Public Relations - can it be a science in its own right?

Among its many duties, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the association of individual practitioners in the UK, are responsibilities to be involved in research.

Indeed, under its Charter it is mandated to do so.

The objects for which the Institute is incorporated shall be:
to promote the study, research and development of the practice of public
relations and publish or otherwise make available the useful results of
such study and research;

The Institute has established a Research and Development Unit to create a hub for industry and academic research.

The CIPR Research and Development Unit Working Party includes among its members Dr Sandra Oliver (Emeritus Professor), Dr Jon White (Visiting Professor), Dr Reginald Watts (Business Consultant) and Jay O'Connor (CIPR Immediate Past President).

The CIPR website page of research resources provides an insight into the extent to which, so far, its research outcomes are promoted by the CIPR and the extent to which the Institute promotes or makes available studies and commissions research on behalf of its members.

Then there is a mass of  information about Measurement and evaluation including the Measurement & Evaluation Fellowship Award in the UK (more information here); the Measurement and Evaluations toolkit and the social media version; the Valid Metrics guidelines and a page offering links to resources for measuring different sectors of PR accompanied by case studies relevant to the sector.

The Local Public Services Group is to provide members with inspiration, know-how and reassurance to actively participate in public relations activities, by exposing them to the experiences and good practice of key practitioners in the field. This group signposts third party case studies and research and papers.

There does not seem to be a reference to the Alan Rawel Academic Conference at any time in the future.

It will be interesting to see what transpires from the deliberations of Dr Sandra Oliver, Dr Jon White, Dr Reginald Watts and Jay O'Connor but I have some concerns.

Jay O'Connor suggests that the committee will 'bring together what is a significant body of knowledge about PR practice' and Reginald Watts, Chair of the Unit, says: "Together with those practitioners, consultancies and research organisations that are active in PR research, there are many practitioners and researchers with PhDs in subjects directly related to communications. My hope is that we can mobilise such members, along with others, to shape future practice and to help us to understand the changing communications environment. This is an exciting and timely undertaking by the CIPR. We are committed to bridging the gap between professional and academic research in a way that will be both creative and highly relevant to practice."

There is some need for the PR profession to acquire the confidence in its own right to work on blue sky research.

Many pure play public relations areas of interest have huge economic social and political significance and deserve the kind of attention to research that medicine has in the minds of research funders.

Some example include:

The wider nature of communication like ubiquitous internet as well as new forms of human/machine communicative interaction (like, for example, body/avata languages using the Kinect type of technologies) become the norm in human and human/machine relationships.

The extent to which we understand the drivers of relationships and the extent to which relationships affect matters such as reputation and recognition of entities (e.g. brands, companies, other institutions and machines) are poorly understood. To-date, our understanding is based on research that accepts that relationships exist now how and why they form (social sciences), are evolutionary (Psychology/evolutionary sciences) or are robotic and are not truly helpful in the reality of organisational relationship management.

In my line of interest, the significance of semantics, personal data (and the relationship between control of institutions in some form of digital democracy to control the emerging internet executive/s) are becoming significant for the profession. People offer a cloud of data about themselves and yet there is no means by which a form of vox populi democracy can challenge the owners of such data (governments, utilities and service vendors).

Value based relationship issues, where everything from corporate objectives to website meta tags affect the capability of organisations to operate without creating inherent dissonance with organisational constituents is poorly understood.

The nature of diversity and ethics in relationships are also major areas of emerging concern where we depend on education and social grooming to release value from human interest and development and yet are amazed at the capability of the dispossessed to invent and provide.

Then, again, there are the issues associated with the nature of trust in relationships. If the worlds banking system, and the government of huge swaths of the global population break down for want of of trust, surely the PR industry should be at the heart of research into trust.

Of course there is a case for having practice based research and there is a case for using and even adopting the better cases of research from other sciences but there is also a case for a public relations science in its own right.

I just hope that the Institute should consider such an ambition and be bold in its considerations.

In defence of Aves

Having been involved with PR evaluation for over 20 years, I have been watching a number of recent debates about the use of statistical analytics with a lot of interest. 

Last week PR Week , the Public Relations industry trade publication, put a number of perspectives together about the use of Advertising Value Equivelents (AVE’s), http://goo.gl/oBEk. There is heated debate on the subject. 

Tom Eldridge put an argument together entitled “ Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation” last January http://goo.gl/oKrOo.

Newly financed http://www.ubervu.com has, like many others, automated sentiment analysis as part of its service.

The evidence of these debates goes on and on.

What they all have in common is that they use algorithms in an attempt to bring insights into an ocean of data.

In PR, Marketing and advertising the use of algorithms is commonplace and always has been.

In psephology, the study of election results, as well as in sample surveys and  focus groups, the face value figures are not commonly helpful and need interpretation. In their development, a system of managing these extrapolations quickly turns into an algorithm used for used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning.

There are some key elements to be considered when using algorithms for gaining insights.

The first is the quality and range of data used.

In almost all research there are a lot of variable to be considered.

For example, in many evaluation methodologies used in PR and advertising media selection, a test of readership for a specific article is expressed in a range of ways including newspaper readership, circulation, position of page and position on page and a whole range of other data points.

The extent to which any of these measures can be attributed to the actual readership of any specific news story is often not clear.

A measure of value of an advertisement can be attributed to the cost the market will bear and thus an advertisement of a specific size, page and position will provide evidence of the value of that real estate in a publication. Such space, were it to be editorial and as appealing to the reader could be considered to have a comparable value.  An Advertising Value Equivalent is on its way. Because editorial has the imprimatur of being editorial it is regarded with more authority by the reader and therefore, some say, has an even greater value. For some it is twice as much and for others five times as much and more.

Here we see evidence of the second key element in using algorithms.

The data used and the methodology adopted need to be common, commonly understood, and transparent for anyone to judge the veracity of the results provided.

In an article, ‘The problem with automated sentiment analysis’, Freshnetworks show how deeply one needs to look into such algorithms http://goo.gl/tjCyI and demonstrate clearly that the devil is in the detail. It notes that humans can be about 80% accurate in sentiment analysis of media corpora and that machines can compete but not in the fine detail. Thus the computers provide an excellent overview already.

That there are criticisms and that there are issues is beyond doubt but progressively, the ability of computers to take the strain and reduce no small proportion of cost.

I suggest, before dismissing automation as useless, there is a case for looking for current benefits in the knowledge that very soon developers will have the computing ability to resolve the issues.

AVE’s may be dismissed in 2011 but will they, or an alternative come back to bite the critics in a year of two?

I believe they will.