Posts Tagged ‘IPR’


How to Speak C-Suite

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Ruth Mesfun*

If you mistook the clattering of keyboards for cicadas in heat and saw your Twitter feed explode with the hashtag #prndigital, yesterday, then you were probably with me at the PR News Digital PR Next Practices Summit at the Grand Hyatt in New York City. The all-day event was a smorgasbord of useful topics and speakers flinging words such as SEO (search engine optimization), influencers, engagement, and fangate pages.

However, if you have ever spoken to your boss about using social media it probably went like this:

justincaseyouwerewondering.com

justincaseyouwerewondering.com

If your digital campaign does not translate to the C-Suite language (increased sales, decreased costs, or high ROI) then it wouldn’t matter if you grow their Twitter page to 100,000 followers. They will pull the plug. 

Here are eight steps I took from the panel on Prove the Value of Your Digital Efforts to the C-Suite featuring Margot Sinclair Savell, vice president of Measurement and Analytics at Weber Shandwick, Angela Jeffery, APR and member of IPR Commission and Nick Panayi, director of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC.

1.      Define organizational goals. Make sure your goals are strictly C-suite speak. (e.g., Our goal is to increase sales by 30 percent.) That way they see that you are on the same level.

2.      Research stakeholders and prioritize. This should be done regardless if you are presenting a digital campaign or not; you should always know your audience.  

3.      Ask yourself: What do they care about? I want to add in a perfect line from Margot Sinclair Savell, “Don’t just measure communications; measure the impact on your bottom line.” 

4.      Set social media objectives that correlate with their goals. Now this is where you link your social media efforts to their C-suite objectives. (e.g., With the Twitter campaign, we are launching, our goal is to increase our followers by 50 percent and positive sentiment by 40 percent which in turn will increase our sales by 30 percent.)  

5.      Choose (the right) tools and establish benchmarks. Once your campaign has launched, use tools and benchmarks to monitor how your campaign is playing out in The Media. Remember to monitor both the social media goal and the main goal (C-suite objective).

6.      Analyze, Analyze, Analyze! Be sure to use both qualitative and quantitative metrics and have these also tie back to your communications and C-suite objectives.

7.      Present to management. Remember to add charts of correlation between the campaign and the C-suite objectives. Translate metrics into the language.  

8.      Continue to build on that foundation: monitor, analyze, and improve. Review and revamp your strategy and tactics, making sure to revise as departmental and C-suite objectives evolve. 

So, how are you proving your value of your digital efforts to the C-suite? Please share your thoughts with me, here, on BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.

 ***

Before joining the BurrellesLuce team in 2011, as social media specialist, Ruth worked as a marketing assistant in a kitchen design firm and, later interned with Turner Public Relations. She holds a BA in Economics with a minor degree in International Relations from Rowan University. In addition to economics, education, and finance – Ruth is passionate about understanding the business implications of social media, including how it can be used to increase ROI, find and maintain a career, and create a business. Connect with her on Twitter: @RuthMesfun LinkedIn: Ruth Mesfun Facebook: BurrellesLuce

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Posted in Industry Events, Media Measurement, Media Relations, Public Relations | 1 Comment »

A Public Relations Cliché I’m Really Tired Of

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Steve Shannon

If you are going to play business buzzword bingo at any public relations conference, the one phrase that should sit square in the middle as the free space is “seat at the table,” as in, “PR needs a seat at the table in the C-Suite (another buzzword) and/or the boardroom.”  I’ve been associated with the PR industry for 17 years now and I heard “seat at the table” at my very first PR conference, and I’m still hearing it today. No matter the topic, session, or agenda, that gem is sure to come out multiple times. How is it, in 17 years, PR is still wandering the halls, looking for the conference room with the meeting that has their “seat at the table”?

I’ll tell you why: Because the vast majority of PR professionals cannot tell you, in numbers, how their 71926867_14.jpgcommunications efforts impacted the bottom line of the organization and, if not the bottom line, how their communication efforts supported the organization’s overall business objectives, again in numbers.  In fact, other than senior communicators at any given organization, I’d wager you’d be hard-pressed to find PR pros who can rattle off their company’s business objectives, as defined by the CEO.

Why the emphasis on numbers? Simple: it is the language of the C-Suite and the Board. That’s a cliché too, but it’s the hard truth. No CEO or board member worth their salt focuses on clipbooks, story counts, impression counts, and the like. Numbers like that get a SO WHAT, as in “so what did that do for the organization’s bottom-line or business objectives?” Buzz and 50 cents get you a cup of coffee, bub.

So what’s PR to do? How does PR measure its communications efforts in a way that can show bottom-line results or business objective support? Unfortunately, there are too many organizations with differing or unique circumstances and objectives to provide a cookie-cutter approach or it would have happened already.

What I’d like to suggest (and BurrellesLuce is ready to help lead the effort) is that the various public relations organizations such as the Public Relations Society of America, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Council of PR Firms, the Institute for Public Relations, and the Society for New Communications Research, among others, come together, and lay out simple, easy-to-get-started measurement templates for the universal business objectives of the most common business or organization verticals, which do share common circumstances and objectives. 

For example, hotels all share the common business objective of getting guests to book sleeping rooms, meeting rooms, and dining or catering services. How does PR support this? How can that be measured and numerically reported in a way that shows the C-Suite how much PR drives sales of sleeping rooms, meeting rooms, and dining or catering?  With a measurement template out there for hotels, endorsed by all of the organizations above, how much do you want to bet that every hotel PR professional out there not measuring bottom-line results or business objective support would start? 

Imagine if there was a template out there for your industry? Wouldn’t you start measuring how your PR efforts deliver bottom-line results or support business objectives?

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Posted in Media Measurement, Public Relations | 3 Comments »

Are You Still Using Multipliers?

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

flickr_graphmeeting_2136954043_5145b15312.jpgDuring a recent PRSA webinar sponsored by BurrellesLuce I referenced the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) white paper, “Dispelling the Myth of PR Multipliers and Other Inflationary Audience Measures” by: Mark Weiner and Don Bartholomew. This prompted many follow-up questions, mostly about the “greater” credibility of editorial content vs. advertising. As noted in the white paper there are flaws in that thinking and there is no substantiated data proving this notion.

The white paper is excellent and should be read by everyone currently using multipliers in their measurement rationale and those thinking about its implications.

Here I want to provide my very “Reader’s Digest” summary for our peers who may need to recalibrate existing benchmarks if they lose a multiplier. In the real world of business, a “multiplier” of publisher supported data is an “Enron Metric.” The more you have to explain something, the more you compromise the credibility. Think about it this way: Your company has a certain number of clients. That’s the number. Would it be acceptable for the customer service department to report a higher number because they have a lot of “happy clients” or “clients who are referring business”? No. Then why would you want to put forward a number that can’t stand on its own merit?

The power of social media is thriving and growing by word-of-mouth and the influence of peers. The reason: credibility. Don’t compromise your greatest asset by taking a short cut or using numbers that aren’t straight forward and/or supported by a third-party data source.

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Posted in Media Measurement, Public Relations | No Comments »