What to do when your release flops? Learn how a 4X4 pulled us out of a ditch and how you can lift your story by reframing the narrative.

Today, I'd like to talk about measurement. We've just conducted a global launch of a product called the Grenadier which is the new Ineos 4x4, and my agency EastWest PR was involved in the Asia launch. We did the work in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. Historically, clients have always wanted to see the press clippings for the work that's been done. One of the challenges now, in COVID times, is that no one can actually show the product or come together. We had, at one stage, 20 people on a Zoom call. We had my team in Singapore, the client and I in the UK, and the journalists in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam all dialling in and watching a video, and having a live video call with Mark Tennant, the client. The feedback by lunchtime is that we've already got some coverage. I was able to then use a platform called talkwalker.com, and it has a free social media monitoring tool. Within four hours, I was able to identify that there were some 1,500 conversations taking place, 4,300 items of engagement, in other words, people resharing, a 10% positive sentiment with over 20 billion potential reach. Now, how can we do that? Well, products like Talkwalker monitoring launches. Today's launch happened simultaneously. We did Asia first through the day, then it rolled into Europe, and then into the States. So, as the day went by, we were able to use Talkwalker as one platform to track not only the way that this news was spreading, but also the sentiment about it. Public relations isn't just about getting noticed. We need to also identify whether we're getting noticed for the right reasons, and whether we're getting noticed in the right places. I was reminded at a conference of the old Gerald Ratner story, and Gerald Ratner and the Ratner jewellery store, which he inherited as a family business, is a case study in what happens when public relations goes wrong. Gerald Ratner, for those of you that don't know, is a jeweller, and at a press conference at the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall, of all places, on the 23rd of April 1991, he said, "We also do sell cut glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks all for 4.95." People said, "Gerald, how can you sell this for such a low price?" He said, "Because it's total crap." Obviously, there might have been a murmur there, but he compounded this by going on to remark that one of the sets of earrings was cheaper than Marks & Spencer's prawn sandwich, but probably wouldn't last as long. Funny as that might have seemed at the time as sort of a party piece, he was just entering the period when news was getting out quickly and, of course, the media had a field day. After the speech, very quickly, the group value plummeted by over 500 million which, 30 years ago, was a lot of money. So, Gerald Ratner is just one case study of how a carelessly worded statement, no matter where it is, and even more so now, in light of the social media, and public relations and good brand reputation can be taken for granted unless something like this happens, where, all of a sudden, the business is back on the line. We've seen recently where people in government have said things that have led them to have to resign, because what they said was deemed to be socially unacceptable, even though it wasn't a policy; it was a comment they made on social media. Public relations is something that we need to monitor and as Francis Bacon, the philosopher, once said, "Knowledge is power," but we might now say that actually, measurement is knowledge. It's no longer enough just to track the amount of clippings. What we need to do is to look at also the nature of the tone of what's being said. And also, now that people can share and reshare, we have to look at what we call engagement. How can we measure all this? I personally like to start a little bit earlier on; I like to start at the input. I've developed a formula called the Active Communications Index. This is a very simple formula. It's just [the amount of content] x [the number of channels] x [the frequency]. This will give you an indicator or an index, and it's going to be an indicator of how much coverage you're likely to get. I have this because clients often worry about the scale of the coverage on the other side of the activity. Much like going to go to the gym and looking at your cardio performance after the exercise, what we really need to be looking at is what exercises you're planning to do in the gym, because the cardio results are going to be the byproduct of the exercise that you do. The Active Communications Index that I've created, which is on eastwestpr.com/speakpr, serves to give companies and entrepreneurs a guideline so that they can start to create consistent, well-distributed media content across multiple platforms, so we start there. Plainly, PR is an industry that people are investing in. It's about an $11 billion industry. Companies are absolutely investing in public relations and in the old days, when I started the agency EastWest PR in Singapore back in '95, clients used to ask for what we call AVEs which are Advertising Value Equivalent. What we had to do was to measure the clippings, get the rate card from the publication, and then to multiply the advertising value by 3.5, because the view was that [3.5] x [the advertising] was the credibility ratio of a paid ad versus earned editorial. In 2010, a group of PR experts met in Barcelona and they came up with what they call the Barcelona Principles, and they've come out with an update in 2015. These PR experts have identified a number of principles of which the number one is about goal-setting and that measurement really is a byproduct of the goal-setting. Often, we have companies who want to measure something, but actually, they haven't really set any goals at the beginning to determine what would be a positive or negative metric. It's a bit like setting off on a journey, and measuring how fast you get there, but not identifying at the beginning whether you needed to get there quickly, or by the most direct route, or by using the least fuel. We need to start with goals, and those goals could be, for example, web traffic, they could be inquiries, they could be attendance at a showroom launch. It could be in, the case of COVID-19 communication, it could be getting people to social distance properly. If we haven't identified what our goals are for the PR activities, then the measurement is bound to be flawed. So let's start there. We need to also then look at if we've got public relations, what are we going to be doing and where are we going to be getting the results? In public relations, what we're doing is sending content press releases, editorial, infographics, videos out to various media channels, our own and the public ones. We use one tool out of the UK called coveragebook.com. CoverageBook is a measurement and evaluation platform which we find very good, because for the online coverage, we put the URL link in, and their software will then troll from actually similar web and aggregate for us the combined total readership. It also has what they call a domain authority score. A higher and lower doman authority score produces a rating, and it's one thing to have a website with massive traffic but it has a low, if you like, quality readership or low rating. What we want is a website or a news outlet that has a high domain authority, but also has high traffic. So, CoverageBook is very good for consolidating both the numbers and making a wonderful presentation of all of your clippings if you need to export it then to PDF, for example. One move beyond that is to look at the sentiment. I mentioned earlier on the launch of the Ineos Grenadier. It's not enough to be spoken about. It's about whether we're spoken about in a positive or negative, or even a different way. Talkwalker.com has a free social media monitoring tool, which actually also tracks sentiment using AI by looking for which words and which keywords your coverage is displaying. Obviously, if it's your own press release, it's going to be positive, but if it is being picked up and retweeted or or reposted on Instagram, or Facebook, or on any other channel then, of course, it may or may not be positive all the time. Tracking both the frequency and the range of coverage is important, but so is the sentiment around it. There is a very large group called Carma, which is a global organization dedicated to measurement, and if you want to go to the big hitting machine, they've got a global media intelligence product or platform. They've got over 1,200 clients, and they monitor over 100 languages, and have five staff in five continents. If you're managing a global launch, for example, and you really want to track both the amount of coverage and the sentiment, then carma.com would be a great platform to use. There is actually an association. Amazingly enough, it's called the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication or AMEC. This group has dedicated itself to the measurement and the practice of measurement in the public relations industry. They have a number of tools, one of which is called the Integrated Evaluation Framework. This is a free framework that is available online and one we can use as entrepreneurs, agencies can use, organizations can use to start to create a measurement for the ongoing PR, about things like reach, sentiment, engagement, and so on. We also have, through the AMEC, what they call the Measurement Maturity Mapper which, again, is looking at how you're progressing over time, because your sentiment and your analysis isn't static. The more work you do in a market, the more detailed it becomes. The more one-on-one interviews that we hold, for example, for this new 4x4 from Ineos, the more depth, the more synthetic will be the analysis. So measurement is important, but it does start with planning. AMEC has got some frameworks that you can use. Carma has a global standard, but there are some lightweight ones like Talkwalker and CoverageBook that will help you get there. For my money, as I am running a small business, what I like to see is click-throughs to my website, and I'm amazed at how many companies I work with that do not track the the analytics on their website. For those that do, that's great, but then even fewer of them have online chat. It's the equivalent to making a beautiful showroom, a beautiful store, or a beautiful restaurant, and having no sales assistant or no matre d'. I'm always amazed when I go to a website and it just says "Contact us," and there's an email form in this day and age when there are platforms like Zoho and Zendesk that enable you to go online and talk directly to the customer support or the technical support. In Asia, I found that companies are very much switched on to this. I've previously talked about people selling on Taobao, and actually bringing people to the website, and selling directly from the website using these interactive chats. You can even use chat bots if you can't be available all the time, and you can use manned ones. Services like Zendesk actually provide the staff who can respond to scripted responses that you have as a company for them. So, public relations, for me, fulfills many functions, but a large one is to get people to come to my website to find out more. It's then essential that we use some of these tools that actually make our website interactive, because public relations is only part of a journey, a digital customer journey, as I shared when I talked about the sewing and the sewing tribes. Back in 1996, I met a man called Jim Macnamara who, at the time, was starting a business called the Mass Communications Group of Australia. Jim and I had a very pleasant conversation, and in those days, we really didn't have the internet. He was talking about the impact of measurement and how it was going to be more and more important in our industry. Jim Macnamara was prescient because as digital came in, not only could we start to measure the advertising value equivalent by getting at our rulers and chopping up pieces of paper and scanning them and sending hard copies to our clients, what Jim foresaw was an age where in digital, everything can be measured, everything can be planned. I was delighted to see that, in fact, the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Form has actually been authored by Professor Jim Macnamara, who's now at the University of Technology in Sydney. Thirty years ago, Jim was sharing his vision for measurement and now, he is still leading that, and what that shows us is really the measurement has always been part of public relations. It's not that it's new because it's digital. The industry has always had a desire to understand the impact that it's making on the well-being of the organization. As we plan our weeks ahead and the public relations, if you think about your Active Communications Index, how much content are you going to send through how many channels at what frequency? Because without the input, you won't have the output. The input can be measured and planned, and with those inputs, then you can start to measure the outputs. That'll This is a little story about measurement and a long time ago meeting a great man Jim Macnamara. I hope this has give you a ratio of how effective you're being, how much helped to maybe shed some light on what you can do with your company when it comes to measurement for yourself or any investment you're making, and how much reward you're getting. agencies that you work with. Remove the fear and the anxiety about public relations or what it does for you, start with a plan, identify the objectives, and put in consistent effort, If you're doing great PR then, of course, the reward will be and you will get great public relations. more people coming to your website and you receiving them gratefully and generously, and you're welcoming them to come and listen to the story of your brand.