An Overview of the Measurement Problem in Public Relations in the Context of Digitalization and Standards: A Data Mining Practice

Abstract

One of the most fundamental problems in terms of the public relations profession is measurement and evaluation. In particular, considering the international standards put forward in the context of Barcelona Principles 3.0, measurement actions are required that combine outputs, outcomes, and potential impact. With the increasing use of social media in the public relations industry, the inadequacy of traditional measurement techniques is obvious. This study is intended for measuring communication effectiveness in public relations using big data and analytics. The research aims to contribute to overcoming the measurement and evaluation problem of public relations. A mixed method was used in the research. Data scraping was used a data collection method. Content analysis technique was used to measure the outputs of the communication activity, sentiment analysis technique, which is one of the data mining techniques, and descriptive statistics methods were used to measure the potential impact. According to the results of the research, tangible outputs for the results and the outputs of the communication activity based on social media data have been obtained. The relationship and potential impact of the data obtained on the communication activity results with the institutions' current outputs (income status, the number of customers, etc.) have been determined.