So you are measuring the impact of your communications campaigns, and the next logical thing to do is sit down and use the results to design your campaigns’ next steps. But wait, you say, as you take your first look at the results. Can this be true?

Your flagship campaign has not performed for your brand as you would have hoped; consumer sentiment wasn’t as positive as expected, and the reputational impact to your brand was flat. In fact, programs that required less time and money performed better than your primary campaign.

Digging deeper into the results, you find that your program received the amount of coverage expected, but the public didn’t receive or respond well to the intended message. Negative coverage consisted of bloggers lambasting your brand and your product. What had been designed as an offering to make lives easier, and promoted as such, was interpreted by this audience as “impractical” and “insincere”. As you look even deeper into the negative content, you find that people are saying things about the offering that simply aren’t true!

This happens frequently in the exchange of information between companies and the media, both social and traditional. The reality is that media messages may be translated, truncated, or interpreted in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily expect. Sometimes the truth gets so twisted that the responses to our initial communications are off-base and downright false.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter if the claims made against your offering are true or not, and a simple presentation of more facts to correct misunderstandings is not always enough. Why? Because perception is reality. Once an emotionally-charged perception is formed, whether it is through a news article, a blog comment, word-of-mouth, or direct experience, that is how your potential customers will feel about your offering, your brand, and your company until they are helped not just to think differently, but to feel differently. And emotionally-charged perceptions are based on more than your offerings; they are usually based on your offering as filtered through another concern, such as your bonuses compared to their paychecks (think banks), your production methods (think Kathy Lee), your impact on the environment, and a host of other issues.

The good news is that as communications professionals you have the capability to measure and investigate not just the volume of what you said to your audience, but the details of how your audience responded. Now you’re equipped with quantitative results that go beyond ad value equivalency and share of voice. They include more complex metrics that allow you to better understand your target audiences – what are their underlying concerns? How can your media messages help allay those concerns? These metrics can be used to help design your program as well as measure its success after the launch. Armed with quantitative results, you can now make the necessary adjustments to return your potential customers’ perceptions back to center.