When you're working in PR, you need budget and resources from the business, that budget always needs to come from somewhere, which means that you need to be able to measure and demonstrate the success of your PR strategy. Historically, there were real issues with measuring the value of your PR activity. So what a lot of people used to do was use advertising value equivalence, which is basically taking a piece of coverage and comparing the value of that coverage to the cost of buying that space in advertising. So for example, if you had secured a half page article in The Financial Times, and you knew that a half page ad in that paper cost around 20,000 pounds, you would report that you had secured 20,000 pounds worth of editorial. Some people went even further than this and came that editorial is much more likely to be read and remembered and believed and respected.

So they would say that a piece of PR coverage was worth three to four times the advertising value equivalent. This meant that PR campaigns were always generating millions in value, which was of course great for the PR industry. But abs are fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. in advertising, you get full control of the message in PR the journalist has control. an advert is usually part of a series of adverts that go together to impact the audience. you're unlikely to convince a journalist to write about you positively for consecutive days.

Also, how do you account for negative publicity? And how do you account for a one line mention in a large article? What about links? advertising rates are also in a Toria Slee negotiable so that 20,000 pound piece of coverage could really only be worth about five grand if you've got a good person negotiating. And how does digital figure in all of this? Fortunately, the advent of digital has made PR much more measurable.

Barcelona principles were agreed upon by PR industry leaders from 33 countries in Barcelona, Spain in 2010. This is what they are. Firstly, goal setting and measurement of fundamental to communications and PR. You need to make sure that your goals are quantitative and qualitative, and that you're setting SMART objectives. Secondly, measuring communications outcomes is as important as measuring outputs. So you need to be able to figure out what the benefit to the business was of the activity that you did.

Thirdly, the effects on organizational performance can and should be measured wherever possible. Fourthly, measurement and evaluation require both quantitative and qualitative methods. Fifth, abs are not the value of communication don't use them. Six social media can and should be measured consistently with other media channels. And seven, measurement and evaluation should be transparent, consistent and valid. Now that we've covered campaign and strategy planning, and being very specific about some of the KPIs that you might want to measure as part of your PR strategy, here are some tools that you might find useful.

Use Google Trends to see how search activity for your brand is changing over time. Use Google Analytics to monitor the impact of digital PR activity on your website, you might want to annotate your PR results in Google Analytics to identify spikes in traffic caused by your campaigns, or segmental online coverage from other sources, and track its long term impact on your website. Here's an example of a campaign we did around the release of the final season of Game of Thrones. And here's the spike in traffic to our website caused by that campaign. Use the Google URL Builder to tag any links used in your campaign. This gives you data on visits to that URL.

Link Explorer is a tool by Mars, which enables you to monitor your site's backlink profile and identify any new backlinks generated by PR men buzzsumo are sites that you track coverage of your social media, web and paid distribution, and Moz and sem rush are tools that enable you to track keyword rankings, which only really work if you're running a full blown SEO strategy. quick recap. Your one page PR strategy will clearly show what you're doing, why you're doing it and how you plan to measure if it's successful. Your PR plan is a more in depth active document that contains your list of week by week activity, KPIs results, ongoing working angles and campaign ideas. Managing Your PR strategy is best done through a series of weekly, monthly and quarterly activities and digital PR is measurable. Make sure you measure results and report back to stakeholders.

Your company's been hacked your customers data has been released on the dark web. The phone is ringing. Your Twitter is being attacked your CEOs panicking what do you do keep watching because in the next section You'll learn how to handle a PR crisis.