Tech Image, a Chicago-area public relations business that launched in 1993, wanted to show clients that their PR campaigns were producing results. Mike Nikolich, president and CEO, tells IncTechnology.com that deploying a business intelligence dashboard enabled clients to access data that shows key performance indicators for media coverage, impact, quality, content and budget to measure the success of PR campaigns.
Elizabeth Wasserman: What problems in your company did you want to resolve with business intelligence?
Mike Nikolich: In public relations, one of the biggest things PR people are trying to justify is net worth of their campaigns. Are they working? What metrics can you put in place to show they’re working? A lot of the metrics out there are fuzzy, they measure ad equivalency, count up placements, and assign ad value to results. It’s black magic and voodoo. And when you get into tight economic periods, fuzzy metrics don’t cut the mustard. We were looking for a way that would prove that if you had to cut the PR budget, the company would feel the pain. We wanted to prove that you can measure the effectiveness of PR campaigns.
Our philosophy is to try to align PR with sales. Most of our companies range in size from $25 million in annual sales up to several billion in annual sales. Typically these companies have very small marketing PR departments. If they have PR professionals on staff, maybe they have just one. Many times we’re viewed as an adjunct to these companies. We figured out after the first economic downturn in 2001 that the companies that really valued what we were providing kept their budget intact and we tried to figure out how do we measure this?
Wasserman: What seemed like the best technology solution?
Nikolich: Everything we looked at was so expensive we couldn’t justify it, in terms of commercial off-the-shelf solutions that had a big, 360-degree focus. Our clients could not justify making a six-figure annual investment to justify a budget that was maybe twice as large as that. Our typical budgets are $100,000 to a quarter of a million dollars. We knew they would love a solution, but the question was whether they would pay for it.
What happened is we were pitching a prospect, iDashboards, a technology company offering a business intelligence dashboard solution tied more to sales professionals and manufacturing. When we went through due diligence on this company and dug into this dashboard solution, we realized that we could probably adapt this to our PR framework. What’s been interesting is that we’ve become one of their best case studies, although they’re not a client of ours.
Wasserman: How did you make this fit your business?
Nikolich: We had to adapt it to our business. This is a dashboard solution that’s intended to integrate sophisticated databases, CRM, manufacturing solutions. We had to dumb down the technology and make it work for our needs. What we did was figure out from clients what was going to be important to them. That was sort of like going to a buffet table and picking out a little of this and a little of that. In our attempt to measure the effectiveness of these programs, it was a really interesting, organic learning process. We put a team together, attended seminars, read books, and talked to sales people. We put a prototype together for clients. Once we had this up and running and showed it to clients, all of a sudden they wanted it. They had to see how they could actually use the data first.
Wasserman: What have the results been?
Nikolich: We currently have 15 different clients running dashboards. Every client is a little different. Some of the key performance indicators we put together compare coverage, maybe to a competitor or the previous year. We might want to take a look at the type of coverage we’re getting. For some of our clients, product reviews are essential. You can make or break a product with a positive or negative review. We have clients for whom 90 percent of what we do is manage the product review process. You can look at coverage by story theme or key messages getting out there. You can look at the impact of those things, are these campaigns generating meaningful Web traffic? Are leads getting generated from this? Is the client repurposing the articles? If you can mine the data and apply it back to these dashboards, and have incredibly talented people who can use the measurement tools to spot trends, you have the opportunity to see what’s working and what’s not. If you’re doing a crummy job, it’s going to show it. But if your campaign is effective, it’s also going to show it.
