A few years back I was an advocate of a PR/measurement combine called Measurement Camp. This was in no way connected with Measure Camp. It proved a useful talking shop for PR to understand more about social media metrics.
Maybe it was too early, but it seemed to miss out on the business end of analytics, dealing with techniques as they were a decade or so ago. Useful, but flip forward a couple of short years and Measure Camp came into being, not by PR people as before, but by the people tasked to quantify online experience, aka ‘the geeks’.
The latest Measure Camp took place in London last Saturday. It applies the unconference format with the 260 participants suggesting topics to be dealt with over the following hours in a series of presentation rooms.
Topics were diverse, addressing advanced pointers on using Google Analytics, j script and R; thru to philosophical discussions on what they would do differently if they could turn back time, or how you break downs the barriers to analytics (thanks to Measure Camp founder Peter O’Neill).
There seemed to be only a single presentation related to PR analytics. It was a really interesting discussion by Ed Hammerton comparing how they used to measure, with how they do it now. What made it better was it was all about the regulation-infested health sector and featured how they report on their PR activity.
Just as PR missed out on search engine optimisation (ref. Stephen Waddington at a recent Future PR event), there seems to be every likelihood that serious analytics is now slipping away from PR.
Particularly when considering the recent CIPR state of the industry findings that senior PR people are failing to recognise the importance of online media and measurement.
I don’t want to paint too depressing a picture for PR. But if they don’t want to be marginalised by advertising/marketing analysts they need to be prepared to give up the occasional Saturday.
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