The Importance of Metrics

So, who does your clipping these days? All the SID types remember clipping -- cutting out those actual literal articles and filing them away. In the digital shift, clippings start to have less and less meaning to the majority in our field.

That's all the more reason to clip more.

Tracking and measuring the success of placement of messages -- oh, sorry, press releases -- is crucial to the ability of the office to do two things. First and regrettably foremost in these Excel-spread sheet driven times, it proves the worth of the enterprise. X-number of inches can be translated into monetary value.

What should be more important is gauging the effectiveness of the operation, and it is more important the further down the Long Tail of sports publicity we move. Anyone can generate voluminous copy for a major sport at a major college. Except where pro sport franchises are sucking the oxygen out of the mass media, how many inches D-I football gets isn't the issue. How many inches is the soccer team pulling at the same time; the D-III football team, etc.

Certainly there are other metrics -- click through on websites, as a prime example -- but for the publicity office this remains an important one. If the inches are declining, what are the factors? Smaller news hole? Sport attendance also dropping, indicating a decline in fan base? Here is where the SID can shine, because if they can buck those trends, they have proof of their effectiveness.