Quo vadis, public relations measurement? − Interview with Tom Watson
Where and when did the development of public relations measurement and evaluation start? Which differences exist between German and Anglo-American concepts of communication controlling? What kind of challenges and difficulties will measurement meet in the future? Professor Tom Watson provides an insight into the history of public relations evaluation and he dares to divine the future.
Watson is one of the leading international researchers in the field. He is professor of Public Relations at Bournemouth University in Great Britain. Recently, he and co-author Paul Noble published the third edition of their book „Evaluating Public Relations. A Guide to Planning, Research and Measurement“. communicationcontrolling.de talked with Tom Watson during a recent visit to the University of Leipzig.
cc.de: Professor Watson, you focus on important research topics such as measurement and evaluation, its history, but also on future challenges. Regarding your research findings, when did the progress towards the measurement of communication start and where do we stand now? Could you please outline relevant breakthroughs or turning points in the evolution of public relations measurement and evaluation?
Tom Watson: Public relations measurement and evaluation has a long and rather fractured history. US academics Margot Opdycke Lamme and Karen Miller Russell argue that monitoring of media goes back to the times of President George Washington in the 1780s. In the nineteenth century the first cutting bureaux arose in America and soon became media analysis agencies as companies grew bigger and had multiple networks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a practice of organised media monitoring set in the United States.
Scott Cutlip writes in his book, “The Unseen Power: Public Relations: A History”, that the first known public relations agency in America – the “Publicity Bureau of Boston” – developed a so-called “Barometer”, which was a card index of editors’ publications and interests in the beginning of the twentieth century.
In Germany, public relations in a governmental sense had started in the middle of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of that century, major industrial concerns such as Thyssen and Krupp and big chemical companies started professional public relations activities. Although we would nowadays refer to these practices as press relations, they were already monitoring what their output. By the middle of the twentieth century we have evidence of organised media monitoring companies and evidence that the Advertising Value Equivalence was being used widely in North America and in Britain.
There have been no really big breakthroughs in the history of public relations measurement and evaluation, but there were gradual changes with two or three major cornerstones.Cutlip and Center’s book “Effective Public Relations” is the earliest and probably best known book in the research area of public relations measurement and evaluation. It contains the PII model and therefore can be seen as the first big breakthrough. The 1970s were another benchmark: at that time there was a lot of discussion about measurement and evaluation, mainly led by Professor James Grunig of Maryland University. This was followed by the publishment of several concepts and case studies by academics as well as by practitioners, sometimes working together. Around 1990, there was a variety of literature is available, mainly in North America.
In Europe and the United Kingdom progress was slower. However, in the late 1990s the measurement industry organised and established the "Association for the Measurement and Evaluation Communications” (AMEC).
In my opinion, we can observe three stages: the modelling by Cutlip and Center, the desire to develop models and methods of practice towards the end of the twentieth century and the big step in 2010 when the AMEC announced the “Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles”.
cc.de: You are now professor of Public Relations at Bournemouth University, but your career covered journalism and public relations in Australia and the UK. From your point of view, are there great differences between the developments, which took place in Europe, especially in Germany and the Anglo-American countries? Do you see any differences in both research traditions and approaches up to current times?
Tom Watson: There are definitively differences concerning the development in Europe and Germany and the Anglo-American countries, mainly based on the different cultural, political, social situation.
Taking a look on the Anglo-American side first, public relations developed out of a media relations model and has led to its being as mostly a publicity model; a form of promotion and persuasive communication. Consequently there is relatively small amount of strategic organisational communication. While the research is tended to be more pragmatic, sociological and anthropological approaches are still rare.
On the contrary, in Germany there has always been a more sociological or philosophical aspect in public relations research such as the concept of the public sphere or the area of discourse. These concepts did not exist in the Anglo-American thinking about public relations.
The research community is just starting to explore these differences, for example there was the “International History of Public Relations Conference” with contributions from a dozen different countries in the beginning of July.
The American view on public relations history has dominated the research. There is evidence of an American-led hegemonic worldwide understanding of public relations, which tends to be a persuasive model.
cc.de: Mr. Watson, let’s move on to the current time. The third edition of your book “Evaluating Public Relations. A Guide to Planning, Research and Measurement", was recently published. The title includes the words "planning" as well as "research" and "measurement". What role does communication measurement play when it comes to planning successful communication but also overall business strategies?
Tom Watson: In my opinion communication measurement combines two traditions: the planning cycle and Walter Lindenmann’s terminology of three stages of evaluation “output”, “outtake” and “outcome”. In addition to the three existing steps of Lindenmann, the Swedish Public Relations Organisation created the term “outflow”, which is about the creation of value, in 1996. Communication controlling brings the concepts of “research”, “planning” and “measurement and evaluation” together. It is a disciplined approach and challenging for the average PR practitioner, who tends to concentrate on the “output”-level. This practitioner does not consider the other stages of internal and external “outtake” or “outcome” and the “outflow”. Instead he uses simplified media measurement.
cc.de: You and co-author Paul Noble discuss a wide range of methods and new industry standards on PR measurement. Could you please give us a short summary of your main ideas? In how far does the third edition differ from earlier editions?
Tom Watson: The third edition of our book puts far more emphasis on the creation of value, which has not always been the notion of communication. In times of the first edition, published in 2005, the greatest emphasis was on media relations. Also in the third edition, we still have one chapter about very basic media measurement methods. It has been updated and revised, but is needed, as especially small organisations concentrate on this kind of methods.
Hence, the biggest difference between the editions refers to the word and concept of “value”, in which we see the future of communication performance management.
Although there is a lot of discussion around the “creation of value” especially in Bournemouth and Leipzig, we can notice a lack of its adoption by industry. Nevertheless there is progress. Ten years ago, people would never have recognised the importance of public relations measurement and evaluation, stating that there is no time or budget for it. However, today acceptance grows and PR practitioners and companies have realised the need to monitor what is going on.
cc.de: It seems that social media became a powerful part of our everyday life with great impact on what we do and what we think. Therefore, it is no big surprise that companies and agencies want to measure social media activities. From your point of view, which challenges occur from these social media phenomena?
Tom Watson: One of the biggest challenges is making sense of social media, because of its global relevance. We can all participate in it and most of us do. Twitter and especially Facebook are growing greatly. What started as a college student communication tool has turned into a generation-spanning phenomenon. It is immensely difficult to make meaning out of this broad usage and we are running into the common problem of people wanting simple answers to complex issues. Although social media enables us to share content and to redistribute it, this does not say anything about real engagement. People tend to mistake contact for engagement; therefore they over-interpret a simple “like” on Facebook or a “retweet” on Twitter.
The other and probably more important challenges are the intersection between social media and traditional news media and the issue of agenda setting. There is a lot of research in this field and one of the most important results is that we are actually consuming more traditional media but through the internet and social media. Ten years ago, we had to go out and buy a paper artefact or had to turn on the television on a particular time, now we can get information whenever we want it.
This new situation raises the question, who is responsible for setting the news agenda? The most recent report I have read argues that, especially in rural areas and outside the city centres, citizen journalism is becoming more important. Citizen journalists pick up various stories, publish pictures and posts with the help of social media and through this, call traditional media’s attention to incidents. This leads us to an intersection that shows the difficulty of identifying the real genesis of a story: who put it on the agenda? Social media monitoring can brighten the situation and bring about transparency. Although some people say that social media has the great potential to obscure things, in my opinion it also has a great potential to discover them. Consequently social media has a great impact on organisations, which have to handle this new situation of transparency.
cc.de: What does that mean for measurement methods and our understanding of monitoring the common communication process?
Tom Watson: I think that traditional news media is probably easier to monitor, because they are still in a more codified and structured form. It is immensely difficult to define and to understand social media. This leads us back to the discussion of engagement. For an organisation there is a kind of a tightrope to walk to differentiate between stakeholders coming in touch with content and stakeholders really comprehending, retaining and acting upon a message. The latter I would call engagement. Organisations have to question if there is any substance or depth in its relationship to its stakeholders. This is the “outtake” zone of Lindenmann, which asks, "how do we process the information?".
Concerning Hon and Grunig’s paper of 1999, which is about the relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders, there can be four dimensions, which are “control mutuality”, “trust”, “commitment” and “satisfaction”. “Control mutuality” is the interaction between two people and a mutual influence of ideas. So this concept fits to the idea of engagement.
cc.de: Do you think that there is really a need for new frameworks like the AMEC Social Media Valid Framework? And if yes, why?
Tom Watson: The AMEC is not saying that there will be only one type of measurement. It is trying to create a set of standards, a range of measurements, that can be considered reasonable. On the long path towards an organised, regular, repeatable, replicable measurement, we will have to overcome obstacles like methodical inaccuracy. This might be the reason for some people who are sentimental towards the old days with Advertising Value Equivalence and all these weak methods of measurement. I think we will collect a range of data, a range of methods.
I can remember at the first AMEC summit in Berlin in 2009, where a representative of the British government said five measurement companies had been given the same set of media cuttings and asked them to evaluate them by using certain specific criteria. However, they had produced five extremely different interpretations. Hopefully, we have moved beyond that state of methodological chaos.
cc.de: Professor Watson, thank you for the interview!
About Tom Watson
Dr. Tom Watson is professor of Public Relations at Bournemouth University in Great Britain. Before entering academic life, his career covered journalism and public relations in Australia, the UK and internationally. Watson’s research focuses important topics such as measurement and evaluation, reputation management, and issues management. He also researches and writes on the public relations history and established the annual International History of Public Relations Conference in 2010. Tom Watson is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and founding fellow of the Public Relations Consultants Association in the UK. Furthermore, he is co-editor of the Journal of Communication Management.
Readings:
Watson, T., & Noble, P. (2014). Evaluating Public Relations. A Guide to Planning, Research and Measurement (3rd revised edition). London: Kogan Page.
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