**Please note that there will not be an IPR Research Letter next week due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. The IPR Research Letter will resume on December 2.
Measurement Month: How a PR Pro Changed the Measurement Landscape
Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, Paine Publishing LLC; Member, IPR Measurement Commission
In partnership with PR Daily, “How We Did It” is a series featuring IPR members discussing a success in their public relations career. Katie Delahaye Paine is a member of the IPR Measurement Commission

When I was trying to climb the corporate ladder in Silicon Valley in the ’80s, I was a recovering journalist with an undergraduate degree in Asian Studies. I was always trying to make an argument for more budget but was totally intimidated by all the engineers and techie types I had to pitch my ideas to. One day I was sitting in on a meeting and suddenly realized that words just didn’t work on engineers. So I started making presentations using charts and graphs and numbers and my budgets got approved!

Then in 1986, I moved to Lotus Development (now IBM). When I realized I was their ninth Director of Corporate Communications in five years, I decided that I had to demonstrate my value, or I’d quickly be out of a job. 

Read the rest of Katie Delahaye Paine's blog to see how her start in Silicon Valley led her to a career in PR measurement.
Measurement Month: Going Back to the (Psychological) Roots of Measurement and Evaluation
Thomas Stoeckle, Analytics & Insight Partner, Dot I/O Health; Member, IPR Measurement Commission
This blog is provided by the IPR Measurement Commission. November celebrates AMEC Measurement Month 2020 #AMECMM.

For all the obvious reasons, 2020 feels like ten years rolled into one, so 2010 can seem like a really long time ago. That was when, at the 2nd European Summit on Measurement in Barcelona, AMEC introduced the Barcelona Principles to address “the lack of clear standards to PR measurement results in the profession.” Updated repeatedly since, we are now at version 3.0, and there are continuously refined methodologies that are grounded in the principles, such as the Measurement Maturity Mapper and the Integrated Evaluation Framework. These are critical steps for the industry, and it can seem as if PR measurement and evaluation only started properly in 2010.

We know that is not the case – Isaac Newton’s quote about the shoulders of giants comes to mind – and for everyone curious about the evolution, but also the present and the future of the field, there is no more authoritative source, than Jim Macnamara’s 2018 monograph Evaluating Public Communication[1]. In this brief post, however, I want to look back a lot further than the 1980s, which Jim, Fraser Likely, and others see as the beginning of serious PR evaluation.

Read the rest of Thomas Stoeckle's blog to learn about the beginning of "serious PR evaluation."
Measurement Month: How Internal Communication Creates Social Capital
Julie O'Neil, Ph.D., APR, Professor and Associate Dean, Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University; Member, IPR Measurement Commission
This blog is provided by the IPR Measurement Commission. November celebrates AMEC Measurement Month 2020 #AMECMM.

Much of the focus in internal communication is on functional, pre- and post-test measurement and evaluation of campaign initiatives. While assessing outputs, outgrowths and outcomes of communication campaigns and initiatives is both important and fundamental to practice, practitioners might consider more holistic approaches in order to better understand how internal communication creates value for employees and organizations (Buhmann, Likely & Geddes, 2018).

Michele Ewing and I examined how communicators working for large global companies identified intangible contributions of their internal communication work. Using social capital theory (Porters, 1998) as a framework, we qualitatively explored how internal communication builds and maintains employee relationships and creates social capital for the organization, which can be accrued and later expended for organizational benefit (Kennan & Hazleton, 2006). Social capital refers to resources inherent within networks of relationships, which are facilitated by communication (Dodd, 2015).

Read the rest of Julie O'Neil's blog to learn how internal communication creates social capital.
Three Things PR Pros Should Know About Sentiment Analysis
Manuelita Maldonado, University of Southern California; Tech Public Relations Intern, GOLIN
Manuelita Maldonado was the 2020 winner of the Makovsky Best Master's Thesis of the Year Award. This blog post is based on her thesis research, "The Rise of Intelligent Machines."

Earlier predictions noted that by 2020, all our digital interactions would have generated 40 times more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe. As more clicks, shares, posts and comments hit the digital space, this staggering amount of data will continue growing exponentially, forcing businesses to look for novel ways to analyze the content of these new streams of information in order to obtain actionable insights. Artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies are playing an essential role in helping organizations process and interpret large volumes of data in short periods of time, allowing them to better understand their competitors, consumers, media, and other key stakeholders. 

The fields of marketing, advertising and public relations are usually more interested in analyzing unstructured data like social media posts, photos and videos, because it allows agencies to move beyond traditional metrics (such as AVE or number of impressions) and obtain valuable insights like market trends, customer preferences and feelings toward a brand. And it is only through artificial-intelligence-enabled technologies like natural language processing (NLP) that PR professionals can analyze large data sets to obtain results more efficiently and accurately.

Read the rest of Manuelita Maldonado's blog to learn about AI, NLP, and sentiment analysis in public relations.
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