In talking to clients about why they should invest in building an internal competency for PR measurement, I often run across the idea that "there must be software out there that can do this better." There is software out there, but it doesn't really solve the problem, and often creates new problems that are harder to resolve. The three major problems with automated reporting tools:
- Suspect Data: Automated applications use keywords (company name, products) to vacuum up articles across the media landscape. For example: a single earnings release can be counted five times because Dow Jones runs a brief at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., mid-day, at market close and possibly in the day’s most-active listings. If you want to show management meaningless reach numbers in the millions (or billions), then you definitely want to use an automated app to count the clips. However, if you want to gain credibility with your senior management, then I recommend a rigid focus on precisely tagging your coverage based on the things you care about (content, message, spokesperson) and discounting inflated reach numbers. Another dead-end automated metric is tone—software can NOT properly score tone! There simply is no way to escape the fact that you need a human to review and score your coverage.
- Fake Analysis: The whole point of media measurement is to understand and improve the public relations process. There is NO WAY software can automate the analysis your Corp Comm team must do in order to show your business-side stakeholders the precision and value of the PR effort. You want and need your company's PR measurement to be a custom application. There is no way around this fact. View with grave alarm measurement vendors’ siren song offering a black-box metric that promises shortcut linkage between media coverage and corporate reputation. None exists, so don’t waste your time or money!
- Non-Actionable Information: Software apps driven by sloppy data and analytical hokum create drag on your team's time and resources. Yes, you will get some nice looking charts and online reports, but do you really care that 97.9 percent of your coverage was positive/neutral? Chances are you're only interested in the 2.1 percent that fell out side of the lines, and why it occurred. Is 11 percent message pick-up a good thing or a not? Your team must analyze the data. Software can't.
As your organization increases its measurement maturity, you will quickly discover automated software is fine for low-level clip counting, but quickly looses utility for delivering analysis for decision-support. You still need to train your team to spot trends and describe the data in ways that are relevant to your organization's communications goals, and in ways that your leadership will care about and understand.
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