The Vision: To Match Market Urges

We are living in an era which sees change as a constant. Our vision is to provide real-time metrics to organizations so they can adjust to the changing marketplace to maximize shareholder value.

The foundations for the current developments date to research during the 1990s in the area of communication theory of high-speed management. The 1997 book chapter, “Lessons in Marketing Strategies during Recession from High-Speed Management to Sun Tzu's Art of War,” he lays out the foundation. “High-speed theory argues that the key to an organization’s success is making timely and appropriate adaptations to a complex and ever-changing environment, which spins off new opportunities and new threats. Alert companies monitor the environment for changes to be ready to grasp opportunities and make adaptations.” (In S.S. King and D.P. Cushman, eds. Lessons from the Recession: A Management and Communication Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 215-243)

With the explosion of media outlets (including traditional media such as newspapers and magazines) and new media (including internet distributed media such as on-line newspapers, newsletters and blogs), environmental scanning must also include “message discipline” – maintaining an effective and coherent message across all media. To evaluate the coherence of an organization’s messages in the media in a timely manner presents a major research challenge.

Martin developed a solution – a real time, statistically reliable system to measure coherence of communication activities across traditional and online media. His research paper, “News Release Flow-Through: News Release/News Article LSA Metric” was awarded Top Faculty Research Paper by the Public Relations Division at the AEJMC 2004 conference in Toronto.

Another paper using the metric, “Assessment Outcome Coherence Using LSA scoring” appeared in Academic Exchange Quarterly, fall 2004. K.D. Payne’s Measurement Standard: The International Newsletter of Public Relations Measurement (http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/) continuously monitors and highlights positive developments in public relations evaluative measurement and metrics. Our strategic public relations new metric and approach was praised in the December 10, 2004 issue as “the best new idea in measurement.” They wrote: “After 18 years in this business, you think you’ve heard every new measurement metric anyone could think of, but Ernest Martin has come up with a new one that everyone in media analysis should pay attention to…. We sincerely hope that we see it widely adopted within the next few years.” http://www.themeasurementstandard.com/Issues/1104/eng/contents1104.asp

Research to extend the concept to financial communications, “Timing Retail Investor Communications with Wave Theory,” was presented at the Eighth International Public Relations Research Conference, Miami, March 2005.

The current system, combining previously researched elements in to the Investor Public Relations Navigator System^TM, is usable by publicly-traded companies in the global marketplace.

The following are five aspects to help corporations to grasp the opportunity.

The Importance of Retail Investors
Timing and Wave Theory
News Release Flow-through
Key Message Strategy/Pre-testing
Key Message Coherence

IPRN System

Ernest Martin, Ph.D.
efmartin2@vcu.edu