The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Constructing the Influence Scorecard

An organization’s influence strategy describes how it expects to influence and be influenced in ways that are wholly necessary and sufficient for the successful execution of the overarching strategy. Its Influence Scorecard must therefore identify and measure the essential metrics associated with the way you’ve decided to go about influencing and being influenced.

Earlier in The Barcelona Principles section (pages 45–47) I alluded to the follow-up work underway to establish the ‘validated metrics’ to replace the discredited advertising value equivalence (AVE). The first draft of this work was presented at the AMEC PRSA PR Measurement Metrics Conference in London in November 2010.

The crux of the matter is that it makes no difference whether we’re talking about PR, marketing, customer service or grounds maintenance; what is a valid metric to you may be an invalid one to me. Or, more precisely, just as it is for wider business performance management, the validity of an influence performance metric is entirely a function of your influence strategy and operations. However, as you’ve reached this point in this book, you already know that.

Of course, just because two different organizations happen to have different influence strategies does not mean they might not share the same influence performance metrics, and that’s because it is the combination that’s unique to the organization, not necessarily each metric.

In fact, perhaps one of my tweet responses ...