Stick With The Old Crew If you want to measure good PR

How do you know if your PR is good value for money, asks this piece in The Sunday Times.

A cynical answer might be: if you aren’t sure, it isn’t.

Alternatively, maybe really good PR is only obvious when you suddenly don’t have it.

The piece says that it is lately much easier to measure PR returns than it used to be; although it takes a while.

“That puts people off so they revert to measuring tactics and intermediate measures, which might show changes in the short to medium term but this approach could end up being misguided,” we read.

From the outside, it feels relatively easy to decide whether a big company has good PR or not.

Are our water companies playing well with the public just now? Of course not. They are a disgrace. (This is the fault of how they operate of course, not the PR people specifically.)

From a financial PR perspective — the piece above seems to be mostly about consumer PR — the best flaks are the ones that have been doing the same thing for a long time.

So they know the business and the CEO really well. Moreover, they know which hacks cover the stock most closely and exactly where they are coming from.

They know whether we get on with the CEO or not. Know when to say about a piece, “let’s let that one go”, or, “that’s harsh, let me have a word”.

When big companies switch agencies that’s generally a drag, at least for hacks.

The new team doesn’t know the business so well and feels obliged to offer a new approach. Sometimes restricting access to execs and harming relationships 20 years in the making.

That seems such a risk for such little gain – one big agency is surely mostly like another.

My suggestion is that your best available PR person is probably the one you’ve already got.