Tuesday, February 12, 2013 what are the barcelona principles?
It's not normal for a committee to come up with a good set of ideas. There's a set of guidelines that many pr people don't know that can help you navigate the comms landscape. They're worth taking a look at.
by Dan Slee
A short while back a PR person got very animated that people in the industry didn't know what the Barcelona Principles are.
For the most part I'd be amazed if the majority know what they are.
For the record, they're a set of principles US and UK private sector PR people drew-up in the Spanish city in 2010. They're not the be-all and end all but they are an interesting set of rules that stand scrutiny and you can refer to.
For the record they are here:
- Goal setting and measurement are important
- Media measurement requires quantity and quality
- Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE) are not the value of public relations
- Social media can and should be measured
- Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results (outputs)
- Organisational results and outcomes should be measured whenever possible
- Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.
A more comprehensive explanation can be found here.
The thing I like most about them and the thing that chimes is the concentration of results and not simply coverage.
AVE - advertising value equivalent - is dead. In other words, it's not that 100,000 people saw the campaign that attracted £70,000 worth of coverage that's important. It asks a big 'so what?' to that.
What did those people do as a result?
If 10,000 fitted smoke detectors and you're target was 1,000 then that's your result right there.
In particular it tackles the question that many traditional PR people throw at social media. How do you measure it?
The answer is that it depends on what you are trying to achieve in the first place.
That concentrates the mind wonderfully.
But there is a danger that applying them to unimaginatively to social media means you are not getting the point.
The point of social media is conversation and to take part in the conversation. Things you can later measure come later.
That's something really important to remember.
Dan Slee is co-founder of comms2point0.
Reader Comments (3)
You make a great point, no-one knows much about the barcelona prinicples or the valid metrics which were derived from the principles, but why?
Measurement needs to be transparent, however not one method fits all. I think PRO's need to be inclined to breaking out of their AVE's comfort zone and tell their clients how they can benefit from new evaluation methods. It is fair enough a lot of agencies and consultancies do not have enough resources to cover the use of the valid metrics as a whole, but if they slowly introduce more sophisticated techniques other than media cuttings, they can produce a valuable campaign. I also agree when you say 'what did people do as a result when they read you're coverage?' I'm sure most PRO's do not go out and research who responded to the PR activity.
New measurement needs to take place!
Hi Megan,
Thanks for your comment.
It's actually a really big step isn't it, saying bye bye to AVE.
But the more you think about it the more of a red herring they are.
To carry on the smoke detector analogy, if you know they mean families are, say, 60 per cent less likely to die if they had them then with the right data you can reach a figure of lives saved. That's a totally different figure than to packets of Daz shifted. Both are just as valid. Both matter just as much to the campaign. Although actually the washing powder company deep down won't want to see fire deaths either.
One point I do wish I'd developed more is just the point of using social media to create a conversation and an audience first. Sometimes I've heard PR people talk fixatedly about measurement and goals to the exclusion of the conversational aspect. That's really old school and I wish they wouldn't. Police officers talk to people on their patch to build trust and breakdown barriers. It's the week after next when they may need to call in those favours when some children go missing which was what happened on my patch recently
Agreed again! PR is all about maintaining relationships and two way communication, so why should conversation be excluded from PR activity or measuring this as it makes such a big impact with personal social media conversations and even networking for new business and needing favours!
And yes its such a big step to say bye to AVE's but it has to be done!