Editor’s Note: CM sister pub PRNEWS’ is holding its final Digital Learning Series event on Measurement and Data for PR on August 14. Panelist and measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing, discussed the latest challenges, tactics and tools for measuring and evaluating reputation. For the full interview in PRNEWS go here.
What are some of the greatest challenges to measuring and evaluating reputation?
Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing: Frequency. The only effective way to measure and evaluate reputation is to ask your target audience what they think of you, and few organization have the money to do that on a regular basis. Really good measurement companies like Southwest set up monthly metrics that come in from RepTrak so they can measure the impact of PR (good and bad) on their reputation on an ongoing basis.
That’s the best way to do it. If you can’t afford monthly tracking, you should at least do quarterly pulse checks of your target audience—short, targeted surveys to see what (if anything) has changed.
The other big challenge is all the hype around using social media and/or media monitoring to evaluate reputation. That works if your audience regularly gets information from social media and if you have enough brand visibility to break through all the other stuff that’s out there. Otherwise, it’s probably misleading at best.
Name a tool you recommend using to assess public perception.
Paine: Qualtrics surveys and RepTrak are both great tools. If you can’t afford them, SurveySparrow is a very good, affordable survey platform—much better than SurveyMonkey.
Name a tactic for measuring reputation.
Paine: Pre/Post-surveys before and after any campaign or announcement or crisis. Essentially you need to know where you stand with your audience now, so you know what’s normal. That way if there is a big spend on promotion, or a crisis, or a big announcement, you can measure the change in audience perceptions.
For the full interview, head over to PRNEWS.
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