Communication Measurement and AI
Last month, the Measurement Commission of the Institute for Public Relations published a summary of their recent discussion on new and innovative approaches to measurement. Many of their comments are likely familiar to most seasoned communication practitioners, e.g. “Aligning measurement objectives will help organizations measure what is meaningful for their decision-making.” Yep, of course.
At the same time, I’m seeing a lot of industry commentary on the use of AI for doing communication work, e.g. creating written content like blog posts or emails. First, if the blog posts we’re writing can be replaced with ideas scrapped from existing sources, perhaps you could use a bit more originality in general — and if you’re a manager using ChatGPT to skip having to think about the messages you send to your team, we should talk. They deserve better.
However, I believe there is a lot of promise for AI in making it easier and more cost-effective for organizations to adopt an outcomes-based approach to measurement instead of merely counting outputs. Imagine, for example, that we could use AI to quickly and more expansively track the impact of the specific content, language, and timing of incident response communications.
Could we finally convince business leaders and lawyers that “your security is our top priority,” undermines the credibility of everything they’re about to say? What about whether specific characteristics of an incident are likely to impact a company's stock price or political climate? What kinds of engineering projects will be the most compelling for recruits over the next six months and do we already have a robust library of public content to attract them? We understand a lot of these considerations today based on qualitative research and measurement — which are invaluable for understanding the expectations of our stakeholders — but quantitative measurement is an area where I believe AI could help improve the effectiveness of our counsel.
That said, data is only half of what we need for an effective communication measurement strategy. The other half is being able to break down that information into messages that our audience can understand. That’s why it’s so important for managers and individuals leading in unofficial capacities to understand that the empathy we put into communicating with our teams can’t be reproduced by anyone or anything other than you. Please do not use AI as an excuse not to improve your own communication skills. AI can help us refine our effectiveness and reduce inefficiency, but it’s still our responsibility to develop and care for others — human to human.
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