In preparing material for the talk on ‘How to Measure: Beyond the AVE’ for the CIPR I have been collecting information from mainly online sources. It has been a few months since I have done a talk on this subject and I have been amazed that none of the key pointers I have used are more than a year old. It only goes to show quite how fast-moving an area this is.

The main thrust of the talk is to discredit AVE and highlight the alternatives. The thing I need to try push home to people is that the alternatives to AVE are not as easy to do. AVEs are simple, easy to convey and are often portrayed as a proxy for ROI. It is the lazy person’s PR measurement.

Brian Solis at the recent Dell B2B Huddle in London warns on the problems of using others case studies as templates for your own measurement. People who are doing this for the first time are spending a lot of time (and money) finding what works, which metrics correlate and how effort transfers into measurable outcomes. As such this work is valuable and as a result it is understandable that people keep it to themselves.

There is also the issue that, as Philip Sheldrake points out, organisations are unique, as is their vision, strategies, and therefor so will be the correct measurement. Often this stuff does not travel well – we have got to bear that in mind.

I am looking forward to the talk and in particular to the Q&As as it’s bound to get some opposing views! I will put the slides up on Slideshare in the coming days.