Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How to Measure the PR Value of a Blog or a blogger. 7 steps and 7 metrics to examine.

We were asked an interesting question recently about placements on blogs and their impact:

“How do you measure the PR value of a blog?”

Most of the time, PR firms and practitioners measure an outlet’s capabilities on behalf of a client in terms of audience, in terms of the number of eyeballs that you’re in front of. That’s not irrelevant: a blog that has 0 readers will deliver 0 new audience members to you, and thus having some audience members is a good place to start. Let’s look more carefully at how you might measure a blog’s potential impact on your PR program through the lens of how SHIFT measures PR.Recall that we measure PR in 7 broad categories or buckets......

The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analysing the data and, finally, reaching social media business intelligence; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top 10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy.

When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best. However, bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools, such as Brandwatch, which brought social media monitoring to a new level, offering a much higher variety of services and in-depth analysis. It all depends on your needs. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best free monitoring tools...

Earlier this week, Jason Falls – IABC conference head honcho, whiskey lover, and all-around fun Louisville host – wrote a blog post called, “The Death of Public Relations.”

I like Jason, but I saw that and got ready for a fight.

Then I actually read the post…and I agreed with him.

No, I don’t think PR is dead, but his point is the industry is at a cross-roads because, as a whole, we’re not so good at measuring our worth.

He says advertising equivalency and media impressions mean nothing and that we have to stop counting words and start making business sense for the CEO. Amen. That said, I have a quick story to tell you....

Is Ad Value Equivalency always bad? One of the most lambasted metrics in public relations is the heavily-demonized Ad Value Equivalence (AVE). For those unfamiliar with it, one of the ways that has been used to measure the effectiveness of PR is to ask the question, if you had to buy the same level of impact, how much would it have cost you? For example, to get a quarter page of the New York Times is a listed national rate of 31.5 inches at an inch rate of $1,207 per inch, or $38,020 for a single weekday national ad. A well-placed editorial piece costs the time, effort, and connections that your PR team or agency can leverage for your benefit.

The reason that AVE has been so demonized in the PR world is that, from the perspective of public relations professionals, it greatly understates the impact of PR and confuses PR with advertising. In the example above, the ad in the New York Times simply does its work, and you get some results per dollar spent. The media placement, on the other hand, is sometimes syndicated, sometimes reprinted, sometimes blogged about, sometimes shared, and is generally considered more trustworthy by the average reader than an ad. None of the sharing that happens – especially in the digital editions of news media – is accounted for in AVE. The AVE formula simply treats PR as another form of advertising, which is functionally incorrect. Paid media and earned media aren’t the same, and shouldn’t be measured identically....

As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.

Before launching the digital audit it’s important to establish basic criteria with respect to rating status, structure and performance. To help guide next steps set up a simple decision filter that will aid in prioritizing your findings. One simple way to do this is to assign a color coding systems as follows...