Rock Star PR

Over the last few months I’ve seen that ‘evaluation’ of the effectiveness of public relations has always been a sticky issue. I’m yet to stumble across a single method of effective measurement, but yet I face a constant battle to explain how effective my work can be for my company as a whole. Public relations is often defined as the management of reputation, but how do we give ‘reputation’ a scalable index? And are there other avenues that we can address using public relations that could give much more influence on the bottom line?

From my five months in public relations, I’ve started to think the following…

Maybe effective measurement can be attained with a trident approach;

• Traditional column inches/A non-traditional web presence
  • An important part of raising awareness of any company
  • A way to improve opinions and general thought
• Website visitors
  • High levels of traffic can then improve Alexa ratings, which can be effectively used to improve search engine rankings, in turn increasing traffic even further
  • An effective sales team should be able to convert visits to sales
  • An innovative design should ensure that a visitors attention is kept and that they then return in the future
• Sales that are directly driven by public relations
  • This can be measured by simple questioning of customers. Eg, “Where did you hear about our service?”
  • Social media public relations should improve sales through a high forum profile and should help to improve brand transparency

The other avenues to improving the bottom line through effective public relations practice could include (but not be limited too);

• A transparent forum presence
  • This ensures that customers and potential customers can passively view the way in which your company operates and also opens up a more relaxed avenue of communications
• Giving customers the opportunity to directly contact you, by any means
  • By highlighting that you are not a sales person, it immediately gives customers a sense of security
  • If you then distribute a wide variety (email, telephone, IM) it allows for relaxed contact. These customers can then be handed over to the sales team at an appropriate time
• Introducing social media into a daily routine
  • By increasing social networking/media presence you can connect with passive customers
  • This also allows for stealth marketing (this was the only name I could give it). By listening (passively or actively) to your customers, service, pricing and product can all be improved.
  • By increasing corporate transparency, a product or service can become totally integrated with the needs of the consumer, and immediacy allows for the product to reflect the (sometimes) constantly changing needs of the consumer

Some of this might be painfully obvious to the weathered PRO, but I hope that I might have included some minor details that could be new, or that I might have better articulated existing thought…

Anyone care to comment?