How can I measure the effectiveness of PR against my business results? Fair question? Sure. But the inability of PR pros to answer this age-old question to some people’s complete satisfaction could be a bum rap.
Forgive the sports comparison, but I’ve always regarded a PR professional as one of the offensive linemen of any company or organization. In football (American football for my friends in the UK), an offensive lineman is charged with protecting the quarterback, helping move the offense up the field, and creating opportunities for the “skill players” to make big, sometimes game winning plays. We (the PR/Offensive Lineman types) know the game is won at the line of scrimmage, but we’re not typically the ones scoring the touchdowns, unless of course we recover a fumble (made by our own team member) and take it into the endzone. Does this sound vaguely familiar?
I’d like for someone to prove to me that an offensive lineman’s performance in a specific game meant the difference between the team winning or losing. It would certainly be a rare event. We’re also not inclined to ask if that offensive lineman’s presence on the field is necessary. Somehow, we just know it is.
To take it a step further, if the team spent less money on an inexperienced, lesser skilled offensive lineman, would they have still won? On a given day, it’s hard to prove. But over the course of a season, NFL teams must believe otherwise because they are making serious investments in offensive linemen, and no one is out there crying for more quantitative analysis – metrics that prove they contribute to more wins. The reality is football is a team sport.
Offensive lineman should be held accountable and responsible for what they can control and deliver out on the field – and of course there are statistics to quantify how well they perform their role. As long as everyone on the team is doing their job, the team should be well positioned to achieve success.
Business is also a team sport. And to be fair, CEOs have been investing millions in PR for years, without what many of them believe to be an adequate answer to the age-old question.
Public relations professionals should be held accountable for their role – no question about it. And we should continue to search for better metrics to quantify that success. I learned a long time ago, that whatever the individual success or failure, never take either too much credit or too much blame. Win or lose – we’re in it together.
That being said, we as PR professionals will never isolate our impact on an organization in a way that some would like, no more than the offensive lineman can. One can’t completely separate our contribution from the rest of the team, nor can we know with any certainty to what degree our performance contributed to the final business result. We all have to rely upon and trust one another.
Can we refine, fine-tune, and continue the quest for better measurement? Sure. But in the meantime, we should also do a better job of managing the overall perception on this topic. This is what we’re supposed to be good at, isn’t it?
You’re absolutely right, Leo. I’ve been demonstrating the effectiveness of PR programs for 22 years. In only about half a dozen cases can I say that PR could be directly tied to sales. But there have been lots of cases where we have tied PR to business results — i.e. reduced cost, reduced hostility — other things they can control. But every morning I wake up to yet another blog saying you “can’t measure PR.” I would argue that most of the things you think you CAN measure – -i.e. advertising, marketing etc. are in fact being falsely measured. Just as you can’t attribute a winning season entirely to a quarterback, too much of “business results” is being attributed to paid media without proper consideration of the surrounding environment. Web analytics for years has attributed purchase to the click thru of a particular banner ad – -without taking into consideration the influence of Twitter, YouTube, or a blog like this..
Great analogy, this one! In fact, every time I ear a PR talking about “his” success, I just shut my mouth and think for miself “this guy doesn’t know his job”.
And Katie made a good point too: it’s getting harder to know where all the metrics results really come from.
This is not a communication mix anymore… this is a communication swirl. And a team swirl also, with everyone changing positions on the game as the needs come from different places of the field.
Great!
Thanks to both of you for weighing in so quickly!
As a current PR pro and former offensive lineman on a 10-0 football team, I can fully appreciate this analogy. We did all the blocking and taking care of the messy stuff at the line of scrimmage, while the QB and running backs and receivers made the big plays and grabbed the headlines. The great thing about that undefeated team was those making the big plays acknowledged our role and gave us credit whenever they could. Thanks for making the connection.