Barcelona Was a Great First Step: Here Are 5 More Issues to Tackle

 by Katie Delahaye Paine

Editor's note: Welcome to our Barcelona Summit coverage:

• For an overview of the Summit, and links to other articles, blogs and photos, see Everything You Need to Know about the Barcelona Summit. 
• For a discussion of what the Barcelona Principles mean for the measurement industry and how you can spread their acceptance, read 5 Things You Should Do With the 7 Barcelona Principles of Public Relations Measurement. 
• For a practical guide to improve your public relations and social media measurement, read The Barcelona Principles Checklist.

The passage of the Barcelona Principles was a great achievement for the public relations measurement industry, but it is clearly just a promising first step. (And it was a first step that took a long time to achieve: It was October of 1995 when what is now the IPR Measurement Commission first met. Then in November of the same year there was the first ever European standards meeting.)

There’s no accurate estimate of how big our industry is, but my guess is that even if you count every member of every organization represented in Barcelona, we’re still talking less than half the practitioners of public relations. There are so many more than belong to IABC, AEJMC, IPRA and other organizations that weren’t represented in Barcelona. So, anyway we look at it, we still probably have about half of all communications professionals that still need to be convinced that doing good research and adhering to the principles is the way to go. 

More importantly, the principles as initially presented are only the beginning. There’s another month to tweak and improve them – and, I hope, make a more definitive declaration of the death of AVEs.  But assuming we move beyond AVEs, there are so many other issues that need tackling. Just as the IAB and CASRO have taken definitive stands and set the standards in market research and internet advertising, so too should our industry come to consensus around a few other issues:  

1. Could we please have a standard language for sentiment – as in the tone or sentiment of any mention can be positive, negative, neutral or balanced
2. Could we perhaps agree on a standard definition of engagement? 
3. As the world increasingly gets its news from mobile devises, will we be able to set standards for what constitutes a mobile impression? 
4. And speaking of impressions, can we either set our own standard or agree to use IAB’s standard definition of an online impression? 
5. Will we at some point get buy-in from all the individual country organizations like CPRS, PRNZ etc?? 

Happy measuring,

 

That photo at the top is from my Barcelona Flickr set.

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

Yes, it needs to be more granular, but glad to see there is movement. Here is the link to the Principles, in case your readers want them: http://ow.ly/22eDa

[Nina Zapala]

I can't believe I just stumbled into this conversation for years I've been perplexed as to why the PR industry has no set measurement standards. In my opinion, and yes it's just my humble opinion, this degrades the PR profession, as how does one measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Please don't tell me it's measurable via advertising standards as this is akin to comparing apples to oranges. (I hate to say it but clients demand it!)

I am not only excited, but ecstatic that this information is now being circulated. I'm hopeful that PR clients from the smallest to the largest will be able to reap the benefits of measurement; aka campaign effectiveness.

Today is the day of change, and I can't wait for the many new measurement standards to take effect. These standards will help build credibility for the PR industry and when this occurs -- PR will rival the advertising industry, and we will all benefit as both industries have a specific purpose.

[Bill Paarlberg]

Nice to hear from you, Nina. The Measurement Standard, and of course our publisher Katie Paine have long been rooting for standards and against AVEs. If you haven't seen Katie's blog, there's some real hot action going on over there with her and Jack O'Dwyer and AVEs recently: http://kdpaine.blogs.com/
Thanks, Bill Paarlberg, TMS Editor