A professor’s outlook on her student’s work can sometimes dull with the daily wear and tear as we grade press releases, critique newsletter design and help future practitioners understand how to properly deploy a survey, among other things.
But there are moments when in a wave it all washes over and one can’t help but marvel at how much these future practitioners can do with a little direction and a lot of creativity and drive.
Wow. And I mean wow.
When you see Katie Paine is going to be on a panel to discuss evaluation, you know you’re going to get the real deal. Katie Paine is considered one of the true leaders of public relations measurement. Heck, she literally wrote the book on measuring public relationships!
So before she started her Tuesday afternoon presentation about “Reputation, Employee Engagement and Other Measures of PR Value,” I cornered her to talk numbers.
Katie Paine rattled off her 3 favorite metrics in this video in a single take without hesitation:
Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay, both of the University of Central Florida, presented their case study content analysis of what they called the Kindle crisis from summer 2009.
Using a quantitative content analysis of postings published within an established Kindle community, the researchers looked at items published in the forum over a 2-day period that discussed the CEO’s very direct and unorthodox apology for their misstep.
The scholars classified each post as to whether the post noted the author owned a Kindle (indicated ownership, indicated was not an owner, did not mention ownership) and impact to behavioral intention (said the apology would change behavior, said apology would not change behavior, did not indicate any behavior change based on apology), among other variables.
Continue reading " Coombs and Holladay Discuss the Kindle Crisis "
I could sum up today’s presentation on “Simplicity and Persuasion: Move Your Audience to Action” in the few words our presenter closed with:
Motivate the heart. Direct the mind. Simplify to persuade.
Mahmoud Arafa, president and creative director, Designframe USA, told us to simplify the message then present it in a way that elicits interest and taps into the “what’s in it for me” motivation. How do you move from belief to action? That doesn’t come with a single tactic. You must combine tactics and approaches.
Even so, remember simplicity. This is a bandwidth issue — the less words the better. Often simple becomes abstract. Move beyond this.
Dr. Kevin Stoker, APR of Texas Tech University and Dr. Brad Rawlins of Brigham Young University presented their work developing a continuum of accountability during the Public Relations Research Showcase Presentations round-robin session at the 2010 PRSA International Conference.
They propose 3 types of accountability, from lowest to highest:
In direct accountability the organization and its stakeholders are accountable to one another, though it is more often looked at in terms of how well the organization serves its stakeholders. An example of direct accountability occur when the organization responds directly to a customer complaint. Today we see high levels of this occurring through technology, such as Southwest Airlines Twitter account where the airline responds to complaints tweeted by delayed or otherwise inconvenience customers.
Continue reading " Stoker and Rawlins Continuum of Accountability "
