PR: Are you Busy or are you Indispensable?

One of the great failings of most public relations is measurability. First off, I'm not talking evaluation. There's plenty of collecting news clips and analyzing media impressions.

That, however, is not the same thing as being measurable.

Sure we PR people do all sorts of campaigns and activities - and yes we make sure to count all of these activities and their surface level results. But what does this show? Does it show that we're indispensable or does it just show that we're busy.

I came across a recent article by Diane Thieke that resonated pretty strongly with me. She argues that we, as PR professionals, need to demonstrate the value of our offering in clear, measurable terms. And by measurable, she means the bottom-line.

She provides 10 different ways to accomplish this, and the ones that stick out with me are tying PR activities directly to company yearly objectves, assessing what the competition has done - and most importantly, objectively measuring the variety of relationships that PR manages.

That means analyzing and qualifying your strategic and media relationships, because the nature of those relationships, is the difference between getting good or bad press, or potentially, between winning or losing on vital revenue-impacting opportunities.

Collecting clips is a great way to show effort, but the analysis needs to go one step deeper. By taking evaluation to the next step, being truly measurable, you will not only quantify your activities, but qualify them with the contextual value that ultimately contributes to the bottom line.