You may have seen a load of #amec10 tweets last week? If you missed it, nearly 200 senior PR professionals from across the globe met up to agree some principles to start the PR sector on a road to ensure that it measures itself in using some agreed and universal methodologies. This all took place at the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) Barcelona summit.
Some background
These principles themselves are described, even by AMEC Executive Director General Barry Leggetter, as “baby steps” but needless to say they are an important move in a unified direction.
Some of the principles outlined below might seem pretty obvious, indeed you might argue that a “we all believe in world peace” principle would be more controversial!
That said, this should be seen in some context. AMEC has a worldwide brief and the UK seems to have a bit of a lead in terms of media evaluation. So, while some of the UK and US practitioners at the summit were in favour of a more aggressive “let’s start the process of producing a final solution” attitude, this conference was all about agreeing in principle to move forward.
The real challenge for AMEC will be to ensure that it produces a roadmap to find agreement on a workable and universal method to measure PR over the future months and years.
PRmoment.com’s view on this is that, yes, this is an important first step. But if PR doesn’t get a wriggle on, PR and trade bodies like AMEC may find themselves overtaken by the current speed of change sweeping through PR and social media. The importance of this is emphasised by the economic climate, (the marketing disciplines must be able to demonstrate their ROI) and the trend of other marketing disciplines encroaching on PR’s space. (ie, if PR doesn’t sort out this issue, someone else will.)
The seven principles are outlined below (for me, point six is the most interesting):
1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programmes.
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality – cuttings in themselves are not enough.
3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity.
4. Social media can and should be measured.
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results.
6. Business results can and should be measured where possible.
7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Evaluation, ROI, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hi Ben,
You and your readers may like the post over the weekend by CIPR President Jay O’Connor about the Barcelona Principles. It includes an audio interview I conducted with AMEC Executive Director Barry Leggetter and Katie Delahaye Paine of KD Paine & Partners right after the event concluded.
http://www.cipr.co.uk/blogs/5867/2010/06/19/barcelona-principles-end-ave
The post also refers to an earlier interview with Katie that resonates strongly with your assertions here.
Cheers, Philip.
Understood that these are baby steps, and absolutely agreed that outcomes and business results are what need to be measured.
But in the interests of modernising the long view of PR evaluation, we need to recognise that quantifying clinically what PR investment does for brand value and hence shareholder/stakeholder value will always have limitations. Commercially, reputation’s value lies in its ability to get customers to spend or recommend. The only way you can truly measure reputation levels in order to gauge that is to go and ask everyone who could potentially be a customer what they think of you and whether they will buy/recommend. And do so frequently. Even then, there are no assurances they will give you the right answer or any degree of clarity.
Further point: AVEs dead? It may be usful to know what the equivalent ad exposure would have cost. But it does not allow you to measure PR value. Comparing bought media to costs earned media costs only helps you to highlight that they’re different beasts, rather than drawing some sort of comparison that allows relative value to be assessed.
[...] posted a comment to this effect on PR Moment, but one thing that strikes me about the AMEC 10 PR evaluation discussions and grandesque [...]
Good post, Ben, and thanks for attending the #amec10 summit. While I fully agree that we tackled some “obvious” standards and practices, we did address a few thorny issues in the Barcelona Principles that have been hotly debated for years. We can certainly take on more of those thorny issues in the months and years ahead — the principles should be a foundation, not the final state.
More importantly, the open voting process helped reinforce how much agreement there is on almost all of the principles adopted in Barcelona. Combined with the industry associations involved, this will allow us to obliterate the “PR has no measurement standards” myth from our industry. That myth has all too often talked good people out of good metrics. Or trapped us in circular conversations as an industry. No longer — it’s now time to move onward and upward…