I’ve been thinking about the way PR folks measure their success. In Singapore and most markets I’ve worked with, the standard KPI is clippings. But I have a problem with that. Yes it is easy to count, but as a boss or client, what is my influence?
You see, the mass media is dead. By dead I don’t mean out of business, but dead in terms of influence. Before the age of the Internet and cable TV, it was easy to communicate your agenda and news to the masses. Just get into the newspaper (most cities/towns in the world have only one) and get on TV or Radio.
But today, with hundreds of cable/satellite/IP TV channels, approximately 200 million blogs, millions of online news sources, and not to mention endless hours of uploaded video, there is no media that reaches the masses. All that’s left is niche media and highly distributed media.
This shift affects the PR industry the greatest and it really calls for a different game plan. I feel that most PR agencies, at least in Singapore and Asia, still live in denial and continue to sell the “we have great friends in the media” pitch to prospective clients.
In our social media age where a single obscure blog post can turn into a whirlwind of influence (remember the HD DVD key issue?), calling the editor-in-chief of the newspaper your best buddy isn’t exactly a trump card anymore.
The advantage of a good PR agency is its ability to produce stories that spreads. It doesn’t matter if that story goes out to a journalist or a blogger, as long as it’s online because good story spreads no matter what.
So until we can do wireless keyword search on everyone’s brain, I think that the true tangible effect of influence from a PR perspective is how well it spreads. It’s not impossible to accomplish as proved by the launch of Cuil. All it took was one good press release to get this snow ball rolling.
Filed under: Marketing, Social Media
Hey Ben, great job highlighting the shift between media then and now.
I agree that influence needs to be a KPI, and leads to the race to answer the question, “what benchmarks influence?”
i don’t know if a “good story spreads no matter what” there’s a thin line between wisdom of the crowds and herd mentality.. the “influencer” is still essential to how the story spreads too don’t you think?
Hey Brian, you are right. I’m not discounting the prominence of the influencer but raising the distinction between mass and distributed media. An influential person/platform is what we’re after, but whatever we go for nowadays will never have the mass media effect we used to have.
Mmm… influence is not the KPI, that cannot be measured. What can be measured is how far it spreads. It’s the same as pitching a story to the wire agency and getting it published in many newspapers and magazines.
You know, I recall when I was in the agency, we used to down play non-proactive coverage. But now I’m starting to believe that these non-proactive coverage means word is spreading without pitching and that is as close as we get to influence measurement.
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Is there a an example locally or in the region that you think has achieved this?