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
