PR News CEO Lilia Glazova pens book titled “Why Does a PR Professional Need a Ruler?”
“What gets measured, gets done” - Peter Drucker, management theoretician and the founder of modern management
Measurement is not just about tracking something but a key element of the process of communication. Today it’s hard to imagine that a campaign or initiative can be deemed successful without analyzing how well it was done.
A report on trends in the industry by the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) shows that data, measurement & evaluation and research, understanding & planning are among the top three skills in the industry worldwide.
New technology, access to big data and the sweeping digitization of the world are driving robust growth in public relations. Measurement is evolving, too. Before using a ruler to measure the stack of clippings about a company was enough to gauge a PR person’s progress and now there are lots of new tools and methods available and the ruler has evolved into charts, graphs and Google Sheets. That said, some professionals, due to circumstances such as lack of time and understanding of measurement, and costs, still rely on outdated evaluation methods.
Lilia Glazova, author of “Why Does a PR Professional Need a Ruler? Tips on Measuring Communications”, encourages PR professionals in house and at consulting companies to view measurement and evaluation of their work as part of their daily routine. Her book is a comprehensive guide to various media monitoring methods and techniques, choice of KPIs, evaluation of short and long campaigns and sponsorships. She also reflects on the future of communications, offers advice to media analysts, and shares insight on media consumption in Russia.
“Why Does a PR Professional Need a Ruler? Tips on Measuring Communications” is a go-to reference book for PR practitioners as well as non-media professionals monitoring for various information on a regular basis.
Excerpts from the book:
“I’d like to begin with a statement I try to prove throughout this book: PR in its pure form will cease to exist as a profession soon and will be replaced by communicators who control the flow of information across all channels”.
“PR strategy reconstruction is meant not to copy what the competition do but, quite the opposite, to stand out from them. By analyzing what messages the competition communicates, where and how, you can come up with something different”.
“Break all that is said and written about a company into four unequal piles, each handled differently to achieve different goals: minimize paid media to drive the cost of contact with your content per person as low as possible; work earned and shared media to build a positive sentiment; and apply owned media to achieve maximum message penetration”.
About the author:
Lilia Glazova is owner and CEO of PR News, chair of the Russian Association of PR Consultancies (AKOS), chair of a Russian Civic Chamber Communication Industry Coordination Committee taskforce on communication classification, and expert in communications research and evaluation.
She is a guest lecturer at the Moscow State University, MGIMO University, RUDN University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow PR School, MACS and Netology, and regular speaker at international and Russian conferences (AMEC Summit, FIBEP Congress, Russian Internet Forum, Baltic Weekend, etc.). She is ranked on Russia’s Top 1,000 Executives in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and is 2020 Russia’s Media Manager Award winner.
