Friday, September 29, 2006

Media Measurement Can be Tied to Financial Outcomes

Day two of the Summit on Measurement conference started with a case study from United Technologies and its study on measuring media relations messaging on financial outcomes.

The areas of communications that they rate themselves on include: Employee Relations, Customer Relations, Management Strength, the CEO, Corporate Culture, Brand and General Communications, Innovation, Capital Structure, and Cost Control.

They measure tangibles like financials and intangibles like leadership, human capital, technology, reputation, familiarity, favorability etc.

One side comment made that I found interesting: According to Jon Low, a partner at Communications Consulting Worldwide, the company who authored the study, "CEOs are enamored with innovation, but we've found that it's not a factor in [the company's] revenue growth;" it is the second lowest factor, he said.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Glenn,

this was very much the theme of a a Reputation Management workshop I attended yesterday at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

The lecturer was talking about how accountants have always been able to determine the value of "goodwill" of a company (which, crudely, is the market capitalisation minus the value of the physical assets), but that we somehow need to be able to break down the remaining chunk into elements like human capital, intellectual capital, reputational capital and relationship capital.

Relationship capital, he said, was the value of the relationships the organisation formed with its various sets of stakeholders. And that's where he felt PR people could most definitely add to the value of their organisation.

The challenge to me still seems to be around how do you actually put a value to a relationship with an individual, group or entire set of stakeholders - I believe the concept is spot on, but I think many companies and PR professionals are still struggling to do this on a practical level. Will be inetresting to see how it evolves.

regards,
Melanie