Book review: Measure What Matters: Online Tools for Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement and Key Relationships by Katie Delahaye Paine. Wiley.
Let's start with one of the author's anecdotes from her own practice experience.
"I spent millions of dollars each year writing, designing, and producing pieces of paper that were supposed to make my sales force more effective," she writes. "Whether it ever worked was never questioned, it was what we did."
She's right. The emphasis in public relations practice has traditionally been on what we do, not on whether it works.
This is true of public relations practice. What doesn't or shouldn't change are the principles behind the practice. Now for another quotation from the author:
"The future of public relations lies in the development of relationships, and the future of measurement lies in the accurate analysis of those relationships. Counting impressions will become increasingly irrelevant while measuring relationships and reputation will become ever more important" (p 219).
This quotation is from the conclusion to the same author's 2007 book, Measuring Public Relationships. She cites it again in this new text to point out that what was true then remains true now. Four years ago is not a long time, of course, unless you live in Twitter time.
Continue reading "It's not what we do, it's whether it works" »
Recent Comments