Seven Strategy Steps for modern communication

I thought it may help to examine how organisations can develop strategies. This is at the beginning of the thinking and in no special order but its a start and I only have seven considerations.

I guess the place most people will start is that place of record. The company or brand web site.

Strategically, for a corporate web site we can imagine it as the place where the most visitors come each day to engage on corporate matters. For an etail site it is the flagship store and the trade site is an invitation into the biggest and busiest warehouse and so forth.

Strategy consideration 1

So our first strategy action point is the examine investment at a level that reflects the opportunity. For example there is significant evidence that corporate web sites are extensively used by financial analysis, investors, prospective employees, NGO's, regulators, vendors and many other stakeholders. Equally, if in general, retail sales on line are 15% of all retail activity, does the etail site offer an opportunity to access this business and will that be incremental business, will it enhance sales at bricks and mortar sites, will the return on investment be recovered at a lower cost to deliver added bottom line profits. All the indication suggest this is the case.

We now have available a lot of information about who, why and how people visit our web sites.

For example, the research is telling us that prospective customers come to a web site for a whole range of reasons through the buying process including, according to the Enquiro study, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase and, one can add, to reconfirm and justify the decision after purchase.


Strategy consideration 2

Our second strategy is to consider each of these instances and have relevant content for each of the visitor's needs. The strategy will set out to resolve the requirements for why people should search for, explore, find information and save it ready for the next visit.

Of course, as part of this process, the strategy will include SEO and will ensure that every page of the web site reflects the relevant company values which will be both obvious to the visitor and to the semantic algorithms used by search engines.

Strategy consideration 3

Our third strategy consideration is one of access.

In an era of user created market, and social segments that change and morph all the time, it is important to maintain an interest in the wider adoption of online media to create access.

Is access only to be through a PC or laptop or will it include games consoles, USB ports, mobile phones, kiosks and the panoply of devices that are available across the market?. How do people keep engaged with the company, product or brand? Is it one device or many and, for the time being, never mind the volume of people or even the number of visits because should the devices engage enough and is interesting for people at different stages in relationship building the pay off will come elsewhere.

For example Twitter. We have some good figures about the number of people who visit its web site But we don't have a clue as to how many people use tools like Twirl, mobile phones and Blackberrys to engage through Twitter. These dispersed metrics are going to be ever more diverse and difficult for the traditional marketing person to manage.

Strategy consideration 4

My fourth strategy focuses on content and content management. Lets take the case of a new product launched in California at 10 am local time. Of course, it missed most of Europe because they are enjoying an aperitif and, by the time the news cycle reaches Stonehenge, the story is so old there is not a journalist on earth who wants to cover it. No, the content strategy has to start at some point and as it goes through the time zones it needs refreshing with new and relevant insights, references to comments about it and to give a reason for bloggers and journalists and Susan and her friends swapping the news in Bebo. At what point in this cycle are employees engaged and those many organisations that work for the company (like consultants, vendors, and commercial partners)?

Strategy consideration 5

This content strategy also has to be able to serve many channels for communication. Can the strategy encompass words for twitter, bloggers, newspapers, feature writers. Does it have capacity for associated pictures, interactive AJAX graphical content, news updates and other mashups or widgets. Is there, strategically, room for video, podcast or an interactive second life avatar that can be controlled with a Nintendo Wii? Does this story warrant its own social media microsite, wiki, poll or user evaluation?

Strategy consideration 6

The sixth strategy are those management imperatives such as rules of engagement for employees and other organisations closely associated with the organisation.

Strategy consideration 7

The seventh strategy consideration encompasses both risk management embedded in the approach and crisis management capability - because we are all professionals.



Of course, there will be other versions. I welcome comments.

Agnostic evaluation of media content

Image via Wikipedia

This weekend, I have been playing with a sentiment engine and thinking about people's perspectives.

This one does not take sides. It is agnostic. It decides if a press story is positive or negative from a neutral perspective.

All you do is past text into a box and it analyses the content as positive or negative and shows the structure of sentences that leads to this conclusion.

You can try it here.

The returns it makes is an academic minefield. It challenges your thinking about truth.

It has a first cousin, that can add perspectives. For example, it can make similar decisions from the perspective of the actors (company, person brand etc) which is why it was invented but the returns with no perspective are very interesting.

Sometimes this programme gets it wrong but not often.

It is able to glean content that is negative but which contributes to the positive side of the article and you can see how it does it.

I have tried news articles, book chapters, reports and even client presentations to see where the sentiment lies.

So where is the beef?

This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.

Try it out and be challenged.

Touch the virtual

I have a new word for everyone Realtuality.....

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, "EVE Online," Habbo, MapleStory and "World of Warcraft" are the next step in "network intermediated" social and economic interactions according to Andrew Burger at Linux insider.

But he missed a significant element. They are now combined with the Nintendo's Wii. Wii adds a physical element.

These developments are easy to dismiss and put into the PR no go area of Games.

As you may know, this has never been my view. Games are a form of communication and online games now allow players to interact with millions of other players round the world.

But the Wii is different. The players can interact, not only in the virtual world but in a mashup between the virtual and real dimensions.

A movement using the Wii from Stonehenge can be transferred to a movement on a screen in San Francisco and in real time and in the existing, simulated or game graphic renderings or virtual world.

David Stone, an MIT research fellow claims the motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science." He offers the Wiimote as a key to building realistic training simulators in Second Life.

Add to the Wii and virtual worlds a huge mass collaborative development effort and you get where I am coming from.

Take Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, who says Sims attracts creative people of all ages and both genders and have a track record of 4.5 million players visiting the Sims site monthly, and 70m downloads of player-created content including user created avatars and environments.

These are pretty big numbers and pretty active communities and they are not alone.

Corporate investment in post 2000 technologiesis already interesting. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million in 2007 and has at least nine more developments in train.

A study by Virtual Worlds Management, a Texas-based research company identified $184.2 million this year pouring into companies that run virtual worlds.

You can bet these will be very different and will need to include Realtuality, with its physical dimension to compete.

Intel add fuel to the flames. It say that the next generation Wii will not need controllers. Camera technology and sensors will mean they are obsolete.

The pent-up capability to create applications, the technical advances and money is now converging. The breakthrough cannot be far off.

Virtual offices, virtual homes, virtual friends and all interacting with real offices, real sports, real homes and real people stretches the imagination and yet is not far off.

Does this mean that the press conference is acted out by real people in virtual worlds or virtual people in real environments. Yes to both.

Does this mean the end of the travelling salesman, yes it does, and is supermarket shopping now a case of really walking but down virtual aisles, yes it does.

But these are pretty ordinary transmogrifications. What happens when we mashup email, twitter, VoiP and that old fashioned place of record, the website and add people being both themselves and their alter egos in dynamic activities in dynamic environments and physically involved too. Now add millions of people doing all this in full-on creative mode.

Well... Facebook is, by comparison, dull. Even the announcement by Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company behind the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, that they seek a partner to license a pole dancing game for the Wii is tame.

Development of new markets, new inventions and new societies already happens all the time in microcosm in these emeging worlds and at a pace that makes following twitter seem sluggish. But as these people bridge the gap to what our generation believes is mainstream, the effect will be astonishing.

Building relationships between organisations and their publics in existing games has a very new dimension and is culturally very different. Second life using a Wii is different again and adding big bucks investment and open tools and open source to both is a daunting prospect.

And what is going to drive this revolution?

I think fun and sex. These environments are novel and fun and they open up whole new opportunities for romantic interaction.

Millions, of people using open tools and open software backed up with significant investment by business angels will begin to deliver products that make the exponential growth of YouTube look sluggish.

The commitment to life in these environments will drag people from television, the cinema and night clubs to the next mashup generation beyond today's Wii and big home screens, games and virtual worlds.


The first shops in these environments will soon become the biggest mall anyone ever walked down.

Today, we think we are cool with our corporate blogs, wiki's podcasts and social media involvement but perhaps we should now begin to think of the next digital generation.

News in the making

The telegraph today. The political editors hard at it

The new telegraph HQ

Today, I was given a tour of the Telegraph new editorial centre. Its 67,000 sq ft of open plan editorial space.

My host was Chris Lloyd Assistant Managing Editor ( my nephew).

He has been with the project from its inception and was both a charming host and brilliant in his outlook for where the internet is taking publishing.

The Telegraph has shown thousands of people, including competitors, from all over the world round this amazing facility.

With its extension of My Telegraph due soon and raft of well known bloggers not to mention the growing capability and range of content at Telegraph TV, the evolution fom print to all media is a revelation.

The BBC and Guardian are both creating new centres now.

The big issue now, is can the PR industry raise its game to support these new capabilities?

The pic is Carl Courtney (Chairman of Publicasity - for whom I work three 50 hour days a week), sitting at the editorial hub in this huge centre.

Measuring the value of PR - the values that make relationships

Over the next few days I will be working on development of tools that allow me to look at corporate and brand values.

You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.

First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.

My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.

This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.

These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.

With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.

Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.

But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).

We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.

The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.

Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.

We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.

The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.



That's the theory.



Now to see if it works.....