This interview was really interesting.
In council and government press offices there has been a bit of a revolution over the last few years. Until 2010 PR officers measure their success by counting their output of press releases and by using Advertising Value Equivalent - AVE is when you count the column inches in a publication resulting from a press release and calcluate how much the same space would have cost to place an advert. In 2010 the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications presented their new seven principles at their conference in Barcelona and these have now become known as the Barcelona Principles.
They include the importance of:
- goal setting
- measuring outcomes not outputs
- measuring business results
- measuring quality and sentiment
- ditching AVEs
- measuring and analysing social media
- transparently and replicability
There are many social media companies that provide analysis of reach and sentiment but we are also seeing a number of companies, NASDAQ in particular, developing media and PR management dashboards. What concerns me about these tools is that on the surface they look fabulous but now, 2 modules in to this course I don't know if I trust them fully, without understanding the sources of the data and how they all work together.