BEWARE THE PROMISE OF KPIs & TRACKING IN PR

So many PR professionals and companies spend so much time in creating tracking documents, talking about impacts, reach and KPIs - and largely it's all BS when it comes to the 'media relations' part of PR.

Yet some people are so obsessed with it and it seems to be an exercise to please a board, a committee and to justify really high monthly retainers. The reason for this is that media relations is very hard to track and using software or databases to do this is very, very expensive. Even the simplest software for doing it (other than simple Google Alerts) costs about ￡1,000 a month. Therefore that cost is passed on to the client and oftentimes that client will not even realise it.

I've seen this kind of narrative in action. Only this week, a PR professional said in a private group I belong to that she's had enough of it all, the pressure it creates and she's looking for other work which doesn't wake her up at night. When I said she should work to find clients who trust you and don't need that kind of 'evidence' - a load of PRs came in to say that clients ask for this and it's part of the engagement. In other words, all clients demand this. I call BS.

If a client wants this from me, I will double my fee and will only agree to it in certain circumstances because it's time-consuming. I won't work with anyone who wants to please a 'board' all of the time and where every day we are constantly 'on edge' around getting results. Results none of us can predict. It's too painful to be constantly crystal ball gazing.

And that's the problem here. A complete misunderstanding of how the media works, a complete lack of education of clients around how the media works. These tracking documents can make a client feel better in a month where there has been zero coverage anywhere - at least you can somehow prove your reach.

This whole thing speaks to the utter BS which prevails in the world of PR. The BS promises, the BS phrases - all to make a client feel better from groups of people who often don't even know how the media really works - or who are buying space with various media outlets without telling the clients that they are doing that. I've found this particularly true of PR companies that work within particular sectors.

I remember once sitting in a meeting where I'd done some 'white label' work for a larger PR company and they were delivering a talk on 'outcomes'. This talk was full of spin and outright lies. It was embarrassing. It truly showed that many larger companies focus on pleasing clients and stroking egos than on actually getting publicity or visibility for clients. That's why I advocate practical & real public relations.

Firstly they listed local media coverage (every piece I'd got for them), then national coverage and of a list of ten outcomes over a six month period, they'd got only one piece, every other piece of coverage came from me. My name was not mentioned in anything or anywhere but that was fine - it was the fact that I sat there and watched a very large company with 1000s of employees be taken in by a lot of BS.

Also some of that coverage was not national, though they called it 'national' - it included two local radio interviews and one regional tv mention. They took the credit and relied on the client's (a big client) ignorance of the media. Don't get me wrong they had got coverage but they 'bigged' it up to justify an enormous fee when they had paid me (who got almost all of the coverage) very little in comparison. Now that's on me and it's not a mistake, I'd make again.

Then a marketing manager stood up and showed a couple of pretty diagrams of bar charts and pie charts listing her activity for the month. Usually if I'm confronted by something like that I zone out as I can't be bothered to work out what any of it means in reality. However this time I paid attention - given what had gone before.

These two well-crafted graphics, which probably took ages and was probably time the client fee covered, actually in reality meant that her whole month's work was to write four blog posts and record one podcast. That was it. It looked very impressive but it boiled down to that.

In my world, that could be done in a day easily - as long as the podcast guest turns up.

For me, it's impossible to have KPIs when it comes to the media because no PR company in the country - or indeed the world - controls the media. So you are asking someone to 'guess' what they can achieve in any given period as, unless you are taking advertorial space, you cannot guarantee anything. This leads to BS promises and pretty graphs and tracking documents to show your 'effort'.

There is, nine times out of ten, no direct line of sight between a single piece of coverage anywhere and a particular sale. Tracking on a monthly basis is largely a waste of time because it takes time to get visible - at least a year or two unless you have a huge budget to throw at visibility. Also many big brands don't use media relations as part of their PR, they commit ￡100,000s to billboard campaigns and tv campaigns where they control the narrative and the message - all absolutely fine - it's just not my area. Media relations can then be a by-product of those campaigns if they are particularly imaginative - or they go spectacularly wrong.

When a sale or two does happen due to one piece of media coverage (often called editorial) it's really rare and when it does I always ask the client for a testimonial. We all do a happy dance because we've worked together for it. What we should be looking for is good organic growth over time of turnover and hopefully profit (however a PR professional cannot control what you charge, your profit margins and your ability with your numbers - that's on you not them).

Real outcomes are positive coverage anywhere with any media outlet - or modern media engagement (ie podcast or guest blog) so that there is a cumulative effect on profile. Then the client amplifies that coverage by sharing and talking about it - or they pay me more and I'll do that for them.

It's about engagement with your audiences based around business goals over a long term period. It's not about quick wins, unrealistic KPIs and other BS measures.

I have one client who wants tracking documents every month and they happily pay extra for it - and for them it makes sense as it's an investment they have to justify. However there are no KPIs attached to it because previously they did very little when it came to PR. Their visibility was very very limited so the base line was virtually non-existent. Often KPIs from bigger companies are based on the ignorance of individuals who see the pinnacle of success as being a guest on Question Time, or appearing in Forbes or being on the sofa of This Morning. None of which are based on business strategy or realistic goals - it's a mere wish.

Recently I was asked to work with someone who wanted to be on Radio 4 talking about his product to support the NHS. He didn't believe me when I said this would probably not happen and it might take years to even get him on the BBC. I said it would not happen because the BBC was not there to promote his product - the BBC is there to tell stories which suits its agenda on any given day and an agenda we cannot predict. We can make educated guesses in some cases based on the ebb and flow of news but this product didn't fit into the theme of Easter, Christmas, Valentine's Day or even The Budget.

He said he could do it and didn't believe what I was saying. I just said 'good luck'. Several months later I have yet to hear if he's achieved a goal which has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with 'ego'.

I totally understand that in the world of PR, my little company offers very affordable retainers however every client I work with understands how I work, the tools I use and why I'm more affordable. They understand that there is a process and it can be repetitive but it also leas to more visibility in the areas where they wish to be visible.

They are not paying someone's salary for a month, they are paying for a few hours per month to work on media engagement. This means that over time, I work with clients who really trust me and my team, we trust them and for some clients we've worked together for well over five years. One client who has just retired has been with me for a decade.

Our retained fees don't include hidden charges for 'national' coverage or anything like that - coverage is coverage and we embrace it all if it's positive and if something negative is in the offing (which is rare) we plan for it.

Today my team and I don't want to work with those who insist on weekly or monthly tracking documents and that often means I'll work with much smaller clients - and that's okay. They are as deserving of coverage as anyone else.

If someone is baffling you with paperwork around their efforts, it's often a smokescreen for achieving diddly squat and a methodology for justifying four or five figure monthly retainers.