Summit Talk: Strategy Meets Measurement

October 8, 2015

In the fast-growing public relations industry, strategy is still the secret sauce. Not easy to define. Not easy to measure. Not any more.

Join Playmaker chief Alan Kelly and editor Bill Paarlberg of The Measurement Standard at the IPR Measurement Summit in Durham, NH, October 12-13, 2015, for a first-of-its kind case-based presentation, “Using the Tools of PR Measurement to Evaluate PR Strategy.”

Here’s a preview of Bill’s opening comments to our session:

What PR people want more than anything, besides an article on the front page of the WSJ, is to be strategic. That is, they want to manipulate not only eyeballs or opinion or engagement, but they want to manipulate the planning and positioning of a company or brand so as to affect its position in the marketplace and its bottom line. This planning and positioning is business strategy. And it’s what PR people would like to be able to influence using the tools at their disposal.

Now imagine if the PR and communications measurement industry had the ability to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of PR strategy. It would open a new field of operation, opportunity, and influence for our industry, and for PR as a whole. It would launch us from outputs, outtakes, and outcomes into the world of planning, positioning, and competition.

David Geddes, in The Measurement Standard article recently authored by Geddes, Kelly, and myself, presented an example of how to do just that. He combined the existing tools and techniques of measurement and evaluation with Alan Kelly’s system of discrete strategies to outline a practical system that will evaluate the success of strategies.

Our purpose at The Measurement Summit is to invite you to consider what the measurement industry would be like if the evaluation of strategy was part of our normal operation. We’d like you to imagine taking Alan Kelly’s ontology of basic strategies and using the existing tools of measurement to evaluate them.

Post by Alan Kelly

Photo credit: Institute for Public Relations