The buzz words and phrases being tossed around by many social media and PR professionals these days typically revolve around “listening,” “engaging,” “monitoring,” and “starting a conversation.”

Fine words all of them, but seemingly lost in this barrage of Web 2.0 lingo are words like “ROI,” “measurement” and “leads” just to name a few.

Why is that?

Case in point: I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego this week – a really nice, intimate conference with lots of great content. During a session about digital PR, the speaker (someone who was very knowledgeable) told the crowd that public relations isn’t about measurement and leads, it’s about influencing people. The speaker told the crowd that if your CEO asks about your bottom line impact, then you should tell him (or her) that’s not what PR is about (paraphrasing here).

When I followed up afterward with a question about how one tracks and reports success in the new direct-to-consumer PR model, the speaker talked about conducting pre- and post attitudinal surveys.

Sorry, but I just don’t believe that’s going to sell in the executive suite, especially during these extremely tough economic times. It’s also the wrong approach for marketing-focused PR professionals (not corporate communications) who need to embrace measurement, not continue to deflect or ignore it.

One of the problems to date is that PR traditionally has been a black box of measurement – quite impossible to track effectively. But with the rise of digital media and innovative new measurement and monitoring technologies, that is beginning to change. The effectiveness of PR and social media initiatives can now be tracked like any other online marketing campaign: in terms of traffic, conversions, leads and sales. That’s a new world, and one that most PR professionals aren’t familiar with yet.

One of my ROI-minded clients recently asked me whether all the press activity we’ve been generating recently has driven any traffic. It’s a fair question and one I can’t answer with, “well, PR isn’t really about generating traffic or leads.” In this day and age, that just doesn’t fly anymore. My client knows some of the intangibles of PR, but in these times, he also wants to see some bottom-line results for his money.

So, I’m currently piecing together a comprehensive report showing traffic and conversions from different online sources our agency has leveraged, including PRWeb, online articles, blog posts, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook and more. Through new technology, I’m able to show traffic from both click-throughs (direct from a referring link in the story) and view-throughs (visitors who read an online article that contains no direct referring link, but still came to the site later on).

Because digital PR has such a profound impact on search engine results, I’m also showing rather dramatic monthly increases in organic traffic from Google and other search engines.

Is online PR as effective as search engine marketing – from a pure cost standpoint, probably not (I say probably because this is new territory), but it does generate significant results. Best of all, this data can now be placed in context of other online marketing initiatives, helping PR and social media gain credibility at the executive table, and also leading to actionable decisions that improve overall PR results.

I love the power of social media for its ability to engage people in entirely different ways.  Engage is, after all, the name of the business. However, just don’t let terms like “measurement,” “value” and “ROI” get lost in the ever-growing blitz of new buzzwords. These are words I’ve grown up with my entire professional life, and believe me, they never go out of style.

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