PR News hosted a free online marathon
Rather than making it about the company, we decided to share this special occasion with clients, employees, stakeholders and friends. Having been regular supporters of various educational initiatives in Russia through the years, we thought hosting a free online course dubbed The Wonderful City of Measurement (by analofy with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) would be a great way to celebrate. Over the past years, PR News accumulated extensive expertise and knowledge which we would love to share. The three-day marathon took the participants on a journey along a purple brick road where they encountered three characters symbolizing different stages in the company’s history, from press clippings to media analysis to consulting to offering insights into communications.
The first day on the road to the Wonderful City of Measurement was about media monitoring and its value for PR practitioners, as well as different types of monitoring, making media lists, picking key words, and figuring out the optimal format for delivering monitoring results.
Day two focused on media analysis and what makes it perfect. The participants learned about the purpose of media analysis, what needs analyzing for a given communication campaign, how often it needs to be done and how deep it should go.
The art of reputation audit and the insight it affords into the soul of a target audience was the subject of day three of the course. Mastering it requires, first of all, an understanding of what reputation is, followed by knowledge of how it can be measured, what skills and know-how it involves, what levels of reputation and reputation index are, and how to look for insights based on the acquired data.
For convenience, PR News divided the information presented over the three days into two sections covering theory (texts, figures, tables and videos recorded by leading industry experts) and practice (task and tests). By the end of the course, the takers gained practical knowledge on how to put together the perfect communications research brief, and studied real-life briefs and surveys. The marathon format of the course allowed for a step-by-step exploration of the complex system that is communications evaluation. The PR News team hopes to continue to contribute to PR education in Russia and we are planning more activities as we celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary.
