A recent article in the Chicago Tribune profiled people who use part of their summer vacations for volunteer humanitarian service (link below). Among those interviewed was Paula Amenta, who had worked as a counselor at a camp for at-risk kids.
What country had Paula stated that she visited? Zambia.
What did the paper report? Zaire.
Ouch!
OK, it’s easy enough to bring this to the reporter’s attention and ask for a correction to be published in the next edition. However, papers usually publish corrections in some obscure corner of an inside page.
As a best practice, I write my own summary notes memo, either before or following an interview, and submit it to the reporter. If someone else is the designated interviewee, I am always present during the interview – whether it’s in person or by phone.
Before the interview, I ask the reporter for a preliminary list of questions or, at least, a topic outline. This enables me to gather internal information and prepare talking points for myself or the designated interviewee. I prepare talking points regardless of the level of the level of expertise. Those talking points then become the post-interview summary notes — attached, of course, to your friendly “thank you” note to the reporter.
It’s a supplement to the reporter’s own note-taking and helps prevent misspelled names, misstated job titles, fact-flipping, and other inaccuracies.
Is it spoon-feeding? Do reporters balk? Sure, initially. I’ve found, however, that this practice can foster better relationships with reporters, even entice them to become beat reporters on your organization. Providing your summary notes can make reporters perceive you as helpful, responsive, and especially resourceful on sensitive issues or technically complex topics.
My memo also goes to the organization’s board members as well as cross-departmental/divisional managers and executives, who may decide to share it with their staff members. This way, I am the first and best news source. No need for them to turn on the news or open the paper and go, “What the…?” or, “I didn’t know….!”
Preferably, by the time it hits print, broadcast or online media, it’s old news. Beyond the headline and a lead sentence, there’s little or no need for busy people in my organization to invest much time digesting the media’s take on something I’ve already fed through my internal memo.
What do you think?
Oh, and by the way, Chicago Tribune: Zaire was the former name of the African nation known today as Democratic Republic of the Congo. The name was officially reverted in 1997.
Ouch again!
LINK:
“For more vacationers, getaways are a chance to give,” by Andrea L. Brown, Chicago Tribune, August 28, 2009 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-vacation-volunteer-nzone-28-aug28,0,6706831.story
In addition to discussing the importance of communication share over absolute values and explaining why media costs have a higher correlation to outcomes than media reach, Jeffrey also shared insights and perspectives on ROI, message consistency, and how integrating data better predicts outcomes.
1) The return on investment in advertising focuses on quantitative metrics, not the impact of creative production. An impression on TV is not the same as a print impression or an Internet impression because the dollar expenditures are different, she noted. “So advertising needs to go
beyond spend with a qualitative metric just like non-paid news media. Quantity and quality need to be combined for best correlations.” 
contamination at some outlets indexes at 20, the $30 million budget now has an impact of only $6 million (20 percent of $30 million). Jeffrey’s research found that substituting $6 million for $30 million in the company’s market mix model came close to reality in customer count and revenue estimates. 
3) Integrating news and advertising results in greater actionable insights. By definition, a correlation is a relationship between two independent variables. Perfect correlation, achievable only in a clinical lab, is stated as r = 1.0. According to Jeffrey, an r = 0.7 is usually a good indication that there is a relationship between the media effort and business results. 
such as attendance at an open house, product sales, or increased awareness.
Compiling print and broadcast mentions is a widely practiced form of evaluating PR programs. This, however, is just the first level of assessing message exposure to potential audiences. 
organization appears in a local daily that has a circulation of 130,000, the media impressions are 130,000. If another story is published the next day, this counts for 130,000 more impressions. If there’s a brief mention of a new product or service on NBC’s Today show, this might constitute 20 million impressions if that is the audited size of the audience that regularly watches that program. 
advertising value equivalent, or AVE. In other words, a five-inch article in a magazine that charges $1000 per column inch for advertising would be worth $5000 in publicity value.
for the same amount of space and then multiplying that total three to six times to reflect the common belief that a news story has greater credibility than an advertisement. There is no empirical evidence, however, to support any multiplier factor.
Advertising copy is directly controlled by the organization and can be oriented to specific objectives. The organization also controls the size and placement of the message. News mentions, by contrast, are determined by media gatekeepers and can be negative, neutral or positive. Also, a new release can be edited to the point that key corporate messages are deleted; therefore, the organization can’t control size, placement, or content.
Some argue that AVE metrics help corporate management put a value on PR. Others say it helps marketing executives decide on how to split resources between PR and marketing.
effort illustrates her point. Her research team analyzed the charity group’s media coverage for 31 days following the Myanmar disaster. As the outcome measure, the amount of funds raised daily was tracked. Each media story was analyzed for tone. All of the negative stories were subtracted from the combined total of positive and neutral stories, resulting in a number of net positive scores per day. 
FORMULA: 
impressions, and net positive media values, and correlated them to the funds raised per day.
and trying to correlate them to outcomes like sales, funds raised or survey scores, you may not see a high enough correlation to show that a relationship exists between the two,” Jeffrey said. “Your analysis will look more like your media coverage did not work. You will not see an accurate picture of your share.” 
Thanks to sophisticated software programs and techniques such as computerized news clip analysis, survey sampling, quasi-experimental designs and attempts to correlate efforts directly with sales, PR pros are making considerable progress in evaluation measurement and the ability to tell clients and employers what’s been accomplished. This coincides with the increase in the percentage of PR budgets (as much as 10 percent, according to some industry analysts) being devoted to this step because of constant pressure for PR to justify its overall budget and prove its value to organizations’ bottom lines.
awareness, audience attitudes and audience action, the most widely practiced form of PR evaluation is compilation of print and broadcast mentions. Burrelles/Luce, for example, claims it can monitor 40 million blogs and Internet forums and tens of thousands of newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV, and cable stations. National Aircheck searches almost 8,000 hours of news talk radio each week.
The potential audiences reached are described as media impressions. While commonly used in advertising to document the breadth of penetration of a particular message, media impressions don’t, however, document how many people actually read or heard the stories and, more important, how many absorbed or acted on the information.
I recently had a bunch of articles, press releases and other materials that I authored and published scanned into a PDF. My thought was that this would make it convenient to send to people as an email attachment. 
