I attended the CIPR Northern Conference in Manchester on Friday,  amid a backdrop of heavy security in the lead up to the Labour Party Conference.   The sight of armed police parading round the GMEX complex started my day off with thoughts of vigilance.

The broad theme of the conference was Reputation.

There were some excellent keynote speeches, including Katie Perrior of inHouse PR who spoke about her team’s work building Boris Johnson’s reputation into an election winning mayoral proposition. Paul Newman, communications director of the Liverpool Culture Company, spoke about the effect of the Capital of Culture Year on Liverpool’s reputation.

The conference was heavily attended by PR professionals. As one of the few evaluation specialists present, the conference did leave me wanting to know more about what practitioners in the North are doing to manage the reputations of the companies for which they work.

As the conference split out into breakout sessions throughout the day, I was not able to attend all of the master classes. But I did sense a need to place a greater emphasis on the role that media evaluation can have in understanding the link between media coverage (both in traditional media and  in  the blogosphere) and a company’s reputation.

One of the case studies cited volume of coverage, and overall tone. The ’evaluation’ was backed up with a dreaded ’financial equivalent’ to add weight to the boxfuls of press coverage achieved. But where  were  the case studies about key message penetration and reach to target audiences?  There were no examples of how monitoring and evaluation has helped with issues management. These are core parts of a media analysis programme that Metrica has been providing to its clients for over 15 years.

As a [relatively new to] Lancashire lass, and as a key member of Metrica’s team based outside London HQ, I’ll be talking to more companies based locally to work with them to develop meaningful measurement programmes, giving them actionable data to feed back into the PR planning cycle.

So let’s square the circle and return to the themes at the beginning of this post:

Vigilance / monitoring

Evaluation

The two need to be done in conjunction for a full measure of your company’s reputation.