About 10 years ago the answer for the question about reputation rating will sound something like that: “Do you want to know how much business reputation costs? Buy it, than sell it in pieces. The cost of business reputation will be the amount of money that makes you broke”.
In other words, the main reason of definition of the PR value for Ukrainian top-management was their desire to know if the reputation makes business added value. In case it does, what exactly it should be to make this added value.
In our days its hard to believe, but the first who indicate it was market’s stock value. Obviously its a challenging approach. Meantime there were a lot of skeptic’s doubts, criticism and broken pikes incurs! Logic was served only after appearing of index range implementation. In real time this index was going to fix the influence of communication on stock’s valuation changes. But life makes its allowances and now there is no common pr-index for all sectors. However, the main difference between method specified above and many others that appeared later was the approximation for business criteria and for the tasks of company’s owners. At the time when the score of others estimates calculate the quantity and quality of publications, their influenced and tone value, PR-value' AVE, Media Outreach, generally works for assurance/support of its infrastructure rather than its real value.
In our days the market grow into the communication industry and by now pr-specialists by themselves are interested in correct assessment of their professionalism. Many of them seriously talk about bonus system “for reputation increase relative to expectations” and some of them even receive it. Of course, multivector’s of PR put off the sight – it includes such relations as: press, employees, public, government, shareholders and etc. And the point is not only in all those spheres of relations, pr-specialists use their wide rage of communication facilities in concert with their target groups: publicity, publications, videos and multimedia programs, events, web-sites, sponsorship. Activity of tools usage not always agrees with information value that communicates.
Now professionals are united with the measure of efficiency in changes consequently to our activity. In this sense there are two important points. First of all we should clearly mark out reputation profile or reputation issues. Those are the very factors that influence on target groups in our specified business segment. Secondly, we should know for sure the opinion of all stakeholder groups, opinion of any person we are interest in and we want to influence on. On this basis the product that can determine the extent and mechanism of the influence of the communication system of prototype systems on their reputation indicators was lay down.
In this way the National index of reputational stability and communicative efficiency (RC-index) came into being. It is a joint analytical product of PRT Communication Group and Cominform researching company.
RC-index includes two types of backgrounds:
1 data type – rating of reputational stability (R’) of research objects in the context of knowing degree dominant (α) and emotional perception degree (β) for each stakeholder group and for all stakeholder groups in common.
2 data type – ratings, which characterize the quality of media field:
-
Rating of newsbreak possible influence efficiency R”(PI) demonstrates the relationship between reputational indices (R’) and the sum of the characteristics of the possible impact of all the media information events associated with the object of the research.
-
Rating of newsworthiness influence optimality R”(FN) demonstrates the relationship between reputational indices (R’) and emotional characteristics of the information events of the research object addressed to different target groups.
-
Rating of supposed expenses efficiency R”(CE) demonstrates the correlation between reputational indices (R’) and the notional value, reflecting the approximate amount of money (UAH) necessary to obtain the existing information field by means of buying.
Last year we can see the model on stream for the first time when we present public version of RC-index for the market together with Cominform. Due to this model we can estimate the interconnection of action and result. This research includes 18 largest banks (by NBU data) basis on the only one stakeholders group. Besides the desire to see the influence of communication on the opinion and acts of its customers groups, bankers confirm the right choice of reputation blocks that correspond to the specifics of national business.
But even if we found the “elixir of the ideal reputation” we had to add a blot on the landscape. For the ideal scenario we need ideal realization system - from ideal client to ideal PR-executor, including the unique rightness of business statements. In this case we can see strictly Ukrainian factor of efficiency that can’t lie down in any academic scores. Correspondence to business statements, of course, in accordance to timely and finance plan.
Irina Filenko, PRT Communication Group Director
