This is an especially timely study for the PR industry. I’ve seen quite a few indications that PR professionals are waiting for a magical piece of software that will integrate web analytics, social/online media metrics and produce real-time analysis that will help demonstrate both ROI and help optimize future campaigns. This is one area where PR could learn a few lessons from their digital marketing peers who invest a good deal of budget on analysts and database managers to tie together web analytics, demographic, psychographic and ad placement data flexibly to show which ads and placements are most and least effective. My hope is that PR professionals will become similarly inclined to roll their sleeves up, mine these rich sources of data and uncover the sort of marketing strategy and ROI gems that online advertisers have had access to for years.

Although it’s not explicit in the Forrester and Google report, there’s a also lot of budget to be saved when you rely on analysts to interpret web analytics data. Developing software to seamlessly integrate web analytics and social/online media data is incredibly time consuming and expensive (and, most likely, not incredibly flexible). Any analyst with basic knowledge of SQL or how to merge datasets in SPSS or SAS should be able to accomplish this sort of integration in a few hours. That’s probably going to cost a lot less than developing or purchasing an enterprise software solution.

Software is fantastic for storing large sets of data, writing statistical algorithms for testing hypotheses, and visualizing the results. But, when it comes to deriving actionable conclusions and novel insights based on that data, you’re going to need a good analyst.