III regional ads and marketing festival "Silver Mercury. North-West"

III biggest regional ads and marketing festival ‘Silver Mercury. North-West’ took place in Vvedensky hotel, Saint Petersburg, on 1st and 2nd March, 2017. The program of the event included best advertising projects contest, business conference, round tables and workshops with leading experts of the field.Cases were split in 28 categories of 6 fields: Branding, Event&Promo, PR, Media, Digital and Creative. The total number of works in contest of 2017 is 165 that is 1,5 bigger than in 2016.
4D Agency was the co-organiser of the festival in PR field. Festival promotion included the following
• Work with informational partners
• Announcement in mass media
• SMM – Facebook, Instagram account, advertising promotion

Public Relations category was included for the first time. Organisation of the PR category included:
Selection and invitation of jury
Description of PR categories with KPIs
Round table ‘Charity PR or PR for charity’ organization on 2nd of March
PR business conference organization on 2nd March
Overall results of PR business conference are below

Modern trends in measurement and evaluation of PR, Natalia Belkova, Business Communications Agency 4D, CEO

In the end of 2016 Business Communication Agency 4D entered the worldwide group of full service PR and Marketing Communications agencies GlobalCom PR Network that holds 70 offices in 60 different countries worldwide. We asked our colleagues what PR-trends of 2017 they say to be the most important and what KPIs they use. We will try to figure out differences between Russian and Western approaches

Trends of 2017

• Journalists are going to be more attentive to the information and facts they get. 2016 was very scandalous. The project of blood test analysis system became very famous in United States –it would lead to getting much more information comparing to the traditional method that used syringe. This project was highly promoted and journalists were careless to check the information so the project got hundreds of dollars of investments. And only after journalists of The Wall Street Journal conducted an independent research and found out that all the information that had been considered as fact was untrue. And in the end lots of honored press-men had to confirm that they hadn’t paid too much attention to check the facts.

• There are many famous web-sites that present themselves as news resources in Russia. In fact they don’t relate to Media but this fake news they publicize may harm the reputation of the company and PR-specialists have to solve all the incoming problems.

• One of our clients uses only 2 KPIs for PR evaluation. The first indicator is bad references, the second – article or interview of the head of the company in one of the most powerful business media. In Russia often the primary target is in the quantity of the publications but not in quality. But we shouldn’t forget that due to the growing share of online media we need to watch the negative and build a PR strategy to defend it as it may destroy the company’s reputation.

• Cisco Company in one of their latest report predicts that 75 % of the world’s mobile traffic will be represented by video content by 2020. This should be kept in mind while developing the strategy and planning the tools. If you can implement it, you are going to be among the leaders.

• One more trend in promotion campaigns of goods and services in B2B or B2C segments is Influencer Marketing. We get used to the fact that companies choose bloggers or celebrities that have lots of followers in social networks to promote their brand. But implementing this tool you have to be careful. For instance, last year when Maria Sharapova was accused of consuming doping, lots of big companies terminated with her. In the end the ones who did this lost as public totally supported Maria. Those who stayed with her got a very positive effect on their image. Brands are likely to search for true representatives and followers of the values of their target audience that will act the way they say but not just get more likes.

• Thought leadership Most people will say that it is a tired theme but nevertheless if your Head, owner or client has something helpful to say – useful information, researches or valuable experience – use it in your PR campaign in 2017. AC Nielsen – a global information, data and measurement company – represent the data that 92 % of people trust a personal recommendation even if they don’t know him in person. It is an additional point for creating an influencer marketing program.

Everything can be measured. Communication valuation principles

In 2010 AMEC, International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, created The Barcelona Principles that were reconsidered in 2015. These are some kind of precept for media-analysis. What are they about ?

Importance of Goal Setting and Measurement. We should understand why we do that. Clearly, we should measure both company results and its influence on business. It leads to the idea that we should consider and understand why we act this or that way, how it will influence the business, investments, stocks, followers, etc.

Use of Quantity and Quality Methods. Unfortunately, to justify the results we count the quantity of publications but actually we should look deeper – the temper of the publications, responses, learning of the colleagues’ and competitors’ experience, your position before and after the campaign.
Measurement the effect of the social media. Social media have already come into our lives so deep that we cannot avoid measuring their impact on an equal footing with Media. We should use different indicators – the number of page views, the temper, audience coverage, analysis of the target audience of the Media. And what the most important – these measures should be clear and easy-to-measure.
Despite the fact that everything can be measured, we should clear it out that there isn’t one common formula to evaluate the PR-effectiveness. Don’t look for the one size clothes – use integrated approach.
PESO Model helps to consider possible channels of communication and to define possible tools to measure KPIs. The author of this model divided PR-channels and tools into 4 directions:

• Paid channels (Paid). They mean articles that were paid. Their advantage is the possibility to place a certain trumpet-call. And this can be easily measured.

• Earned channels (Earned). They mean traditional press releases, getting the feedback, made presentations. And they also can be measured.

• Social networks (Shared). This means the content that your followers have shared in all known resources – Facebook, Vk, etc.

• Owned channels (Owned). These are the tools that are intensively used in B2B segment – professional blogs where you can tell about the company, services, the results of the researches, scores. Also here we can speak about your own channels in the social networks - youtube webinars, expert reviews, etc. that can become good resources for publicity.

To conclude this report I’d like to highlight that for these schemes and methods to work and targets to achieve it’s important to analyze the information field before planning any campaign. Second tip – you have to set goals. You need to work hard on the content, check the facts, make researches. At the start you must have a well-defined timed content-plan with key messages, ready articles, releases, publications, where you clear out what messages will be sent via concrete channels (media, journalists, bloggers), who is going to be the ambassador. Moreover you should understand your aim and final result. And after the campaign you should measure the result using only those methods that fit the channels chosen.