden is director of lead generation for ON24, Inc., and manages marketing and corporate initiatives to drive ON24's sales lead generation. Cece Salomon-Lee has more than 10 years of public relations experience. She manages marketing communications and public relations for ON24, Inc.

Q7. What impact is PR having on the business?

Ah, the Holy Grail...Anyone who has ever worked in PR has at one time or another heard this question from a boss or a client. If only there was an easy, one-size-fits-all answer that would satisfy every questioner and situation. But alas, there just isn't!

There is definitely linkage between PR outcomes and business impact, and it's our job as PR people to find it and prove it, but you can't do it alone and it will require additional resources, processes and data. You will need help from sales, product development, marketing, IT, IR, customer service, product development, business development and anyone who touches customers, interacts with stakeholders or manages the brand.

In our experience, marketers who exhibit precision and discipline in how they track brand awareness, corporate reputation, sources of sales leads, prospective employees across all channels and mediums will be best suited to answer this question. Anyone who professes a finger-in-the-wind, gut-level, I-know-it-when-I-see-it approach to the marketing discipline probably won't.

A word of caution: Low the claims by various industry alchemists (e.g. PR firms, trade groups and so-called measurement vendors), who through divination (see also: unnatural acts with data), to have a secret code that correlates PR activity and outputs to brand equity, stock price or corporate reputation, you can be assured that it will make for an interesting meeting, but it won't apply in your case. It's not that there isn't a link between PR and business impact, there is. It's just that it's different for every company and every situation. You won't be comfortable wearing someone else's clothes.

So where do you begin? A good starting point is to understand how the sales team tracks sources of prospective opportunities—how did new customers hear about your company? New customer opportunities and ultimately wins can often be directly traced back to someone reading a byline, a blog, case study or feature article. Make sure the mechanisms for tracking sources of customer interest are present, being utilized and the communications team is getting regular downloads of this critical data.

Similarly, the communications function can have a direct positive impact on employee engagement. This is a complex area of analysis colored by many individual factors including title, tenure, reporting relationships, compensation and other workplace issues, but employee morale and engagement can measured and monitored using interviews, pulse sessions and surveys. Since this is such a complex subject, I’m going to get some insight from one of the leading authorities in the space, Warren Egnal the head of Engagement Strategies.

Q6. What is the quality of the coverage?

To avoid being ensnared in the subjective judgments about the age-old question of "quality," it's vital to develop a template that scores editorial coverage for qualitative attributes including: headline treatment, executive quotes, customer quote inclusion, photos, and artwork.  Additionally, some attributes I recommend to clients are:

• Extent of reference: how much of the article was devoted to your company, product or idea?
• Tone: from negative to neutral, balanced and positive
• Net Takeaway: what would be a reader's impression of this coverage (Negative, Informative, or Recommendation)

Create a scorecard, share it with your clients and stakeholders, and show them exactly how you score each piece of coverage. Invite their input and incorporate their feedback. The next someone comments that a five-page, standalone feature you landed in Fortune was, “Just OK,” you'll have a document that helps you get to "shared vision."

Q5. How are we doing against the other guys?

A thorough media measurement program must include a competitive monitoring and analysis dimension to track how a client's company, products and ideas are faring against the competition. This aspect of measurement requires an ongoing commitment to using actual human beings to scan, scrub and catalog the search results.

While there are a number of useful applications out there to help cull the Web and blogoshpere for relevant mentions of your client (I'm currently testing a very promising application from start-up Andiamo Systems), there is no substitute for trained human judgment to read and categorize coverage, evaluate messages and score content and tone.

Definitely use software to automate data collection for competitive intelligence, but you still have to rely on people to analyze and report, lest you sow the seeds of disappointment through sloppy data.

Q4. What is the coverage about?

Very often, thin or irregular attention is paid to the content of a company's media coverage, so systematic analysis of content is a huge step up in measurement maturity.

The easiest thing to track is high-level subject matter: Is the coverage about products, financial performance, philanthropy, executive vision, community relations, etc.? Standardizing the subjects you track and tagging coverage this way will go along way to answer questions about what part of the corporate narrative is getting picked up by the media.

The next level of analysis is to understand message pull-through and spokesperson inclusion, as well as to tag and summarize which third-parties (promoters or detractors) are being quoted in your media coverage.

Q3. Who and how many did we reach with our message?

When reporting media program results to clients, there seems to be a strong tendency in the PR business to show the highest reach numbers possible: “Our product launch campaign achieved 134 million media impressions!” Sounds good, but what does that really mean?

Business-side stakeholders often don't understand or even trust media impressions as a valuable metric (it’s largely an industry convention/invention), so it’s a better idea to demonstrate the precision of the effort rather than just talk in terms of gross reach. To do this, try segmenting your reach by target audience as a way to demonstrate the quality of the reach: “We reached four million small business decision makers” or “We reached 12 million stay-at-home moms.”

Additionally, if you want to take this idea a step further, try using a “net audience” qualifier to show qualified reach for each publication targeted. For example, only 10 percent of Wall Street Journal’s subscribers may have an interest in your enterprise security products, whereas 90 percent of InformationWeek subscribers would count as qualified targets.

I’ve found it helpful to provide clients with both gross and net reach data as a way to add precision to the reporting and gain buy-in and credibility with skeptical internal audiences.

Q2. Where is the coverage appearing?

Tag each piece of coverage based on the type of media outlet in which it appeared (trade, platinum, dailies, online, broadcast, blogs, etc.). This will enable you to provide media mix analysis based on segmentation: “63 percent of our coverage was in core trades," or "The percentage of coverage in top-tier media outlets for Q2 was 12 percent, up from 3 percent in Q1.”  Sounds basic, right? Yet very often clip reports fail to properly segment, categorize and weight coverage based on where it appeared in the media landscape.

Q1. How much coverage are we getting?

Understanding and describing your company's media coverage is the foundation of a good measurement program. True, this is simple counting (449 pieces of coverage in Q1).  But please don't get ensnared in the myth that you shouldn't count clips.  Counting is the basis of good management and all process improvement. 

As you improve your media measurement capabilities, you can add analysis that explains spikes in coverage (news announcement, product launch, earnings, etc.).  If your company is publicly traded, it's a good idea to segment earnings coverage from product, customer or other corporate news as earnings coverage is generally formulate and predictable.

A Thousand Words Worth...

Here is a picture of the Measurement Maturtity Model.  The red/yellow/green settings are illustrative; your color bands will vary.