Seth Godin recently posted on a concept he's calling "Local Max." In a nutshell, he's telling us to "break on through to the other side." The Local Max is that point in the life of your business where proven strategies continue to bear fruit...yet it's often also at this point where you yearn for "the next level" in your company's evolution. The key, according to Seth, is that, "You can't reinvent yourself and your organization until you deal with the fear of point C." (You gotta check the link to Seth's blog, at this point: the accompanying graphic is important.)
I feel that the PR industry has reached its own Local Max, specifically in regards to measurement issues. We are all too happy to turn the task over to 3rd parties like Biz360, Cymfony, etc. This bugs me. No offense to these vendors, but they are all of 5 years old, and yet have more credibility than PR mavens when it comes to the how-to's of PR measurement?
If we've abdicated this role and responsibility, is it because we're more comfortable at our Local Max point? Are we too afraid to face the pain of "Point C" in Seth's graph?
That's where SHIFT is at, frankly, with our LeadSensor offering. Despite offering a kick-ass solution for measuring marketing ROI (yes, Virginia, that includes PR ROI), we're just now starting to make headway. It was a painful 2+ years to develop this system. It's painful today to walk a client through an explanation of the methodology. It's painful to have to explain that, yea, sorry, but this ROI measurement service costs extra.
But we'll keep pluggin' away - for ourselves but also on behalf of the PR industry, too - because we're not afraid of the pain; we can see that "Big Max" milestone on the distant horizon.