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.

With the focus on social media, we all spend a great deal of time focused on how external stakeholders can take control of a company’s message, and impact their reputation.

Today, National Public Radio ran the first of a three part story (here) that has the potential to become a reputation issue for several airlines, as well as the FAA. The report is about issues arising from several airlines’ decisions send their airplane repairs abroad in order to cut costs. The key to the most compelling issues raised in the story? The involvement of a primary but often overlooked stakeholder group: employees.

A company’s reputation amongst its own employees is an area of reputation to which firms should pay explicit attention. A sense of shared community is inherent, but the effort to hide issues from this stakeholder group is the most difficult, while the opportunity for direct and immediate communication is strongest. In a reputation crisis, a positive perspective on the firm from an average employee will have stronger impact than a press briefing from a manager, while an otherwise strong external reputation can be eroded quickly by employees who hold the company’s practices in low esteem.

Back to today’s example: In the broadcast version of the story, the reporter indicates that he went to El Salvador to look into one of the companies performing the outsourced airline maintenance. He explains that he sought to speak with management of the firms, but they would not speak with him.

A business refusing to address press is usually not a smart option. In this case, it led the reporter to forget about management’s perspective and instead to track down some employees and ask them about the U.S. airlines they are working with. They were more than happy to oblige, and the result was not great for the firm. In today’s story they discussed having put a crucial part of a door in backwards so that it broke during flight, and tomorrow we are promised that mechanics at the firm will tell us about “troubling practices on the shop floor”.

It is not clear why the maintenance company’s executives would not talk to the reporter, after all, they are simply performing a legal business under FAA regulations, aren’t they? Well, whether or not they are covering up some bad behavior, their mistake was to assume that they could control the message about their company, and their mistake should be a lesson to all companies.

As a very smart client of ours likes to say, the key to a good reputation is to “behave well, and communicate what matters”. If you are a company that is not behaving well in the eyes of some stakeholder group, then your communications will ring false. If you are behaving well, and you communicate what matters to your stakeholders, you will have happy stakeholders, and no cause for concern.

Companies may erect policies to try and control the communications from their employee stakeholder group, but for most companies, this is neither iron clad, nor sustainable, especially if this group has something to say about the company’s behavior. Reputation management involving external stakeholders like customers, regulators and advocates cannot resort to rules and policies around what can and can’t be said, and no company should assume that reputation management for internal stakeholders be any exception. In this case, the airline maintenance company needs to jump on the clueplane, ASAP.

A recent post by David Rockland on the PRSA blog commented on the importance of measurement. I completely agree that measurement is critical to successful communications, and am always amazed at how often communicators seem to overlook this. How can you possibly understand if what you’re doing is working if you are not measuring it appropriately?

This is precisely the reason why measurement matters to communications. Communication is an incredibly broad space. It continually evolves as messages shift and change, new communication vehicles develop, and targets become more focused. Every campaign and outreach effort must be continually measured, adjusted and improved upon to ensure successful messaging across this broad field.

Many communicators spend a considerable amount of time planning their strategy. The best of these start with business goals, identify their specific targets, understand how messages must be adjusted for each target and goal, and then design their campaigns. Sadly, even the better communication strategists tend to lose focus once the campaign has launched, or focus on just elementary metrics.

This is a flawed approach. As David mentioned, if you are not measuring, the campaign doesn’t count. You have no way of knowing whether your outreach was successful.

True, more communicators are beginning to grasp the importance of measurement. Unfortunately, many are using only the most basic of metrics – volume, share of voice, or impressions. That may be a starting point, but it is not a stopping point. What good does 10,000 hits from your press release do, if you are not sure who saw them, what impression they made, or what their impact really was on your target audience or your corporate reputation? These metrics only provide the very first step in determining whether your communications campaign is working. They tell you that it might have reached people. The logical next steps are to confirm it reached people correctly – that your campaign really is working, that the people you wanted to reach are the people you did reach, that the message you wanted to convey was, in fact, the message you conveyed, and that the impact on your corporate reputation was exactly what you hoped it would be.

This is where we at evolve24 tend to start when working with communications teams. Our analytics and consulting are designed around accurate measurement, and incorporate everything from emotions generated through reputational impact. We recognize that truly quantifying communications return may require borrowing a few ideas from the marketing teams. Our goal, though, is to provide what too many communications teams lack: a quantifiable, measureable assessment of communications programs.