Public relations professionals who demonstrate a desire and an ability to measure clients’ success using hard data will be the most successful in the public relations field, experts told the audience at the Walter Cronkite School’s Must See Mondays event.
Aly Saxe, founder and CEO of Iris PR Software, and Alan Lobock, founder of SkyMall and journalism entrepreneurship professor at the Cronkite School, discussed public relations success at the “Rough and Tumble: Public Relations for Startups” event.
“PR people need to really stop living behind this veil that what we do is qualitative and subjective and you can’t measure it,” Saxe said.
The goal of public relations, or “the red-headed stepchild of marketing,” has been lost over the years as new technology and professions emerge, Saxe said. She said many professionals do not practice the basic and vital methods necessary for success.
With so much media and so many forms of representation and advertising, people are lost in defining the roles of public relations today, Lobock said.
“If the circus is coming to town, and you paint the sign saying ‘circus coming to town this Saturday,’ that’s advertising,” Lobock explained, using a metaphor he found online. “If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion; if the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed, that’s publicity; and if you get the mayor to laugh about it or the media to report it, that’s public relations.”
Saxe took this concept one step further, explaining that public relations is just as much about data as it is about reaching an audience.
“It is quantitative,” Saxe said. “You can measure it. You should be measuring it. If you don’t start measuring it, you are going to die in this industry.”
Public relations professionals are not known to like math and numbers, Saxe said, which is why they choose public relations rather than marketing.
“I hate math, but I love data,” she said. “And data tells you everything.”
Public relations professionals use both internal and external measurements to check their clients’ objectives. Website traffic, leads, sales and foot traffic all contribute to the external ways the success is being measured, while efficiency and benchmarking contribute to the internal ways, Saxe explained.
With proper use of new available technology such as social media, and the emerging millennial generation in the workforce, Saxe believes the public relations field is earning back its validity and debunking the “red-headed stepchild” stereotype because PR professionals are learning to measure success with data rather than “fluffy feel-goods.”
Journalism student Rachael Moore said method was a key concept she found in the night’s discussion of PR.
“It’s not just about getting the message out there but how you get it out there, and who you get it to,” Moore said.
Contact the reporter at sloane.mcgowan@asu.edu.
