Getting social media strategies right 2.0

In developing the strategies for online activities, one can look for examples.

I was struck by the attempt by one organisations, (a not for profit industry association). It has an excellent public web site and its members password protected access to a vast array of content essential for effective practice.

It provides email services to members to alert them to up coming events, industry developments, issues, changes in law relating to practice and a range of papers.

Suddenly, the president started a blog.

The proverbial golf course conversation had persuaded him that this was a spiffing idea.

It went against all the tenets of Public Relations. It did not serve the aims of the organisation other than to offer a profile to the president, involve him in a heap of work and, inevitably, the content was sporadic and light weight.

Vision and aims

• The aims of the institution is to be the leading authority and representative of its profession in the UK and a leading light and exampler worldwide.
  
• It has a need to demonstrate its understanding of the issues and interests of its profession and their relevance to legislators, regulators and other institutions.

Backgrounder

• The Institution is a democratic institution with an executive and a representative council, professional standards committee, education arm, regional branches and special interest groups.
• The interests of these groups are of interest to the membership and as well the specific groups involved.
• It is newsworthy from time to time and its initiatives often have wide implications for members, other institutions and interested parties.
• Only about half of practitioners are member of this institution.
• It has a churn of membership that is unhelpful and seems to have reached a ceiling in it potential to expand.
• Unlike the similar counterparts in associated professions, its voice and influence is comparatively small.
• It has capability to influence industry affairs, enforce ethical practice, influence legislators, gain recognition of its profession in stand alone industry courses in Universities and its ability to attract sponsors in the corridors of power in the legislature and
• Its training programmes and meetings are well attended but few attract the really big hitters in the profession and some areas of practice are not too sure of the value they get.
• Practitioners a long way from London get much less by way of services, partly because there is a London centric bias and partly because of distance issues and partly because of the cost of servicing remote outposts.
• Online its Internet footprint is not huge.

Stakeholders

Yes the stakeholder base includes:

• London and regional member
• World leading experts members
• Latent and aware prospective members, past members and people considering entrance into the profession.
• In addition it has stakeholders such as its global counterparts, akin and associated professional organisations and professional institutions in other sectors too.
• It has governmental publics at the centre and in the regions
• It has issues based publics with common and competing aims and objectives.
• In education and some specialist areas of practice there are other publics.
• Notably, as for all professions there are detractors. In this instance these are vocal and their criticism goes to the heart of members practice and then, of course there is fringe and rouge group with the pretence of being members.

And so the list goes on.

Very diverse and very important stakeholders and the need to be able to asses the relative significance of such publics is quite critical.

Objectives

What then should the Public Relations objectives be? This is, after all a well founded, well informed, reasonable wealthy, well meaning institution servicing and representing over half of the practitioners in the country.

On the basis of the foregoing, would it be 'start a blog'?
Of course not!

The need to lever the value inherent in the organisation is blatantly obvious. Its assets in terms of democracy, organisation, members, knowledge and authority can go a lot further if it opens up and levers value through enhanced transparency.

There can only be one over riding objective.

It has to be the nexus of professional practice.

Strategically this translates into an organisation that provides the means of connection; it needs to be involved in a connected series or group of interests and it should aim to be at the the core or centre of its profession and associated professional institutions.

It needs a plan that extends beyond the annual tenure of a single President but perhaps not more than a couple of years. There has to be a time element to this effort.
The extent to which this is already archived needs to be evaluated to provide a benchmark by which measurable objectives can be set.

Strategy

The strategy can now be articulated.

Within this strategy the institution's assets need to be exposed with the development of messages for each of its stakeholders delivered through channels for communication that, in themselves, serve the objectives and strategic ambition.

It does not take a brilliant mind to realise that the Internet is going to be pivotal. Indeed, for a democratic organisation shining a light into the decision making corners of the Institution is essential and social media has a significant role here in opening up the democratic process.

The Public Relations practitioner, involved in this process might like to examine a range of tactical approaches. Not being privy to the inner workings of this Institution, it is not reasonable for me to propose tactics. I can list a number that may be considered.

Tactical ideas

The first is an RSS feed on the key pages of the Institution's web site. In addition, it should make available to members a free RSS reader and could extend this facility to other institution members and leading lights (perhaps also adding their web sites to the feed before delivery using one of the RSS fed conversion services)

If the organisation is the nexus of professional practice, the president should be the figurehead at the pinnacle. His public statements will need to reflect the most important issue and he should take a statesman like posture. Long term, authoritative, representative of the best and, form time to time damning of the worst.
Certainly not a blog. It is too frequent, to personal and too tactical. Perhaps a monthly podcast to members. Occasionally a no holds bared podcast interview by a leading journalist. Sometimes a joint podcast with counterparts of other leading institutions. Such podcasts to be made available in broadcast quality for distribution worldwide to off-line, online, media both for online and broadcast distribution.

There would have to be a capability for members and, separately, the public, to comment on the content with an authoritative and considered response.

Podcasts with associated wiki's of the executive and council meetings are essential. Easy to do and including the working papers, comments and considerations broadcast to members. With wikis, it is possible to comment and to see how the executive develops responses to issues.
An alternative would be a Second Life gallery (like the House of Commons) to observe proceedings and may be interactive chat to council members during voice/video streamed meetings.

The special interests groups should also have wiki's to develop plans accept papers, comment and criticise with regular Skypcast interactive meetings (may be even in Second Life meetings – or both).

Each of the Interest groups could have member blogs to open up their considerations to the range of institutions they interact with.

There is a case for joint, closed (i.e. Only available to members of the institutions – think global here folks - involved) blogs for members with common interests. Perhaps with an editor providing external reports to all members and public institutions.

In making statements, the Institution needs to target them. They should be issued as press releases (a record of fact) but also posted/pitched to community sites and facilities (from flikr to industry leading bloggers).

On the big issues, issue specific web sites with their own blogs and options for live interaction during meetings and virtual conferences (Skypecast, chat, IM).

News alerts should be available via SMS with the option to see a short statement by a spokesperson on cellular video.

Members like to be involved with members. Virtual networking is a thought and gathering member with common interests such as students, heads of practitioner firms, specialist interest groups would be essential. This needs to be across a wide range of platforms from chat aided Skype conferences to Second Life with associated wiki's included.

An expert wiki is, of course essential, how else might one find expertise or practitioners and much better than typical member lists on the institution's data base because it allows the practitioner to add to his/her entry in the member's (virtual) membership handbook.

Now.... I am not suggesting that traditional newsletters, conferences and meetings should be abandoned. I am suggesting that there should be training to help members understand and use the technologies and I am suggesting that in doing these things that the membership will quite suddenly become social media aware... and is here lies the big opportunity - the members and the institution become very visible and authoritative

Yes... I am warming to this... and getting sore fingers so added contributions will be really cool.

• Can you think of other cool applications for this brain storm of tactical capabilities?
• Can you think of an institution that might like to use such a plan?
• Can we create a template for such institutions?
  

Picture: The Virtual Gallery, by Stephen Peters

Getting social media strategies right.

For some time now we have seen high profile companies open up blogs. Many are just sticking thier neck out.

Some have a large number of internal blogs and make great play about it.

What, one may wonder are the strategies that lie behind this move into social media? It is more than fashion?

The fact is that organisations have an Internet presence.

• They have control over part of it if they have a web site.

• They have influence over part of it because they use email, instant messaging and can acquire hyperlinks from portals and directories and because they interact with organisations that create content on line such as newspapers radio and television.

• They have involvement in some of it when they engage the social media like blogs, usenet, discussion lists and chat.

• But there is a huge part of the Internet presence of organisations where the organisation has no influence. It is the range of web sites, blogs, Usenet, wiki's that talk about the organisation, its aims, ambitions, policies brands and products without interaction with the organisation.

The Internet affects organisations. They cannot escape involvement. For some the web site creates enquiries, sales and interactions that have to be dealt with. Be it email, information from a database, fulfilment or a phone call, the acts of the online constituency will create circumstances which demand attention. Investment in people and procedures because of an online presence is inevitable.

What this means is that most organisations are to some extent involved in online social interactions.

Inevitably, this will cause organisations to think about how the existing investment and online asset can be enhanced and the rise and rise of blogs has focused the mind on what to do next.

For many the first answer is to respond to blogs or write blogs. This shot from the hip is fun only if the organisation wants to get into trouble and grin sheepishly when it all goes wrong.

There is another way. It is to use the practice of public relations which means there is a need for a plan.

For most such a plan will follow a well worn path.

The planner will review the vision of the organisation and explore its current aims. A review of the organisation's constituency, the stakeholders and publics to identify relationships and perception will be critical. It is this landscaping that will allow the organisation to identify how it can create, sustain, maintain and develop relationships in the interest of the organisation. Among these considerations will be the relationships that are influenced by the Internet.

There is, as we know no distinction between Public Relations and online relationships. Public relations is mediated by the Internet as much as internal relations, and board meetings.
This review will by now be shaping Public Relations objectives.

What we see, as we cast our view round the landscape, are a range of relationship disciplines. These will encompass corporate affairs, internal affairs, press, radio, television broadcast media relations, Online media and media online relations, community affairs, web (site) based community relations (both owned sites and third party sites), Corporate Social Responsibility, blog and Usenet relations, Podcast and videocast audiences, email and IM audience relations, Investor relations and all those domains of public relations that makes this profession so interesting.

The extent to which publics (stakeholders) are touched by these disciplines will be cause for further analysis and objectives will be set for each.

We know that, the days when messages targeted for one public could differ from messages for a second public are long gone. Sure the messages need to be highly focused for each public but all publics can see all messages. Control of messages has changed a lot in the last five years.
With such objectives, there is a vast array of communications tools that can be considered for relationship management which can make strategy development quite complex. Knowing what we want to archive for each stakeholder group, development of a coherent methodology for achievement within the timescale inherent in the objectives will be a challenge.

To optimise the outcomes for objectives will, almost inevitably need a multi-touch approach using communications channels tactically.

Development of tactics almost always requires planning against timescales for delivery and delivery times have changed out of all recognition. For example, today, a press release issues in the morning will be in the hands of active publics long before the newsprint version is available to newspaper readers.

All this suggests there is a lot of work to be done before a tactical decision to use a blog can be made by an organisation.

Picture: High Profile Studio

Standing up to minorities with social media

I have just met the mother of Laurie Pycroft (and I quote from the case study in the Social Affairs Unit web site) - a sixteen-year-old from Swindon – who was so appalled by the antics of the animal rights extremists campaigning against the Oxford University animal lab that he decided to stand up to them. Here he tells the story of the founding of Pro-Test - an organisation which is campaigning in support of the Oxford University animal lab.

Here is a case of activism that really caught the public imagination and which put some backbone into both the government and legislature.

Yesterday, The Boston Globe reports how this young man has created a considerable backlash and the story continues.

What is noticeable about this campaign is that it was driven by social media and while not 'classic' in the Public Relations planning and management sense is a social media classic in its own right.

While we see Mega Corps in deep trouble over minority activities on a daily basis, a young man has shown them the way.

From this case study, it is not too difficult to identify the methodological approach.

In this case the landscaping was more social than scientific but testing opinion and building a community, moving from the virtual to the real world and building a community (including a media community) is out of the text book.

Picture: Pravda

Good Research

Public Relations needs good research about the relevance, cost and value of Public Relations tactics.

Using Blogs as a corporate tactic, bearing in minds that this is part of a wider strategy, needs good advice and research and Joe Wikert's recent post alerted me to the work of Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently published this report about blogging and what it entails.

Picture: Fusion Advertising

Blogs Improved Credibility

For BA and Cadbury, here is the news....

New Communications Review report that Cymfony has reported preliminary findings from its survey, Corporate Blogs: Best Practices, which it is has been conducting in partnership with Porter Novelli, According to the early findings, 78% of businesses say their blogs have met their initial goals, citing increased media coverage, improved credibility, increased website traffic and lead generation. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they started blogs because they felt a need to participate in the medium, while 41% were addressing a specific need. And despite their success, 65% feel they don't get enough interaction on their blog.

The discussion in For Immediate Release covered the point rather well, I thought.


And just to aid practitioners who seek to plan for crisis, the Alison Clark issues management chart is available here:


Picture: Tansport Cafe

Thought on Values and Relationships

I want to take the thinking in 'Towards Relationship Management' recently published in the Journal of Communications Management a few stages further.

In relationships management we see that relationships occur when explicit tokens are recognised by actors because they have an understanding of the values associated with the token.

For example, you recognise a rose as a plant, and flower and also recognise it as a social token associated with romance etc. The rose is the token, its description and associations are values.

We know that people associate different values with tokens. A rose grower may have a completely different set of values for a rose compared to a love-lorn student.

Where two people recognise tokens and also have the same or similar values for the token, they are attracted to each other and, as for people so too for organisations and people and organisations.

Some things are metaphors for values. For example, a coin is a metaphor for wealth.

All assets are metaphors for values.

If we imagine an asset, we might imagine our home. Is it the solid tangible asset we believe it to be?

I don't think so. It is a meta pore for a lot of values such as a licence to hold land, a shelter, technologies for making bricks and skills in building and a place to have a social life. It is range of responsibilities such as household costs, cleaning and maintenance. These are the bunch of values that go to make up the so called 'tangible asset'. Your tangible home is really a bunch of intangible values that come together so you can go home to bed.

There are millions of tokens and they have even more values.

My thinking is going this way: As values come together in a nexus of relationships, they form things we understand (both tangible and intangible).

In human terms, we know that people seek out like values that they have in common.

Thus we see a landscape of intangible values forming a terrain of perceived tangible and intangible relationships.

This has interesting consequences for governments and corporations, economies and social constructs.

It is a line of thought that needs deeper research.

Picture: SurealLandscape

PR 1.0 R.I.P

I saw this posts in Crispy News from Dan Geenfield in which he makes this point “Have we reached the point of collapsing the distinction between traditional PR and its new media offspring or mutations (depending on your perspective)? Has PR 2.0 become the new PR 1.0? ....... We are still grappling with the pros and cons of blogging, while we continue doing our day job of generating MSM media, keeping our bosses and clients happy and having a life outside of work.”

What strikes me about New Media is how it adds value.”

I commented on his blog but it is worth considering further.

We invest a lot in press releases.

I was looking at how stories move round the media to update my lecture on Internet moderated PR and it is becoming quite obvious that press releases, one online, move through a range of communications channels such as news agency reports, news aggregators, search engine lists, online newspapers and blogs. It struck me that Radio, TV and print follow through but often hours, days or weeks later.

The eFootprint is significant even for simple activities such as press relations. It is my view that such activity adds to the value of organisations. They add to the 'Digital self'. This is a concept that I explore in some depth here and which identifies how online Public Relations makes a considerable contribution to the value of companies and other organisations.

New Media as added content and coverage in a blog or blogs offers additional deep briefing which enhances a stories potency and offers journalists (including citizen journalists), added opportunities to spin extra content and context (and a wiki to proved even more content is better still). Cross posting adds Google Juice, tagging prompts wider coverage and an RSS feed on the release, blog, wiki, web pages means that some people will come back for more because it is a subject of interest.

Podcasts about releases from authorities in their subject also adds legitimacy and trust.

This means that, in practice, the job of pitching a press story does not stop with a conversation and press release to a journalist. We have many more channels through which we can pitch. Some are indirect (a newspaper) and others are direct (a blog post).

For all these reasons, it seems that the, already significant, investment in a press release is not fully realised without the contribution new media makes.

For something like a doubling of cost, there is the opportunity for many times the benefit.

New Media is a competitive and commercial necessity. If we do not use new media, are we letting the client down? Or, to answer Dan's question, is that we have to use channels for communication. PR 1.0 is dead unless we are prepared to undervalue the client's story.

Picture: PC by Paul

Blogs - a bridge between Academia and Practitioner

For half a century there has been a divide between Public Relations practitioners and their academic counterparts.

One of the effects of PR blogs has been that both sides have begun to hold a conversation. I cite this example from Walter Carl. We are also seeing PR students blogging and are bringing the knowledge they gain from the schools into the practice domain and even more powerful, we are seeing practitioners being critical (in the best sense of the word) of practice evidenced in comment and contribution which brings both research and best practice to the notice of the profession.

There is a long way to go but I see this as being one of the most valuable contributions that Social Media can make to the profession.

Right now, we need more academics commenting publicly and being engaged in the profession that sustains them. We also need practitioners to demand more of academia.

What are the benefits?

The first is that the bloggersphere is part of Continuous Professional Development, is global and open.

Second is that best practice is evident and transparent and worst practice is exposed.

These interactions also show the wide diversity of practice and will accelerate transition from 40 years of press agentry bondage.

Finally, PR practice can reach out to other areas of professional and academic excellence and research and can adopt the best available for the benefit of its members and clients.

A pretty good deal I think.....

Picture: Digital Bridge

The financial logic for Internet presence

For a long time I have been arguing that it is logical to include Internet assets on the ballance sheet.
Sarting at this post and following the links at the bottom of each post takes you through a complete lecture on the subject.
It shows why we need to pay ever more attention to our on-line presence.

It is a pearl awaiting discovery.






Picture: Pearl Oasis

Employees snoop

A long time ago I Chaired, the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission which talked about the five elements that are the nature of the Internet.

Porosity was one.

Today we find out, from a report in The Register that corporate snooping is rife. It is the smallest step from there for information to get into the public domian online.

Nearly a quarter (22 per cent) of UK employees admit to having illegally accessed sensitive data such as salary details from their firms employer's IT systems. More than half (54 per cent) of 2,200 adults polled during a YouGov survey said they'd forgo any scruples to do the same, given half a chance, according to a Microsoft sponsored survey that points to a culture of internal snooping and casual identity theft in offices across Britain.

Wiki's and blogs for E-Bay

IT World reports that EBay is beefing up community-building capabilities on its online auction site to include support for blogs, a new wiki for members to share information and new types of alerts for users to stay on top of sales, the company announced on Wednesday.

The eBay Wiki will let anyone post and edit articles on topics of interest to eBay users. The site, www.ebaywiki.com, looks a lot like a blog, including the capability for visitors to post comments about articles. But unlike a blog, anyone can alter the content of existing posts.

Visitors can browse headlines based on categories including eBay policies, seller tools and specialty sites. Many of the articles posted on the site so far are how-to type articles that might help users learn about how eBay works. JotSpot Inc., a Wiki technology and hosting company, powers the eBay Wiki.

In addition to the wiki, eBay is also now hosting blogs for users. EBay enthusiasts can create blogs that will appear on the blogs.ebay.com Web site. Bloggers can post photos, allow others to comment on their postings and enable RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

The blog site is arranged in two columns: one lists all of the latest postings across all of the blogs and the other links to individual blogs by title. So far, many of the bloggers appear to be written by eBay sellers hoping to draw attention to items for sale.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics supply evaluation data

BuzzMetrics announced today that it is providing TechRepublic weekly data from its index of online consumer discussions about products and services for one of the site's most popular services, the Peer Product Reviews.

The data are culled from millions of public comments, reviews and opinions from thousands of consumer forums, discussions, Usenet groups and blogs, and are automatically structured into two charts that are integrated into the TechRepublic reviews -- the "Buzz Score" and "Slant Score."

The "Buzz Score" measures the volume of online consumer discussion, based on the number of consumer-generated posts in blogs, Internet forums, online discussions and Usenet newsgroups, about each product reviewed. The "Slant Score" tracks the percentage of positive posts for each product among online discussions. Each chart is featured along with commentary from TechRepublic's members, as well as links to discussions, whitepapers and articles about each product.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics' publisher market applications provide data that can be used by advertisers to make informed decisions about when and where to advertise and by media companies interested in the added dimension of consumer-generated media and "buzz." The applications also include category- and issue-specific blog data from the company's BlogPulse.com search engine and analysis portal.

You Read it On-line first

The Times is to put foreign news stories on its website before they appear in the printed paper.

This follows a move by The Guardian, announced last week, that it would post certain foreign and business news stories on the internet first.

Also last week, The Telegraph revealed plans to delay publication of stories online until later in the day to encourage sales of its print product

The response from the PR industry is encouraging.

Acording to Amy Fairbairn at the Public Relations Consultant's Association, there is both the economic background and interest in new media to use new media to meet the challenge. In an Interview for FIR, she made it clear how interested the UK industry is. You can listen to the Interview here.

Beeb Pop

The BBC News website has launched a 'Most Popular Now' page allowing users to gather information about which stories are proving to be most popular.

The New Journalism.

From Journalism.co.uk

The University of Southern California's Online Journalism Review is offering a series of suggestions on how new techniques may improve online reporting.

The site's online journalism wiki highlights strategies that seem to turn the traditional work model of journalism on its head.

It suggests the practice of open-source reporting - the journalist tells readers the topic he or she wishes to investigate, and inviting them to submit leads, sources, ideas and information. The reporter loses any exclusivity.

This second technique - distributed news reporting - relies on readers submitting information themselves into a database of incident reports.

This model is used in examples like citizen photojournalism agencies like Scoopt and Cell Journalist .

RIP Traditional Media

I don't go the whole hog on this but Mediatrack has:

Following on from the AMEC forum last week about “how evaluation fits into the new media climate” the issue of whether traditional media has had its day or not seems to be a thorny one. Whereas some see it as presenting an overwhelming challenge to accepted media evaluation methodology others see it has offering a wealth of opportunity in a rapidly expanding market, the Internet. There’s no doubt in anyone’s minds that the PR model is now severely disrupted and mainstream media is on its way out. In its place we have the new phenomenon of social media, blogging, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and web 2.0 community based sites. Features such as tagging and social book-marking are a huge growth area and heralded as the way forward in producing a more semantic and reliable web. This is powered by the basic human need for immediacy, control and cost. People want information now and they want it for free. The social proof supplied by consumer generated media helps feed this movement.

Picture: Jo Kline

Swindon WiFi

The local government of Swindon announced this week that is to be covered by a wireless Internet network. This could mean its 200,000 residents could log onto the Internet anywhere, and any time within the borough's boundaries.
Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC has adopted the initiative and so there is a big hitter involved. He was reported in the local newspaper, the Swindon Advertiser, last Monday saying that “Swindon has a real opportunity to turn itself into a centre for new media in the digital era.”

This announcement follows an initiative by BT one of our monolithic telecos with a 12 UK cities announced a few weeks ago.

City wide wifi was first introduced to Grand Haven, Michigan in 1994 and according to Yankee Group there are already around 300 municipal wireless projects in the US including San Francisco, so Shel, you may be next.

With such local news, I had a hunt round to find out what advantages people see in municipality wide broadband.

The first obvious advantage is the provision of low-cost solution broadband access to low-income residents.

It can save operational costs by providing broadband connectivity for public-safety such as video surveillance.

Welfare agencies can maintain minute by minute contact with there stakeholders.

It opens up application of mobile wi-fi phones and services like Skype which will be a major cost advantage for many public and private bodies.

City governance cost drop, not least for contact with municipal workers.

Wi-Fi Internet access available to students in the local schools, libraries, and classrooms can be located anywhere in the city to connect to the Internet or school networks.

Workers in the locality like doctors will be able to wear wireless badges to replace pagers.

Depending on bandwidth, there is opportunity for digital radio and video of various kinds.

Then there is entertainment such as gaming devices and other applications.

Many believe the networks will help boost economic development by drawing more people to the city.

Certainly the cost of changing locations drop.

The use of blogs and wiki's for mobile and home workers becomes practical.

Communication such as in-store advertising, local podcast news and community networks are a real options as well.

Picture: Cellular Operations Building

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Where would you invest?

I nearly missed this post by Niall Cook. And it is far too interesting to let slip.

It shows where people go when visiting Hill & Knowlton. Blogs come out on top and Niall asks 'where would you invest'.

I am not sure exactly what he really means. Does he mean where would a company spend promotional money from the trading account or does he mean would you invest in H&K because it has such powerful blog presence.

The answer for sentient investors would, of course be, invest in Hill and Knowlton unless it did not reflect the relevance of this asset on its balance sheet. In which case sell.

The reason I say this is as follows. There is dubious legitimacy for a company to spend cash flow on investments (accumulation of assets) unless it is declared to investors. The reason being that it dilutes earnings. Cash spent on such investment is not available to shareholders on the one hand and and the higher valued shares yield less. PE ratios become meaningless because the full value of the company is understated which deflates price and overstates earnings and H&K understate its online asset as it is. Spending cash on blogging and other social media to exacerbate this under-reporting is close to corporate sin. H&K can get away with this because accountants use keyboards to count beans instead of value and regulators have not 'got it' either.

Creating asset value is a legitimate activity for all companies. One of the least expensive ways of creating assets is on-line. This means that, as long as H&K can recognise that its online presence is an asset, and I come to this below, it can and should raise equity to fund the development of its online presence.

How can I justify such scurrilous talk? Well let me explain.

There is the tangible asset of H&K. Tangible assets (tokens) may include: premises, cash, creditors, equipment, work in progress, stock. Some tangible assets are negative such as debtors.

There are the intangibles such as patents, copyright, trademarks, processes, know-how, know-what, brand values, stakeholders (sometimes, and narrowly called human capital when referring to internal stakeholders). This is the H&K you meet and see in the H&K offices round the world. For many people this id the 'Real self' of H&K.

Neither tangible or intangible assets have any value without relationships. These can be physical, technological, inter-organisational and personal relationships. Relationships require a medium in which to inter-react.

But there is another H&K. It is the H&K “Digital self”. The one that most of us (including clients, vendors and other institutions) know.

This digital self is influenced by on-line actors affecting the organisation. Some actors are technologies, some are organisations and yet others are people (hyper-links, search engine ranking, on-line responses and form filling, email, Instant Messaging, references on other web sites, on-line media content, comment in blogs, wiki's, podcasts and other social media). To be effective, H&K has to invest in properties (IP, processes etc) to give itself access to the benefits available from these actors. Such properties will be technical, some process, some know how.

These investments are assets (that should be declared on the balance sheet) and they facilitate relationships between H&K and its many stakeholders.

As the Internet affects organisations, there is a two way flow of information from the 'Real self' organisation and the 'Digital self' organisation. This is a logistics issue and requires logistics assets to make them work.

This adds a new range of (intangible) assets to the organisation including new processes and original responses to the new circumstance. In addition new relationships are created in new logistical responses are deployed (email, web, Database interactions, Instant Messaging, social media etc).

The organisation is changed by its 'Digital self' Its digital self provides the means by which the organisation can exchange values with stakeholders.

In another era, such assets might have been transport (ships, trains, trucks, etc.) and would be on the balance sheet.

As the 'Digital self' grows through investment and engagement (more hyperlinks and comments – providing search engine 'Google Juice' - for people and organisations interested in corporate values), its digital asset grows and now shareholders need to know how the investment delivers products, services and productivity.

So this is not just an issue of H&K blogging, it is wider than that but it is an investment and separating the investment from trading is important and relevant for investors, regulators and business managers alike.

I single out H&K because of Niall's comment and yet in a country where 10% of all retail sales are online, I suspect that there is a lot of under-reporting going on that is massive in scale.

Social media revs up the pace of change. H&K's web site is by no means a dog, it is at leat in the top quartile worldwide and yet the evidence from the H&K findings shows that its blogs have a particular potency greater than its web site. This has been archived in 18 months (I think Niall first posted on a H&K blog in December 2004).

These assets are potent and are real assets and one expects they will be reported as such. If so, how much PR activity should come off P&L?

Nice thought......

Released from 40 years in bondage

An article in the FT and the steady progress of young people who know more than I do catching me up added to my thinking about values. For the PR industry, like many others, age diversity policies loom.

It all comes down to pensions in the end. Will I be wealthy enough in retirement – then the answer, of course, is no. That is until one looks at the totality of values involved. For my part, I have no intention of retiring. But if I did (when I do), there will be a set of values that will be even more important than the cash value of pension funds. I like teaching and research and will find a niche somewhere. As today it will be the rich relationships with family, friends, neighbours and the interesting books, the adventure of visiting places I have not been able to see during my working life and so forth. Modest exercise will continue with sailing (and winning races against my all too professional sailing daughter), wandering the Wiltshire Downland and achieving a state of grace with an Eden like garden. I will, no doubt, keep tugging at the CIPR beard and dunderhead practitioners who are not prepared to sustain CPD at an advanced level (not that one is suggesting that the CIPR isn't........ummm..... er – six blog posts a month! – trying).

We know from David Snowden, that active brains can remain very active into old age- to the extent that they outperform under 45's; From Sherry Willis and Warner Schaie that oldies can zip up their mental performance ahead of all except children (and keep it too) and we also know that people who have not done loads of different things, and seek the routine slow down long before they collect their fob watch. A career in press agenty might seem quite good, but a career that extends PR to its fullest and widest (corporate affairs, internal comms, investor relations, social media and all those many domains of PR practice) will produce better minds as well as better practitioners.

I know from people in the communities I have lived in that those older than me both contribute and enjoy their social environment. The driest sense of humour in the world belongs to a friend of my 89 year old mother-in-law – and you have to be very quick to follow him. I also know that work colleagues still seek out his opinions and breadth of experience two decades after retirement.

For the Public Relations industry in the UK there is a serious age diversity challenge comming later this year it may be a good idea to see what values they will be recruiting against over the next few months.

Now that PR is wriggling out from under its 40 year bondage in press agentry, it has can work at the 'top table'. This, of course goes well beyond being the Comms Person pontificating/scribbling at the table. It brings relationship management skills to the board, has a broad landscape and argues its corner when more specialist managers hold forth at length about 'our brand values' (who owns them?); our assets (tangible, intangible or relationship assets); our valuable employees (under whose roof?) and our customers (at which point/s in the 'conversation' with the organisation).

Such values are at a premium and are far from the telesales operation that infest the the floors between reception and executive suit of so many PR consultancies.

Picture: Traped

The Scoble Effect

One of the big news items among geekier bloggers is that that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to join PodTech. The reason this is important in Public Relations is that his powerful presence in the bloggersphere has been a real lesson for Public Relations practice.

The right person, right media and right time and above all a frank relationship with readers and internal publics has given him iconic status at Microsoft among its customers and especially among the many Microsoft opinion formers.

Compared to other organisations, this approach has given Microsoft access to market influencers and protected it against restrictive regulators to an extra-ordinary extent.

A more complete explanation (and communication theory) of the Scoble effect is available here.

Social Currency and the Relationship Value Model

For a long time I have been looking at the relationship value model and I want to explore the concept of values we use in interactions as the coinage of social currency.

In examining the significance of relationship in the Relationship Management domain of Public Relations, the theory goes that organisations are not monoliths but the nexus of relationships which merge morph and change from day to day and hour to hour.

These internal relationship are not really internal, it is just that that is where the focus, the nexus, is.

The key is in relationships and these are created and formed when people find values in common and which tickles the deeply embedded motivations that make us human, the Deo Optimo Maximo among social animals. We are genetically programmed to form social groups.

It is worth going back a long way to see what the thinkers had to say in their time and if the realty matched the ruminations.

In 2001, author and broadcaster Douglas Rushkoff explained the currency of values with the expression Social Currency which he explained like this:

When my father was growing up, bubblegum companies competed by offering free trading cards inside their packages. Little pieces cardboard with the images of baseball players proved the most successful, and soon children were buying whole packs of baseball cards with only a single stick of bubble gum. Today, baseball cards are sold without any bubblegum at all.

More importantly, this depth of data allows the card to serve as what I've started to call "social currency." While children can debate the merits of one brand of gum over another for only so long, they can talk endlessly about the players' whose cards they've collected, trade them, or even just peruse one another's collections. See, the cards aren't really ends in themselves; they are the basis for human interaction. Johnny got some new cards, so the other kids come over to see them after school. The cards are social currency.

We think of a medium as the thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I'd argue, are really just forms of ammunition -- something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day.

Content on the Web is no different. Sure, the Internet allows people to post their own content or make their own web sites. But what do most people really do with this opportunity? They share the social currency they have collected through their lives, in the form of Brittney Spears fan sites or collections of illegally gathered MP3's of popular songs. The myth of the Internet -- and one I believed for a long time -- is that most people really want to share the stories of their own lives. The fact that "content is king" proves that they don't. They need images, stories, ideas, and sounds through which they can relate to one another. The only difference between the Internet and its media predecessors is that the user can collect and share social currency in the same environment.

Dynamic and successful people and organisations can make things happen

Nancy Dailey, Ph.D. and Kelly O'Brien offer us further insights

People who can make things happen have one thing in common-social currency. Imperceptible, yet powerful all the same, social currency is like business accounting for goodwill. It's the intangible value earned from the exchange of positive human interactions. Helpful relationships produce social currency. Regardless of your position in the social space at work, your social currency can wield influence and power to make change happen.

So what is social currency? It's the new power tool for today's work world. Technology is pushing interdependence in our organizations faster than we can adapt. People need to mirror the technology: fast, focused, integrated, and web-like in their interactions with co-workers, clients, and vendors. People with social currency can move faster and be more effective because they have established trusted relationships. It1s these relationships that move others to change, to try new things, to explore possibilities.

Here's how it works-The more helpful relationships are, the more information is shared. The more information is shared, the more people feel connected. The more people feel connected, the more they trust the relationship. The more trust people feel, the faster the acceptance of change. That's why this notion of "social currency" is replacing information as a key power driver of change.

Having information by itself is no longer the same as having power. Just think of the number of emails you receive each day (and don't read). Distribution of information in organizations today, at least technically, is fast, focused and integrated. What is missing in organizations is the mechanism to make sense of all the information and for the information to make any difference. Information alone means very little. It's what people do with or about it that matters. That's where social currency comes in -- it attends to the ‘people side' of the equation -- where information gets transformed into knowledge, skill, and action.

Nancy has a number of interesting papers on her site which add to this thinking.

Social Media and Social Currency

In this contribution, they begin to introduce the idea that out modern technologies have a role to play. Perhaps we can explore this a little further with John Clippinger at the Commons Blog who puts some of these currency and values ideas into an Internet context. He sees some values as tags and I paraphrase:

Reputation systems are an especially important aspect of social cooperation because they are attached to an individual and form the basis for whether they can be trusted and accepted. A reputation is really the collection of tags that are assigned to an individual or entity to reflect assessments of their competence or status within a specific social network. Given that individuals play different roles in social networks - they can serve variously as connectors, gatekeepers, truth-tellers and enforcers - reputations are tied to roles within social networks.

It is not difficult to see how important reputation tags are in small traditional societies where once a reputation is acquired, it may be very difficult to change. Honor-based societies depend upon reputation tags as the principal governance mechanism for defining and enforcing a social order. "Honor killings" of a daughter or sister in order to preserve a familiar reputation suggest the power of reputation in Human Nature. Even in online communities, reputation tags are the motivator and governor of behaviors. People take seriously the reputation scores of an eBay seller/buyer, the accumulated scores of a player of online games, or the number of friends and ratings one has in the online social networks of Linkedin, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook, or My Space.

Reputation tags affect an individual or group's ability to participate within and across different networks, thereby becoming the basis for granting/revoking certain privilege and decision rights. Since reputation tags can be measures of competence by a socially credible third party - e.g., religious, educational, financial, political, trade or professional institutions - they play a very powerful role in governing social mobility and enabling/thwarting interactions between different social networks. By providing information about information - who or what it is, where it came from, as well as marking the rights and privileges for accessing, exchanging, altering, or forwarding goods, services and information, tags are the true control points in self-organizing networks.

A social currency is the reputation score an individual or entity acquires in a particular social network that credibly reflects their value in that network. For example, like a monetary currency, the value of a social currency may be set by the demand that an individual in a given social network can command, as in some kind of supply and demand calculation. Yet the calculation may also reflect a more subtle calculation of value based upon peer ratings of performance that cannot be captured in measures of supply and demand.

Different social networks have their own social currencies reflecting their reputation and membership rules. Highly proficient members of these networks - those who know how to truck, barter and exchange - can accumulate their own form of social capital - i.e., favors, obligations, goodwill. In many cases, they can convert one social currency into currencies in other social networks. For example, success in sports is often convertible to success in politics, business and entertainment. Likewise, social currencies accumulated in a business network are generally convertible into the currencies of social standing and political credibility. The more open and diverse a society is, the greater possibility for social mobility - something rarely possible in closed, traditional societies.

Coming more up-to-date with comments from Earl Mardle we see how Social Media, Social Currency and relationship management are beginning to play out and how practitioners think about their future:

Charlie Todd, 27, posts to video sites because he enjoys "the ability for your users to rate and comment on your work," he said. He also posts because he doesn't have the server space or bandwidth to host memory-intensive video. Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a New York-based improvisational comedy troupe that organizes heavily planned "missions" around the city to make people laugh, and then posts the results on the different video Web sites. They garner high ratings in the process.

Higher ratings means more views, which push the videos onto the front pages of the sites, which then guarantees more views. If it's good, it stays on the home page, said Arik Czerniak, CEO of Metacafe. At Metacafe, a top video could get half a million views in 24 hours. "You don't need to get lucky ... because we've streamlined the viral process, if something is good it will be noticed by the community. You don't need to have 1,000 people on your mailing list," he said.

The fundamental question is why this is so much better than traditional media fare and an answer is that it lets us do something that has been smacked out of our lives for too long, it lets US Play. Call me a Philistine if you like, but there are no redeeming social or humanitarian values to be gained from "Everybody Loves Raymond" and its ilk, none. Numa Numa, or the Brokeback Mountain trailer for Back to the Future or many of the hard case snippets on YouTube are no better as great art, nor any worse; but they are great generators of social currency, both directly for their creators and for those who email the links to their mates or blog about them or talk about them over the water cooler.

The discussion has come full circle and can see a commercial manifestation in the interview with Russ Klein, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King Corporation, did for Shel Holtz this week 'on a theme he introduced called “social currency” - an evolution of word-of-mouth into a real-time and ongoing collective conversation in the marketplace'.

We now need to understand the coinage of social currency, those values that are so critical in relationships which I have touched on before.

Picture: McWhite

Issues management

Keith Jackson is always worth reading and his views on Issues Management and the resources he selects are helpful for practitioners. In this case, www.issuesmanagement.org. offers some useful ideas but I do have some problems with many practitioner's views about Issues Management. I would add three thoughts to the article.

The first is that all issues are of their nature negative. This is not true some are great opportunities and need to treated with the same care and attention.

Second is the difference between Issues and Crisis. Issues are commonplace and, by degree, the daily process of management. Crisis is a threat to survival.

Third is that there is never and issue which has a single stakeholder response. There is always a need to map and prioritise the range of publics that influence issues both internal and external.

If this sounds a bit like normal PR practice, then its about right.

Picture: Bubblegum crisis

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Clarity made simple

I have just been working on how I can make The Clarity Concept, which Jon White Peter Prowse Dejan Verčič and I have been working at for longer than I care to remember, more accesible to practitioners.

It is a way that Public Relations practitioners can develop a 360 degree view of the publics that are key to organisations.

Using Gliffy, the free counterpart to Visio and it was not too difficult at all.

The Times to launch online TV service

News and jobs for journalists :: The Times to launch online TV service: "According to The Times, the service, called Times TV, will initially consist of news clips from third-party providers and will launch this week.

Well, we also have TV going into Radio:

Channel 4 launches internet radio service
Television broadcaster unveils plans to diversify into radio and take advantage of unregulated area

The Times reports that the initiative was announced by Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, News Corp's British newspaper wing, as part of a plan to 'triple our page impressions in the next few years for Times Online'.

In May, Times Online generated 59.9 million page impressions. The newspaper plans to expand the service with the online TV wing by encouraging readers to contribute their own news content to the service.

According to News International, which also owns The Sun, The Times' online revenue has risen 45 per cent year on year. Much of this is attributable to its mobile phone quizzes, puzzles and crosswords service."

Emotions Are Contagious!

Emotions Are Contagious!

In a research study titled 'Emotional Contagion', scientists revealed that emotions can be transmitted to subsequent receivers as fast as the blink of the eye, according to a study findings published in The Washington Post.

Elaine Hatfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and co-author of the study, says that emotions whether positive or negative are passed from person to person without even the notice of the receiver.

John T. Cacioppo, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago says that the people who are more expressive spread their emotions more powerfully and the ones who are calm on outside but respond strongly to emotional events are most susceptible."

How do we rank media for campaigns?

In communication management there is a need to be able to identify media relevant and effective for communication.

Having a methodology that could test each medium for its influence over an issue/brand, its importance to the success of the issues management/brand and its empathy with the issue/brand seems like a good idea.

Using the Publigram software, it came out quite well.

I am open to adding other media to this list.

Telephone

Mobile voice

Mail

RSS & RSS optimisation

Search engine optimisation

Own site

SMS

Email

Search engines

Press Radio and TV advertising

Media relations

Brochures

VoIP

Blogs

Bloggers

Chat

Other web sites/portals

Instant Messenger

Usenet

Direct Mail

Exhibitions

Conferences

Point of sale

Tele-sales

Discussion lists

Hurry up! Hurry up - I haven't got all minute - net revenues are escaping

The PR industry should already have 10% of the online budgets. In the UK this means £140 million last year and nearly £200 million this year. It should be taking a bigger proportion every month as new media takes hold. This represents 20% of the total turnover of the UK PR industry if the CIPR research is to be believed. Tony Bradley, no doubt has development of this market as a big industry sector priority.

For the USA, Duncan Riley has posted interesting figures about growth in online advertising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report that Internet advertising revenues reached a new record of $3.9 billion for the first quarter of 2006.

But, back to the UK, the Online Marketing Show opens in a couple of days time. Colin Williams speaking about the show told me yesterday that pre-registered attendance figures are up 45% over last year.

With £1.4bn spent last year, online has overtaken radio, consumer and outdoor advertising and the Interactive Advertising Bureau's goal to create a billion-pound medium by 2006 is met. It it is now talking about doubling its target to overtake newspaper advertising, currently worth around £1.9bn in the UK.

The Online Marketing pre-show survey, published two weeks ago, showed that over 15% of respondents said that they now spend more than 75% of their marketing budget online, up 10% from last year. Overall 23% marketers spend more than half of their budget online, compared to only 9% in last year.

Yes, it is time to take a lot of this budget.

'New Mobile Services' from Portio Research identified that as many as 50% of European mobile users are interested in mobile TV and are prepared to pay on average €10 for 'all you can eat TV' - the potential market, especially in Europe, is huge; Video calling is in its infancy with only 6% having used it, but over 60% want to and are prepared to pay for it; Mobile advertising is a big turn off for most with over 65% of respondents expressing a zero tolerance.

Meantime, Sarah Lelic reports in the Guardian that Vodafone, the mobile operator last week unveiled the UK's biggest ever corporate loss, with pre-tax losses at the group hitting £14.9bn for 2005. Market saturation and big write downs are the cause and competition is hotting up. Europe's first "quadruple play" mobile phone service, offering its customers mobile, fixed line, voice over IP and broadband all bundled together with one bill is promised from Orange, another mobile operator.

Channel 4, the TV channel is moving into radio. They say:

“Promising a fresh approach to radio programming, Channel 4 Radio has already begun commissioning a range of innovative audio content. Programmes available from launch include radio extensions of flagship Channel 4 television shows such as Channel 4 News, Richard & Judy, Lost and Big Brother – with further cross-over commissions planned for later in the year.”

So here are many PR opportunities ready made. The market is growing, the marketers are interested, they want to explore social media marketing, they have the budgets and are getting the message that advertising is a turn off.

We are seeing client driven demand and the industry has to be ready to respond with real capability and really quickly too.

Tony, all yours.

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