PR's winning ways in recession

Despite assurances from the British Prime Minister yesterday, there are a number of commentators reflecting on the prospect of recession. Comments by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Joachim Fels of Morgan Stanley are but two and public opinion in the USA is of a similar mind.

If the US goes into recession, the world has to tighten its belt too.

In these time of universal interactive communication when intangible assets have a greater influence in the economy, what do we need to consider? The first is that the knowledge economy goes much further that the exchange of arcane patents and processes deep into the the interactive crowd of Facebookers and bloggers. They are participants in knowledge of organisations, intellectual properties, products, processes, trade, products and services as well as confidence and mood. In the last four years, this extension of social media means a much greater part of the population is involved in the knowledge economy offering added direct and indirect corporate assets.

The extent to which organisations can use the combination of transparency and porosity to gain advantage in economic slow down depends on the extent to which they can use interactive public relations and gain advantage from the relationship cloud.

As economies slow, there is a ripple effect and experience will tell us that the process begins with worries over sales. Recruitment is stopped, travel budgets are squeezed, inventory is tightened, R&D is focued on the short term and marketing budgets slashed. A question mark will hang over PR.

As the brochure print run is reduce, film and photographic budgets slim, exhibitions and conferences are eschewed and everything is turned to face the shop window or is shunted out of the back door, times seem very hard.

Typically in these times, such steps will go through two or three iterations as the red ink keeps coming.

The loss of confidence, that most intangible of harbingers, means this belt tightening will go on far too long after the recovery is under way and economies begin to grow again.

The best companies will stay in touch with the market, retain and re-deploy the most tallented employees, and will hang on to the best ideas and developments and those assets that are of greatest value beyond some of the less productive corporate icons. In addition they will work with the most agile and innovative vendors.

Where in this mayhem is the PR advantage?

We have the advantage that corporations are more aware of the value of relationships and that the web is now interactive and we can achieve things that were not possible before.

The first addresses the problem of employees.

In recession, more people are more available as and when they are needed using online communication. The empty desks no longer means loss of capacity. The capacity, as and when it is needed is a mouse click, Skype conference or wiki post away. This does mean that companies have to become more porous. The communications professional should be in a position to aid this process, developing interactive solutions to create, build, sustain and motivate employees.

The cost of travel can be largely replaced in the effective interaction of the web. Not the dreaded video conference but the humanly interactive, richness offered in online social networks. by which I do not mean MySpace or Facebook, but similar deployed packages.

The once tight knit R&D group can lever up both the wisdom of crowds and huge opportunities available from the concept of open source participation applied not just to software but to almost any developmental innovation.

Meantime those so valuable but under utilised experts we used to find in mundane occupations, often dressed up as added responsibilities during recessions can now face front. People like product managers who are less active in a world where the supply chain is less active are a typical example. They are the authentic voice that can have such influnce in writing and interacting in the bloggersphere and using wiki's. They can now be deployed in creating a much closer and directs relationship with key markets and other publics.

Many marketing activities can be moved onlne with the advantage of being a less costly but more direct relationship building activity. The power of YouTube and Linkedin and their competitors are now available to in place of exhibitions. The cell phone can come into its own for web sized photography and video.

The natural discipline for this brand of relationships and communication professional, a person who understands the simplicity of VoIP, wiki's, blogs and the social side of social media. It is the person who sees widgets in place of data bases..


This is a corporate advisory role from is the person who can convince the corporation that niche is nice; the cultural disruption role of PR is significant and that PR has a specific role as a relationships management discipline (and is what is says on the tin).

This then is the big opportunity for PR when times are tough.

Exciting huh!

Image from: http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/

PR people eschew £50bn

Online spending is now expected to reach over £50bn for the whole year - beating predictions made by the IMRG earlier this year. Last year's total was £30.2bn.

If the public can spend £750,000 online every minute why am I not getting daily emails from the PR industry Associations telling me that my membership will cancelled if I do not attend at least one Social Media workshop by 21 March 2008?

How long can a whole industry ignore the richest high street ever?

Its not just about a swanky web site its about reputation, trust, relationships and zillions of online publics. THAT sounds like PR or are all these things the industry talks about just spin.

First, where is the list of accredited degree courses that do NOT have a one year compulsory digital module - that will show how seriously the institutions are taking £50bn in the context of accreditation? Second, where are the workshops, interest groups and specialist trainers to show how well these organisations are preparing members for £70bn next year.... I could go on.

Its time to elect leaders for the PR institutions that are going to lead.

XBRL - How the accountants stuffed the PR's

Neville Hobson blog about the first companies to use the eXensible Markup Language designed for the financial sector, the eXtensible Business Markup Language (XBRL).

XBRL is an emerging XML-based standard that permits the automatic exchange and reliable extraction of financial information across all software formats and technologies. It enhances the usability and transparency of financial information reported under existing accounting standards by reducing the need to manually key information, thereby minimizing the risk of data entry error.

Some years ago, with a forward looking groups I was privileged to be involved with a similar initiative for the PR industry (XPRL) and wrote the vision document for it.

One of its objectives was to offer the means by which computers could understand the elements of financial reporting - the PR bits as opposed to the accountancy bits, a point I have made in the past.

Not a single in-house financial PR department or major financial PR agency would get involved but that does not mean companies are not taking the matter seriously:

Curt Anderson, senior director of Investor Relations for Microsoft. “As more companies make their financial statements available in XBRL format, key financial information will be more easily and quickly comparable and analyzed across industries and companies.”

It would seem that this is not so much a matter for PR then.

Except, of course the media wants it:

Michael Porch, senior vice president, News Capabilities Group, Reuters says "XBRL gives the financial community a standard way of digitally publishing, extracting and exchanging company financial reports and associated information. Reuters is interested in exploiting the power of XBRL to bring value to our customers."

Some our traditional media see XML as the way forward for which the PR industry is simply ill prepared.

Business Wire XBRL offering, has gone it alone with a proprietary scheme that enables wide earnings table displays, bulleted highlight lists, text hyperlinks and other style options. They say that Business Wire provides the most advanced XBRL systems and tools and I bet they charge the rate that goes with beggar thy neighbour - that is the PR industry that does not have a sector-wide capability.

XBRL, got the prize and locked out the PR industry. Industry will have to adopt these standards soon. It is to be a requirement in the UK. If we want to issue a trading statement, add more words, graphs, pictures or stream video of the AGM, we have to go through a range of proprietors systems AND go cap in hand to the accountants to integrate PR content into XBRL.

So far, the PR industry has made a muck of the whole exercise and there is no logic that will get the PR industry to come out of its stupor.

Now, CIPR, IABC, PRCA, and the other Global Alliance members as well as ICO will have to negotiate bits into the XBRL schema if the PR industry is going to have much say in the content that can used in future machine readable content. Without XPRL, or an institution like it, they don't have a leg to stand on.

In an era when 700,000 thirteen to sixteen year olds in the UK regularly use virtual environments it is time that someone among the leaders of the PR industry showed some visionary leadership by understanding that today a range of 'publics' use media with a reach three times greater than the print edition of the FT. Its just not unusual - its already commonplace and its digital.

The nature of modern PR

Neville Hobson alerted me to Eric Schwartzman’s interview with Colin Farrington in the On The Record Online podcast.

Neville's point is that:

Colin Farrington, the director general of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), simply does not understand the role of social media in public relations.

By chance, I have been involved in an exchange with Simon Wakeman discussing the role of Public Relations and made the following points:

I do not hold with the idea that PR is a 20th century practice. Even Press Agentry combined with lobbying and celebrity was practised by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in the 18th century but PR goes much further back in forms of diplomacy.

It is not that this is a new idea. I assembled some of the roots of relationship management as a PR practice in ‘Towards Relationship Management’ (2006 Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Page: 211 - 226).

The problem is that we have very little to guide us as to the nature of relationship (which I touch on in the paper) but there is light at the end of the tunnel (as in ‘watch this space’).

It does mean that when we look at relationships and the practice of acquiring, developing and optimising effective and affective relationships, we discover that without relationships the client counts for naught.

PR then becomes the (diverse) pivotal practice ( in the mould of medicine, another very broad range of practice) in delivering, sustaining, ensuring health and vigour of the organisation.

That then is our business and is different from the amateur practitioner (e.g. the CEO) because we have (or should have) the expertise, or reach to specialists, who can deliver such benefits.

The point at issue is where we stand in the post-Bernays era and my contention is that PR practice operates in and with the widest understanding of the social domain in which values are germane as a key to human relationships and Public Relations. I put my case thus:

There is a body of work that examines value systems and organisations have a number of values systems. They might include the values associated with optimising investor returns; they may also include employee related values systems, product, customer, environment values etc. In each case there is a domain of PR practice that encompass and operates among such values.

Public relations management which deploys all these PR domains of practice using a range of tools (including most notably, but not exclusively, communication in its execution) is the practice of Public Relations in its highest form.

I accept that most practitioners are specialist and work almost exclusively in a domain of practice often with no more than a communication facilities role, but that need not distract us from the true nature of PR.

That the institutions like the CIPR, the Universities teaching PR and other institutions choose to exclusively grub around in the undergrowth, does not mean that we should not enjoy ambition among the stars with a wider view of the significance of relationships which is fundamental to the social nature of humanity.

From that perspective, we can better understand the significance of the social media revolution and not be constrained by the narrow view given to us by 20th century agents and propagandists.

If we choose to remain in the undergrowth, our view of ubiquitous interactive communication will be that it is but a channel for communication (to be controlled and channelled). If we choose the higher calling, we unleash the interactive, creative human spirit with the wider human state for each to elect to be of, or contribute to, the nexus of their personal social networks.

For me, that is the vision for Public Relations.

The contribution made by Colin Farrington to Eric Schwartzman is perfectly legitimate for a Bernasian practitioner rooted in 20th century PR. The PR that gave us the proto Bernasian mass media manipulation with consequence manifest in Nazism, Communism.

Command, control, de-humanised, 'one value system fits all' approaches legitimise propaganda and the suppression of diversity in the of human state. Today, because of ubiquitous interactive communication, a process that has been gaining ground for 50 years (telephone, multiple broadcast channels, fax, email, social media are drivers) , there are apologists for the practice of public relations as an extension of propaganda. Among them Kevin Maloney at Bournemouth University.

These apologists suggest that because PR practitioners (by this they mean political and business PR practice) are countering each other's propaganda, then there is a legitimate form of practice which Colin gave voice to in his interview with Eric.

The concept is flawed.

It suggests that the citizen is to be controlled in every sphere of life by an everlasting all powerful elite. In all history, this has never been the case (if so, what was IX Hispana, the Roman 9th Legion, doing in Briton 900 years ago and how come there are foreign soldiers in Iraq) Omnipotence is fleeting and all the more so with the democratising and social reconstructionism brought about through ubiquitous communication.

The difference between the people 'who get it' and those that don't is in understanding the human voice which, as it is liberated, emerges from the shadow of the propaganda veneer and its associated counterpart propagandists (scream) advertising. In post World War society, applying mass psychology to the masses was once effective. Once the masses become individuals and can see, join, create and interact with networks of social groups, the power of the elite is changed in direction from control to engagement.

Today, an elitist view of the diversity of mankind, expounded by Colin a year ago is an example of the Bernasion view of PR which suggests that blogs are the:

...... ill-informed, rambling descriptions of the tedious details of life or half-baked comments on political, sporting or professional issues They read like a mixture of the ramblings of the eponymous Pub Landlord and the first draft of a second rate newspaper column. The concern of some public relations people as they worry about this new media for consumer comment, engagement and reputation destruction is a bit overdone.

He missed the point.

Progress towards ubiquitous interactive communication which briefly gave 20th century propagandist tools for suppression, is, contrary to Colin's assertion, influencing the very fabric of life. To pick one medium (a global news magazines or blogging) is to miss the bigger picture. People do affect political and commercial outcomes (do we already forget 'The Battle for Seattle', the first mass political activist programme driven by the internet?).

The 20th century practice of PR as a form of competitive propaganda war waged through to pages of the monoculture we called 'The Press', is no longer possible. The very institution 'The Press' is now heavily mediated by other forms of public human voice (including blogs).

The lobby practice of PR, and I think of investor relations as well as politics, depends on a well researched persuasive voice. To believe that an elite to elite conversation is not mediated by the biggest (and publicly available) knowledge repository ever known (the internet) suggests an elite that cannot respond by way of engagement. 'Let them eat cake' is not a good practitioner approach for public relations or lobbying.

For these and many other reasons, I refute Colin's version of effective PR and the PR practitioners who continue to subscribe exclusively to Bernasian PR.

All I can suggest to the CIPR, of which I am a Fellow, is raise the sights for your profession. Look to a vision of PR that is able to contribute to engagement and aspirational values systems or, with the people you support, you will cede to the likes of the Taliban.

Make the message simple - stupid

Chip Heath in an interview in McKinsey Quarterly (free subscription), offers a lot of very useful and well researched, tips on how to make messages compelling.

One of the insights I liked a lot is:

When messages are abstract, it’s frequently because a leader is suffering from the “curse of knowledge.” Psychologists and behavioral economists have shown that when we know a lot about a field it becomes really tough for us to imagine what it’s like not to know what we know—that’s the curse of knowledge. If you’ve ever had a conversation with your IT person about what’s wrong with your computer, you’ve been on the other side of the curse of knowledge. The IT person knows so much that he or she can’t imagine knowing as little as the rest of us. And we’re all like that IT person in our own domain of expertise: prone to be overly complex and abstract.

As one who does this a lot, Its a very helpful idea.

A recommended read because of the quality of research behind his thinking and a lesson for everyone in PR.

Xbox and the future of the social animal

Imagine a place that mixed Facebook, World of Warcraft, Second Life, podcasting, video, Twitter and Skype.

Such a place would be a magnet for already huge and seriously interactive communities online.

Such a place would be of interest to Chris Kimble, David Grimshaw and Paul Hildreth who have already shown that the online context is important.

What I am suggesting is context that would be hyper rich and more important that other places to go.

Such a rich environment would be very important because, as Elizabeth Shove, and Alan Warde at Lancaster University note, social theorists maintain that ‘people define themselves through the messages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display. In an environment of games, avatars and Facebook-like display added to a wide range of channels for spoken, music, video as well as text communication, people will be able to satisfy their deeply embedded human needs online like never before.

That is why I think that the Microsoft announcement a couple of weeks ago is so important.

Microsoft is to add a social network element to Xbox. It potential offers a mix and match of sensations that are now only speculative.

This has the potential to mash the real and virtual person in a fashion we are not really prepared for.

People, that's us, manipulate and manage appearances and thereby create and sustain a ‘self-identity’ as part of their need to be effective as social animals. Its part of our DNA.

This is part of the evolution of the human species.

These new developments offer a real and virtual combination.

In an answer to the question: "What sort of person is s/he?" will shortly be answered in terms of a combined real and virtual lifestyle or visible attachment to groups rather than by personal virtues or characteristics alone and on a globally networked scale.

In such an environment, the many selves and the picture of the world we modify through inputs from our senses hark back to Featherstone who in 1991 reflected upon the tendency for the same individual to seek to present him or herself on different occasions in two or more ways, as bohemian and conventional or as romantic or formal and now, as the internet evolves, there a possibility to do so in many manifest ways in hyper virtual worlds.

It is an extension of a not uncommon practice we have see online for a couple of decades but now it will be much more dramatic, entertaining, emotionally absorbing and above all infective across the whole online experience.

This is futureology, guess work and musings.

Why would people do this? Why should sane people spend hours gazing at a computer screen? Why should people be engrossed in blogs, social networks and games?

There is a deep itch in our human make up that make such activities compelling. In our millions we already do it. But add even greater richness – a step change as great as from Newsgroups to blogs, to MySpace to Second Life and it seems that such change is inevitable.

Perhaps the big question for us now, is: dare we think of such things and be, just a little prepared, - well - Just in case.