Agile PR: The Bearer of Reality

Earlier in my career, I worked with startups dedicated to software quality including Coverity and Agitar. These companies promoted more than their products, they promoted agile software development methodologies.

But it wasn’t until today when listening to Perficient's Kevin Sheen, Managing Director of Global Offshore Services, that I realized how it feels PR has become much more "agile". Especially as PR evolves into social media. 

For those who don’t know, agile software development is a methodology for developing software  code that involves frequent iterations, teamwork, collaboration and transparency. 

Keen said 75% of CIOs want some way to measure their software development performance, but only 33% do it. Among the reasons for not measuring performance: lack of discipline; lack of time/money and the tongue and cheek “we don’t want to be the bearer of reality.”

I suspect a similar disparity exists with PR pros. We all want to develop good metrics, but not everyone takes the time to do it or be thoughtful about what the metrics are.

But what struck me about the chat today is how recent PR launches I’ve done feel quite agile – both in their methodologies and their metrics of success.

Keen listed a few agile methodologies and metrics for success. I’ve taken his categories and added how my own experiences with recent launches apply.

Agile PR Methodologies:

• High degree of transparency – The social media elements around a launch today take a lot of time; especially if part of your goal is to monitor and engage target communities online in the places they frequent whether that be blogs, LinkedIn, Google Groups or Twitter. If you decide to outsource a lot of this monitoring/response work to an agency, it might require frequent (daily) updates with clients (unless you trust them implicitly to understand your positioning and online voice).
  
•  Iterative methodologies – Just as with agile development, the moving parts around PR launches today are much more complicated. You now have to monitor and promote your messages through various channels. Something said on Twitter can change your timeline; your targets or how you approach the launch. You have everything planned out at the beginning, but each day is filled with mini plans. Iterative plans can include specific Tweets, comments to blogs, pitches, content creation (videos, screencasts, press releases, blogs, etc) that can change on the fly.
• Tracking Changes – Keen calls his overseas project teams nightly and looks at a dashboard monitoring their process. PR doesn’t have slick tools like agile software to track their progress daily by a variety of metrics, but even if the process is manual, you need to be able roll up all the information each day into something understandable and actionable for client. For us, it was daily detailed agendas and a weekly PPT dashboard aimed to help other executives at the startup, not involved in the day to day, quickly understand the status of the launch. Anybody who has worked with me knows I hate busy work, but in this environment, clear communication about the ever changing landscape was a key value that we brought the client.

 

Agile PR Dimensions of Success:

• Quality – This is the big one and where most good PR agencies are putting a lot of time. How many visits did your launch drive to your clients web site according to Google Analytics? How many of those converted to sales? How many people watched the video? How viral was your messaging on Twitter? How many people downloaded the product?
• Predictability – In the software development world, predictability is “how close cost estimates come to actuals.” Part of me think this doesn’t apply to PR agencies who work on retainers – the amount of work involved with integrated PR/social media campaigns right now means they are probably doing a lot more work than you are paying for. The model is turned around – no matter how hard your agency works you have to have metrics to evaluate if the results are worth it in the end.

Dangers of Staff Churn

Offshore outsourcing has another similarity to PR agencies – the churn of the teams doing the work. Just as PR agencies can churn 50% of the staff over a year’s time – so do the offshore development teams. One US company got so frustrated by the churn (and the ongoing loss of familiarity to their project) that they literally asked for pictures of each member of the development team.

It's a little simplistic to drill down too far in the new parallels between PR and agile software development - but certainly the parallels exist.