Institute for Public Relations

This study examines the relationship between the tone and visibility of media coverage about a CEO and an organization’s overall media tone and visibility. This paper also examines how the topic of media coverage (strategy/vision, product, CSR, positioning, financial performance) impacts the relationship between CEO media tone and organization media tone. A content analysis was conducted of media coverage for 36 Fortune 100 companies and their CEOs within 53 opinion-leading U.S. media outlets between January 2010 and June 2012. The findings show a positive relationship between CEO visibility and organization visibility, as well as CEO media tone and organization media tone. ...

June 2012 – More and more organizations need to measure their media coverage globally, but how can they do this cost effectively? This paper takes a very granular approach to helping the reader define business goals and objectives; determine suitable measures; analyze media content needs; evaluate dashboard systems; determine language and analysis processes; develop measurement scorecards; select provider services; sell the solutions internally; and, evaluate their success. Clear pros and cons to every option are provided, enabling the reader to balance the three competing essentials: quality, speed and cost.

June 2012 – Organizations engage in traditional media relations for many reasons and their objectives for analyzing the media coverage may be similarly varied. Media coverage can serve as a proxy for public perception and is relatively inexpensive and accessible. Public relations professionals apply media analysis to help demonstrate the value of PR, provide insights to make better decisions, improve performance, understand issues and anticipate change. The IPR Measurement Commission proposes the following standards for consideration. The overall recommendation seeks to ensure that measures used in analysis are well-formulated and implemented by (i) gaining agreement from the start among all relevant ...

April 2007 – Building upon a foundation established in “Exploring the Link between Volume of Media Coverage and Business Outcomes,” this paper looks at the effect of competitive share of media coverage volume on business results. Through four case studies on a non-profit hospital, a pharmaceutical brand, a B2B service and a package goods manufacturer, the authors make the case for using competitive media analysis to see stronger correlations to results.

2007 – Researchers found public relations placements and advertising to be equally effective in generating consumer interest in a newly launched product. No statistically significant difference between ad and editorial in an experiment focused on key measures of credibility, knowledge, interest and purchase intent. Although the respondents said that they got more information from the news article (despite identical information in the ad), that did not increase the believability of the message. Nor were there significant differences between ad and editorial regarding purchase intent, although those reading the news story showed less ...

2006 – This paper suggests a strong relationship between coverage volume and business outcomes, with three case studies looking at volume alone, tonality-refined volume, and message-refined volume.

May 2006 – This paper discusses several different approaches to deriving a Return-on-Investment (ROI) for the support provided by media relations publicity efforts within a marketing campaign. The primary questions discussed in the paper are whether it is possible to show that media publicity helped generate sales or other business outcomes, and can a financial return be attributed to the publicity? In the more than three years since the Dictionary of Public Relations Measurement and Research was first released, it has become one of the most popular papers the Institute for Public Relations has ...

2005 – The premise of the authors is that the media content analysis methods commonly in use fail to address the fundamental information needs of public relations professionals. Currently public relations professionals rely on eight basic methods of content analysis. This paper reviews each of these methods and points out the fundamental flaws in each of these approaches.

This paper examines, over a five-year period, the evolution of a journalists’ perception of the media relations efforts of Southwest Airlines. Quantitative measurement and analysis is coupled with an in-depth qualitative investigation to understand the media’s perceptions of Southwest’s public relations effectiveness, media relations value, use of relationship maintenance strategies, perceptions of communication channels and perceptions of dialogic communication-specifically in regards to utility of information, accessibility and responsiveness.

Using data from a nationwide survey of newspaper health journalists (n=308), this study examines the influence of intrinsic and external news factors on journalists’ attitudes toward stories provided by public relations agencies. These factors consist of three types: 1.) individual-level factors; 2.) media-routine factors; and 3.) organizational-level factors.