In Dubai last week I met a data scientist. There is nothing remarkable about that fact, however this data scientist works for a PR firm.
PR is one of those industries that varies wildly and is struggling with the disruption to media by digital technology.
While some cling to the intangible value of print column inches, others have abandoned the traditional definition of influence in favour of fleeting ‘likes’.
The PR firms that will win, are the ones that accept responsibility for their performance and embrace data. Being transparent about real, measurable results shouldn’t scare a decent PR agency. On the other hand, a firm that is not willing to be held to account for KPIs may be admitting that they aren’t delivering and are not worth the money you are paying them.
But there is a challenge. Even if a PR agency decides that they can leverage the insights and efficiencies delivered by a Data Scientist – they might need to dig deep to bring one onto the team.
There is a worldwide shortage of these people. The very good ones can name their price if they want to work in the world of hedge funds or Big Data related fields. A good data scientist can be worth millions of dollars to an Ecommerce business.
For example, what if you had the resources to look into search results on your website that returned 0 results? In other words, you managed to get someone to your website – a potential lead – and they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
If this visitor could be attributed to PR actvity, this metric would indicate that the activity may be reaching the wrong audience. Or it may show that you need to look at your product offering. Or it may mean that your PR and content team aren’t in sync and there are no available case studies or pages on the website relting to the news that was just announced.
Any and all of these cases present opportunties.
The takeaway from this is that every business needs to be thinking about what data it has and how it is using data to be competitive in disrupted markets. Invest in solutions, free or paid that deliver insights that can be acted upon – or try to find a data scientist to start really making data based decisions rather than talking about it.