CorpComms Magazine

I'm not a natural born Brit, I'm yet another Antipodean import, yet I have managed to glean from a certain cult classic that 42 is meant to be the answer to life, the universe and everything. Yet I find it falls short of providing an answer to a question comms people across the world are facing in these tough economic times: how do you justify your existence?

Ultimately, the primary function of communicators is the transfer of information and knowledge, often with the aim of managing or altering perceptions and therefore attitudes and behaviour. From culture change programmes to battling negative brand attitudes amongst your consumer base, it all comes down to that same function.

In an ideal world, a communications team will properly research and evaluate perceptions and behaviours prior to and following a campaign, thus demonstrating the effectiveness, and therefore the value, of the campaign. But for most communications teams, the budget doesn't stretch quite that far.

There has to be something more

As head of the media relations function at Aon UK, a large B2B organisation, measuring the impact of our media coverage in a meaningful way is something of a challenge. I've met with numerous evaluation companies and tend to get the same thing in a different package or at a different price. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with my current provider and they have bent over backwards to customise what they offer to my specific needs and situation. But I'm still left feeling that I need something more.

I've recently spent considerable time studying a range of communications evaluation projects and they show an interesting mix of methods, emphasis and priorities. Some backed up tonal analysis of media coverage and message penetration with surveys to assess perceptions and attitudes. They clearly showed the impact of the media activity on the target market.

Others were designed to determine who the key voices were in a debate and what influence they had over the journalists and publications covering a certain issue. They produced a very clear picture of the battlefield or 'theatre of operations' the client was fighting in and allowed them to develop focused and customised strategies and tactics to shift perceptions as part of a 'hearts and minds' campaign.

My own company faced a fairly serious reputational threat earlier this year and as our normal media evaluation criteria would not fit this particular campaign, our measures of success involved altering the basis of the evaluation criteria (ie changing the context of what constitutes positive, balanced or negative coverage), key message penetration, a focus group with leading editors and impact on share price.

Early June saw Manchester United announce Aon as their new sponsors as of next season. Very exciting for us as a company, although one or two members of staff made anonymous postings on our CEO's blog questioning why we had spent so much money on a football sponsorship and suggesting it wouldn't really do anything to raise awareness of our brand globally.

I was able to use some very basic media evaluation data to make our case: in the first 24 hours, we recorded more than 250 million 'impressions' globally and the bulk of the articles not only said who we were, they also said what we do. Not the most scientific or reliable measure, I know, but it served its purpose for this particular stakeholder.

Justify yourself

Our shared services functions have recently been adopted by a new stakeholder, our CFO. As we navigate our way (quite successfully, I might add) through these turbulent times, we are again being asked to demonstrate the value we bring to the business. A detailed and complex spreadsheet was provided, covering everything from the proportion of FTE's (headcount) time spent on the different business units to our demand drivers to KPIs and measurable value. Not a simple task for functions such as internal communications, design, PR and knowledge management. But we found it enormously helpful to think of what decisions would be made using the information we provide and who would be making them. We ensured that context was provided where it would add to the picture and that the 'measurable value' related directly to the needs and priorities of the primary buyers of each of the services we provide.

So why, then, do we have a tendency to try and present a one-size-fits-all selection of measurements, such as AVE, or impact score or message penetration? Each has their place, as do web traffic, focus groups, econometrics (I'm still not sure what that is) and Cost per 1000.

If you look after that consumer brand suffering from negative brand attitudes and a hostile media, then your measure of success might be improving the tonality of articles penned by your harshest critics. In a previous incarnation, I was tasked with turning around the perception of a firm seen to be struggling. My measure of success was the disappearance of the word 'troubled' as a descriptor for the company and the appearance of the words 'remarkable turnaround'.

It's a matter of relevancy

Different campaigns, different purposes and different audiences mean different measures of success. And that's what it boils down to for me. What constitutes 'real business value' will differ from one stakeholder to another and from one campaign to another. Understand what drives your stakeholders in each situation and offer them a measure of value that is relevant to them, instead of striving to make them understand you. 

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