While AI plays a valuable role, human analysis remains crucial for generating actionable insights and evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) that accurately measure PR campaign effectiveness.
In this time of transformation, there is increasing pressure on PR professionals to demonstrate how their activities are driving business results through measurement and reporting. At the same time, measurement is one of the most challenging parts of PR and communications.
With the rise of, and easy access to, artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to measure — but not everything needs to be measured, and not all measurements are equal.
The Power of Human Analysis in PR Measurement
First things first: When setting your goals and measurable objectives for PR campaigns, defining your KPIs is critical. To do this, you must first understand your key business objectives and how they align with your campaign or plan.
Your strategy, tactics and goals should support the overall business objectives (but may have additional PR objectives and desired outcomes that indirectly tie in). *Whether you are measuring yourself or using an outside partner, you can’t go any further without this!
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Measures
Quantitative measurement is easy. They are numbers that are simple to count. These include the standard data most media monitoring firms provide, like media coverage volume (aka “counting clips”), impressions (circulation in print), ad value (or ‘media cost’).
While these measures are known as vanity metrics, they can be handy when comparing coverage over time or comparing to competitors for share of voice analysis. However, quantitative metrics lack depth and nuance, and that’s where qualitative metrics come in.
Qualitative measurement is more complex and much more valuable. These may include measures like editorial tone, story type, exclusivity, strategic message pull-through, prominence of mention, spokesperson viewpoints, differentiation from competitors, product or service endorsements, and competitive share of voice analysis.
Qualitative metrics capture the human experience behind the numbers. They dig into sentiment, motivations, and preferences, providing a richer understanding of how a campaign resonates with the audience. This deeper qualitative understanding informs how you tailor your message to better connect and influence your target audience.
I’ve heard it said that data or numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth, either. It’s all about context.
The Nuances of Human Language
The Nuances of Human LanguageLanguage complexity makes understanding the true meaning very difficult, especially in digital and social media conversations. This means even advanced natural language processing (NLP) AI can struggle with this task.
Some of the nuances include:
- Irony, Sarcasm, Puns: For example, the sentence “This movie is fantastic, truly the zenith of cinema” could be interpreted very differently depending on the tone of voice and context. AI will struggle to pick up on these nuances and classify the statement as genuinely positive. AI also doesn’t understand human wordplay, such as double entendres, puns, and quips.
- Emotional Subtext: AI can struggle to decipher human subtleties beyond the literal words used. For instance, a statement like “That was a fascinating presentation” could be delivered with genuine curiosity or with a hint of boredom. Human analysts can pick up on these emotional cues through tone, the use of emojis (on social or digital), or the overall context of the conversation.
- Contextual Understanding: Since language heavily relies on context to determine meaning, AI might completely misunderstand industry-specific jargon or cultural references. For example, calling someone a “rockstar” is a compliment in the PR industry. AI may be unable to distinguish between these based on the word “rockstar” alone, but a human analyst familiar with the context could easily do so.
- Understanding Figurative Language: AI often struggles with metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech. For example, “She was feeling under the weather” doesn’t literally mean the person is beneath the sky. Human analysts can interpret these figurative expressions and understand the intended meaning.
Identifying Key Messages and Impact for Powerful KPIs
Human analysts can effectively analyze message placement and prominence within the media to inform placement specific KPIs. Humans are better at assessing the effectiveness of message delivery and target audience reach to evaluate targeted KPIs.
If you’re using tone or sentiment-based KPIs, AI-automated sentiment won’t cut it. You want a human to review the true editorial tone of the coverage based on your definitions.
The Role of AI in PR Measurement
This isn’t to say that AI doesn’t have a role to play — it does! For one, when researching your baseline measurements, AI-powered media monitoring tools can suggest related concepts or themes you may not have considered otherwise.
For media measurement, AI’s most important role is its efficiency in data collection and processing vast amounts of information, spitting out quantitative metrics with ease. This frees up human analysts for all those higher-level tasks requiring judgment and interpretation.
For example, you can integrate Google Analytics with the Burrelles’ media monitoring and measurement platform. Built-in AI allows you to see a real-time overlay of media coverage with certain PR events (such as press releases or webinars) that trigger website traffic.
The Human-AI Advantage: A Winning Combination
The best of both worlds is when AI and human analysts work together. With AI providing the data and initial insights, human analysts can then apply critical thinking and expertise to extract deeper meaning and real-world, actionable insights.
The best use-case scenario is when communicators work directly with the measurement team to develop and communicate their objectives, approach, data set, custom KPIs, and format.
For example, one Burrelles client company wanted to evaluate their spokesperson’s effectiveness as part of their measurement reporting. They explained their objectives, identified specific media outlets as their data set, detailed the approach they wanted us to use for determining volume and quality, and specified what information they wanted us to include in the executive report (in a PowerPoint presentation format).
Our media monitoring platform with AI-powered automation made tracking and gathering the data simple. It also produced all the standard quantitative measurements without a hitch. That made analyzing the volume of coverage where their spokesperson was quoted versus their competitors straightforward.
click to expandHowever, measuring and reporting on the spokesperson’s effectiveness required human review, critical thinking, and a bit of creativity to determine how to depict the results best. As you can see in the image below, we provided human-driven insights using their custom KPIs on the right-hand side of the chart.
click to expandConclusion
Navigating the complexities of PR measurement requires a multifaceted approach. While AI offers undeniable benefits in data collection and analysis, it can’t replace the human touch. Human analysts are essential for interpreting the nuances of language, understanding the true sentiment behind coverage, and developing insightful KPIs that accurately measure campaign effectiveness.
The winning formula lies in leveraging the strengths of both AI and human expertise. Humans and AI working together can provide a comprehensive picture of your PR efforts, ensuring your campaigns resonate with your target audience and deliver measurable results and actionable insights.
Although Burrelles launched media analysis services more than 40 years ago, rest assured that our methods and findings have advanced along with industry expectations.
Content Authenticity Statement: 90% of this blog article was written by me, a human. AI was used in the intro and conclusion (with human review) as well as for grammar and spell-checking.
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