Can You Measure Love?
I spent this past weekend at a community Expo featuring local businesses and restaurants in Grays Harbor County. It was an impressive event, particularly for such a rural community as this. Thousands of visitors roamed two floors of the newly built Aberdeen High School to learn more about local business in the community and, lets be honest, pick up some free swag.
I manned the Ocean Gold Seafoods booth with two colleagues. It was the first year that the seafood processing company had a booth at the event. Now, to put this in perspective, Ocean Gold is one of the largest employers in the county with 600 workers during the season. Westport is the fifth largest port for landed catch in the nation and we represent the largest processor of pacific whiting on the US west coast.
At least half of the people we met had never heard of us.
Try to imagine the second largest employer in, say, King County going largely unheard of.
But building a strong good first impression is always easier than trying to rectify a soiled one. And we have a great story to tell. Not only are we economically an important engine, we are also committed to sustainability. We exercise full-utilization of the resources that come in because we operate a fishmeal plant. We also employ eco-friendly waste water treatment at all of our facilities. And our whiting fish is MSC certified. On top of that, we give back to the community regularly. In a town of 2,000 with one traffic light, fishing is a generational and cultural issue that we work hard to preserve.
All of this has got me thinking about the value of PR and community relations all over again. It’s an ongoing issue within the MarComm industry and one that I believe has never really been answered effectively. There’s always some bean-counter somewhere who wants to put a number on it. And we can do that with media impressions, tradeshows, memberships, etc. But more often than not, PR is tied in with so many other marketing elements, it’s hard to pull it out and give it a value.
Intuitively, we know it’s important. It’s important because if you have a solid reputation, you are more trusted. This can buy you invaluable capital in times of crisis. It’s also helpful with public affairs, when a business seeks to get involved with political issues that effect its bottom line. Your reputation influences how people feel about you and the majority of our buying decisions are emotionally-based. Besides, being liked is always better than being disliked.
Ultimately, it’s something that must be measured over longer periods of time. You need to be able to trace perception and that takes time to build and longer still to quantify. There are benchmarks that can be put in place along the way (web visits, facebook fans, positive media stories, etc.) but the overall success of a strong communications strategy requires patience. Too often I fear businesses these days are eager for the quick-fix solution. Something that can be tied to google analytics.
I still think there’s more inherent value in walking into a room (virtual or actual) and having everyone in it know you and welcome you. You might not be able to make a pie chart out of that but there is no doubt that having strong allies in the right places brings down the cost of doing business and increases opportunities to grow business. And I don’t think anyone needs a chart to tell them that.
