What's the magic word with clients? "Measurement". Wanna make a PR person squirm? Ask them about "measurement". So what does it mean when one of PR's most noted measurement experts calls to "mothball measurement." Yousa! That's gotta be a bombshell no matter what side of the table you're on.

Katie Delahaye Paine is one of PR's leading measurement experts. Paine is the founder of KDPaine & Partners, a worldwide leader in PR measurement and evaluation. Prior to launching the firm in '02, she was founder and president of The Delahaye Group, an industry leader in business and communication intelligence.

There's more: Katie was an initial founder of the Institute for Public Relations special commission on measurement and evaluation. She served as the US liaison to the European Standards Task Force to set international standards for media evaluation. And she's a Research Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

So listen up!! She's dead serious when she says, "It's time to stop talking about measurement and change the conversation!"

Without further ado...

Why "measurement" should be mothballed
By Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO
KDPaine & Partners, LLC

Jim Dowling, Planning Director for Oglivy PR in Asia, had a recent blog post with a catchy title: “FCUK MEASUREMENT.” Where he went on to say a number of things I disagreed with; I agree with the headline. No, I’m not suggesting we stop being accountable. It’s just that we should be talking about data and research, and stop fretting over how big our rulers are. It's time to stop talking about measurement and change the conversation! Here are three reasons why:

Reason # 1 -- Measurement is too often just bookkeeping; trying to meet some management target that is not necessarily closely related to your real goals.

The very word “measurement” seems to bring out fears in a great many PR practitioners. Maybe it’s because they had their hands smacked with to many (or not enough) rulers as children. Maybe it’s the genetic fear of “word people” fearing numbers and charts and graphs. But, for whatever reasons, it is clear that measurement seems too scary a word. In reality measurement is just a more direct way to achieve your goals based on decision making with the right information.

So instead, let’s start talking about what kind of data you need to make better decisions. When you’re in middle of a battle for thought leadership positioning, how do you know if you’ve won? If you client asks you what’s a better way to launch a product a press conference of a VNR, do you have the answer at your fingertips? More importantly, do you have the facts to back up that answer? If you’re trying to make a decision on how to launch a new product, what’s the best way to break thru the clutter? If your boss asks you who the most effective spokesperson is, can you name the top three? Is your answer based on facts or gut instinct? The reality is, in 2007, you have to have that data at your finger tips. There is simply no tolerance these days for decisions based purely on gut feelings, mostly because what gets done depends on whose gut is bigger and more powerful. (Now that’s a disgusting visual.) What we need is data that tells us what works and doesn’t work, data to tell us what makes our constituencies act/buy/report, data that gives us regular direct feedback on our activities. Besides, when you have half a dozen people all lobbying for their own pet project, the only way to shut them up is with data. That’s what measurement provides – the hard data to back up your gut instinct and help you make better decisions. But somehow when you call it “measurement” it becomes something to put off, delay or avoid all together.

Take KDPaine & Partners. It's a perfect case study. We’re about to launch two new services, at the end of the month, -- the first is a social media consultancy to facilitate conversations among communities in New Hampshire, the other is a significant expansion of our survey research business. At the end of our first little brainstorming session we had a list of some 30 potential tactics ranging from bumper stickers (No Paine, No Gain) to islands in Second Life. The problem is that we don’t have enough budget to do it all, so how do we make a decision? We look at the data. We look at the type of people we’re trying to reach, our goals for the launch, the type of people participating in each community, who we’d reach by participating, what the relative cost is and what the competition is doing to make noise in our space. Once we have the data in front of us, we make a decision.

Reason #2 -- There shouldn’t be a standard for “measurement” so why wait for it.

The other thing we have to stop talking about is measurement standards. Do you have a standard way that you evaluate your friendships? Do you use the same benchmarks to decide whether you’re having dinner with friends and family? Some programs are designed to generate media coverage, but others are designed to avoid it and still others are designed to influence the media coverage of others. Still other are designed to solicit ideas or change perceptions? So how can there be a standard way to measure all of this? The answer is, there isn’t. But PR people seem to forget that the R in their title really does stand for relationships and that there is no way you can evaluate the health of your relationships by counting column inches and comparing the result to what you might (if you were stupid enough to pay full retail) have to spend on the equivalent advertising. Just because counting column inches and comparing results to falsified ad equivalency numbers is a lot easier (and makes you look better) than doing real relationship measurement, is no reason to do it. Yes, it’s a lot easier to call in an air strike than negotiate with your enemies, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Like I tell those wimpy agencies that still do this AVE stuff when they say “the client demands it” – If the client demanded heroin would you give that to them as well?

Reason #3 -- Whether you like it or not, you become what you measure.

If you measure nothing, you are worth nothing. When you measure eyeballs and/or the number of bloggers you’ve pitched in the last week, the end result will be that you may meet your numbers, but you may or may not have touched your target audience at all and you will have left a lot of pissed off blogerati in your wake. If, instead, you measured your awareness or perceptions or the types of conversations that people are having, you’ll become a better communicator because you’ll have the data to make an informed decision based on what has or has not worked.

So stop measuring and start gathering data. Stop waiting for someone to come along and give you a ruler, and start making decisions.