Data-Driven Public Relations Research

21st Century Practices and Applications

Jim Eggensperger, Natalie Redcross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351767781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

The public relations industry is undergoing a revolution in using data to define promotional programs, to measure influence and to address the needs of clients with more precision than ever. Applying tools that range from online surveys to social-media listening to applying big data with sophisticated algorithms, today's PR professionals are data-driven in virtually everything they do.

Data-Driven Public Relations Research is the first book for PR students and practitioners to offer an overview of these new practices as well as a glimpse into the future of these new applications, including "big data" and some of the applications from real-world PR campaigns and strategic planning. It includes contemporary cases involving brand name companies who are blazing new trails in the use of metrics in public relations.

This book presents a practical, accessible approach that requires no prior training or experience, with easy to follow, step-by-step measurement examples from existing campaigns. Using Excel, the book enables readers to export lessons from the classroom to the office, where use of statistical packages is rare and can give PR practitioners the advantage over competitors.

This pragmatic approach helps readers apply metrics to PR problems such as:

• Finding the best target audiences

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• Understanding audience communication needs and preferences

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• How best to present research outcomes

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• How to manage major projects with specialized research firms.

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Accompanying electronic resources for the book include sample answers to the book's discussion questions, PowerPoint lecture slides for instructors and sample research exercises using Excel.

CHAPTER

1Perspective on Public Relations Research

Learning Objectives for Chapter 1

This chapter is intended to:

●Describe the history and background of measurement in PR

●Introduce the concept of measurements for PR

●Help students think about PR research attitudes and approaches

●Describe the current environment that facilitates research to support PR

●Give an example of how to gather information to inform PR decisions

INTRODUCTION TO DATA-DRIVEN RESEARCH FOR PUBLIC RELATIONS

Humans have an innate impulse to find answers and explanations. Whether trying to understand the world by studying constellations in the night sky or peering through microscopes to see a world unavailable to the naked eye, researchers have been trying to find patterns and causes since the beginning of humankind.

The search takes many forms in modern society and is undertaken with tools and processes that seem to get more powerful and sophisticated year to year, if not month to month.

In the arena of human communication, public relations (PR) professionals have sought to understand the impact of messages and how to increase the likelihood that a message will have the desired effect. Throughout the 20th century applied research tools became more and more sophisticated and valued by professionals and PR clients.

In 2012 another step toward professional research standards in PR was taken with the creation of the Coalition for Public Relations Research Standards which stated its mission was to establish standards for research and measurement. Included in the coalition were premier PR industry groups including the Public Relations Society of America, the Institute for Public Relations and the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications.

McKinsey and Co., one of the premier management consulting firms in the world, suggested to business executives in a 2016 report that executives need to know how to “address many of the critical and complementary top-management challenges facing them,” including the need to apply “hard metrics and asking hard questions.”

The executives being addressed by McKinsey are precisely the clients and bosses who increasingly ask hard questions about the value and effectiveness of communications and expect PR professionals to supply answers that are backed up by solid, data-driven answers.

Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of Cision, the PR services and distribution firm, said in an interview in 2017,

PR still deals in PR vanity metrics, whereas paid and owned [messages] show up with hard numbers, hard conversion rates and hard revenue impact. So where paid and owned are viewed as a direct investment in revenue, comms is still an operating expense (Opex.) Its strategic Opex, it’s important Opex but it’s not attributed business value.

Changing that equation is one of the major challenges facing PR professionals and executives.

In a 2016 article in PR News, John Gilfeather wrote: “measuring public relations is not straightforward.” Gilfeather is president of John Gilfeather and Associates, a PR research consulting firm. He added,

There are a number of obstacles that can be summarized under three headings:

●Knowledge. PR measurement can be daunting for those not among the cognoscenti of the measurement field. There are myriad measurement alternatives and systems. There is a specialized language used that is not always transparent. There is a surfeit of measurement firms each claiming superiority. In addition, public relations professionals are not always numbers people.

●Cost. Measurement is not cheap. With public relations budgets being squeezed year after year, funding a solid measurement study could mean not funding a communications program or a staff position. Justifying the cost of measurement is not for the faint of heart.

●Let’s be honest, a measurement program could demonstrate that the public relations function needs a lot of improvement. The results of research could signal that the current people and processes are not up to snuff. Given the two factors above – knowledge and cost – it is no wonder that measurement could be seen more as a threat than an opportunity.

(Reprinted with approval of John Gilfeather and PR News)

Gilfeather is a veteran of measurement companies and views the opportunities and difficulties of measuring PR efforts with clear eyes.

BEGINNINGS OF PR RESEARCH

The role of measurements in communications has long been an area of conjecture and dispute.

In the early days of PR and professional communications, the measures of success for programs and campaigns were largely based on coverage in mass media or in sales figures, neither of which was readily linked to the communications efforts.

Some early practitioners looked for methods to show the value of promotion and “press agentry” and used a variety of techniques – including content analysis of the coverage received by clients and celebrity endorsements – that may seem familiar today.

A PR firm led by Ivy Ledbetter Lee, one of the early giants of PR, worked for American Telephone and Telegraph, later called AT&T, a forward-looking client that early on recognized the value of systematically measuring public opinion about itself. One of the executives in Lee’s firm created a system in which staffers collected and studied newspaper clippings from newspapers and magazines across the United States. At the beginning of the process, about 90 percent of the articles were antagonistic to AT&T.

The late Scott Cutlip writes in The Unseen Power¹ that James Drummond Ellsworth, who managed the clippings analysis project, remembered, “After we began to scatter seeds of real information through the press … I was encouraged as those which were antagonistic diminished to 80 percent, then to 70, 60 percent and still lower.”

In 1929, Edward Bernays,² widely identified as the “Father of Public Relations,” was hired by the American Tobacco Co. to help market cigarettes to women.

As part of that assignment, he created a spectacle by hiring women to walk down Fifth Avenue in New York City in the Easter Parade carrying lighted cigarettes. The parade, called “The Torches of Freedom,” caught the attention of the media and was discussed in newspapers across the country and may have had some long-term effect on sales of cigarettes to women, which went from 5 percent of sales in 1923 to 18 percent in 1935. Or it could have been a coincidence or a minor influence. In those days there was no way to research influences and the impact of thought leaders as is possible today.

In their book Business Finds Its Voice, Walker and Sklar talk about the work of Bernays for Philco Radio Corp. In 1934 Philco brought out a radio that provided, as the company bragged, “high fidelity reception” compared to the radios that people were used to. Bernays created a campaign using what we would call “influencers” today. He sent letters to respected music critics, asking what they thought of radio reception. He hired Pitts Sanborn, a New York socialite, poet, novelist and critic, to edit and publish under his own byline a compendium of the replies from the critics. The project did not turn out very well when most of the letters panned radio reception. But the notion of celebrity endorsement was shown as a valuable technique.

Bernays tried to codify and systematize the work of PR professionals. According to Cutlip in The Unseen Power, Bernays in 1935 published this process to, as he wrote, “engineer public consent.” It consisted of the following steps:

1Define goals or objectives.

2Research public to find whether goals are realistic, attainable, and how.

3Modify goals if research finds them unrealistic.

4Determine strategy to reach goals.

5Plan action, themes, and appeals to public.

6Plan organization to meet goals.

7Time and plan tactics to meet goals.

8Set up budget for out of pocket expenses for the program.

Not a bad list, even for today’s PR professionals. He did not elaborate on the process for researching the public, and, importantly, did not differentiate among target audiences. Early theories of how mass communications worked may have played a role in this mechanistic approach. Neuman and Guggenheim wrote this in 2011:

In the beginning (roughly the 1930s through the 1950s), we find the “magic bullet theory” or alternatively the “hypodermic effects theory.” According to this simplistic paradigm, like a bullet or a needle, if the message reached its target, its “effects,” typically persuasive effects, would be immediate and evident.

21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

As this book is written, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, applied research in PR is achieving much deeper acceptance than any time in history and becoming a requirement for increasing percentages of clients who want “proof” that money is being spent wisely and campaigns are having the desired effects.

Both authors and many of the collaborators on this book teach students in PR courses that range from principles of PR to writing to cases to PR campaigns. Along the way the teachers have learned how students think about research and about math.

Some students suggest that putting a search term into Google is research. It is – sort of.

Others suggest that reading one article or book and summarizing it is research. Sort of.

However, to be successful and move into professional PR careers, students must have a deeper understanding of issues, communications effects, markets and audiences than a Google search or a series of Google searches can provide. Google is not bad – it is one of the greatest productivity tools ever imagined and created.

Many students in PR and mass communications say, “I am a PR major because I didn’t want to take business because of the math.” But the authors have found, as have their students who have moved into PR careers, there are not many jobs today where math is not an element.

We are not talking about advanced calculus or figuring trajectories of intercontinental missiles; we are talking about fundamentals of math and basic statistics so you can figure out how much you will get paid for your work and do your taxes, for example, and so you can be successful in your communications career.

Great changes have been swirling around the professional communications professions, from basic PR to campaigns to web analytics and to predictive analytics based on data mining and specialized algorithms.

REFINING THE DEFINITION OF RESEARCH

“Research” is a term and a concept that has many faces and forms in the communications industry, not to mention much broader applications in fields from medicine to physics to sociology.

In the academic world, research is often divided into two grand categories: pure research or research for its own sake, and applied research, research that has a stated focus and which aims to create information or an outcome that can be applied to solve a problem or to guide decision making.

Both categories are valuable and both have their own distinct uses in the broad world of communication and PR. However, this book was created with applied research in mind. The authors have lived in both worlds, the PR agency/corporate sphere and the academic arena. We are primarily occupied with the task of preparing students to become communications professionals.

A kind of perfect storm is providing unmatched opportunities for understanding how to refine and make mass communications effective in meeting the goals of clients or employers.

The president of a research fir...