The secret to great PR measurement? You have to give a shit
The exact value of earned media is still treated as an unquantifiable, unknowable thing in PR, argues Istories’ Lee Robson. But continuing to accept guesswork will only tarnish good work, and the overall industry.
The longer I’ve spent in PR, the harder I’ve found it to accept the difficult-to-measure aspects of the work we do as fundamentally unknowable and just ‘part of the job’.
Whether you’re a plumber or a brain surgeon, you wouldn’t count luck or guesswork among the tools of your trade, yet many PRs will turn up to work every day doing just that.
Of course, there are many defences of the need to account for outside forces when working in the capricious world of earned media.
‘The solutions exist, but you have to care enough about the problem to go looking for them’
Seems like a fairly idealistic solution without any quantitative theory or measurement system proposed whatsoever. More buzzwords and jargon…
Do you really need to swear in an article to get your message across?