Professional Development Archives

Why your communication goal must be smart and measurable

As every communicator knows you start your communication plan with a measurable goal, one that lets you demonstrate whether or not the outcome of executing on your plan achieved the goal you established. To be genuinely worthwhile, though, a goal needs to be much more than that. It also needs to be smart. Rather, SMART: Specific – target a specific area for improvement. Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress. Assignable – specify who will do…

How to engage the C-suite about social media with authority and confidence

“Social media takes time to build,” said one of the participants in the webinar on social media and the C-suite that I co-presented for the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) of The Conference Board earlier this month. It underscores a primary reality for communicators looking to engage their leaders in helping them understand the strategic value of social media in the long term as a legitimate business tool. It’s equally true that one of the biggest obstacles to using…

SNCR webinar will help you close the C-Suite gap about social media

While the time is long gone when you had to explain, routinely, to members of the C-Suite what social media is, it’s often still a time of explaining what social media does. One of the biggest obstacles to using social media for business effectively and measurably has been that gap, that lack of clarity of mind, where leaders of organizations cannot see beyond tweets, likes and impressions – hardly strategic imperatives, in their minds. In many cases, the lack of…

How to get the media on board to end AVE

One of the hurdles along the road of seeing an end to the “advertising value equivalence” (AVE) measurement metric that’s decried by many in the PR and measurement communities is persuading organisations to stop using it. The issue with AVE is well summarised in a white paper published by The Institute for Public Relations in 2003, in which this succinct text appears: We urge you to move away as quickly as possible from statements of the nature, “Our news coverage…

The end of AVE in PR?

If there’s one phrase guaranteed to generate debate in the PR business, it’s ‘advertising value equivalence,’ AVE for short. In simple terms, AVE looks at the volume of space an editorial article takes in a print publication, or the amount of time an editorial audio or video segment plays, and equates its value to the price you’d have paid if you had bought the equivalent-size space or time as advertising. For decades the use of AVE has been a controversial…