Media survey
Drops on Monday. Be sure to check it out.
Drops on Monday. Be sure to check it out.
Media reporter Frank Washkuch had the chance to go to Washington, DC area recently to visit with the staff at The Politico, the newspaper and Web site started by Washington Post veterans. The outlet is the subject of today’s feature, this year’s media special, and is really an interesting read. Please take a look and share your thoughts with us.
I think our guest columns, editorials, and PRWeek columns have been featuring some great fodder for debate.
Here are some:
Discuss.
We’re going to be calling for submissions soon for the 40 under 40 feature, which runs in December. This will no doubt please Erica Iacono, who has been inundated with pre-submission solicitations.
As you might suspect, we have a number of Op-Ed submissions every week. While we try to sort through them and publish in a timely basis, sometimes it takes a while for them to run.
We always accept Op-Eds that deal with an important communications message, but here’s a hint for quicker placement: try to tailor your Op-Ed to a specific feature or issue. The best way to figure this out is to look at our editorial calendar here. I would suggest pitching an Op-Ed up to three weeks in advance (making note of what issue you’re targeting) and submit it 10 days before the publication date.
As we pointed out last week, PRWeek.com has relaunched. We will be using this space to keep you up-to-date on enhancements and new features. Please make it a two-way conversation in the comments.
Has new media found its way to the new business pitch yet? Readers want to know. I’m not talking about new media strategies, but rather in the actual presentation to prospects, or in the methodologies for gaining intelligence on a prospect’s business challenges.
Please post comments if you are seeing more of this happening, either in presentations your are seeing from agencies, or in what your agency is preparing for clients. No need to mention specific company names.
On a related note, our upcoming Career Guide includes a roundtable discussion with top HR people, and one corporate executive, on the challenges of recruiting mid-level staff. Social media is becoming a significant recruiting tool for companies. Not a big surprise, but in the ongoing battle for top talent, it will be interesting to see how differentiating a social media strategy can be.
We do not have a print issue, but we will be publishing news, features, etc. on the Web. Continue to both pitch and visit the site.
Often times, we plan our editorials in the beginning of the week before the issue comes out, based on the important news out there. If there’s a PR hook (pet food crisis, automotive sales figures, Delta emerging from bankruptcy), we’ll pursue it.
However, we want to get back to editorials on more substantive PR issues out there: things like measurement, procurement, marketing issues, etc. We’d love suggestions re: what you want to read, either by e-mail or in the comments below.
This was cross-posted in the comments section at Steve Cody’s blog RepMan.
Steve - thanks for your comments. I thought some background might be useful. As you know, we launched this survey three years ago, but today’s research bears only some resemblance to its first iteration. Over the years, we have sought the input of agency, in-house, and academic leaders.
In the beginning, we hoped to rank all agencies by reputation among their clients. So we conducted a survey asking clients which firms they worked for and how they rated their performance on a number of attributes. We did not have a set number of agencies - we just invited clients to rate any agency they worked for.
The problem that we ran into was in the sample sizes. The largest agencies had adequate (if not entirely convincing) sample sizes, while the smaller firms had samples so small they were basically meaningless.
We also had no idea how fragmented the market was until then. That first year some 600 clients rated more than 400 agencies. This was an interesting industry snapshot, but got us no closer to really understanding trends in client preference and needs. Agencies had no real substantive data that could be used to any meaningful degree.
Complicating our process was our firm belief - then and now - that in order to have a credible survey, we could not use client lists supplied by agencies, as other surveys have done. That was the case then and that is still the case now.
Last year we narrowed our research pool to agencies that we believed could achieve adequate sample sizes. But we still needed to crack the model, because the numbers were still inconsistent from firm to firm, especially among current and past clients.
During last year’s survey process, Millward Brown, our research partner, identified a database called the ERI panel that we used this year in fielding the survey (and used partially last year). This helped us meet our goals of surveying 50 current and 50 past clients for all 14 agencies that participated. These agencies all purchased data packets with their full results.
Our success in reaching these sample sizes - which is truly a breakthrough for this survey - now gives us hope that we might be able to expand it next year and ongoing. But at the end of the day, we have to have an adequate sample size for each firm for it to be meaningful. By virtue of their size, large firms are at an advantage in this.
We are, however, not resting there and continue to work with Millward Brown in the hopes of expanding the survey, provided we can reach our sample goals for each participating firm. As we start work on this in the fall, I will give you an update on how that exploration is going.
Thanks again for the feedback. I’m happy to discuss further when I’m back next week.
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