Welcome by Ketchum CEO Ray Kotcher

Overview

The Barcelona Principles at a Glance

Representatives from the two organizations that developed the Barcelona Principles — the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication and the Institute for Public Relations — explain the Principles' origin, challenges and benefits

Viewpoints

Communications professionals from Royal Philips Electronics and FedEx discuss how the Principles line up with their companies' approach to measuring PR results

Roundtable

Five PR and measurement experts discuss why the Barcelona Principles are important, why they chose to support the Principles, what the Principles' benefits are, and how the Principles may change PR

Next Steps

The next set of activities to promote awareness and adoption of the Barcelona Principles

About AMEC

Profile of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication

Next Steps

A series of follow-up activities are in the works to fortify particular aspects of the Barcelona Principles, and promote global awareness and adoption of the guidelines. For instance:

Each participating organization will adopt the standards as its own in a form that is relevant to its members.
The Principles will be translated into the native languages of the 33 countries represented at the summit.
AMEC will work to establish new Barcelona Principles-based criteria for all PR award programs. Other industry groups have now pledged to do the same.
Each of the seven Principles will be further developed, with clear techniques and approaches.

To aid in further developing the Principles, AMEC already has formed two task forces aimed at (1) identifying “validated metrics” to replace AVEs and (2) determining relevant metrics for measuring social media.

Replacing AVEs
The task force addressing AVEs is led by Ruth Pestana, a member of the AMEC U.S. Agency Research Leaders Group and worldwide director of strategic services for Hill & Knowlton. The group’s initial work includes development of six “grids” based on a range of program objectives: brand or product marketing, reputation building, issue advocacy, employee outreach, investor relations, and crisis and issues management. Each grid has three levels of metrics — PR activity, intermediary effect, and the target audience effect — that are then layered over a continuum of awareness, interest, intent and action.

“Our goal is to develop a framework for measurement, because the final outcomes are dependent on the particular program objectives,” Pestana explained. “There isn’t one single metric that can encapsulate everything we do in PR, so we have developed a portfolio of metrics to replace AVEs.”

Measuring Social Media
Another U.S. Agency Research Leaders Group member, Tim Marklein, oversees the task force on measuring social media. He believes even though social media represents a new arena for PR, some traditional measurement concepts still apply. The task force’s metrics also will focus on influencers, who play a significant role in social media.

“Social media channels and tools are new, but measuring them comes back to the underlying principles of quantity and quality of the conversation and the content,” said Marklein, who is also executive vice president of measurement and strategy for Weber Shandwick. “New social media channels offer us significant opportunity for greater data collection, and that ability will help us measure many aspects of influencers that we could not measure previously.”

Both task forces presented the final approaches to these topics at an AMEC conference in London in mid-November co-sponsored by AMEC and PRSA, with endorsement from the U.K.’s PRCA and CIPR.

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Next Steps

Perspectives Staff