Why raising awareness is a meaningless PR objective. Without a key result.

One of the best books on measurement and goal setting to appear in recent years is John Doerr’s Measure What Matters. Clearly lots of books have been written about measurement - so why should this one stand out?

Let’s start with the author.

John Doerr is a rock star Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He is the chair of Kleiner Perkins, which he joined in 1980. By investing in some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and companies, including Amazon, Google, Intuit, Netscape and Twitter, he has helped create more than 425,000 jobs.

He is also credited with introducing the idea of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to Google when you could fit the entire company into a single room. Google today still runs the business on the basis of OKRs. Larry Page wrote the foreword to the book.

As he says: “I don’t write a lot of forewords. But I agreed to do this one because John gave Google a tremendous gift all those years ago. OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of “organizing the world’s information” perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most. And I wanted to make sure people heard that.”

So what are OKRs? And what does it have to do with PR objectives?

John Doerr didn’t invent OKRs. That credit goes to the late Andy Grove, formerly CEO of Intel. Doerr experienced the power of OKRs first hand in his first post university job at Intel. The following video provides more background on the basics of OKRs with some good examples of OKRs in action.

Doerr brought his zeal for OKRs to Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google in 1999. He explained it to the young Googlers as follows:

"An OBJECTIVE  is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. ( As prize Google pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not. Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)"

In other words, objectives that do not have associated key results are not objectives at all.

This is how Google characterises Objectives and Key Results (you can download a handy PDF guide here).

Objectives are the “Whats.” They:

• express goals and intents;
• aggressive yet realistic;
• must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved.
• The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for Google.

 Key Results are the “Hows.” They:

• express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objective(s) in a useful manner to their constituents;
• must describe outcomes, not activities. If your KRs include words like “consult,” “help,” “analyze,” or “participate,” they describe activities. Instead, describe the end-user impact of these activities: “publish average and tail latency measurements from six Colossus cells by March 7,” rather than “assess Colossus latency”;
• must include evidence of completion. This evidence must be available, credible, and easily discoverable. Examples of evidence include change lists, links to docs, notes, and published metrics reports.

Look at your own current PR objectives. How do you think they measure up against the above criteria?

What about the dreaded objective of “raising awareness”.

Would this pass the Google OKR test?

What is awareness?

First, it is worth unpicking exactly what “raising awareness” really means. First, what is “awareness”? There are a number of possible answers to that. Often it is simply whether the question “are you aware of X” is answered with a simple yes or no. It is presupposed that people are unlikely to make a decision to do something unless then are unfamiliar with the organisation/product/service or the action required of them.

Of course, just because people are aware of you doesn’t mean they are going to do what you want. In fact, the brutal reality is that probably only a relatively small proportion of your “aware” audience will do what you want.

The point of all this is that “raising awareness” is a meaningless and pointless objective unless it has meaningful key results associated with it.

It begs all sorts of questions.

What is our current (quantified) level of awareness?

Who with?

By how much do we wish to raise awareness from its current level? 10pc, 20pc, 100pc?

Why do we want to raise awareness by this amount? (ie will a 20pc increase in awareness translate to a 50pc increase in sales?)

Over what time period do we hope to raise these levels of awareness?

I suspect that these kinds of questions aren’t asked as frequently as they ought to be when people are trying to develop PR objectives.

Even if they are, objections are raised as to how you can quantify current levels of awareness. In the past, cost and time would have been cited as reasons why it couldn’t be done.

But Google Surveys provide an inexpensive way of getting a baseline with broad public audiences – run the survey before you commence your PR activity and run the same survey at the end – you will see whether or not the needle has moved by the amount you wanted.

Google search volume can also be a useful proxy for brand awareness. Determine the current level of brand related searches before you campaign begins and then monitor whether brand related searches are rising. And by an amount that is commensurate with your target.

Let’s say that you are currently receiving 1,000 brand related searches per month. You want to increase that to 10,000 per month. Does that mean you simply need to reach (or “make aware”) 10000 people a month? No. You almost certainly need to reach a lot more people in order to generate that level of search uplift. You’d probably need to reach in the order of hundreds of thousands of people to get anywhere near the knock-on brand search volume you seek. But at least it provides a guide to what the target level of reach would be needed to generate your desired outcome.

No objectives without key results

So rather than just say “our objective is to raise awareness of X”, you can combine this with a set of key results such as:

We intend to raise awareness within our defined audience of 100000 people from the current level of 20pc unprompted awareness to 50pc over the next 12 months.

30000 people who weren’t aware of us previously will now be aware of us as evidenced by running a comparative Google Survey or in relation to branded search volume.

Assuming a frequency of at least 7 genuine impressions per person, that means we need to generate at least 700000 genuine impressions through our selected channels (if this were a B2B company, you could use LinkedIn in to get a base level CPM cost for generating this level of reach. If the suggested CPM rate were ￡100 per 000, then you could get that base level of impressions for ￡70,000. But a LinkedIn impression is counted when the content appears on screen for a minimum of 300 milliseconds. So realistically you will need to generate a higher number of impressions to get a genuine level of reach and awareness – but at least you know the minimum level of spend to guarantee reach. And even if you don’t intend to spend any money on paying to guarantee visibility you have an understanding of what your earned or organic approaches are going to have to deliver on).

You get the idea. There is no silver bullet. But putting some effort into trying to determine what key results would reflect an objective such as “raising awareness” being genuinely achieved will go some way to avoiding fuzzy thinking and fuzzy execution in your PR activity.

What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below.