Mozilla’s Public Relations team has been working on opening up the PR process, making it more transparent and more in fitting with Mozilla’s open source DNA. Their most recent foray is a post written by Melissa Shapiro, in which she discusses PR metrics. “How do we know if we’re getting better if there’s no baseline indication of impact? The answer isn’t a pure science. True PR metrics are not just quantitative but qualitative as well. Quantitative analysis explores things like total number of articles, mentions in the press, coverage by country, etc. Qualitative analysis includes message penetration as well as audience and tone analysis. It turns out they are equally important in evaluating the success of Mozilla’s major PR initiatives.”

The article goes on to discuss the various types of quantitative and qualitative analysis we explore as part of our PR process at Mozilla, outlining use cases for each and giving examples comparing the public relations activities around the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 releases. If you’re interested in learning more about the normally opaque world of public relations, you should check out Melissa’s blog for this and other articles.