Measurement has always been a highly desirable, even a necessary, aspect of marketing, and indeed of any aspect of business. After all, without the ability to measure and assign numerical values to a project or activity, it would be nearly impossible to determine whether the activity is worthwhile. And that’s just one of many uses for measurement. Consultant Katie Delahaye Paine’s insight in this book is that in the internet age, there’s no excuse for not measuring and not having the data that one needs.
“While the fundamental techniques of statistics and research design don’t change much over the years, the ability of new technologies to get interesting data into our hands does change rapidly. Measurement tools and systems have advanced tremendously in the last decade or so,” Paine writes. “Electronic access to data from thousands of media outlets combined with automated content analysis has revolutionized the clipping and content business.”
To Paine’s credit, she goes well beyond the classic issues of the measurement of public relations campaigns and shows how measurement can, and these days must, be used in everything from event planning to human resources to marketing. Not only can you afford to measure everything, she writes; you can’t afford not to measure.
Paine doesn’t discuss law firms specifically, but all the lessons that she provides can apply to the day-to-day projects of legal marketing.
That’s because unlike many business books, this one delves frequently into specifics – war stories about how the failure to measure, or the failure to measure the right things, can lead to disaster. Many of these stories can easily be transferable to the legal marketing environment. For example, she discusses how a university accepted a $6 million gift to build a new soccer field, yet failed to monitor the hostile reaction of the residents of the small town in which it was located.
“The important thing to remember about any measurement program is that you become what you measure,” Paine writes. “Those metrics that you define as important will be the ones that everyone will attempt to achieve, so getting them right is crucial.”
One of Paine’s strongest chapters is on how to measure employee morale and sentiment. What channels or vehicles for information do employees trust? What messages are getting through to them? How would one define success in the human relations field? And how does one measure whether the firm is on the way to success? All these questions can be applied to associate and employee satisfaction in the law firm world, to the creation of a culture that permits the attraction and assimilation of lateral partners, and so on.
Paine does, however, tend to be somewhat repetitious in her style. Within 20 pages, she repeats a story about a computer that is tasked with doing a content analysis of media coverage and fails to recognize that a “wicked cool restaurant” in New England slang means something that is outstanding, not something that is evil or nefarious. Just tell the story once.
Also, since this book was published in 2011, not 2016, there is essentially no discussion here of mobile apps or of the vast amount of business-related data that is available on them. Note: in 2011, less than 30 percent of Americans used a smartphone. Today, it’s 64 percent. The same is surely true in the legal and business communities.
By: Jonathan Groner, PR Specialist and Freelance Writer, for the March/April 2016 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter