The great and the good of the PR measurement industry gathered last night for the annual AMEC Awards, and it was a "scorcher" of an evening, as a tabloid-inspired Nick Grant put it. With winners from as far afield as Australia, Germany, Dubai and right here at Metrica towers, our industry seems in rude health. 

Trevor Morris, Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the University of Westminster and chair of AMEC's judging panel, noted the high quality of entries put before the judging panel. His opening remarks served as a great reminder of the attributes that make good PR measurement programmes great, and in turn provide maximum value to the clients we work with:

- Wrap every aspect of your measurement around your client's objectives. And don't stop at PR objectives either- clients need our help to show the contribution PR has made to the wider organisation, as well as keeping its own house in order. The language in which they communicate performance is also key.

- Think about what isn't published, as well as what is. In tricky times our clients spend a lot of time minimising the impact of negative coverage and / or killing the story before it draws breath. Consider negative message tracking (with upside down "maximum of" KPI's) and look for ways to correlate media relations activity with journalist output.

- Focus on the Outcome. Too many organisations stop their measurement at the output stage, when that's only half the story. Our clients conduct newshook research all the time - just one additional question could help them to demonstrate a change in behaviour/ attitude as a result of their PR activity. Find out how data is correlated on your client's organisational performance and aim to feed measurement data into it. 

 The number of companies winning awards last night (I lost count at ten - and I don't mean glasses of wine!) shows that we're getting the message as an industry, and our clients are getting greater insight from our measurement as a result.

One final thought from last night  - Geordie Greig, editor of the London Evening Standard, spoke of the reasons behind the decision to adopt a free distribution model, and insisted that, had the paper not gone free, it would not have been in circulation today. Greig also mentioned that certain UK national papers are losing in excess of £100,000 a day. With closure the only other apparent outcome, I'm fascinated by the concept that newspapers may have to become free outlets to survive, just as news outlets and the NLA begin to charge people for accessing online content.

The death of the newspaper has been announced time and time again, but perhaps we are approaching the point where the only "scorcher" left is print itself going up in flames.

You may or may not have heard of crowdfunding - a means of raising money for charities, the arts and other 'heart on sleeve' causes that rely on public support to do what they do. Crowdfunding works by seeking relatively small donations from a large number of people, in exchange for a stake in the proceeds and/ or final output of the project they are investing in.

It's a great concept - it shows the ability of social networking tools and community websites to bring together people from all corners of the world, and all manner of different backgrounds, behind a common and worthy cause. 

As a music fan, I love the way I can support up and coming acts and help them achieve their rock n' roll (or hip hop, folk, hair metal) dreams through sites like Sellaband. The band gets a devoted and (literally) bought-in following, they get the funding they need to work towards recording and producing an album, and the "believers" get new music and a warm, fuzzy feeling when their act of choice makes the big time. Perhaps it also eases the collective guilt about illegal free downloading, which makes it harder for new bands to get a record deal in the first place!

So far, so wholesome. Now the success of crowdfunding as a legitimate and (reasonably) successful fundraising tool has drawn attention from more traditional capitalist ventures. Perhaps crowdfunding's move into the mainstream was best demonstrated by this Financial Times article  in which already-established British tech company Trampoline Systems announced their intent to raise £1m through crowdfunding to finance growth.

I can see the logic - times are hard, traditional sources of investment are hard to come by and only resourceful companies will make it through this recession. But the news leaves me at a fork in the road. Part of me wants to applaud Trampoline for being enlightened enough to see the potential of social networking as a valid and valuable business tool. As PR professionals, we spend a lot of our time encouraging organisations to treat social communication with the seriousness it deserves and factor it into their strategic planning. 

I guess I should also be supportive of this new "hard-edged" version of crowdfunding, in the interests of preserving the freedom of the internet - after all, the web was not built on restricting access to anything (legal), and social communities work better when they are not gated communities.

Despite all this, I can't bring myself to like the idea. Raising money to fund the pursuit of money seems against the spirit of it all. To look at it from a financial point of view, it raises concerns about conflicts of interests between shareholders. And with regulators tightening their controls over mainstream investment and lending practices, is there a risk that crowdfunding will become a haven for less scrupulous investors? I think the likelihood of that is as low as the likely return on investment, but the threat is there.

It all seems far removed from putting money behind the next hopeful and seeing if my personal support makes a visible difference. But then Sellaband itself has "strategic partnerships" with several corporate household names, and the believers get a cut of any profits their chosen band makes. So whilst the type of organisation that turns to crowdfunding is starting to change, are the motives behind it so very different?

Credit crunch. There, I've said it. I'll try and make it through the rest of this post without using the phrase again.

With everything that's going on in the financial sector at the moment we've seen a marked increase in the amount of red across our reports. Bailouts, bank runs and buyouts aren't topics that inspire confidence in most people, and to judge from recent headlines in Time and the International Herald Tribune, even "respectable" journalists are finding it hard not to get caught up in the mood of panic.

Things are obviously pretty bad at the moment, and I for one am fascinated - in a 'look-at-the-car-crash' kind of way - by daily developments on this subject. But given that confidence is at the very core of the crisis, are the shock headlines and prophecies of doom and gloom really fair on the companies concerned? And do we as measurement experts have a role to play in cutting through the hysteria and presenting a more balanced view of the organisations we work for?

The answer to both questions is yes, although forgive me for perching (gently!) on the fence on the first one. Doom and gloom headlines when banks fail and have to be rescued are fair enough on balance. Less fair is when market speculation, perpetuated by the press, destroys confidence in an organisation and leads to its downfall. Leading UK bank HBoS - a Metrica client- wasn't alone in having problems with its exposure to bad debts, but would it have declined so quickly had confidence in the bank not already been rocked in March 08 by false rumours perpetuated by short-sellers in the market, and reported widely in the press? Even in the midst of this story, as our data shows below, HBoS was securing more neutral or positive coverage (within the green 'favourable' line) than negative, and this wasn't the perception that you got from reading the headlines. 

Which leads us neatly onto the second answer. Yes, in times like these our objective approach to the media, and ability to identify to our clients what is really being said about them, is more important than ever. Too often, sensational headlines distract attention from the more balanced view of the facts immediately underneath- the articles linked above are all examples of that to a greater or lesser extent.

Measurement experts must work with PR experts to help them carve through the bad press, demonstrate where they have been successful, and make recommendations on how that success can be perpetuated. It may seem obvious to us, analysing the coverage on the outside of the storm, but it can be difficult for our clients to get that sense of perspective when they're right in the middle of it. The current economic situation is a great opportunity for the whole evaluation industry to show how valuable it can be in a crisis, which in turn could help our clients to secure their PR budgets and continue their good work.

I'm not promising that we can solve the credit crunch (so close to not mentioning it again! sooo close!) but the work we do can really help our clients find their way through tough times, and that can only improve our fortunes and strengthen our reputation.

We're right in the middle of financial results season, the time where the number crunchers of the UK banking industry come out of their counting houses and tell the stock market how much money they've made.

In recent years, these articles have followed a familiar pattern: Bank X announces profits of a figure that only quantum mathematicians understand, city analysts rejoice as profits beat expectations, everyone goes home happy.

So far, so 2006.  But in the wake of the US subprime crisis, the ongoing drought in interbank lending and the realities of an economic slowdown, results this week look very different. So far HBoS and Lloyds TSB have announced a 70% fall in profits, HSBC has seen a 28% drop and Alliance & Leicester swallowed a massive 99% fall to pave the way for its acquisition by Santander. Northern Rock eschewed profits entirely and posted a £585m loss. The banks are clearly jumpy, and the media (to judge by recent headlines) has followed suit. So where does this leave the ordinary punter?

Metrica's ConsumerPulse data provides some interesting insight on public confidence in their finances.

Whilst the banks are having a tough time of it, there are some winners in the current financial climate. An excellent article on bbc.co.uk today shows that "value providers" like Aldi and Lidl are enjoying increased sales as people tighten their belts. 

Metrica's ConsumerPulse survey runs every six months and, with a new version about to launch (and rebranded UKPulse), it will be interesting to see if consumer attitudes change as the economic slowdown continues.  Watch this space!

So Google has a new competitor, and judging by the snails-pace load times on release day Cuil (pronounced "cool", although what the French make of the name I can only imagine!) proved popular. A quick search for Metrica proved its accuracy for text at least, a search for media analysis and media evaluation showed it finds the right companies!  The site previews were a little baffling however (take the link to our "About us" page -  I can't remember ever seeing this guy roaming around Metrica Towers!)

On the whole, the consensus in the office is that Cuil is, well, cool. The layout is neat and speaks the language of people like me who are surrounded by technology but have only really got into it since they dumbed it down a bit. We've established that the search engine works. But here's the thing - why stop there?

Cuil's creators are obviously smart people with their fingers on the pulse of trends in web usage. So with analysis of web content and web usage gaining importance by the second, why doesn't Cuil have any social media search functions or access to web analytics tools as part of the service? I wouldn't have expected blog tracking of the sophistication of Buzz Logic or Radian 6 (or Metrica, of course!) but I find it baffling that Cuil haven't at least paid lip service to the idea. They could be in development of course, but if I was up against Google, with it's vast array of additional products and services (let's not forget Google news for mainstream web content) I'd have been tempted to finish developing my service before I launched it.

In a straight "search engine to search engine" fight, no one really expects Cuil to beat Google. And with people pleading for more control of the information on the web, I couldn't help but feel that, pretty as it is, Cuil's offering is a bit of a step backwards.

The Friday before a Bank Holiday is often quiet, and today is no exception. So I’ve been filling my time by surfing the web for the latest evaluation news in the financial sector.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the top Google link for “financial media evaluation” (inspired search, I’m sure you’d agree) was an article from 2000 titled “The heresy of MEDIA MEASUREMENT”! Under the rather alarming headline, Wilma K. Mathews of Communication World explained that “Counting clips and calculating (advertising value) equivalences measure your activity, your output. They have no correlation to the changed or desired behavior of the audiences you attempted to reach.” Heady stuff for a pre-dotcom crash PR audience to take in.

Back in the present day, I leaned back on my hoverboard  and reflected on how successfully the output vs. outcome message has spread within financial PR. Or has it? PR managers in the financial services sector now understand evaluation well enough to benchmark their PR activity against all manner of sophisticated metrics. Meanwhile, access to on-demand reporting tools such as our very own MyMetrica gives them the means to disseminate the results across their organization in a variety of formats.

Great news, but what hasn’t happened yet is a shift in the mindset of non-PR stakeholders, especially at board level. All too often financial PR professionals find their efforts to provide actionable evaluation data frustrated by demands for something that puts a £ (or $) sign in front of their results. Senior financial executives work with money, after all, and it can be hard to make them value anything else.

So what’s a PR to do? As we see from Mathews’ article, AVE’s were past their sell-by date before the Enron scandal broke. If your board insists on hard currency as a PR metric, you could try cost per thousand people reached either in the population as a whole or, even better, within your target audience. Present the information in a scorecard alongside some more forward-thinking metrics from your evaluation portal and they might just start to see things a different way.