However, is this really happening with hospitals & healthcare systems when it comes to public relations measurement? After a decade of working with hospitals across the country on their public relations measurement, here’s our guide to the most utilized public relations measurement practices from Healthcare Intellavance:

Trend #1: Social media monitoring and measurement are becoming increasingly more important.

Of course it is… and that is why it is critical than you pick a provider that can monitor all social media – including Twitter, non-protected areas of Facebook, blog, forums, websites. Some hospitals are now using their PR monitoring services to reply back to Tweets or respond to postings that might or might not impact their reputation, or even track posts that employees are making about the hospital itself. That being said, we find that although most hospital and healthcare public relations monitor social media and websites, and even measure the web PR activity, most are more comfortable with traditional media and are just beginning to tap the full potential of social media.

Trend #2: Ad value equivalencies are becoming increasingly less important.

Well… that’s the buzz…. Supposedly measuring your advertising value equivalency (AVE) is a thing of the past… you hear it in seminars, when you talk to your colleagues. In reality, AVE’s are still a very common form of measurement amongst hospitals and healthcare systems. In fact, many of our hospital clients, tie their quarterly PR scorecard measures of success to the key PR measures we provide for them – hits, impressions and AVE’s – for their hospital and (if they want) their key competitors. Don’t worry, if your hospital doesn’t believe in AVE’s, we even modified our All-in-1 portal & PR analytics to support non-AVE believers! But, don’t believe the rumors, AVE’s are still alive and kicking!

Trend #3: Multipliers are going away.

Yes… its’ true… whereas, in the past, most hospitals and healthcare systems would use the standard multiplier of “3”, now very few do use a multiplier for all media being monitored. There are some unique approaches to multipliers – multipliers for just TV –with the rationale being that TV stories count more because they are harder to get, or multipliers for only the major dailies but not the weeklies or local papers as they are harder placements to get for smaller hospitals. So, when choosing your public relations measurement service, it is essential that they have a customizable system to support your unique approach to multipliers and monitor all media even deep print – like we do! As there are a lot of different approaches to multipliers and how they should be applied to different media!

I hope this helped. What trends are you seeing in public relations measurement?

To request a complimentary sample report that details localized Public Relations coverage, CLICK HERE.

You can call me directly at 866.508.9508 or email at Cheryl@StrategicIV.com.