Aquarius Advisers

In recessions we always hope marketers will move scarce dollars from advertising into PR, which we are convinced will give them a bigger bang for the buck. But proving that PR delivers a better return on investment than any other form of marketing still is extremely difficult. The proliferation of social media and real-time marketing have made measuring these newer PR activities even more difficult. But the good news is that web metrics will provide data that eventually will provide more concrete measures of PR ROI.

Ever since it acquired Delahaye, the pioneer in measuring the ROI of PR investments, our client Cision has been a leader in PR measurement and analysis. It recently showed why it’s a leader when it struck a deal with Radian6, the hot social-media monitoring service, to provide a social media monitoring dashboard for Cision customers. Over time, Cision and Radian6 will most likely start demonstrating ways to measure what you can monitor by integrating social-media metrics and other online data into their measurement schemes.

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, just posted on social media measurement in his Media Philosopher blog. He calls for more consensus-building on metrics that everyone can agree on, and he also points out the obvious but often ignored fact that there will be as many measures of social media effectiveness as there are uses for social media. It’s one of the sanest and most hype-free assessments of the state-of-the-art in social media metrics and measurement I’ve seen and is must reading for anyone interested in finding ways to demonstrate the ROI of PR investments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Aquarius Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.