The other day I was in a big brainstorm-y meeting with a traditional PR gal.  It was a bit dicey for me, since I really respect this woman, but my goal at the meeting was to get the client to understand what PR strategies they needed to employ today, to make successs for tomorrow.

The client kept on returning to old-school ideas like pitching stories to magazines to get a big fancy spread. I kept on wondering aloud what that was going to do for them if not supported by an aggressive grassroots direct-to-customer campaign.

I trotted out the old story I have about a client who got a full page of their drinks in a glossy monthly and that month, not one of those drinks was sold.

And the old-schooler countered, "Yes, but you can't really track the number of people who ripped out the magazine page and brought it with them to Chicago when they traveled here, the number who saw the piece and didn't order the drink but came in anyway."

No. You can't track it. And despite the fact that she obviously thought that speculative hope was a worthwhile thing, it didn't seem to me like much more than that: hope. 

You'll never really know if anyone did that, will you?  And yet that, in fact, is what you are paying for.

So, what can you track?  What can you do that you can monitor the success of and actually see if it is successful in the long run?

Well, you can count the numbers of followers you have, the number of people who retweet you, the number of people who rush in for an apple cider donut when you tweet that they just came out of the oven.

You can count the number of people who actually view your YouTube video, read your blog; you can even analyze the influence of your Facebook Page using hard numbers. And you can actually see the number of media, influencers and concierges who navigate to your news release on RIA — the number who are actually engaged.

So, the lesson of the day is this: Demand hard numbers from your PR firm.  Make sure that when they tell you about the actual data-driven impact their work has — not just speculations about how many people ripped out a page of a magazine, shoved it somewhere for safe-keeping, and then remembered why when they stumbled upon it at the bottom of their briefcase two months later.