“Measuring Public Relationships, the Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success” is an excellent book by Katie Delahaye Paine for any business that wants to measure whether their public relationships efforts through traditional and new media like blogs, is having any impact on their bottom line.
(If you’d rather listen to my four-minute, click below. What I said covers different material than what I wrote below though.)
1. Author Katie Delahaye Paine explains in simple terms what you need to know to measure everything from blogs to speaking engagements.
2. The book provides lots of charts you can copy and tailor to doing your own measurement projects.
3. You’ll learn what can be measured cheaply, compared with what you need to hire an expert firm to do.
4. The book explains how to create useful metrics from company goals.
5. You’ll learn how to break results into outputs, outtakes and outcomes
6. If you’re a medium-sized business, and view social media as just one small part of an overall marketing strategy, this book is likely more useful than reading a stand alone book on social media metrics. Stay tuned later this month for a review of “Social Media Metrics,” by Jim Sterne, if you’re looking for a book geared specifically for measuring online results of social media.
7. The author clearly explains how to make sure you measure what matters to your audience first and therefore earns your company money, instead of getting caught trying to analyze goals that don’t factor into the bottom line.
8. You’ll learn how to benchmark results of different kinds of efforts that seemingly can’t be compared. For example, holding a book tour might be a far more expensive endeavor than holding one big press conference and party to announced the publishing of a new book, but the results of the tour might be far cheaper overall, because the benefits far exceeded the results of the press conference.
9. The book helps you decipher the benefits of public relations versus advertising.
10. The book is filled with great case studies and information on excellent additional resources on measurement and putting together surveys.
Tags: Book review, Measuring Public Relationships
