by Nanette Besson — The Barcelona Principles are not alive in Germany. Same goes for social media standards. There is no lobby that actively supports these international standards in Germany. The public relations measurement professionals in Germany either have their own system of measurement (mainly accessed by the top-down approach of communication controlling, e.g., the DPRG have their own controlling framework) or they try to sell the results of their own studies (e.g., an Excellence Study published by Rolke, or the European Communication Monitor by Zerfaß, et al.). These studies focus on professionalization and excellence.
Measurement is not a top issue at the moment and not too much has changed in the last couple of years. Linking communication to business results is the main issue. The average PR professional is still thinking about wanting to measure, more rather than doing it. AVEs are still here, and outputs like visits, hits, likes are most popular criteria for measurement.
Trends for 2015 might be crisis communication and communication failures, in connection with social media. There has been some discussion coming up on those issues. Whether measurement will be a trend, I do not dare to say yet. One of the main PR magazines is just publishing a whole issue about vanity and (self) assessment (pressesprecher magazin, Nov 2014). ∞
