Monitoring update

There are some standard methods for monitoring online activity.

For basic free monitoring there are recommendations and more for bought-in services.

Publicasity has some cool tools in its Publicasity Netvibes pages which aggregates a wide range of monitoring services and is up to date in real time.

There is also sentiment analysis for Google natural search at MediaDash and a prett comprehensive instant audit at TrackBuzzNow

There are some other service and the one with big buzz is TweetDeck capability for Twitter.

Its the Message Stupid

I was taken by this post in Shel Holtz blog and thought the comment he quotes from Phil Gomes whose blog post was titled, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s the ‘messaging’ that sucks.”

Shel quotes:

In his post, Phil draws a distinction between messages (it’s important to have them) and messaging, which Phil defines thusly:

The development and cloying repetition of corporatespeak statements devoid of meaning, rendered in a language that no one uses, delivered without the benefit of listening first, and presented in venues and contexts where they are clearly inappropriate.

Phil’s absolutely right if, indeed, that were the definition of messaging. It’s not, though. It’s the definition of bad messaging. It logically follows, then, the only bad messaging is bad. Good messaging is simply the strategic use of appropriate channels to make sure the right people—the market for your message—is able to find it and hear it.

The New Marketing

Jeremiah Owyang discuses this video by Scholz and Friends, a German marketing agency.

It is worth watching.

Changes in the Value Chain has to change the role of PR

We are living through extraordinary times. As people gain access to online all the time communications tools with their cell phones and computers at home and at work they are changing the nature of interactions in the value chain.

The 20th century view was relatively easy to understand. The organisation was was largely a discrete entity, could survive using mass media and marketing was largely in charge of interactions between organisation and customers (broadcast messages supported by sales support) downstream and dependant on vendor marketing and selling capability upstream.
It could be described like this:





In the 21st century the value chain began to change. Internet driven transparency meant that much more was visible to everyone in the value chain. It replaced corporate public relations because competitive advantage required that organisations to make more information available to all constituents.

Today this model is becoming more general. Companies make public their CSR policies, vendors and customers and much more. In addition a lot of other organisations and individuals make information available about organisations. Classic example is the information made available to the public about organisations are websites like Companies House and Whois lookup which, in the past would have required a lot of expertise to discover and now are used as commonplace tools to find out more from third party sites. This has empowered constituents upstream and downstream as well as employees.

In addition, the range of channels by which actors in the value chain can interact have grown and many of them are, as we know interactive and part of interested networks.

Internally, there are changes too. Departmental barriers have come tumbling down because of the growth of new additional forms of communication such as email and instant messaging. These have made it easier for people to form relationships both between departments and between the historic hierarchies of typical 18 to 20th century organisational structures.


Now a new paradigm has emerged. Every organisation is outsourcing. Few organisations realise the extent to which they have outsourced and many will be surprised at some of the outsourced activities that happen automatically. An example is the automatic updates (patches) that happen to desktop PC's right across the organisation. They just happen. Other examples from auditing to logistics are common.

These third parties are part of the organisation cloud and are a form of transparency whereby internal and, in the past, confidential information is shared with third parties under an array of contractual agreements - many of which are inferred. Such agreements are often only as good as the relationship between the parties and have little by way of legal grounding.

Where, for example is the agreement between an organisation and a search engine?

Thus the value chain is changing very rapidly and is much more dependant on relationships than contracts.


This has profound implications.

It demands interaction in many more forms and between a wider range of actors and demands relationship management across a much more diverse range of constituents.

For the practice of public relations this change is very significant. Practitioners now need to be able to understand relationship management in a much more holistically and need to be able to explicate the changed nature of organisations and an understanding of how to implement management strategies and policies to the advantage of the organisation.

Teaching public relations, training practitioners and developing expertise is part of what we need to do.

There is one other imperative, which is very relevant to those organisations that represent the industry which is to explain this enhanced role for PR to organisation managers.

What exciting times we live in.

More reading:

Benkler Y 2002 "Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm" Yale Law Journal Volume 112, Issue Number 3

Martin Bailie

More to come....

David teaching about blog post

This is really hard!!! I've taken over David's blog so that he can show me how its done. Very confused!!!! We've been talking about Delicious and now we're going to link to it.

A Grunigian view of modern PR

Thinking through how PR can approach its online responsibilities one might want to use the1984 Grunig and Hunt model and it works quite well.

I have attempted to do it graphically and, no doubt you will want to change my perspective but I thought it time to extend the debate and examine some of the practical applications of social media that this view opens up.

(click on graphic for a full view)

The implications in terms of cost and control are, I think, relevant and important when advising clients. Being interactive does cost time on the one hand and having an effective website these days has high cost associated with design, production, hosting and management.

There is a myth about which claims that web2.0 use is low cost but the time and attention required is high but the effect seems disproportionately higher.

That is not to say that presentation is forfeit, far from it. A well designed blog is all the more readable and appealing as long as it is not crowded by bling and advertising.

Perhaps too, there is a consideration on the effect of using different channels.  Certainly there seems to be greater internal and external engagement as organisations move toward the two-way model but at the extreme the case is less well made. Moving in that direction has its advantages but it needs to be progressive.

One gets an impression that as an organisation moves towards two-way symmetrical communication combined with high levels of community interaction (and per force less involvement as a proportion of total activity by the organisation - think Facebook, YouTube, Linux, Procter and Gamble) there is a tendency towards higher performance in terms of long term sustainable organisational growth. The reverse is also true (do banks fall into this category?).

To enlarge the thinking....

It would seem that, as a generality, the further one gets towards two-way symmetrical, the more growth and corporate sustainability one can expect.

There is precedent for this kind of thinking. 

Taking a long historical view, the political systems that are more open and interactive have tended to last longer and brought more wealth to people.

Companies like IBM have re-engineered themselves in this way and have become stronger for it (Microsoft's reputation changed dramatically after Robert Scoble opened up the company). There are also the examples offered by Clay Shirky in his book 'Here Comes Everybody'.

The converse is true. Highly controlled political systems tend to have a finite life and the very closed companies suffer the same fate. A brief spectacular followed by a quick decline.

The value of hyperlinks

It seems odd to imagine a Hyperlink as being the basis of relationship ... but then, on second thoughts, it seems pretty obvious. But, it would be mere spin to make the claim without proper grounded research.

Bruno Amaral is examining how relationships are formed in some very interesting research for his Masters thesis.

We have been using some powerful new software designed for purpose by my friend Girish in Delhi involving word clustering, latent sematic analysis and web site network analysis and visualisation and it was the latter approach that prompted thinking about the nature of the hyperlink in the development of relationships.

The theoretical precept is that relationships are formed by exchange of tokens which have common values explicated by the participants.

My analogy is that of a rose and I use it a lot in lectures.

Being a man of certain years I take a full red rose to the lecture and after a preamble take the rose, admire its deep red colour and beautiful perfume and then walk to a pretty young student high in the auditorium and present it to her with a broad smile.

Mostly the students blush. No one has yet refused it.

You see, a rose has a number of values that are associated with it. Regard, romance, love, passion and a mutual exchange.

I can then explain that we all attribute values to a rose. Not everyone associates a rose with exactly the same values but where there are common values them the message is the basis for creating a relationship.

In PR that is what we do all the time. We interpret tokens such as products and services in such a way that their values will build relationships with publics.

Of course, people observe the exchange of tokens and interpret such actions from their own  perspective and their own set of 'rose values'. 

In a lecture, one can make such a point with a not much more than a raised eyebrow but make it clear that the audience' observation of the present is also part of relationship building.....

And then comes the let down.

Reaching into my pocket I produce a £20 note and offer it to another girl. No one has ever accepted it!

So the values of a rose is higher than the value of a £20 note?

The point is made.

We give different values to different tokens at different times......... after all a rose is only a dead stick.

Now, if we translate this to a hyperlink, we begin to get a view of how important a hyperlink really is.

It can be of great value because of the values expressed once the link is clicked on. Sometimes this is a great way of building relationships and sometimes its a disappointment and sometimes we just don't go there.

Even more important, we might click on a link one day and on another will think it is inappropriate.

Using hyperlinks in PR is a skill.