What metrics measure the performance of a public relations professional?

The obvious is the % of coverage pieces to outlets pitched, but there is a system in Canada called the Media Relations Rating Point System (MRP) that measures things like tone, reach, and ROI. The last time I checked a few years ago the service was about $1000CDN per year so it may have increased. http://mrpdata.com In my company, I look at quantity of coverage but also responses from media (unpublished or published), observations, what types of media were most successful in coverage, and general reach.

PR, as a field, hasn't really been quantified yet. You can count the articles that appear about you over a given period. Some may result from the work of your PR agency and others may not. Ask for email threads and phone records if you want proof of causality. Some in-house corporate communications people measure the size of the articles that appear about them in publications, and then figure out how much an ad that size would have cost. If the cost of the PR firm is less, then they feel like they've won. It's a rough metric, it's called "ad equivalency," and it's largely been debunked. Sentiment analysis may eventually tell us more about how news articles impact clients' reputations and visibility. http://Blix.io is one site applying sentiment analysis to PR, measuring emotional bias and intensity of news articles, comments and social media. That's probably the most cost-efficient alternative to polling before and after a news article to measure how readers think about your brand....

Public relations is about much more than pitching stories to media, but many journalists never see beyond that, unless they have crossed over to the agency side (as many increasingly do). Agencies that want to stay in business measure performance in several ways, chief among them are: contribution to client account retention contribution to client account fee income growth success in attracting and winning new client accounts adherence to KPIs set out in individual job descriptions (above and beyond the previous items - and related to role) generation of creative ideas to sell new services contribution to the agency's own marketing and brand-building efforts contribution to growing and developing more junior colleagues