Capturing Client News

If you are responsible for media relations within your organization, you know the importance of capturing the resulting stories from your efforts. Whether this is print, broadcast or digital, this tangible proof of your work is something you’ll want to share. There are a variety of services available to monitor the media and provide you with clips or broadcast files.  And of course, there’s Google Alerts and good old-fashioned reading or watching the news yourself.

But simply pulling the clip and turning it into a nice presentation for the client is not enough. What about the clip makes it significant?  Did it achieve its intended goals?  Was it a positive, negative or neutral?  Were the key messages or other key performance indicators (KPIs) part of the story?

When I first started in public relations, one of my jobs was to take the clips and measure the length and width of the story. We reported column inches and airtime and assigned an ad value. And we would pat ourselves on the back when we had hundreds of inches of print coverage and thousands of dollars in ad value.  But the truth is, it meant nothing.

The PR industry (fortunately) has moved away from this archaic approach and now follows the Barcelona Principles.  We’ve written about it before.

The bottom line is you should share the results of your efforts.  But without an evaluation of the impact of the story and its intended purpose, it really is just a pretty clip.