As part of our launch strategy for Igniting Creativity In Business, we’ve set off on another media campaign to drive traffic, market awareness, and revenue.  Public relations is a key facet of our growth strategy, and one many entrepreneurs struggle to get their arms around.  Traditional PR firms can be very expensive, requiring substantial monthly retainers while simultaneously guaranteeing they’ll to do their best to get you media exposure.  That sentence is usually followed up with a caveat of the nebulous nature of the 24/7 news cycle and how all PR firms are constrained by the whims of the media.

This doesn’t have to be the case.  Fortunately, we work with perhaps one of the only PR firm that actual works on a pay-for-performance philosophy.  Our PR firm, E.M.S.I., is led by Marsha and Steve Friedman and their remarkable staff of seasoned, creative and talented media experts. They work on a set budget that guarantees media placement.  They just don’t toss you to the lions, either.  Senior Campaign Manager Alex Hinojosa and Creative Director Penny Carnathan work diligently to design and align a media strategy that truly optimizes our return on investment.  Alex is a brilliant media coach as well.  He thoroughly prepared me for how best to communicate my message during radio interviews.  Rich Ghazarian, our radio campaign manager, has booked us on many syndicated, terrestrial radio programs that have high ratings and are heard throughout the country.  These aren’t internet podcasts, we’re talking broadcasts.

If you’ve been burned by agencies that promised the world and delivered little more than a monthly invoice I highly recommend the E.M.S.I. team!  They’re the perfect fit for entrepreneurs looking to build their credibility, visibility, and reach for a very reasonable investment.

You can listen to this morning’s interview with Tron Simpson by clicking the MP3 link here:

Interview with Tron Simpson 3:14:12

© 2012, Terry Murray.

© 2012, KCMN, Colorado Springs.

Here are some easy ways that – in modern day times– companies can measure the success of the public relations campaign.

Know where you’re starting.  If you’re launching a branding campaign, make sure you know what your target audience currently thinks about your company.   If you’re out to build awareness, make sure you know how much the target audience knows about you beforehand.  Take the time to conduct something like an email survey among your audience.  Or, if you have the time and resources, sitting down with a cross section of people in your target audience can provide deeper data on what they truly think of you.

Social media monitoring.  Nowadays, everyone wants to use a little bit of social media.  If you’re incorporating this into your PR campaign, be sure you’re measuring it by more than just the number of Likes on your Facebook Page or the views on your YouTube video.  Have someone on a local level or a system like socialmention measure the climate of your social media during the campaign.  What was the tone of the comments posted on your Wall?  How many tweets about you were positive rather than negative?  How engaged were your Fans in your posts or tweets?

Monitor the media coverage.  You’re probably most familiar with this one: you should monitor the press coverage you receive. What were the stories or articles like?  What size is their circulation or what were their ratings at the time of airing?  Google and GoogleNews do a great job of covering online media, helping you to see the stories that ran online about you but not necessarily in print or on TV.

Measure your online impact.  Even if you’re not doing any online marketing, per se, don’t assume that your story or campaign won’t end up on the Internet.   Sites like blogpulse.com allow you to track which blogs are covering your story.  Make sure you have Google Analytics set up to track the traffic from these sites and whether or not they’re converting (i.e. completing your call to action).

All too often as marketers, we’re challenged with “sales” or “donations” being our only way of measuring our effectiveness.  By realizing that there are many stages in the sales funnel, including building brand awareness, loyalty, understanding, and then things like sales and donations, companies can gain a better appreciation of the role of PR in educating and shaping our target audiences’ minds.

Public relations done well connects a business with its audiences, from investors to clients, from media to neighbors, from employees to competitors. It is not limited to just publicity. Many practitioners, and those hiring, mistakenly believe PR means “press release”. Publicity is only one aspect of public relations. Developing any kind of relationship takes effort and determining both the correct audience and the needs of the business. Relationship with a business as an inanimate object is impossible. People do business with people; public relations is the business of showing the people side to reach the audience.

Public relations takes planning. A small business needs to define the goal (think big-not just sales).  Once that is decided, determine the audience and figure out where they communicate: social media, public forums, word of mouth,  television, etc. At this stage it’s critical to develop the message that reaches the audience.  Then choose the public relations strategies to get you to them. Step by step planning helps with implementation. don’t forget a budget. Outline the timeline (how often you can commit to doing the pr/marketing, when you have a business to run not to mention the product/service you provide). Wrap it up with evaluation to keep testing the market or the tools and see if they are working.

Once the plan is in place, consistency in the delivery will be important. Can’t do PR occasionally.

The elements of public relations for starters include employee relations, customer relations, media relations, donor/investor relations–developing a connection and understanding with the key audiences. Employee and customer relations can help generate future sales. Donor/investor/customer relations keeps clients–easier to keep them than to find new ones. Media relations and social media efforts build your expertise. Publicity is getting coverage of your business or  or an event you are hosting in front of the media that reaches your audience. Government relations may be needed if you are impacting neighborhoods or need laws adjusted because of impacts to your customers or your business. Many businesses are now dealing with multicultural customers, another relationship. Events can be both a strategy or just a tactic for media.

Look at your time allotment, your communications skills and your target audience and come up with a plan.

No social media strategy? You may as well throw darts!

Any organization involved in social media needs a plan. We call that plan a ”social media strategy.” Sounds scary, doesn’t it? It’s not, really, but it does require some research, pondering and eventually, tough choices.

I say “tough choices” because there are literally scads of social media platforms out there from which to choose. And, who knows what is coming down the information highway next?

The only certainty about social media use is that it, like any other communications effort, needs a plan to be effective. We’ve all heard the expression “fail to plan, plan to fail.”  No plan for social media doesn’t necessarily mean you WILL fail in your goals and objectives. However, you may do just as well throwing darts at a board plastered with the various social media tools, tactics and techniques available to you.

Unfortunately, the dart-throwing strategy – if you can all it that - is all too common and I often see smaller businesses taking this exact approach. And, unlike the photo above, those ”social media” darts often fall short of the bullseye….if they even hit the target at all.

   Begin at the Beginning

Strategizing for social media can be a daunting task. It is not something one can just pull out of  a hat. It does require some time and effort. But, as with most plans, a social media strategy will provide a “roadmap” if you will for your efforts in this realm. So roll up your sleeves and begin at the beginning.

And the beginning is this:  TACTICS ARE NOT STRATEGY! Put another way, Facebook status updates and event invitations, Tweets, Blog articles, and such are tactics. The use of those platforms – or not – forms the bedrock of social media strategy.

Choosing or avoiding certain social media tools simply because one doesn’t understand them or because a competitor/friend/colleague suggests or trashes them is NOT a strategy, either.

Now that we have that clear, let’s move on.

Before you board the social media bandwagon, consider your audiences. How do you communicate with them now? How effective are those communication methods – can you or are you even measuring those methods for their outcome? Don’t forget to include traditional AND social media methods you may be using as you take a snapshot of where you currently stand with your audiences.

This first step to creating a social media strategy is the “research” phase. Yes, it IS necessary. The only way to determine where you will go is to consider where you have been and well, where you currently are. Try to make this research as honest and exhaustive as you can – this is not the time to be embarrassed about communications efforts that fell flat or didn’t come to fruition.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the four pillars of social media strategy and how to use them to support and stabilize your organization’s communications and community-building efforts.

In my first post on social media measurement and evaluation, I wrote from more of a general point-of-view. My aim with that article was to simply introduce the idea, the need, to have some form of measurement in place for websites and blogs. Measurement is the key to knowing where, how, when, why and with whom your messages online are working for you – or not.

Now, I don’t personally use Google Analytics at this point in time. But, I do use analytics on my blogs. WordPress makes this pretty easy with its Stats feature. How easy? Well, on this site, it was automatically part of my account. Once I realized this, I checked my other blog, on which I write about yoga in the midwestern states. That blog is a custom theme and as such, the stats feature was not automatically part of the package. So, I did a search, found the stats plug-in and am now up and running with analytics on both blogs.

Back to Google Analytics, though. I worked not all that long ago for a company that had Google Analytics for its website but had little idea how to use it. I can’t say that I did, either. But, what I now know after even just a bit of research and reading into the matter is that Google Analytics is smart business if you do business online.

In the case of that former employer – and in most cases with small businesses, I suspect – Google Analytics is being used as little more than a nifty little thing to talk about in meetings. By that I mean to say that the tool is probably most commonly used to “track” traffic to a website. Well, that’s what it’s for, after all. But, even with my limited knowledge of Google Analytics at this point, I can see that it’s also so much more than meets the eye.

Google Analytics will more or less provide you with all the details about your web traffic you can handle. Sure, there’s all the usual stuff such as unique visitors, most visited pages, time on pages, click-throughs and the like. But, it’s the more intimate information that GA can help obtain that makes this measurement program so powerful. a perfect example of this is how the service enables tracking of the actual conversion of site visitors. In other words, at what point do mere visitors make the purchase – or whatever other behavior is sought – on the site? Which keywords seem to bring the most traffic to the site? Where are visitors leaving the site without converting?

From a PR standpoint, it really doesn’t make any sense to NOT use Google Analytics. Unless, of course, you are using some other measurement service you are happy with.

Google Analytics is free and Google offers numerous online and in-person opportunities to learn about this service and how to put it to work. Of course, not all the learning is free, but it does appear to be reasonable. A good place to begin is to simply visit the Google Analytics dedicated site and take the tour.

Evaluation in public relations is everything.  As content is to blog, so too is evaluation to your PR plan. And yet, this is the one step that is often overlooked or ignored in the big picture of the PR campaign. Seems everybody is rushing to implement all those sexy tactics that came up in the PR brainstorming session. Who wants to talk about evaluation at this point? But if you don’t, how will you know which tactics did or did not work, and to what extent, and among whom, etc.?

Well, social media is no different when it comes to evaluation. Though it is – or should be – only a portion of the larger PR plan, it needs to be measured for its success. I use the term “social media” here as a collective to include the various tools most of us are familiar with already. Think Twitter, Facebook, SmallerIndiana, YouTube and so forth.

To determine whether or not your social media strategy is serving your brand well or not, you must evaluate your efforts. And, you must evaluate with some frequency. As with your other PR efforts, you can determine what stays and what goes in your social media strategy based on your findings. For example, if you discovered one of your traditional communication tactics such as a direct mailing was not achieving your goal, you’d likely dump or revise the mailing. The same holds true for social media.

But, here’s the crux: you have to know what your goals are with various social media in order to evaluate said social media for success. A good PR counselor can help you do this. Of course, before you even construct a social media strategy, you should have a fleshed-out PR plan in place for your brand.

Destination Web

For most of us, if we have anything for sale, we likely have a website. This could be as simple as a personal blog (selling your opinion, your experiences) or an online store – or anything in-between. For the sake of this post on social media measurement and analytics, we’ll focus on websites. This, as opposed for example, to a bricks-and-mortar storefront, which may also benefit from customer traffic via social media efforts.

In a nutshell, web analytics software will enable you to see who is coming to you site. Furthermore, the right analytics software will pretty much answer all the important questions of any PR plan, social media-based or otherwise:

• Which audiences (who) is engaging with you
• When are your audiences engaging with you
• How are your audiences engaging with you
• Where (i.e., via which particular SM channel) are your audiences engaging with you
• Why are your audiences engaging with you – what behavior are they enacting

If you aren’t tracking this information in some way, then you are simply throwing social media darts and hoping they stick. You have no clue, really, as to what your return on investment in social media really is. Investment is not just about money, it’s also about your time – what is your time worth?

Easier Than it Sounds

Of course, the words “evaluation,”  ”measurement,” and certainly “analytics” are troublesome for most of us. They make us uncomfortable because they shout “statistics!”

The good news is that there are some fairly decent web analytics programs out there that are easy to install and interpret. A couple of good ones, such as Google Analytics and WordPress Stats, for websites and WordPress blogs respectively, also won’t set you back a penny. 

If you need something more sophisticated than either of the above applications, there are many companies who over measurement and analysis services for a fee. Most likely, if you’re a small biz or sole proprietor, you can get by just fine for now with one of the free services.

You will need to know how to use the data gleaned from web analytics to evaluate your social media strategy. This can be done in-house by putting together an Excel spreadsheet that catalogues your selected stats so you can compare and contrast your social media efforts. How? Well, you may see a trend toward increased traffic to your site on the days you Tweet about your new blogpost. If you want to really dig in, then you’ll need to also track your audience’s behavior around that same time period. This is, natch, tied back to your PR goals. Was your aim with the blog Tweet to get people to sign up for your event, to purchase your monthly special? You get the idea.

Of course, I am simplifying here the use of web analytics. It gets much, much more complicated. But, let this be a starting point if you don’t know about or aren’t yet using ANY analytics. The key thing to know about them is that they will tell you much more than how many Facebook friends you have or the number of Tweetie birds who follow your brand. 

In a nutshell, web analytics can help you make the leap from simple outputs to outcomes. And in good, effective PR campaigns, it’s the outcomes that matter most – social media or not!

It is highly likely that many of my musings on PR in this forum will focus on what I call the “holistic and complementary” wellness niche. Yep, that means yoga – and other cool stuff that often holds hands with the practice of yoga. This is because I am bound and determined to marry all I’ve learned about PR with my passion for yoga and complementary healing and wellness.

The main driver behind this stance? Most people working in this niche either don’t have the time or know-how to do their own PR – nor do they warrant or need a big, pricey agency to help them. And last but certainly not least: I believe social media is just the ticket for developing, growing and maintaining relationships between those who work in the holistic community and their target publics. More on this in future posts.

The above notwithstanding, I will also probably talk a bit here about PR for small business, whether wellness-related or not. I am a strong supporter of small business, especially of the entrepreneurial variety.

I look forward to nurturing this blog and turning it into, well, whatever the universe (and I, and you, the readers) decides it will be. But for now, at least, let’s talk PR….

Our competitors rely mostly on advertising. Yellow pages advertising is a must in this line of business, but the skill set I acquired at H&P definitely gives us an edge.

Emmanuelle Sailor