Scott Malish addresses one of the issues we’ve been discussing a lot lately in FirstWord Digital: how to most accurately measure the ROI of our online PR campaigns.

PR pros must live and breathe social media and think up new, unique ways to use it for clients. But at the same time, it is also up to us to be able to measure the impact those social media channels are having for clients.  And to go even further, it is time for the industry to push clients for their business data - whether it’s sales, web traffic, whatever - so that PR can measure the effectiveness of their work against it.  This will not only help improve levels of client service substantially, it will hold PR accountable. And by doing so, we will have the opportunity to become true business partners and not just a “nice to have” extension of marketing.

Especially in the online brands sphere, it is becoming more and more necessary to work with our clients’ back-end Web developers for access to traffic data and detailed analytics. As public relations professionals, it’s also our duty to educate our clients about the fact that ROI consists of more than just numbers. The wise Paull Young pointed me toward this article, which maintains that outcomes (the degree of success of your campaign) are more important than outputs (how many eyeballs saw it).

Hits, subscribers, friends and tags…measure dissemination, not change in opinion, impact or action. They measure outputs, not outcomes.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to judge our PR successes solely and subjectively on the positive influence it had on its audience. Yet pragmatic publicists know that for the vast majority of clients, numbers are still king. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work as hard as we can to change those attitudes.

—Alyssa