Fishburn Hedges

04.07.2011

I don’t think I earned many Facebook “Likes” when I said that the Lisbon Summit on PR Measurement wouldn’t find the silver bullet for evaluation.

I realise that’s not what the great and good set out to do in Lisbon though, and I’m very pleased that they didn’t, because PR can’t be measured by one single metric.

Many of us were left underwhelmed with the Barcelona Principles a year ago.  Among the seven guidelines for measurement were that “AVEs are not the value of PR” and that “social media can and should be measured”.  These aren’t at all profound but they aren’t meant to be.  They are aimed at getting the industry on the same wavelength.  It’s just quite depressing to think that some corners of the PR world clearly need to hear this from their own industry bodies, because they hadn’t clocked on before.

So one year on, it’s great that the summit in Lisbon has kicked its Metrics for PR Measurement tool on a few steps, and it’s now looking like a very practical tool indeed.  There isn’t a silver bullet in sight, but a whole host of options, for every communications discipline. None of these are new, mind you – that will be the next stage for the industry to come up with – but it will educate, and train the mind about the wealth of possibilities.  I hope in the next round that we can find a way to isolate PR’s impact from other disciplines.  A challenge for us in the short-term though is to avoid pasting these slides into client proposals.

Another thing I’m quite pleased about is the plan to introduce client education programmes.  It’s a great idea: increase the in-house demand for quality evaluation and more tailored measurement, and the agencies will have to respond.  Everyone’s a winner in this scenario, because ultimately it will demonstrate the importance of communications to those who tend to ascribe bigger budgets to other disciplines.

One final thought though: talk of evaluation can often fall on deaf ears, whereas chat around social media is met with wide eyes and enthusiasm.  And because so much of our work in the digital world is about ‘listening’ to our audience’s views and understanding sentiment, many could be taking a keen interest in evaluation without realising it. 

Is this a clue showing us how to better manage the subject with the “silver bullet brigade”, and push them that little bit further towards thinking about the outcome of their work? 

As for Facebook “Likes”, you can keep them – they don’t tell you all that much.

Posted by Adam Keal