Impacts within reach and beyond measure

Photo by M. B. M. on Unsplash

By Deron Snyder

There seems to be an app for just about everything nowadays, including fun nonsense.

There’s an app for virtual shaving, compete with falling whiskers of the color and length you choose. There’s an app that allows you to milk a cow, seeing how fast you can fill a bucket.

There’s an app for popping pimples, tapping on aquarium glass, and taking bathroom breaks.

But strategic communication professionals could really use a yet-to-be-developed application. This technology would compute the intrinsic value of staying in touch with contacts and asking about their families. The merits of making a personal connection with powerful and influential people. The significance of being seen as a positive, open, and caring individual.

Yes, there’s an app for building relationships.

But as far as I can determine, there’s nothing to tell stratcomm professionals what a relationship might be worth and how it might increase the impact of campaigns.

One of the industry’s biggest challenges is getting colleagues and clients to understand and appreciate the intangible benefits derived from communication work. Intangible assets have been estimated to comprise as much as 84% of a business’s value. Much of that is generated through communication professionals’ effort and success in building goodwill: strong brand identity; loyal clientele; reliable network of vendors/distributors; functional website.

Those things can’t be touched and held. They don’t have cut-and-dry values, which complicates the response when CEOs or clients asks the communicators: “What am I getting for the money being spent? What’s the return on investment?”

That’s a trick question, because not every benefit is transferable to ledger sheets. Establishing, maintaining and enhancing a company’s good reputation doesn’t really fit on  a profit & loss statement. The same is true for other areas of management where the work can’t be simply expressed as single-factor, monetary-based outputs.

Unfortunately, some communicators allow themselves to be sucked into the ROI terrain, relying solely on verifiable outcomes and forsaking the unmeasurable. One of the most popular factors taken into consideration is media activity. When campaigns lead to stories in print, cyberspace or over the airwaves, communicators can shout “See? That’s what how the investment paid off!”

Some go as far as advocating ROI for PR professionals, because the term is so familiar in the business world.  It’s “a strong tool to prove the value of media relations activities to an organization’s bottom line,” writes Shelly Aylesworth-Spink. She also promotes the idea of linking strategic communication and PR to sales.

Those calculations are fine for what they’re worth, but there’s more to stratcomm than media relations and earned media compared to the cost of paid advertising.  That’s why notions such as “Advertising Value Equivalence” and “Public Relations Return Value” have failed to gain widespread acceptance and use.

The fact is there’s no ROI formula to adequately capture the complexity of communication processes and management. All of this is complicated by the blurring of traditional distinctions, where measuring strategic communication now entails technical communication, political communication, interpersonal communication, social media communication, written communication, and on and on.

But for those who think they’re totally off the validation hook, they’re not.

Many communicators likely entered the field due to a preference for words opposed to numbers. Unfortunately for them, but math IS involved in certain aspects of measurement. And not just plain math, either. We’re talking formulas, decimals, deviations, percentages, and enough letters and symbols to make white-jacketed scientists applaud.

Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of communication campaigns has become a distinct area of research, where practitioners debate over experimental designs and the choice of quantitative vs. qualitative methodologies. Scholars have taken to the subject and produced rigorous evaluations to advance the science of communication and simultaneously understand the practice of communication.

In fact, interest in formal evaluation models is growing from decades-long models that lacked standards and were narrowly focused.

A recent two-year international study examined a number of frameworks and models to identify several new concepts and dimensions in evaluation. There is no shortage of dissertations and journal articles on the matter, where you can discuss theoretical and methodological requirements, social-interaction perspectives, and Type II errors.

Fortunately for stratcomm professionals who are averse to equations, there are other, less-daunting forms of measurements that should be included in the evaluation of every communication plan. These are the metrics of social media, where the technology essentially keeps track of itself.

Clicks, likes, shares, comments and mentions are but a few of the social media’s key performance indicators available to gauge a campaign.  Depending on the specific nature and goal of a campaign, certain metrics might be more useful than others.

There are online listening tools, SEO activities and Google Analytics. Communicators can track changes in followers, reach or traffic data. “The main challenge is figuring out which metrics are most important and how to apply them,” writes Bob McKay.

In any case, there are more than 300 social media metrics tools to choose from, which might create pause.

Working in the digital space might seem simple enough. But when it’s time to evaluate campaigns using some of the aforementioned academic approaches, non-scholar types might want to bring in some help. There’s a big debate on using in-house evaluators vs. using external evaluators because the former has more knowledge on the communication campaign while the latter has more knowledge and credibility on evaluating interventions such as communication campaigns.

Not every aspect of a campaign can be measured with a quantitative ruler. But a campaign evaluated by someone who understands theory and methodology and study designs, etc., can glean use information that otherwise would remain in the dark.

Thorough and rigorous evaluation can identify problems within the implementation of campaigns. It also can find determine exactly how effectively – if at all – campaigns met their goals.

There’s no app for that either.

But unlike some of the intangible byproducts of strategic communication campaigns, there are tangible elements that should be measured afterward. The results can be used to improve campaigns in the future and provide cut-and-dry values in the present.

That’s the best we can do for now.