ADPR 3850 1st Edition Lecture 11 Outline of Last Lecture I Persuasion Ethics Outline of Current Lecture II Measurement Current Lecture Empirical analysis the act of measuring This is the fourth step Measurement o Measurement has multiple meanings in public relations o Measurement is the evaluation of results against agreed upon objectives established during planning Evaluation improves the public relations process o It is also the manner by which we collect PR related data o This is how you really tell if you were successful Basic evaluation questions Adequately planned Message understood How could strategy have been more effective Audiences reached Objectives achieved What was unforeseen Budget met Future improvements Objectives A prerequisite for measurement Measurement becomes difficult without having developed a clearly established set of measurable objectives These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute o Informal objectives may need to focus on message dissemination or audience exposure o Motivational objectives may require public opinion surveys to determine how audience attitudes shifted o Behavioral objectives may require sales data Proper measurement means isolating the campaign as the cause of these changes Measurement of Production Counts how many releases photos pitch letters etc were made within a specified time frame Emphasize quantity instead of quality Measurement of Message of Exposure Compile clippings mentions o Most widely used metric Media impressions o Placement X circulation viewership listenership Internet hits Advertising equivalency o Space time X advertising rate o 5 inch article at cost of 100 per column inch 500 Information requests o Counting the number of requests for information a campaign generates Cost per person o E g Super Bowl ads cost a lot but reach millions of people Audience attendance o How many people attend an event Measurement of audience awareness attitudes and action Audience awareness o Survey o Day after recall Audience attitude o Related to awareness o Baseline benchmark studies Audience action o The ultimate objective of any public relations effort o Measure desired behaviors Measurement of social media Social media leads tracking web traffic for all your sources and identifying top sources Engagement duration time spent on your pages Bounce rate how quickly people bounce away from your webpage after being directed there Membership increase and active network size how many followers do you have and are they active Activity ratio proportion of active to passive members Conversions are your members subscribing to your new letters making purchases etc Brand mentions how often is your brand being mentioned across social media Loyalty sharing of content etc Virality also being re shared Blog interaction do people comment on your blog entries Barcelona Principles A bunch of PR leaders from over 30 countries setting up global standards and practices for measurements Saying we have neglected measurement side of things for too long and we need to understand its value Drafted by European based Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication AMEC o Input from PRSA Global Alliance The 7 principles Importance of goal setting and measurement Measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs The effect on business results can and should be measured where possible Media measurement requires quantity and quality Advertising Value Equivalents do not measure the value of public relations Social media can and should be measured Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement Measurement and the social sciences What does it mean to measure o It s the process by which we observe both the seen ex Height and the unseen ex Attitudes o For the most part we ll refer to the concept as a means of quantifying something o E g a strong conservative is provided a different numerical value than a slight conservative But why assign numeric values at all Increased objectivity Allows for statistical tests of the measure s quality e g reliability Standardizes how we assess attidutes behaviors etc Levels of measurement Nominal categorical Ordinal Interval continuous ratio Nominal measures Aka categorical or discrete data Nominal data categorize something your gender race eye color etc Simples form of measurements Ordinal measures Categories have a natural ordering unlike gender race etc But you cannot say anything about the intervals between values in the data o E g ordinal data can tell you the order of runners in a race but it cannot tell you if first place was twice as fast as second place o Put differently the difference between 9 and 10 on a scale may not be the same as the difference between 5 and 6 Interval Measures An extension of ordinal data but with equal intervals between values E g temperature data o The difference between 55 and 56 degrees is the same as the difference between 67 and 68 degrees Ratio measures Radio data are interval data but with an absolute zero value E g temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin E g age number of days reading a newspaper 0 to 7 Working across levels of measurement Important you can begin with any continuous ratio measure and collapse it down into other categories interval ordinal or nominal but you cannot take a lower order variable and move upwards o E g years of education ratio variable can be collapsed into degree level high school diploma but not the other way around How might we collapse age into an ordinal measure Pew age categories o 18 29 29 38 etc Summary slide categorical vs continuous measures categorical o nominal and ordinal o place observations into classes o categories are exclusive o often reported as counts percentages and proportions continuous o interval and ratio o places observations on a continuum o assumes the distances between values classes are equal o Typically reported as averages ranges standard deviations medians etc