What do People Think of You, and how do you Measure it?

An important aspect of running a successful advertising campaign is to first test the waters as to what you should be putting out about yourself. You don’t want to run a campaign meant to call people to action about an issue that your company itself is trying to run damage control on. It would be like BP releasing an ad about their safety track record right in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Tailoring your ads based on public opinion is essentially square one of any successful ad campaign because then you can compensate for any negative media presence. Katie Paine covers two very important aspects that any company trying to run a campaign should take into consideration. That being that a company trying to get their name out there should start with their reputation with the opinions of their community as well as their employees.

The first aspect that Paine outlines is the analysis of the community that surrounds your company. Home is where the heart is, and if the people in your hometown hate you then it will be harder and harder for you to build a positive image for yourself. Several of the steps associated with evaluating this particular metric are incredibly similar to the other “seven step” programs that she drafted for other measurement outreaches. However, one step that stands out because it is specifically tailored for this metric. Paine states that an important aspect of determining public opinion is to determining “Who or What Are Your Benchmarks?”. The main point that Paine emphasizes is that measurement is a “comparison tool”. The best way to tell how well you’re doing is to compare your data with a different set. Paine recommends that you use the data from another town in which your company is present, or “compare yourself to peer organizations of similar size and reputation within the same community”. This sounds like a good method in theory, but I personally find it hard to believe that a competitor is going to provide their sampling data for comparison with another company. And even if they do provide the data, who is to say that they haven’t skewed it before it was sent? In my opinion it sounds like you are putting a lot of trust in a competitor assuming that you are even capable of finding one that is in the same town as you. It would be more trustworthy and easy to use data from your own company at another branch. Comparing town to town could serve as a way to monitor and test different techniques of interacting with the community. This way you serve as your own benchmark, and none of your information is being spread around to the competition. If you are capable of monitoring your community presence in this way, I think it would be the smartest move from a business standpoint. If you’re reverse engineering other business’ profiles for your own benefit, who’s to say that your competition isn’t doing the same thing with your profiles and techniques. I would narrow down Paine’s advice to keeping things as in house as possible to avoid your marketing secrets from getting out.