How Do You Audit Perception and Awareness?
There’s a lot of dialogue about social media strategies and measuring ROI. Any marketing strategy needs to incite Web traffic, sales, donations and other measurable results to justify dollars and efforts spent.
But public relations isn’t just about that direct response. It’s about influencing perception and understanding of a product, service or company.
Perception isn’t quantitative, unless you have thousands of dollars to spend on focus groups and surveys.
A good PR program will drive awareness and communicate brand value which should have a long term impact – something that circulation or sales won’t reflect immediately.
So how do you measure perception? It isn’t a science, but with all of the tools online to monitor your brand, there are a lot of things you can audit prior to campaign start, and then periodically throughout the program. In addition, you shouldn’t just look at your own brand, but your competition as well as the industry as a whole. Some things to look at include:
- Number of conversations – Buzz in the form of conversations is important. If no one is talking about you but are discussing your competitors, that’s an area of opportunity. It says you need to put some steps in place to get your audience talking.
- Location of conversations – Where are the conversations about your brand taking place? Are people chatting about your product on forums but bloggers seem to be highlighting your competitors? Or are bloggers who focus on a certain topic covering you but there’s radio silence from another set of key journalists? Are tweeters shopping at your store? This is a great way to target your efforts – where can you enter existing conversations and where should you go to start new ones?
- Tone of mentions – Are the conversations happening online positive, negative or neutral? Is there a general consensus that your food tastes bad, or your customer service needs an overhaul? Looking for trends can help target efforts across departments and also help you identify key messages.
- Accuracy of information – Today we rely so much on the consumer to deliver our messages, which means the right messaging is more crucial than ever before. Overall, is dialogue reflecting accurate positioning? Do people understand how your product is differentiated from that of your competitors? Are any health claims being properly communicated?
This data can serve as a jumping off point for strategy and should be detailed out in order to measure a shift in thinking. You can then reevaluate in six months from start to see if you’ve successfully powered a change in overall perception.
What are some other key points to measure to audit the perception and awareness of a company or product?
Rachel Kay
Photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt.
Nice post, Rachel – some good rules of thumb to keep in mind when considering a company’s perception and reputation.
One thing I would add (even though it’s touched upon in the ‘location of the conversations’) is the user feedback – especially when it comes to a product or website. This feedback has two positives
1. the obvious ‘love’ a brand gets when someone is jazzed about the product/site.
2. it gives your team an oppt’y to help resolve any issues that may come up.
Thanks Narciso!
Absolutely – great point! The feedback provides great research for the entire communication strategy. It’s worth the time and effort as opposed to reaching out blindly.
Loved the post, Rachel. Great stuff.
Another variable to add to some of your existing ones — time. Tracking the diffusion of brand buzz with a timeline will help you determine why your site’s traffic jumped last Wednesday.
Is your coverage a hot topic for a day, or is it a steady flow of information? Is Thursday at 3:30 p.m. a better time to reach your consumer than Tuesday at noon?
Maybe all the national media coverage you received started out with a tweet from an everyday consumer and snowballed from there.
Time is always a variable to consider.
Ryan – awesome point and I completely agree. You can see how those conversations and feedback align with marketing activities, launches, PR mentions etc…further helping to shape an effective program.
I think that’s a great point that Ryan makes. Obviously the where and the how are important, but we need to find out the why as well.
Why did it happen when it did; why did one approach fail at a specific time and date but another approach succeeded at that same time slot.
Love the fact that you’re mixing up your questions for both traditional and “new” PR, if you like. Practitioners in both quarters should be reading and asking the same questions.
Danny – thanks as always! You summarized my feelings about Ryan’s comment much more eloquently. We agree completely.
So many of the questions I hear about emerging & social media from clients is just this – how do we measure it? These are five tangible things that PR pros can point to as mediums for measurement. I like your comment that these aren’t science, but I would almost disagree. While you can’t say an opinion changed or influenced resulted in $X on the bottom line, tracking behavior change and influence using those tools helps to make educated assumptions in PR outreach.
@nlawhead
Nick – thank you for your thoughts! I agree – an in depth analysis of activity can rival even the most expensive quantitative research projects. We recently audited a brand (a 50+ page report) and the findings were riveting. We will execute a strategy based on that and then re-evaluate after a period of time. You can drill down pretty deep with this kind of research.
Thank you for including accuracy of the message. So often, people say that social media forces companies to give up control of the message. But, from a PR perspective, shaping the message is still a huge part of what we do. While we can’t control what others say online, we can try to educate and influence the message. As the web shapes PR 2.0 (or whatever we’re calling it nowadays) the basics — like shaping messages — are still critical.
Heather (@prtini)