By Todd Murphy, Vice President, Universal Information ServicesUniversal Information Services is participating in an awareness and education campaign organized by AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. These events are sponsored by membership companies and work to better educate public relations professionals on reliable methodologies for measuring PR and media.Each day this week Universal has defined one of five key metrics important to public relations measurement. Yesterday we covered Key Messages and Message Penetration. Today we will look at how the volume of Media Exposure can affect your measured results.

Media Exposure quantifies the amount of attention that television, radio, online media, social media and newspapers give to a specific story. The volume of media exposure is simply the measurement of that attention and can be represented in terms of number of mentions, stories or share of voice when compared to other specific topics.

In a fixed media market, where the placement opportunities remain static, tracking the volume of media exposure can be an indicator of the receptiveness the media has towards your stories or organization. When performing competitive measurements, tracking your volume of exposure relative to the competition, can generate an effective share of voice metric.Whether a strict volume of media placements as an indicator of message penetration, or as a share of voice comparison, understanding volume of media coverage can still have an important role in calculating the effectiveness on your public relations effort. Exposure Volume should not be a stand-alone metric as it yields little to know information about behavioral changes or modified market actions. But when used with other qualitative metrics in can be a very helpful indicator of effort.Our final metric will resolve how several of these measures can be formulated to determine true impact of your public relations efforts. Tomorrow we will look at Universal Information Services’ Impact Score, a metric that combines qualitative and quantitative measures in order to yield a relative number for evaluating individual stories, time frames, and campaigns. In the meantime, share your experiences with calculating media exposure and any concerns you have with that measure.