I posted a comment to this effect on PR Moment, but one thing that strikes me about the AMEC 10 PR evaluation discussions and grandesque declarations (though the intention is spot on) is that if the PR industry begins a gallant guest to put pound signs in front of everything it does to enhance reputation, it will fail.

The Barcelona Declaration of Research Principles represents baby steps, so this is absolutely no criticism of what last week’s debate aimed to achieve. And it’s absolutely agreed that outcomes and business results are what need to be measured.

But in the interests of modernising the long view of PR evaluation, we need to recognise that quantifying, in a clinical and pound sign-oriented way, precisely what PR investment does for brand value and hence shareholder/stakeholder value will always have limitations.

Commercially, reputation’s value lies in its ability to get customers to spend or recommend. And the only way you can truly measure reputation levels in order to gauge that is to go and ask everyone who could potentially be a customer what they think of you and whether they will buy/recommend. And do so frequently. Even then, there are no assurances they will give you the right answer or any degree of clarity.

Further point: AVEs dead? Not dead, no; but of increasingly limited value in the modern media world. It may be useful to know what the equivalent ad exposure would have cost. But it does not allow you to measure PR value, and anyone who ever claimed it did that was grasping at straws in the absence of something better.

Comparing bought media costs to what earned media costs only helps you to highlight that they’re different beasts, rather than drawing some sort of comparison that allows relative value to be assessed. That in itself is an aide to better understanding how PR has value and how it can be used as a commercial asset. But it’s a crude tool and only useful as an aside to the quest for better, grown-up measurement.

The main thing that PR agencies need to be when modernising their evaluation, and that the industry needs to be in pulling people together to crack this, is honest. Just because media is digitising and the resulting audit trails give us far more to go on does not mean that we can put pound signs against everything and be absolutely convinced that we’re right. PRs need to be clear with clients on what can be measured, what can’t be measured and why you’d even want to measure some of these things in the first place.

We need a single approach to unequivocal proof, not just a way of winning the case through sheer weight of argument and personality.