I found a very telling chart in MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008. The chart examined how search ROI stacks up against other marketing tactics including public relations. While 40 percent of companies felt PR delivered a good or outstanding ROI, 20 percent rated PR ROI as highly variable and the remainder felt it was a low value tactic or hard to gauge. PR ranked as the single tactic most difficult to gauge the ROI.

You don’t need to rehash the arguments of why PR is so notoriously difficult to measure. Without being directly tied to a transactional process, it is difficult to credit PR with boosting sales or decreasing costs.

Here is my prediction: PR is exactly like marketing just 5-10 years behind the curve.

Starting in the late 1990s and continuing today, marketing has come a long way in the digital age. With a vastly increased access to information, marketers are using data mining tools to extract insights from vast corporate databases, using statistics to build complex prediction models to simulate whether a campaign is likely to be successful and ultimately proving the value of their contribution.

The public relations industry must get to this point.

Digital PR is the future as it provides access to a wealth of data about customer brand perceptions, company sentiment and behaviors. For the first time companies can listen into conversations between customers about a product, engage with customers and better understand and track key influencers online.

Today, we are helping clients test messages online and validate the likely success of a campaign before the launch. In the past some big-budget campaigns have looked great on paper but flopped in the marketplace. With digital and pretesting, the chances of failure are greatly reduced.

As the depth of data that is available increases, PR will be able to have its own list of KPIs (key performance indicators), calculate the ROI and leverage complex statistical models to improve communication and better target the message.

When PR is truly accountable and can deliver hard numbers to the C-suite — increased budgets and respect will follow.

As with any major change, you will see a number of companies adapt, some fail and others become the new dominant players. Regardless, O’Dwyer’s list of the largest public relations firms will look very different in a few years.