How PR could have given BT a Milch Cow

The date was August 22 2002. This day showed quite starkly that patents are a liability unless they are exposed to the processes of Public Relations.

It is etched in the minds of British Telecom, the UK communication giant, when it lost its court case against Prodigy. BT was taking Prodigy to court for royalties it claimed it was owed as the inventor of the hyperlink. BT tried to prove that a patent lodged with the US patent office back in 1980 was still valid. The company claims that every US hyperlink was its intellectual property and therefore subject to a licensing fee. If successful, every internet service provider in the US would have been liable to pay BT for the use of the technology.

There is no doubt that patent 4,873,662 was lodged by BT and was a protocol we now recognise as a hyperlink and The Register outlined the technology with a copy of the short abstract about the "Hidden Page" patent.

BT developed the technology itself in the 1970s, applied for the patent in 1980, and received it in 1989. It next stumbled upon the patent during a routine update of its 15,000 global patents in the summer of 2000.

As milch cows go, being the 'owner' of hyperlink technology does not come better than this but BT fluffed it.

The missing link was that the investment in the patent was lost because its features and benefits were not exposed to those people who could translate it into financial return.

Bearing in mind the cost of gaining a patent both in time and financial cost, there will have been considerable internal communication inside BT about this spiffing idea. What was lacking was the process of Public Relations.

Public Relations has a role in exploring the values inherent in a brief such as ideas and products (tangible and intangible assets). It reviews the landscape for the brief in a range of social and cultural contexts. Its practice includes the planning and execution of engagement (internal as well as external) among publics such that they relate these value to their knowledge, understanding and interests. In turn, such publics can (through their own public relations processes) spread the values to a wider public.

The difference between communication and Public Relations becomes clear in this example. Creating relationships with publics, goes beyond (but may include) the communications processes required but it is in the relationship management process that we see the role of Public Relations at its most effective.

What this case shows is that the management of public relations in BT, that is the process of empowering BT employees with PR skills or engagement of PR professionals in support of employee activities, was missing.

Public Relations is a process of relationship management and at its most effective has to be a management practice as ubiquitous as financial management for companies to be successful.

This approach is essential for a modern company.

In the first instance, it is the means by which productivity is enhanced, especially among those valuable employees whose jobs cannot be automated. Employees whose role it is to create new ideas, products, processes and services are better deployed when added value is levered from their work through effective relationships that engage colleagues in their exploitation.

This relationship value model is the means by which an organisation can have and sustain unique competitive advantage because its develops a capability in which teams of people with a common interests are engaged in adding value throughout the organisation and beyond.

Finally, the application of the public relations process offers high value returns because this is the process that speeds product to market.

Picture: Milch Cow

Flopsy Failed Again

The Times reports that British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown's eight-year crusade to boost Britain’s productivity performance suffered another heavy blow yesterday when official figures showed that growth in productivity collapsed to zero in the third quarter. It was an announcement that follows on from my last post (Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail). Flopsy failed again.

Contrast this with Federal Reserve statement on Dec. 13 which reports "robust underlying growth in productivity" alongside a view that productivity may be evidence supporting Alan Greenspan's speculation about a new economic paradigm.

The simple fact is that HM Treasury is so locked into its narrow view on money that it cannot understand the value of intangibles.

Whereas, in the USA, there is a value attributed to enterprise, initiative and wealth creation, the present British Government does not give credence to culture and especially the culture of of wealth creation.

Like Marxists governments before them, New Labour has attempted to put a glossy spin on centralisation and control with a pretense common good only to be found out by the reality that wealth extends beyond the factory and producer to the enterprising and visionary.

In a global, knowledge rich and citizen enfranchised era this will not do. There is a need for a new era of economic management based on how this new franchise where relationships lever value from tangible and intangible assets.

Picture: économie-finance

Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail

China upped its numbers on the growth of its economy today. Including Hong Kong's wealth, it is now on the fourth largest economy.

This is an issue for the UK – it just went down to fifth.

How soon Germany, Japan and .....the USA? What are the checks and balances? As long as the USA can fund its debt.... the debate continues but an economy, a population and a social structure of such huge influence affects us all.

Sir Digby Jones, director general of the CBI, reaction to the news was to call on companies in the UK to see China's growth as an opportunity. "It has always been a matter of when, not if, the Chinese economy will eventually eclipse the UK's in size," he said. "These figures for growth in 2004 highlight just how rapidly China is growing and what an amazing success story it is now becoming."

Opportunity? Yes. Inevitable? no.

Sir Digby, you accepted failure with such acquiescence, it is time you retired. The CBI is a rabbit held in the headlight of competition. It is not a matter of when it is a matter of competitive competence.

So now it is time to do something about it.

Here is a hint on how this can be done by Bradford Johnson, James Manyika, and Lareina Yee in the McKinsey Quarterly Review.

In reporting the latest research, they observe:

• As more 21st-century companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with other companies, their customers, and their suppliers.

• Thus the traditional organization, where a few top managers coordinate the pyramid below them, is being upended.

• Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can't be automated is the next great performance challenge—and the stakes are high.

• Companies that get it right will build complex talent-based competitive advantages that competitors won’t be able to duplicate easily—if at all.

So,Confederation of Business and Industry, get to work on the new model. Get shot of the inconsequential thinking on Corporate Reporting and put something robust in its place.

Start looking as value in the round instead rigged Balance Sheet, P&L and pretence at 'Stakeholder management'.

To begin with managers have to take a different view of their organisations and how they are run and this is a Public Relations process (by what ever name you want to call it) I don't care what it is called and I accept that, based on the findings of the recent CIPR study, you can be forgiven in believing PR is event and party planning (that is what the report's statistics say).

We have to be focused on creating wealth in both broad terms (tangible and intangible assets – including relationship assets) and on the relationship mechanisms that lever wealth from such assets.

It is no longer enough for people with ideas about using the public relations process to create wealth to call out in the dark. Now is the time to act.

Floppy eared government has to get realistic. It is using pathetic measures to find out how to compete in the real world. To measure the intangible productivity of the country it uses measures of references to academic papers. This is sheer buffoonery. It takes months, even years to get papers published in many disciplines including the social sciences in the UK. It measures the number of patents applied for. It takes years to get a patent accepted and few reflect the capabilities of organisations to create wealth from Intellectual Properties. Indeed, the Treasury compounds this nonsense by allowing patents to be included as assets when really they are costs (it is the application of patents to process and relationships with consumers to lever wealth from patents that is the asset). It measures the proportion of enterprises with co-operation arrangements on technological innovation activities with other enterprises or institutions and yet uses no measure of the effectiveness of relationship creation, sustenance and development. It looks at the proportion of sales accounted for by new or improved products and yet has cotonttail views on how the relationship value is achieved.

With massive increases in student numbers, it hopes that first degrees are going to show that it is increasing the level of qualification of the workforce and yet knows that most students spend 30 hours each week working their way through college instead of studying and that many universities are driven by numbers and not quality of qualification.

The Research Institutions are no less guilty. Research into relationship management does not exist. Even though The Secretary of State says: companies need "successful relationships with a wide range of other stakeholders" because they "are important assets, crucial to stable, long-term performance and shareholder value.” research funding in Public Relations is at best a lettuce leaf hiding the ineffectual progress of academic study and is none existent among PR academics.

Time to get a grip. Time for new thinking and, perhaps time to get really competitive.

Perhaps the new Conservative leader thinks he has solutions. Some are not too sure. One asks if his approach is going to continue to be control freak competitiveness or real and tangible effort to tackle our need to realise value from our skills, our ability to lever wealth.

Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, The CBI, UK Government and Academia.

Picture: The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

Get Niche - end ubiquity

The last six posts to this blog cover a number thoughts on the application of Public Relations from a corporate perspective.

What is becoming obvious is that there is an emerging need for a wide range of expert communications skills across a wide range of communications channels and consultancy with the knowledge and expertise to be able to manage and deploy these channels and skills.

Furthermore, the monoculture and ubiquitous press relations model is becoming niche and we are all going to have to work with niche channels for communication henceforth.

Not all such channels are new (take, for example wiki's) it is just that their day has come.

Corporations are learning a lot rom blogs. It is showing them the future, a very interactive future and one that needs a shift change in the PR profession to match.

Picture: Ubiquity Oliver Clements

PR Communications Channels

The nature of people is that they are more aware and remember messages when there is a range of stimuli about them.

As a strong advocate of 'multi touch' public relations, I have come across a range of products that can be used to extend the range of media channels available for PR practice.

We are all aware of the press, radio, TV, leaflets, posters, direct mail and that traditional stuff. Today, there is a further 19 channels for communication in use by a very high proportion of the public.

The Internet offers a wider range of communication channels, for most practitioners, these are still limited to PC's and laptops.

But, in addition to computers, the Internet is used on other devices such as cell phones, digital and satellite radio and TV.

There are other devices that use the Internet too. Many of those gaming machines used by younger brothers are Internet enabled devices too.

All these devices ofer a range of communications channels. These channels can mix and match in variety of ways.

Some channels are quite familiar and include email, instant messaging, web sites, Usenet, discussion lists, weblogs (blogs), Mobile Blogging, wikis, RSS and there is more information about them on at Wikipedia which is more than just a source of encyclopaedic knowledge, it is an example open source citizen maintained and interactive connectivity. The virtual environments like Second Life also provide communications channels and also have commercial application.

For practitioners who want to make a personal link, there is SMS, voicemail, mobile audio and mobile video and content designed for Blackberrys and PDAs.

So much for the past. Now we are seeing new developments that are even more useful.

We can use our imagination on how to use a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios, or it could be used as an intelligent leaflets and much more.

What about interactive posters? When a camera phone user takes a picture of the bill board, they are directed to a website that features real PR content.

In addition to watching movies or football match,there are a number of PR applications for broadband mobile that can make these developments much more interesting fun and engaging because mobile is two way.

Can celebrity or political campaigning do without Vlogs? How cool can a creative PR make vlogging? There are other services to help too.

Then there is on-line broadcasting with podcasts. Here is a way for providing content for iPods and CD's and, of course online audio content.

Interactive television has long way to go too. Imagine people pulling PR messages from the push medium of TV?

Then, there is the capability to use gaming, such as X-box to interact with your communities.

And this leads us to imagine how many new communications channels are out there and the ability to integrate these many technologies into PR techniques.

Of course, you may want to keep an eye on what is happening on-line and can build your own monitoring and research resource using Alexa or Rollyo.

Picture: Communication by Isabelle Cardinal

Adaptive PR Strategy Process

I have been working on the application of the relationship value model. The extent to which public relations has become a very broad discipline using a wide range of relationship and communications models calls for a review into models of practice that are available today.

The existing models of practice have been refined of the years but with globalisation, a paradigm shift in social communication, a declining traditional media and the dramatic influence of mobile communication, the practice of PR is changing. The concepts of pyramid management is being replaced, say McKinsey because of a need to gains sustainable competitive advantage.

Organisations have changed dramatically. The move towards weightlessnessopen source (think IBM, Sun, Novell, HP etc) and collaborative/community design, development, production, distribution, marketing and exchange is accelerating fast. There is no escape from the information economy. outsourcing, partnering arrangements with vendors and the significance of

The impact and significance of the individual has changed too. The citizen journalist has considerable power (and whereas the traditional media offers smart and useful finished articles, the on-line journalist is part of a continuing story with untidy nuances). The significance of blogging among stakeholders and internally, the rise of the Wiki, RSS and podcasting are now well in view for implementing Public Relations Strategies.

These developments have significant implications for corporation and their capability for relationship management.

It is the role that Pubic Relations plays in aiding relationship management including areas of practice such as corporate communication, public relations, marketing, internal communication, knowledge management and other areas of relationship activities that now comes under the spotlight.

To be able to be effective, this means there has to significant evolution in Public Relations Planning and Management.

Based on actual consultancy practice, a model has been created for planning and management which both reflects the aims and ambitions of organisations and which is sufficiently flexible that it can respond to changing environments.

This process is not designed for the planning of a public relations campaign although the planning of such campaigns without reference to the model would be counter productive. It does, however, offer a capability to implement individual campaigns into the wider strategic management objective.

The process draws on a range of management disciplines and adds existing literature of the subject.

In preparing a plan for Public Relations, there is a very strong case for involvement of both internal and external constituents and there are a number of tools that are applicable.

The essence of the PRPM programme takes the corporate view of the organisation, and reviews the vision and role of the organisation (an example). This vision and and associated commentary about what an organisation does provides the basis for developing concepts of social groups.

There are a number of methodologies for identifying social groups (publics and stakeholders). The use of visualisation with focus groups is one such methodology create a map of those social groups (business, government, and other publics) affected by what the organisation does. The key element in this process is to identify relative significance of stakeholders to the vision of the organisation.

From this list of groups, the next part of the process identifies how the organisation would meet its mission through interaction with the publics. In the first instance considerable research into these publics is needed. In particular the explicit interests of the publics, the explicit interests of these publics related to the organisation are essential. In addition the perspectives that such interests have from the publics' viewpoint is needed together with the perspectives for the same interests from the organisations' viewpoint. This shows up areas of dissonance between the organisation and its publics.

Further research will examine the publics from their social perspectives of where and when they are most likely to be interactive, the channels for communication that most apply in such circumstances.

From here the process examines each public in the light of the organisation's mission. In most cases this requires interpretation of the mission statement in terms of organisation/stakeholder aspirations and the question asked is 'how each of the elements of the mission can apply to each public'. This can be expressed in terms of what is needed to reduce dissonance and bring about convergent between the parties and is expressed as SMART objectives for each group.

From there the plan evolves into relationship strategies and thence to creative and operational tactics with time and resource budgets implemented using project management software. In implementing strategies and tactics a range of internal and external groups will be affected and here there is a good case for application of intranet based information and discussion (blogs and wiki's are helpful here).

The plan requires daily monitoring of news coverage and on-line comment both national and international using an on-line services and an news/evaluation filter to generate a rapid report and analysis by 0700 each day for dissemination to internal staff and external enterprise partners.

Monthly reporting, quarterly reviews are recommended and the plan should be be recast annually. The advantage of using SMART objectives is that the evaluation of each strategy was relatively simple to implement.

With this sort of planning, the process can aid response to issues and crisis where the real problem is often a need to create convergence between the organisation and the issue public/s.

More about this process will come in due course.

This process is the application of the relationship value model in practice.

In this model, the whole process is adaptive. From vision and mission to the resolution of dissonance, the plan calls for a meeting of interests, including involvement for change throughout the organisation to make the organisation adapt to meet its public's needs and aspirations.

In a socially interactive and global world there is no other way organisations can gain a competitive advantage.

Picture: Raytracer

public relations
strategy
management

Drucker meets Grunig

Are Grunig's comments about Public Relations being a management function misplaced as far as the United Kingdom is concerned?

Recently elevated to Charter status and claiming to add £3.4 billion to the UK economy, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations claiming to represent the interests of its 8000 members does not seem to have got the message.

The Institute provides a long list of case studies for the delectation of its members through its web site.

Not much of this corpus has the basics that would be recognised by the late Professor Drucker. "As Columbus discovered America, Drucker discovered management" claimed Ken Witty, the producer of the TV documentary of this icon of management. Ambling through the Institutes case studies he would not recognise any of them as contributing to management.

Drucker invented Management By Objectives and, the nearest the CIPR studies comes to acknowledging the great man, many of the studies have 'objectives'.

But none of them follow through. It was Drucker who said Objectives should be SMART:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Realistic, and

• Time-related.

It is here where the case studies fall down.

For the most part, most fail because the objectives are not specific as to what measurable means. In turn they may or may not be achievable or realistic.

The extent to which PR can claim to be a management practice is dependent on its acceptance of management disciplines.

PR, one might see from these case studies, is not manageable and can not be included in the pantheon of management if Drucker is to believed. It was he who said 'If you can't measure it, You can't manage it'.

Peter Drucker pointed out in the 1970s that effectiveness was 'doing right things, while efficiency was doing things right'.

It would seem that PR falls into the first category. As John Naisbitt noted and the CIPR demonstrates "We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge."

Where PR might start to 'do things right' also comes from Drucker who said “Knowledge is power. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not hiding it.”

In practice we see individuals and coalitions of people with knowledge. They are not powerful. It is only when knowledge goes through a process that makes knowledge productive. In its communications role, Public Relations facilitates transmission. But it is only when this process has the objective of making knowledge productive that it has any claim as a management process.

If this is true then we might re-asses the CIPR corpus as demonstrating a capability as a management practice.

Making knowledge productive has to be SMART and is a Public Relations process:

• Specifically to evoke or provoke response to an issue (or issues)

• Measurably resolving issues between the parties (organisation/ publics)

• Achieved to the extent of resolving dissonance (and no more)

• Realistically to the extent that interactive evocation or provocation is optimised (not maximised)

• Time-related to the extent that knowledge can be evocative or provocative.

Here we can see and measure how relationships can facilitate the transmission of information to make it productive.

In applying such a test to the case studies some of them can be identified as management processes. This is not to excuse the corpus because the SMART elements are not sufficiently explicit.

In applying such a test, one might ask about other mechanisms for measurement. One such would include Return on Investment. There are two elements at work here. One is the immediate return on the process and the other is the long term asset value.

The immediate return is a matter of identifying the value ascribed in meeting the SMART objective (financial or intangible) and the cost of implementation (human resource and facilities applied). It would be simple if the cost of communication and interaction could be identified. Here we have a dilemma. The cost of maintaining, for example, a free media is a difficult assessment and takes us along a path examining the value of cultures and economic infrastructure. Communication in the USA is cheaper than in Africa for both cultural and economic reasons. Closer to home examples include the differing cost of interaction with the elderly or socially or economically deprived.

The asset impact is of significance because the capability to interact with knowledge has undergone a transformation. Here we may see that this capability has enhance the 'knowledge inventory' of an organisation because 'transmitting information to make it productive' can be achieved at a lower human or material cost.

Both the immediate and asset returns can be measured, in part, in financial terms but frequently this is only part of the story. The intangible value is often very different.

True ROI measures are hard to come by.

There is another way. Public Relations is a cultural activity. The influence of every PR campaign has an effect on culture. But this is for another day.

Picture: The Instruments of Knowledge 1994, Oil on canvas, 66 x 84 cm, Sydney, Private collection Ralph Heimans

Aha! Neville Hobson, you asked how I square my views on PR with membership of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations' definition. Well, luckily, I have already covered this in a previous post.

I still hold that PR levers wealth and explain here....

The debate about public relations being about relationships and relationship management is even more important and goes back 30 years. There are a couple of problems about how to define an organisation and how to define relationships.

In exploring these concepts we discover that there are values involved and that these values are the stuff of relationships and are the means by which organisations can exist. The research also shows how organisations are not really a hierarchy (management pyramid) but are made up of groups of people with (to a greater or lesser degree) convergent interests.

Public relations in its role of facilitating relationships allows values to be exchanged and built upon.

But let me take you into a lecture theatre with a couple of hundred people in the audience.

In trying to explain relationships I take two exquisite roses with me and a $50 note and after some initial comments hand out one rose to a pretty girl half way up the auditorium.

What I have done is to create a relationship with the pretty girl. She blushes. But why?

All I have done is give here a rose, a token.

But she attaches a whole lot of values to a rose. It is symbol of romance and has all manner of connotations. The relationship, fleetingly, blossoms.

The audience looks on and each of them in turn attaches values to the rose and observe the exchange and using their interpretation of this action come up with a whole range of conjecture about this turn of events.

I then introduce my wife who is sitting at the front and give her the other rose and she to has a number of values she attributes to the rose and in this circumstance the rose represents atonement. Of course, at another time and in different circumstances, a rose could represent a moment of great romanticism, but not on this occasion.

I then take the $50 bill. It would buy 20 roses. I give it to another pretty girl... Not surprisingly she takes offence and refuses to accept the money.

Relationships are created in an environment (channel if you will) using the exchange of tokens and where there are common values and common understanding of those values, relationships can blossom.

This is the job of public relations. It entails understanding the environment, identifying tokens that have common values and offering those tokens to create relationships from which new values can spring.

And, to put all of this into context, the rose I take into the lecture theatre is really just a dead stick. It is our culture that gives us all the values we attach to a rose.

So relationships are important and so is the cultural context. Relationships both create organisations and provide the environment, culture and context for survival.

We see expressions of brand values change and morph in the bloshphere just as much, if not more so than the lecture theatre. It happens all the time but always in context. Indeed the fulsome hyper-linking of the bloggersphere and the dynamic of wiki's are the classic case of culture and context building. In these cultures value is being created and even money (which is only a metaphor for value) is being made.

PR at its best is multi-touch. It is evidenced in coverage on TV, radio, the press, magazines, web sites, blogs, wiki's, podcasts and mobile communication and at the water cooler. By enjoining conversations in these channels and by being in tune with the culture of our publics through relevant channels we influence the values held by them and progressively create relationships that shape opinion and values.

Just look at how this works in the connected world. We seek information and build links between the people who provide it for us. In blogging we do it with blogrols; hyperlinks and engagement.

But.... unlike most people, the best practitioners have, or know people who can, identify the stakeholders, the objectives, the strategies and tactics most applicable to gain positive outcomes. We use the boutiques to help implementation and we monitor our effectiveness.

Practiced at its best, this is a management discipline. It is the only management discipline that is optimised to do all these things. Accountants can't do this, advertisers can only work on the fringes, the marketer has to narrower view. Human resource managers are hidebound by the (these days fractioning – remember Neville Hobson's comments about BA food in his recent podcast?) walls of the organisation. It is only public relations that has the breadth of understanding and skill that can do all that is needed.

So we can work in the cultures and among the publics to engage them in development of their values and appreciation of our point of view effectively and with better results than all other management disciplines.

We create the space where value can accrue and offer the knowledge by which value can be acquired.

Now... I accept that this is a utopian view of PR as practiced. It is far wider than most common practice – much of which is boutique work like media relations - but it is public relations.

I hope I have been more convincing about PR levering wealth. It is a bold jump for the profession but one that is well worth making.

Neville added another comment and said this “touches on the reputation of PR in eyes of others and we don't get support from outside the profession for the view.” Well, more fool us.

He suggested that we loose our licence at a time when 'anyone can communicate' and the adder of value is dispersed. But more fool us for not developing and using capability to influence the agenda.

I agreed that the 'change required in PR isn't inevitable. Because it is up to the practitioners to be part of the change otherwise they will be irrelevant and therefore cannot add value.'

But what is in a name? If the PR industry does not do it, someone will and if not us then more fool us.

So, I hold by my precept that public relations is the management practice that levers wealth. And, potentially is the only such practice available to do so.

I will say this: it is only now, with the engagement that has become so evident because of blogs and wiki's that this idea can have traction.

Our era of global engagement is the one that provides the evidence that engagement through relationships add value. It allows us to see how intangible relationships and intangible assets open the way for companies to design, develop make and sell goods and services and make profits.

We can be, if we choose to be, at the heart of this process.

Else we are but fools.

Picture: “The fool doth think himself wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” As You Like It Shakespeare

Glittering Opportunity for PR

In listening to Hobson and Holtz discussing the future of PR last Sunday, we heard a classic example of expertise trying to think through changes taking place in society.

It was interesting, valuable and a good listen. I was also gratified to be included in this podcast. Like a lot of PR this is grounded in practice, and advanced practice at that. This is not empirical research and, with the greatest of respect to messrs Hobson and Holz, showed that we have to create a better research base to give practitioners the authority among dominant coalitions.

It was a surprise to find that Brendon Hodgson was given so much air time. This is incomplete thinking. In addition, they were critical of the Hodgson timescale. They should know that agencies take a very long time to get the message and are right to point out the pacing of the predictions.

But back to the main issues.

First we need to identify what an organisation is. The triangle (empirical/semantic) structure of an organisation is not representative of the reality. The dominant coalition, as we know it morphs and changes.

We all have experience of the decisions in companies being driven from a range of internal groups and this influence does affect the person we recognise as a CEO who is the focus for such power shifts.

Organisations have presence in cultures. For example in the culture of computing technology organisations like IBM and Microsoft have a powerful influence on the culture.

As people in cultures gain a voice, they change the cultural landscape which in turn has an effect on the organisations whose being is dependent on the culture.

We can test this hypothesis using media coverage as a metaphorical representation of culture. In this coverage there are concepts encompassing a range of cultures. But, if you look at the concepts that apply to, say, Madonna, there are few in common with, say, banking. These are two separate cultures.

Today, with wider communication, values can be created through a broad interaction of many people. Stalin can no longer rule. If ever there was evidence for this today, modern day China is an example. These cultural values are very importnat if we seek to engage with publics.

This means we need to be competent with the tools of communication and Dan York's contribution was absolutely right. There is some experience in how to manage this.

In summary, the podcast suggested:

Whether or not called public relations, new, more advanced yet practical and cost effective methodologies are emerging and are long overdue. They are knowledge based. Within the existing profession we can embrace them. They will continue to emerge because there is massive demand for public relations development. It will be a painful process but most of what is lost can be brought back and much is new and we do not have to give it away.

While nearly every other form of commercial activity has changed beyond recognition, the practice of public relations has remained almost static. Press release writing, press list building, issuing of press releases and terrestrial event management is still the bigger part of PR practice. It cannot long remain this way.

PR practitioners have a glittering opportunity if members seek knowledge, are more professional and get organised to compete. There is yet time to catch up but I fear there is not the will.

I can but agree. They were my words to the CIPR annual conference in 1995.

Then I was projecting into the future today I am frustrated that so few of my PR Colleagues still don't understand a decade later.

Picture: By

John Brown  "Being alone is being away from those who understand you."

The future of PR in a Word

For Immediate Release, The Hobson Holtz bi weekly podcast will be talking about the future of PR this week.

It will be interesting to see how far they are prepared to go.

The social media tools like blogs, podcasts, wiki's SMS, mobile PR and the rest are a tempting finishing point and yet they are only tools.

The future of PR can be much bigger. If one believes, as I do, that the practice of PR adds value (a comment made by Shel in his Thanksgiving podcasts #88), then the future of PR as the management function that adds value and creates wealth is bright.

If one believes, as I do, that the creation of wealth from tangible and intangible assets is through relationships between organisations and people, then this is our future.

It does mean that a lot of people in the public relations sector will need to go back to school. It means there will be a tussle between PR and other management and academic disciplines such as accounting and economics.

Back to the tools. The inevitability of social media tools is that they become pervasive in the delivery of television, radio, the press and the web and other communication channels. In turn this means that value will be driven by these developments.

The tools will deliver the capability but without PR, all this is noise for the ill prepared corporation (government and other groups). While the changes in technology are inevitable, organisations will loose the opportunity to deliver products and services. They will not be able thereby to create values including profits unless they can see how public relations delivers value and wealth.

It is not inevitable that this is the future of PR. Far too many people in the business do not want us to go down this route. Its complicated, requires education investment in our own futures and is much wider than most PR practice. The PR industry missed the opportunity that the web offered way back in the '90s and has been playing catch up with IT departments since but that was small beer by comparison with being involved wealth creation.

The future of PR could be missed by the PR industry – what is in a name?

Will Hobson Holtz miss the big picture? Tune in and find out.

Picture “I lost myself in abstract meditations” Dale Chihuly, Sea Form 1985

Journalist Unhinged by the Internet

I am staggered that a journalists should be unhinged by falsehoods in cyberspace. John Seigenthaler writes in USA Today that he has “no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious "biography" that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia.” He then rants on about how wicked Wikipedia is for not knowing who done it.

This is a simple 'told you so' post. In 1995, I said it outloud, then in 1998, then in 2000 and again in 2001 and have lectured about it since then all over the world.

The Internet has agency. It can change your messages.

Just like that guy in the pub can be beastly so too can the Internet. But it has reach, a long memory and people as well as machines to do it.

It's common sence to be aware and watch out for it. Its basic PR and if a A former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors has too narrow a view of what PR does .....sob!

Picture: First Amendment Centre

Singing in the bath

Seth Godin is struggling with economics. He is among friends. Economists are too.

Why is it that people do things because they like doing it without gain.

Well, that is not what is happening. What is happening is that people like to add value.

Blogging, like singing in the bath, offer us an opportunity to add to the range of memories we can use in our daily lives. Some of these activities add values to our cultures and the communities within these cultures.

Some of these values, like money, can be used by economists to play with. Other values like singing, can lift the spirits and can be used by people who need a lift. Blogs can offer significant reach for valuable ideas and values.

This is not a hobby economy we are talking about, it is about our culture and that is what the social economy is all about.

Picture: Garden Guides