PR Writing: Chapter 14

Three important takeaways:

1. If your company generates a lot of media attention, you can outsource a media clipping service to monitor and track the conversation about the company.
   1. They can go as far as analyzing the coverage for you, or you could just compile a content analysis yourself. The goal of this is to see the success of social media/media campaigns, what the sentiment of the consumer is, which media placements received the most traffic, etc.
2. Speaking of traffic, you can actually track the traffic on your website.
   1. This can mean how many people are visiting it, where they click, how long they stay on each page, etc. This can help with which pages seem to be easiest to navigate (are they pressing the back or home button a lot?) and just how popular your page is in general.
3. By holding focus groups, surveys, conducting research, etc. you can create a benchmark from which to start a campaign. Benchmarking is used to measure the public opinion through these techniques and can be a great way to ensure success with better thought-out techniques and strategies.

This chapter was very important because what is a campaign without evaluation? When a PR professional takes certain steps to aid his or her client, they must not only do research and prep work to get it started, but they must also research throughout the process, and then follow up with more research that determines the success of their work. Otherwise it was all for nothing without the defining measure of change. This is going to help me because PR research is something I have realized this semester that I do not enjoy, but it is absolutely necessary. This chapter really explains the necessity of evaluation and being honest with results, and I think that every PR practitioner should have a solid knowledge and acceptance of this step.