The example in the long-term care analysis was that the reporters assumed the readers knew what long-term care insurance was and never explained it in the article. A subsequent consumer survey showed significant confusion by consumers over what the product was and how it worked. Follow up media efforts included a strong emphasis on making sure reporters did not make this presumption in their articles.

Angie

Out here in corporate-land, we still are debating how to measure PR effectiveness — or at least, how to explain it to people who have no idea what we are talking about.

Everyone wants numbers — preferably with the requisite currency designator in place. That’s how we get the misuse of AVE (imo, okay for product stories, but not general reputational matters). It’s even easy to use Web trends and path analysis — story appears in WSJ/FT - track traffic post-story and compare to pre-story; works best for products that can easily be bought online…

But even the content analysis is still descriptive in nature, rather than more outcome oriented… or am I mistaken?

In the paper Angie references, the revolutionary part (again, imo) is that it’s focused on errors - how “Six Sigma” is that!?! You could get someone’s attention saying you’re going to “reduce news media errors and misstatements about our company and what it is doing” as a strategy — and could link it up with market research on reputation. Even without a currency symbol, it’s measureable and impactful, no?

- - take care all

Wilma - it’s fun to see you refer to Klaus Krippendorf! He and a couple Harvard programmers built our Ai engine for media analysis.

At FCC, we use Carma International (this is not a plug for Carma) to benchmark our media favourability score using a global index. Carma scores the media content by key messages carried, spokespersons quoted, positive, neutral or negative tone, placement of the article in the publication or on the broadcast (i.e.) front page versus tucked away in some unnoticed location), volume, key reporters and key publications (which are targeted in our national media relations strategy. Then, our score is compared to companies worldwide on a global media favourability index.

The measurement is credible among our senior management and is used on our balanced scorecard as a leading measure against corporate reputation. With the media favourability score alongside the other financial and performance indicators, we are able to position communication as a contributing business driver.

This paper was peer reviewed by several leading academics and industry practioners, none of whom felt this proposed analytic method was “ancient”.

I was not speaking to sophisticated analysis firms that certainly have trained analysts to do this type of work, and doubt the authors of the paper were, either. But I’ve been in the measurement world a long time, and almost all the teaching I’ve heard from the mainstream PR organizations focuses on scoring items that are IN the article as opposed to those that SHOULD HAVE BEEN. I defer to your knowledge that this is not a truly new approach, but it is new to the mainstream.

I will invite Dr. David Michaelson to join in on our discussion. Stay tuned!

The real issues are that evaluation companies hide thier methodologies behind mumbo jumbo, PR practitioners are not taught and do not find time to work at evaluation methodology and academics and peer reviewers are not knowledgable in the area.

The content analysis capabilities of the specialists are as comepetent as any. The application of semantic analysis and inference engines far exceeds the capability of practitioners who would rely on some of the same technologies to keep a plane in the air but not offer to the client becaus its ‘automated’.

Radical! phooey!