Starting 2012 Out with a Bang!

By: Angie Jeffrey, APR

How exciting to write my first blog post for 2012 in my new capacity as Senior Counselor to CARMA International, a company I have admired for more than a decade.  I remember sitting on a plane from London back in 2001 as I tried to decide whether to start a US office for a UK analysis firm as an extension of my then PR software firm – TRAKWare, Inc., (creator of PRtrak™).  I had gathered some competitive information and remember the visceral reaction I had to CARMA’s brochure.  In a nutshell, CARMA’s work was heads and shoulders above the rest, and I decided NOT to pursue the other opportunity.

Flash forward 10 years, past two acquisitions of PRtrak™ and a lifetime in PR analysis, and I finally have the chance to add CARMA as a flagship client of my new PR and measurement consulting firm.  A lot of time has passed, however, with automation encroaching on the quality of media analysis … and, of course, with CARMA adopting automation processes that make sense.  However, CARMA remains committed to human analysis to guarantee the highest possible quality and accuracy, which is why I’m proud to be part of the extended team.

By Alexis Pollak

What excites me most about working with CARMA, though, is its ability to link the results of media coverage to hard business outcomes like survey results, sales, leads, website hits, and more through a correlations process they call CARMA Connect.  Over the past decade, I’ve been involved in a lot of research that uses correlations to outcomes, and there’s no question that the C-Suite “gets it” when you can show the relationship between your work and business results in hard numbers. 

Anyway, I’ll be blogging and Tweeting along with the rest of the CARMA team, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.  Happy 2012!