What you need to know about the Barcelona Principles

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 9 comments

This post was originally written for the Fleishman-Hillard Intranet. FH’s Don Bartholomew contributed to this post.

How much do you know about Barcelona? To be honest, up until the last year or so, it was just a city I had heard people rave about in Spain that my wife and I wanted to visit whenever we make that trip to Europe we’ve been talking about.

But for PR pros like us, Barcelona should have a much deeper meaning than a vacation. Because something happened there in the summer of 2010 that shook up our industry. Something that we, as strategic counselors, need to do a better job of making sure our clients understand. That something was the Barcelona Principles.

What are these principles? In short, they’re the most notable outcome of the European Summit on Measurement held in Barcelona in 2010. That summit marked the first time global PR industry leaders had come together on an international stage to debate and vote on the way we should be measuring our work. Some PR pros know the principles like the back of their hands, but they are still new to many. FH’s Don Bartholomew does an amazing job of detailing the principles and providing feedback from the leaders who helped develop them here. I’d strongly encourage you to check out his post for background. Then, when you get back, we can talk about what these principles actually mean in our everyday jobs.

Applying the Barcelona Principles

It’s one thing to say we now have some measurement principles to live by, and here they are. It’s another thing entirely to actually discuss how we should be living by them. Let’s do that now.

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR program.

Hopefully this is one you nod your head at, because your clients are already doing it.

- Goals and measurable objectives are an integral part of showing PR’s success, especially when it comes to showing the impact of social media.
- Instead of just talking about that occasionally elusive ROI, talk about the impact our work is having on achieving communications and business objectives.
- And, I don’t think it really needs to be said, but we should always be measuring our work. The do-something-creative-and-pray-the-company-likes-it model just doesn’t suffice.

2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality — clips alone are not enough.

You’ll absolutely understand this one if you have ever gotten into an “our impressions are bigger than your impressions” debate with advertising or marketing.

- Impressions are important, and they should be reported. But we shouldn’t stop there … especially, since quality may be more important than quantity if your client is trying to reach a specific niche audience.
- Per FHKCs Nicole Trembley: “If your client is a cat food company, which is more beneficial? An earned media hit in the local newspaper or on a cat food blog?” Often times, it will be the latter.

3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity.

PR professionals have always searched for ways to compare ourselves and our work to our friends in marketing. But, AVEs are not the way to do that.

- Even the Wall Street Journal agrees.
- AVEs are generally about attributing a financial value to PR for budgetary reasons. It’s usually an allocation decision for someone in marketing — “everybody else is doing it” syndrome. They see it as an easy way to put a financial number on media relations. But that number is not accurate in showing the true value of PR. AVEs only measure what work we did, not how people, especially our clients’ target customers, reacted to it.
- When Don and I were discussing AVEs, he pointed out that AVEs limit the entire value of public relations to media relations. So, we get zero credit beyond publicity and maybe 50 percent or more of what PR does is not covered by AVEs.

4. Social media can and should be measured.

This principle ties back nicely with the first one.

- PR has struggled to measure social media for a while now because ROI gets hung over our head. But, often times, the benefits of social media are long term.
- Setting measurable objectives makes it easier to show short-term impact.

5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results.

Raise your hand if you report metrics like impressions, hits, tweets, posts, etc.

- It’s not that these metrics don’t have some value. But, if you think about it, all they show are outputs — how much coverage was obtained. We need to go further than that when providing results to our clients, and we should be focusing more on outcomes.
- How did customers react to what we did? Did we ask customers to take an action (e.g., click a link to our website) and did they do it? What did they tell us about the brand through qualitative conversation?

6.  Business results can and should be measured where possible.

Drawing a direct line from PR to business results (e.g., sales, store traffic, attendees at an event) has been and continues to be elusive. But, it’s up to us to be creative and look for opportunities where we can draw that connection.

Two examples:

- The first is tracking sales from OEO, if your client has a coupon code to share with bloggers.
- The second is a case study I read the other day. L. L. Bean actually removed all shipping costs on its items in 2009, because customer feedback and online behavior showed people were actually backing out of sales because shipping costs were too high.

7.  Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.

Strong ethics are vital to PR being taken seriously as business counselors, and that holds true with measurement. This principle is simply a reminder that we must be transparent in how we come to the results we get and, for those of you who are math fans, be able to “show our work” to our clients.

So, are you applying the Barcelona Principles to your work? How are you educating clients on the principles? Have you given AVEs the boot, but good?