The Practitioners' Rough Deal

An excellent post by Stephen Waddington, prompted me to to resond to some of the comments it evoked.

The original post is here and I have extended the arguments below.

The initial comments was:

The challenge of identifying the authority of a blog was raised yesterday at econsultancy’s Online PR roundtable.

Technorati recently changed its blog authority ranking to reflect the real time potency of a blog rather than influence over time. Consequently only very high profile blogs are being rated.

The number of inbound links combined with Google PageRank was proposed as a solution at yesterday’s roundtable.

And then there are a lot of differnet methodologies.

My response was:

Typical of the PR industry, come up with black art reaction and ignore the research - soooo professional. The research work presented by Bruno Amaral this July (bledcom.com) is based on blog discourse. It shows the proof of concept in analysis of (blog) discourse for the creation and development of relationships (oh, and for those who want to know buying and selling is part of a relationship for lots of people as well). What, it seems, this debate might be about is the extent to which there are common tokens identified and expressed with mutual understanding as to the values that are attributed to them by actors which will ensure relationships are created, re-enforced and extended. One way of doing this is to use semantic analysis to identify commonly held and agreed values (which is what Bruno did). This may provide the same answer as a mash up of inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations, number of readers/subscribers, words published per day, number of comments etc. The one thing we do know is that one approach is definitely built of sound science and three years of solid, peer reviewed, research and the other may not be. If one was betting the survival growth and profitability of your company on the methods used, there might be a reason for choosing one methodology over another.

My principle beef is that there is a lot of good research about that the PR industry ignores. A lot of research is conducted in the universities, is converted to dry academic papers and some long and boring books that a few undergraduates and even smaller proportion of PR Masters students have to read.

The chance for a practitioner to get at this stuff is zip.

Its not as though organisations like the Chartered Institute of Public Relations or the PRCA help much - if at all. In the case of the CIPR one struggles to find the courses and conferences that are leavened with expert academic research because the institutions do not list the people and qualifications of the teachers and trainers. Of course, knowing which PR celebrities, old codgers and underemployed practitioners are engaged by the CIPR would be interesting but the web site is a bit shy about revealing this.

On the other hand, there are the academic institutions. These places, where PR academics count how fairies on pin heads communicate and undertake senility surveys of ten past it practitioners. They are stunningly secret.

Sometimes they invite the world into their cloisters and sometimes they are seen at conferences wearing their habits.

I was a bit surprised to discover that universities with PR degrees are staggered that the PR industry needs social media expertise from students emerging into the sunshine of modern practice. This reeks of academia polishing the ivory towers.

PR academics NEVER criticise practice or practitioners. As the financial industry went into melt down not a single PR academic suggested even meekly, that banks like other institutions needed to manage relationships if they were going to lend to each other (and customers?). Not much good at grasping the hour these PR academics.

Here they are without an argument to put about really great measures of successful PR such as ... well we all know how much Advertising Value Equivalents are used.

I really do want to see the survey of top 1000 company CEO's who use the measure, rely on it, base the future of their companies and careers on such a profound measure of ...... ummmmm.....

I know of a university with a PR course that has a PR office that uses Ave's. Where is the PR equivelent of:

Three more scientists have resigned from the UK drug advisory body after the home secretary sacked of its chief advisor, Professor David Nutt, for disagreeing with government policy on marijuana.

So am I really surprised about the comments of Stephen's blog. No.

Am I amazed at the PR institutions and academics lack of spirit in pouring scorn on iffy methodologies. No.

But I believe that practitioners deserve more.

A New Monitoring Tool - Real Time

Greg Cohn is the Director Strategy & Business Development at Yahoo! Today, he is making a big thing about Real Time Web and I am delighted.

The reason I am thrilled is that a company I am associated with, Klea Global, has launched a Real Time Monitoring service called NextMention. The basic service is free... as you would expect and a raft of commercial services are due out soon.

What is does is simple. It monitors everything. News, Blogs, Twitter, social networks, web sites, Google's Sidewiki and lots more and if your organisation or issue is mentioned it alerts you. The alert can be by instant messenger or email and for paid for services by SMS, Skype and lots of other communications channels and platforms.

For PR, monitoring clients 360 degrees of internet content is a big deal. You will be surprised at how much there is.

CIPR has a £700k hole

PR Week reveals today that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a financial problem of £700,000.


Its hard to believe. In the name of transparency the Institute had no media statement on its website at time of writing. Its CIPR in the news page made no mention either.

But, we are told by PRW that:

The executive board met last week and agreed a programme of immediate cost savings, along with a three-year strategy that focuses on the needs of the CIPR membership and the profession.

‘Our cash flow position remains positive, and we are committed to turn round the finances in the next year,' said CIPR President Kevin Taylor.

‘We believe our new base at Russell Square, with its improved training, conference and office facilities, will help in that turnaround. Services to our members will remain our priority.'

This is no time for long term members like me to rock the boat but we can make constructive criticisms that may help the Institute develop a three year strategy that is more in keeping with the needs of the public relations profession than has been evident in recent years.

Ethics, modern communication education, dramatically enhanced and modern management theory are desperately needed as bedrock career skills.

But, above all, there is a need for a complete overhaul of PR education and research.

These are changing times.

The Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for non geeks the Real Time Web has become fashionable. It's fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance, a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November noting that

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

Code named Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service that will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media.

Very few services are real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services. Topsy (http://topsy.com) is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month. Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/) offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results.

Meantime, People like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the Real Time Web..