The power of a conversation...

Hello again.

It is now week 3 of my internship and things are ticking along quite nicely. I am beginning to remember (most) names and am getting a better understanding of relevant procedures across the organisation.

During my time here, I have had many interesting conversations with staff members in the office. As an aspiring PR professional, I like to converse and I highly value listening to the opinions of others. You can learn a lot from a conversation.  

A talk I had last week with a colleague forms the basis of this blog post. As we were walking to the Perth City Library for a meeting, we got to chatting about the role of Public Relations within an organisation, and how sometimes, it’s not a widely acknowledged (or known) profession and its identity can get lost under the umbrella of Marketing. Public Relations is VERY different to Marketing - we know this. Yet, how often are the two lumped together with the same definition? I am sure that almost every Public Relations and/or Marketing student can attest to this. 

Further into our conversation, we also discussed the challenges that Public Relations professionals can have trying to prove its worth to an organisation. The effectiveness of Public Relations can be difficult to measure, particularly brand image and reputation. A return on our investment is not always easy to gauge. Thus, we can be presented with a myriad of challenges when trying to convince a CEO to invest more resources into Public Relations based activities.

So, inspired by this conversation, I did what any good university student would do and commenced some further research. I went onto “Google Scholar” and searched “Measuring Public Relations”. My search returned a multitude of articles and one caught my eye. It was an article called “The evolution of public relations measurement and evaluation” from the journal: Public Relations Review. The title of the article is fairly self-explanatory; the author provides an overview of how the measurement of Public Relations has changed significantly over the years. It was an interesting read. 

What really stood out for me was the adoption of seven principles to measure Public Relations at the European Measurement Summit 2010 in Barcelona. Call me silly, but I had never come across these principles in, nor heard of the European Measurement Summit. Has anyone else?

The seven principles are as follows:

1.   Importance of Goal Setting and Measurement

2.   Measuring the Effect on Outcomes is Preferred to Measuring Outputs

3.   The Effect on Business Results Can and Should Be Measured Where Possible

4.   Media Measurement Requires Quantity and Quality

5.   AVEs are not the Value of Public Relations

6.   Social Media Can and Should be Measured

7.   Transparency and Replicability are Paramount to Sound Measurement

Here is the link to the webpage which provides more detail on each principle: http://amecorg.com/2012/06/barcelona-declaration-of-measurement-principles/

The inclusion of social media is an obvious one, as PR professionals, we simply can’t ignore the power it can yield. But, I would be interested to hear your thoughts; do you agree with these seven principles? If not, why?

Well that is all for me today, until next time.

Claire

15115685

Link to article “The evolution of public relations measurement and evaluation”: http://ac.els-cdn.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/S036381111100213X/1-s2.0-S036381111100213X-main.pdf?_tid=8cb4ac7e-13bd-11e4-b5e2-00000aab0f26&acdnat=1406266735_46d6b0427d8bf2aff7e26101bd4956e2