Thank you for the invitation. Quantifying the work results of public relations and PR has been criticized by many people as a false proposition. There are various vanitymetrics vanity indicators, but I still want to answer a question here~ Although public relations, communication and marketing are a glory circle, after becoming a market speaker, It is found that marketing performance and various ROIs are much easier to quantify than PR. The performance of Marketing can usually be directly or indirectly reflected in sales figures, while the PR department, which is difficult to directly link to business, can only exist as a support department for a long time in many cases, no matter how you have a variety of market sense and skills. In addition, with the support of digital marketing, Marketing spends money on digital advertising, and the results are tangible and tangible, which is much more tangible than the hard work of the public relations department to publish articles. Here is a famous quote from Amway, Peter Drucker, the father of modern management: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, it hurts many friends who prefer brand public relations and communication. The basic skills of PR include writing articles, personal connections, media relations, etc., and organizing data is also one of the important basic skills. How to quantify the value generated by these efforts? How to present the results of the work with data when conducting work reports? For marketing: In terms of paid promotion, the number of sales leads and order conversion rate can be assessed; in terms of resource replacement, network traffic can be measured; in new media operations, it can be quantified by reading volume, forwarding volume, likes, activity conversion volume, etc. . Especially in recent years, the trend of digital transformation has spread to marketing, and various martech tools have emerged. The ultimate goal is to help marketers use data to track, evaluate, and quantify from a growth perspective. However, in terms of brand public relations communication, there seems to be no hard indicators to measure the results. PR does not have many truly intelligent tools (PRtech) available for use. A. Quantification is a double-edged sword. Quantification is a double-edged sword. The advantage is that it can win the right to speak for PR, but the disadvantage is that the gold content of the data has been criticized a lot. Even if you keep searching to see how many media outlets have accepted your company's manuscripts, count how many manuscript requests you have received this month, count the reprint effect of your manuscripts and active mentions by the media, what can these numbers indicate? First, let’s talk about publishing news or soft articles. Different from the relatively traditional and formal Newswire agency services abroad, domestic publishing methods are many and complicated. You can use public relations companies or formal press release publishing service agencies. Some companies will also use small soft article publishing platforms or even SEO manufacturers. Although the era of ClippingHouse has long passed, many corporate public relations departments still use the original method of pressclipping to report to senior management. The side effect is that the briefing contains a large number of hidden links (GhostLink), and the article does not have a website navigation entry, but only an empty one. Just a link. It seems that there are a lot of manuscripts included, even for websites included in Baidu News, but in fact they are small 18th-tier websites with no media value and no SEO effect. This is a typical example of falling into the trap of the number of links. So how do you measure the PR effect of publishing an article? Many people will use Baidu Index or some third-party public opinion monitoring tools to try to quantify the effectiveness of public relations communication, but the granularity is often too coarse and can only reflect a general data. These data are presented to the boss every quarter and every year in PPT. On the other hand, the actual value of data is “self-aware”. B. Media type classification chart: Media PESO concept chart. In recent years, the foreign PESO concept has also become popular in China. Divide the media into PaidMedia (paid media reports), EarnedMedia (free word-of-mouth media reports), SharedMedia (exclusive media reports), and OwnedMedia (brand's official self-owned media channels).

As mentioned in the above picture "SpinSucks: Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age", each media type has an intersection. For example, the often mentioned Marcom (Marketing Communications) is located at the intersection of EarnedMedia and PaidMedia. With the frequent emergence of concepts such as converged media and the era of intelligent media, the media ecology has become increasingly complex. What is the real value of a media report? C. To quantify public relations and communication data indicators, we must first put forward the concept of "vanity indicators". The so-called vanity indicators are the product of deliberate "quantification for the sake of quantification" in order to reflect the value of PR and report to senior management. There are many vanity indicators, and in fact they are also widely used quantitative tools for public relations communication in many companies. For example, when it comes to scoring a round of PR propaganda, one of the common methods is to grade news media according to their comprehensive influence, from central media, five major portals, mainstream media, to vertical media, local portals and other media at various levels. A financial number represents public relations value. This analysis method has been "overturned" in many industries. #1AVE & PRValue There is an indicator here that has been popular in China for many years. The Alphabet Party is called AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent), and the public relations department and marketing department will refer to it when making decisions. Although it may have many different names, the computational methodology remains the same. It is an important criterion for measuring the intensity of public relations activities and the exposure of brands and products. Let’s first take a look at what exactly AVE explains? AVE first came from print media, and was later used in radio and television, as well as in the current era of online digital media. For print media, AVE is calculated based on the advertising value per unit area x article size. In terms of radio and television, AVE is calculated based on the advertising value per second x advertising duration. In short, AVE equates the value of media placement through a specific amount. There are many calculation methods: AVE = page length Easy to calculate. Secondly, AVE can help public relations reflect the value to senior management, and it is also a simple and direct means to link communication budget and ROI. For example, to evaluate the advertising value of a sports event sponsorship, to measure the overall effectiveness of a public relations campaign, etc., AVE is an indicator that has been questioned but is still used in many cases. However, there are some problems with equating AVE with PR value. The value of different entrances and channels on the same included website is different for different companies. However, AVE does not consider the personalized needs of enterprises; AVE also does not evaluate the positive and negative emotional attributes of articles, the degree of brand exposure in reports, and The extent to which some key messages are actually conveyed in the article, etc. AMEC (Association for International Communication Quantification and Evaluation) even called on global PR to cancel the use of AVE and its derived indicators in their work in 2017. Instead, use the integrated evaluation framework launched by the association based on the new media ecology. Internationally, the Barcelona Code 2.0, which was implemented in 2015, can also be used as a measurement guide for the public relations industry. As a general guide, the Barcelona Guidelines 2.0 are also applicable to most domestic situations and can be used as a self-assessment tool for corporate public relations in public relations effectiveness analysis and reporting. Figure: Barcelona Principle 2.0 #2. Media volume, SOV, reach rate. The indicator ShareofVoice (SOV, media volume share) will appear in some public relations communication data analysis reports to help see whether a certain brand has sufficient volume among the target audience. and share of public opinion. The advantage of this indicator is that it can be used for benchmarking analysis of competitive products. It is a common dimension in public opinion monitoring and analysis to check the media volume of the company and competing products in the same industry during the same period. If the company's own brand targeting a certain keyword is detected, If the share of voice volume declines, then public relations communication will need to increase its efforts.

Of course, when calculating SOV, simple keywords alone will not work. You must build a keyword system that is close to the core of brand delivery for the whole thing to become meaningful. Meltwater's Boolean logic keyword series method can maximize the leanness of the keyword system. Tracking SOV in real time is an effective way to quantify PR effectiveness. However, SOV has its limitations. The amount of brand content in the article, the positive and negative emotions, etc. are not reflected in the measurement dimensions of SOV. For example, it is meaningless to simply and crudely compare the SOVs of Pinduoduo and JD.com without exploring the positive and negative attitudes of news or soft articles. Let’s look at media reach (Reach). When evaluating the value of media, the value of the media is usually judged by the traffic of online media. Compared with the crude PressClipping-style "evaluation by volume" model that purely looks at the number of publications and even counts ghostlinks as times, the measurement method for measuring media reach (Reach) is much more advanced. But simply adding up the value of all media exposures will fall into the "vanity indicator trap" again. Assume that the total media reach value of a public relations communication campaign is 1 million. Whether these 1 million comes from 10,000 media outlets each with a reach rate of only 100, or from 100 media outlets with a reach rate of 10,000 outlets each, the effect is vastly different. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all indicator for measuring the effectiveness of public relations communication, and the effectiveness evaluation plan needs to be adjusted in-depth based on the company's situation. Even though Meltwater's monitoring tool provides many key indicators and even provides brand communication models such as DIS digital marketing power indicators, companies still need to appropriately customize the KPIs for public relations communication according to their own circumstances. There is no magic bullet indicator, flexibility is the way to go. D. Scientific public relations communication data evaluation framework Going back to the AMEC (International Communication Quantification and Evaluation Association) mentioned earlier, how does this foreign organization establish a framework for public relations communication effect evaluation through a combination of data indicators? Figure: AMEC's ??ValidMetricsFramework The disadvantage of these models is that they require a lot of manual analysis, and many are qualitative analyses. Not every step can be quantified through data. The final BusinessResult is definitely more accurate than AVE, but because it cannot be quantitatively analyzed, It is difficult to fully implement in many enterprises. Figure: Lewis’AwarenessMeasurement There is no optimal solution to the evaluation of public relations communication effectiveness. If a company needs to rely on a quantitative scoring system, the best way may be to compromise between AVE and qualitative analysis frameworks. E. The custom scoring system basically needs to do quantitative analysis of brand public relations, PR, etc. It needs a public opinion media monitoring data tool. The data must be viewed in the dashboard in real time, exported, and used to use automated models or manual models. Calculate the EarnedMedia value. With a customized model, you can abandon the old AVE or just reach through media/SOV, and use a weighted index. One of the fascinating things about a custom weighted example is that it can provide different weights for different media, which can be ranked according to the traffic of the media. Of course, different channels under a portal media can also provide different scores, for example, Sohu Finance, The value of Sohu’s local entrance and Sohu account’s self-media are definitely different. The second fascinating thing is that the calculated score is a multi-dimensional comprehensive evaluation score. Although the score is an absolute value without financial attributes, as long as the evaluation standards are consistent, it can be benchmarked with competing products. Or compare it with the enterprise itself in different periods to obtain an objective evaluation of the effectiveness of public relations communication. The third fascinating thing is that the score weights are defined and assigned by people within the enterprise. Key indicators can be scored in a targeted and weighted manner based on the company's own needs. For example, for some companies, it is very important for leaders to be exposed in core media. Customized scoring tools can be used to highlight the relative weight of CEO exposure.

The fourth fascinating point is that the content and frequency of presentation of some key content, such as the core message (KeyMessage) of brand communication in news and soft articles, is particularly important for companies that are undergoing image building and brand transformation. Articles that use the new keymessage definition will naturally have a much higher score than content that still uses the old brand image. The fifth charming point is that the data results of the custom scoring tool are presented in real time. There is no need to wait for the agency or execution party to provide calculations. The brand owner can call the results at any time, perform continuous real-time analysis, and report to senior management. Instead of analyzing the results in stages and discretely. Generally speaking, this kind of workload is a bit heavy (especially when setting up the model at the beginning, and then it runs smoothly). You can find an in-house or external media data analysis team to do more in-depth professional analysis and mining. Basically, this process is "model setting" and "manual data correction". If you are interested in this set of things, you can send me a private message. I welcome colleagues to communicate~