Measuring the Impact of Digital Communication

Measuring the Impact of Digital Communication as explained by Dr. Don Wright at the International PR Summit – November 2018, Bali.

Some people literally in measurement are spending half of their time convincing people in management what they should be doing in the other half of their time. The other thing you have to deal with is the reality that maybe it’s there’s a lot of intervening variables and enter into behavior and putting that enter into opinion information and so forth and so on. That are really non-existent when you’re just dealing with simplistic, you know the number of web visits, the number of clicks, how long some of these get on a website, whether they purchased anything or not, and if they did purchase what was the value of the purchase. Those elements are so easy that almost anybody could measure them and they’re doing the measures that go deeper. You need to pay more for it because you need people with your expertise to do that.

We have a pretty major problem with social media measurement in a number of areas. One, we’re not funding it properly, the budgets aren’t allowing for people to run a campaign. There’s adequate funds to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Second issue that I found in my own research is that, as much as we talk about, social media measurement or digital measurement or what have you as much as we talked about all that stuff, but only about half, or in some cases fewer than half, of the people that I’ve surveyed and I’m talking about thousands of people when they’re surveyed are actually involved in measurement at all. Then when you take those people, who are involved in the measurement, most of them are dealing with output measures, rather than outcome measures. The reality of the situation is that there’s a major issue, not only do we not have the budget to do all the measurement we should have, but we don’t have the knowledge and the ability to do that. That leads them to the concern that first, you have to have the budget so you can hire the people to do the work, then you have to have people who are qualified to do the work. If the money was there, the people would become qualified to do it.  But the situation it is getting better. Today, 2018, is a lot better than it was back in 2005, 2006, when they first started doing some of these measures.