Measuring and Evaluating Media: Traditional and Social

Media remain essential to public sector communication. To track and improve performance, communication through and with media needs to be evaluated. However, today the media environment raises both challenges and opportunities for media evaluation. This is due to the increased number and types of ‘new media’ that are challenging press, radio and television (TV) and creating a modern mediascape characterized by disintermediation and fragmentation. Despite the recognized importance of media in public sector communication, the evaluation of both traditional and social media has relied in the past on a few primary quantitative metrics. However, digital media now enables the collection of a wide range of metrics, such as the number of views, downloads, clickthroughs, likes, follows and shares. But with the proliferation of many different metrics, identifying standards for media evaluation is ever more challenging. The purposes of this chapter are to provide a systematic overview of the extant metrics and measurement techniques for evaluating traditional and social media relations practices and to offer a view for the future. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we begin by briefly depict the nowadays media scenario to address the complexity of evaluation and measurement processes. Then, we describe media relations’ metrics. Next, we explore methods and metrics for evaluating and measuring publicity. Finally, we turn to a discussion on the impact of media relations and publicity on organizational performance.