Agnostic evaluation of media content

Image via Wikipedia

This weekend, I have been playing with a sentiment engine and thinking about people's perspectives.

This one does not take sides. It is agnostic. It decides if a press story is positive or negative from a neutral perspective.

All you do is past text into a box and it analyses the content as positive or negative and shows the structure of sentences that leads to this conclusion.

You can try it here.

The returns it makes is an academic minefield. It challenges your thinking about truth.

It has a first cousin, that can add perspectives. For example, it can make similar decisions from the perspective of the actors (company, person brand etc) which is why it was invented but the returns with no perspective are very interesting.

Sometimes this programme gets it wrong but not often.

It is able to glean content that is negative but which contributes to the positive side of the article and you can see how it does it.

I have tried news articles, book chapters, reports and even client presentations to see where the sentiment lies.

So where is the beef?

This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.

Try it out and be challenged.

Touch the virtual

I have a new word for everyone Realtuality.....

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, "EVE Online," Habbo, MapleStory and "World of Warcraft" are the next step in "network intermediated" social and economic interactions according to Andrew Burger at Linux insider.

But he missed a significant element. They are now combined with the Nintendo's Wii. Wii adds a physical element.

These developments are easy to dismiss and put into the PR no go area of Games.

As you may know, this has never been my view. Games are a form of communication and online games now allow players to interact with millions of other players round the world.

But the Wii is different. The players can interact, not only in the virtual world but in a mashup between the virtual and real dimensions.

A movement using the Wii from Stonehenge can be transferred to a movement on a screen in San Francisco and in real time and in the existing, simulated or game graphic renderings or virtual world.

David Stone, an MIT research fellow claims the motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science." He offers the Wiimote as a key to building realistic training simulators in Second Life.

Add to the Wii and virtual worlds a huge mass collaborative development effort and you get where I am coming from.

Take Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, who says Sims attracts creative people of all ages and both genders and have a track record of 4.5 million players visiting the Sims site monthly, and 70m downloads of player-created content including user created avatars and environments.

These are pretty big numbers and pretty active communities and they are not alone.

Corporate investment in post 2000 technologiesis already interesting. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million in 2007 and has at least nine more developments in train.

A study by Virtual Worlds Management, a Texas-based research company identified $184.2 million this year pouring into companies that run virtual worlds.

You can bet these will be very different and will need to include Realtuality, with its physical dimension to compete.

Intel add fuel to the flames. It say that the next generation Wii will not need controllers. Camera technology and sensors will mean they are obsolete.

The pent-up capability to create applications, the technical advances and money is now converging. The breakthrough cannot be far off.

Virtual offices, virtual homes, virtual friends and all interacting with real offices, real sports, real homes and real people stretches the imagination and yet is not far off.

Does this mean that the press conference is acted out by real people in virtual worlds or virtual people in real environments. Yes to both.

Does this mean the end of the travelling salesman, yes it does, and is supermarket shopping now a case of really walking but down virtual aisles, yes it does.

But these are pretty ordinary transmogrifications. What happens when we mashup email, twitter, VoiP and that old fashioned place of record, the website and add people being both themselves and their alter egos in dynamic activities in dynamic environments and physically involved too. Now add millions of people doing all this in full-on creative mode.

Well... Facebook is, by comparison, dull. Even the announcement by Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company behind the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, that they seek a partner to license a pole dancing game for the Wii is tame.

Development of new markets, new inventions and new societies already happens all the time in microcosm in these emeging worlds and at a pace that makes following twitter seem sluggish. But as these people bridge the gap to what our generation believes is mainstream, the effect will be astonishing.

Building relationships between organisations and their publics in existing games has a very new dimension and is culturally very different. Second life using a Wii is different again and adding big bucks investment and open tools and open source to both is a daunting prospect.

And what is going to drive this revolution?

I think fun and sex. These environments are novel and fun and they open up whole new opportunities for romantic interaction.

Millions, of people using open tools and open software backed up with significant investment by business angels will begin to deliver products that make the exponential growth of YouTube look sluggish.

The commitment to life in these environments will drag people from television, the cinema and night clubs to the next mashup generation beyond today's Wii and big home screens, games and virtual worlds.


The first shops in these environments will soon become the biggest mall anyone ever walked down.

Today, we think we are cool with our corporate blogs, wiki's podcasts and social media involvement but perhaps we should now begin to think of the next digital generation.

News in the making

The telegraph today. The political editors hard at it

The new telegraph HQ

Today, I was given a tour of the Telegraph new editorial centre. Its 67,000 sq ft of open plan editorial space.

My host was Chris Lloyd Assistant Managing Editor ( my nephew).

He has been with the project from its inception and was both a charming host and brilliant in his outlook for where the internet is taking publishing.

The Telegraph has shown thousands of people, including competitors, from all over the world round this amazing facility.

With its extension of My Telegraph due soon and raft of well known bloggers not to mention the growing capability and range of content at Telegraph TV, the evolution fom print to all media is a revelation.

The BBC and Guardian are both creating new centres now.

The big issue now, is can the PR industry raise its game to support these new capabilities?

The pic is Carl Courtney (Chairman of Publicasity - for whom I work three 50 hour days a week), sitting at the editorial hub in this huge centre.

Measuring the value of PR - the values that make relationships

Over the next few days I will be working on development of tools that allow me to look at corporate and brand values.

You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.

First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.

My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.

This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.

These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.

With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.

Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.

But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).

We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.

The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.

Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.

We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.

The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.



That's the theory.



Now to see if it works.....

The Clip Book

Working part time in an agency gives an insight into how far they have regressed.

In the 1980's and 90's I ran a PR consultancy. We had a sister evaluation company (Media Measurement) which did all out work on clip book production as well as evaluation to meet a range of client needs. In those days we used a lot of trees in PR.

The evaluation team were specialist, had all the software and equipment to deliver product on time and right first time.

Professional PR people and awesome writers were not wasted on clip counting and mounting.

Easy.

Now, a decade later I find that agencies are still using PAPER! The Clipbook carbon footprint in the PR industry is massive.

Because clients want it?

Now, I don't care about the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) demand for huge amounts of money to force organisations to knock over more trees. Its time to face them down.

I am not a person who believes that you can't read off the screen. We all do it.

I don't care about size for size Advertising Equivalents spreads and all that complete AVE rubbish. That was invented to satisfy the 20th century egos of Marketing Directors. In those days they had secretaries who typed letters!

Paper guard books offer so little information compared to digital ones. Today, would professional managers accept cash flow forecasts without drill down?

But what I resent most is the complete an utter waste of intelligent people’s time and on every count. Cost, wasted skill, environment damage, encouragement of lazy, typically innumerate, PR practice are all reasons to move away from paper.

Partnering with a professional evaluation company is the right direction for agencies (and I mean partner – not supplier) and this needs to be a three way, transparent relationship with the client.

In cost saving alone, it makes sense.

Search v Value

In recent weeks I have been working for Publicasity. They are developing their online skills - and the new web site, blog Twitter etc. is due in a few weeks (of course).

But we have been working on audits for a range of clients and companies and one the striking statistics that emerge is search volume.

More than once, we have un-nerved marketing directors with a graph that they recognize as sales graphs.

These search graphs are now beginning to be important. A way of being able to identify the how well companies are doing over the counter and online in terms of sales.

It struck me that there are more applications for these kind of data.

Knowing that search volume tells us about the commercial success of an organisation means that these data could also be useful to investors and others.

This conjoin between actual activity and online activity is another way of expressing the value of online work.

Find top bloggers - pre alpha

Here we are. The client has asked us to begin a blog outreach programme for their new widget. You need to find the top bloggers in the field. Goog and Technorati provide a huge list. Which are the top bloggers. Whose influence in the bloggersphere really counts?

Well, this is a pre alpha experiment and I will welcome comments. You can try it here in an iFrame or go to the web site here which is easier on the eye.

Enjoy!

In preperation for Euroblog 2008

Tomorrow, I will be joining a panel at Euroblog 2008.

I will be in the august company of

• Toni Muzi Falconi,
• Ansgar Zerfass (University of Leipzig, Germany),
• David Weinberger (Fellow at Harvard Berkam Center),
• Frank Ovaitt (President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations)
• Gilles Klein (Le Monde),
• Tim Macmahon (NY University)
• Wolfgang Luenenbuerger, (Head of Social Media, Edelman Europe)

We are tasked with examining:

The changing media environment and how it is affecting business, academia and its implications for the future:

• What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
• How can we measure it?
• What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.

I thought that I would get my thoughts ready before the event.

In the first instance we need to be sure that there is a changing media environment and whether the extent of any such change is significant.

A year ago, I presented evidence of the changing media environment. Based on work at Bournemouth University I showed that at a time when more people were online; when people were spending more time online and when access was increasing because of the uptake of broadband there was a paradox. In 2006, I showed that traffic to search engine sites and retail web sites was not reflecting the extra eyeball or eyeball hours. Worse still, traffic to these sites was in slow decline. Where was all the extra 'traffic' going?

It was going to social media. Blogs, wiki's, social networks, YouTube.

These finding legitimise the the first assumption in our discourse and are a vindication of my repost to the views expressed by Betteke van Ruler, Professor of Communication and Organization at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, in April 2006. Social media is significant and has a huge role to play in communication.




Of course, it would be wrong to blithely make the assumption that there is significant evidence of the generality of business being affected by the changing media environment.

What, then is the evidence that online interactions are affecting business?

Over the last two months, I have undertaken in-depth studies of the digital footprint of five companies. One of the resources used has been Microsoft adCenter Labs . In presenting to a B2C client with over 600 UK retail outlets, I showed this graph of search driven numbers of visitors to their websites.



For the marketing director this was a surprise. This graph was a match for their volume sales! In subsequent analysis for a range of other clients we were able to demonstrate similar correlations.

It would seem that people go online before buying and search extrapolation from these data suggests that they do so in significant numbers, mirroring other research of this nature in areas like B2B purchasing.

In answer to the second premise for our discussion, I contend that companies and the internet are now joined at the hip. Even for company websites that are not e-commerce enabled, the internet is having a significant impact on business performance.

The next issue we need to face before we go further is the extent to which the internet is affecting business.

Once again, we now have evidence of what companies believe they are achieving online.

With some confidence we have evidence of the demographic nature of the website by sex and age profiles:











But when we go and look at who is actually visiting the site we get a different picture:

The age and sex profile is not the same:



What we are seeing is that it is the consumer who is deciding what they want and need from the internet. This is full blown evidence of the phenomenon of 'user' segments. The marketing people (you remember - those folk who held sway in the 20th century) have got it wrong.



There is other evidence that is interesting. If you examine the SEO keywords used by webmasters, they are more often than not at variance with keywords people use to search for products and services (which also demonstrates the poor SEO of most websites). In this case, we are seeing evidence of people online deciding what they believe are brand and corporate values. In the majority of cases (in the five surveys I have done so far) there is significant dissonance between what the company thinks are its brand values and what their website visitors believe.

Progressively, companies are changing their keywords as the attune to the power of SEO. The companies are being changed by the online community.

But is this enough? What about the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication.

In the UK there was a very significant change in the behaviours of the interactive community.

As a generality, and for years, the numbers of blog posts about companies has shown a progressive increase.

But last year (round about November time) there was a sea change.

The rate of growth in the number of posts moved from progressive to exponential. It is not the numbers of posts that is important. It is the rate of change that is so significant.

Once again, in each of our surveys the results showed the same dynamic.

















From the foregoing, It is reasonable to accept the premise of the session at Euroblog. There is a :

changing media environment and how it is affecting business and academia and it does have implications for the future.

These finding also help us with our examination of:

• What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
• How can we measure it?
• What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.

The opportunities are, of course, no longer potential. If companies are being changed because of SEO, the opportunity is being seized. But probably inadvertently and probably at considerable risk to the organisation.

Not that risk cannot be managed it can and so I hope that the discussion on risk is based on good research, practice with good assessment and in a structured way.

This is going to be fun.

You are not the words you write

I chanced upon Daniel Chandler's essay on intertextuality (looking up more reading about value systems) in which he notes

In 1968 Barthes announced 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader', declaring that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination' (Barthes 1977, 148).

Essentially the reader has his/her own context and interprets both the author and the work from a personal and cultural perspective. But the sentence stood out for me because of its immediate parallel with the significance to user generated content.

Here there is no authority except in the author but many interpretations. In a sense, we cannot make clear our written intention nor can we expect common acceptance among readers.

Thus the values we express are not all of our own making but of the readers making.

It was good serendipity.

Finding nice bloggers - finding nasty bloggers

In recent weeks, development in using Bayesian inference on Latent Semantic Analysis of blogs has been keeping me up at nights.

From a simple engine developed by my friend Girish, I have been thinking about how one can use this information as a predictive tool and it has some promise.

Let me go back a bit.

Here is a simple application to find out the sentiment of bloggers between two competing entities. You can try it out. Try comparing 'clinton' with 'obama' and see who is getting the most positive and most negative blog posts.

You will also see that the programme also measures the extent of objectivity in the content analysed.

Because of the way we have set this application up if the comment about the candidates is neither positive or negative it produces a nul return (because of the nature of the experiment).

This experiment has moved on quite a lot and soon I hope to have a more advanced example you can try out here.

The experiment we are working on is to use the concepts identified in the blogs to monitor what subjects are growing and which are retreating and the sentiment attached to them.

The next phase is to predict where such concepts are going within a level of confidence that is acceptable.

Now comes the theoretical leap of faith. When a new concept emerges, it will be disruptive and may well provide an insight what future news will be.

Now that really will add a new dimension to PR practice.

Relationships the missing link in Clay's book

At last after some long train journeys I have finish Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky.

He brings to the modern time the work of a number of American researchers and weaves some great case studies in a very engaging way.

The one element he needs is the dynamic behind why 'if you publish it people will come'. Of course this is not true but is a truism and it all comes down to the basis of relationships and notably relationships online.

Relationships form when the values of one entity (or person) finds another entity (or person) with values in common.

We go to the places where we know there will be like minded people. We talk to people with similar interests, we seek contexts where the values are akin to our own when we are in the 'mood'. We migrate to the blogs that interests us and then pass along the best to people who follow our blog.

On page 217, Clay explains the nature of 'networks of dense clusters', with a nice explanatory diagram which is a social media take on social networks.

There is some interesting work from the Haas Business School Alumni Networks' blog Group Scope which is not theoretical but is similar and from real life mapping and which shows the diversity of organisations (click here to see interactive version of the graphic) that form around a range of relatively narrow values and through a range of online channels for communication.

It is the basis upon which the Relationship Value Model ( a very European model) is predicated.


Group Scope have been investigating ‘hot company’ networks based on the idea that key people and investors can help point the way to new companies. They point out that the goal of a ‘derivative network’ is to take a network of interest (aka values systems) and ‘invert’ it to see another view of its affiliations. In each of the ensuing three derivative maps, they expose new sets of people and companies that are not in the group of ‘hot companies,’ but are related to that group through these derivative networks because they have common value systems interests.

In other words, the common themes of 'hot companies' (aka 'hot company values systems') are of interest to a wide, interlinked, network.

Its the values that encourage people in networks to find and then distribute the values in networks of dense clusters.

Here is a Touchgraph image of this blog and we can see the networked relationships:

It is closely interlinked with a relatively few (but germane) other blogs and sites.


















BoingBoing.net, for all its reach is not as heavily networked. It is like a newspaper, a broadcast medium. It is the point well made in Clay's book.

What PR can take out of this is that the 'top blogs', the ones with a big readership and consequently relatively little interactivity, are really just publishers of stuff like any other mass media. If the content from these 'broadcast bloggers' is picked up by the network of dense clusters, great. But if not, try an advert in The Times.

On the other hand, further down the power curve, people who are interactive will pass on the news adding value (commentary, personal recommendation, insights and other values) on the way.

Thus PR is about relationships in this milieu where values are added to the values public relations explicates for its clients. In the networked community, values have a dense relevance among people who have a close relationship with them. These communities are very affective. They are the real key to reputation, for when content in the communities migrates to other (including, but not exclusively broadcast) media, the effect is significant because of the added values contributed by the networked communities.

And, values come before communication. So PR is not just about communication.

Let me explain. Suppose two actors (people) have common interests in similar values but there is no communication between them. In such a case there is no possibility of a relationship forming. However, in a network of dense clusters, there will be a third party who can act as the bridge between the two original actors and will show the values one to the other either overtly or, more often, through other values that are common to all three.

It explains the phenomenon of why RSS is so powerful in bringing relevant people and information to us so quickly. It explains how some activities truly 'go viral' online and it also shows that effective values systems, including corporate values systems have a wider and diverse online 'community' of direct, related and indirect interest. To miss quote an ex US president 'its the values stupid' .

In recent weeks, I have been exploring values and value systems for clients. Of course, driven by the idea that 'key messages', a 20th century marketing idea for brand exposure in mass media, most client have such messages in the meta data on their web sites (although some are far from well optimised). But often these 'keywords' are at odds with the actual content that people seek or read. Even worse, the value systems offered in texts and images on web sites miss the mark which shows up in the demographic data now available from services like Google Trends and MSN labs.

So far, every time we have shown these results to clients, there is an element of shock and a demand for re-evaluation of corporate and brand value systems as well as web design. The former falls directly into the lap of the PR practitioner who now can clearly see where the disconnect (dissonance) between the 'user generated social (sometimes market) segment' and the organisation lays.

Here we begin to see how whole organisations can be changed by the 'messages' (aka values) and how the online community is having a direct influence not only on brand positioning but corporate positioning, not to mention direction, as well.

There are more than a few organisations that are beginning to see that corporate values are critical to long term survival.

The book is worth reading and with just the one further, relationship values, step, would be seminal.

Thank you Clay.

Here comes Everybody Part 3

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky should be in the library of every business and PR school. Its out later this month and will challenge most minds when thinking about online public relations. Its engaging style, modernity and use of case studies makes the arcane come to life.

There are some interesting new insights and explication of previous work in a modern context and responds to Harvard's John Palfrey criticism at the same time.. The one that is powerful is his explanation of Power law as it applies to interactivity online and notably, blogs. There have been interesting papers, notably with contributions from Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer.

In response to some ideas of David Sifrey Jason Kottke did the math.

Back in 2003 he noted:

The dotted blue line is a linear equation, the dashed red line is a quadratic equation, and the solid black line is the power law equation. The linear and quadratic equations fit the data poorly. So the quadratic is an improvement over the linear equation, but neither compare to the excellent fit of the power law.

What this means for PR people is interesting and comes from another part of the book dealing with the nature of networks online.

First the power law part. Bloggers range from people with a lot of followers, who because they have so many, cannot be very interactive with them all, to the blogs at the nexus of a few chums (who interact a lot with a few). This means that the 'average' blogger is probably a long way down the curve and 'average' is a meaningless approach to identifying influence.

We come across the power law a lot in online activities. Wired magazine's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in article in October 2004 where he coined the expression 'The Long Tail' shows a commercial interpretation.

But the next part is also important. His explanation that to achieve connectedness (and enter the illusive 'viral' nature of the internet), then it is the properties (like blogs) that have very modest numbers of connections that are the most powerful.

In public relations terms and to identify content that will move people to respond to a brand or issue, it is not the people or online properties with the profile of publishing (Boing Boing being the apogee example) , it is the people with much more modest numbers of links that really count.

In a part you can see this in the scatter.com video that Anthony Mayfield has on his blog:





The notable elements are that this is a continually morphing process, that the most powerful influence is not from the big broadcasters but from the many smaller nodes interacting and range of elements that contribute to both connectedness and significance.

Online PR is not about big numbers it is about a range of changing and relatively small nodes that have a small interaction with other nodes. It is the number of small blogs that is important not sheer reach.

Here comes Everybody Part 2

I have a review copy of the new book by Clay Shirky 2008 Here Comes Everybody Penguin.

The subtitle is "The Power of Organizing without Organizations"

It is an idea that I contest.

A long time ago, last century, Mark Adams, Prof Anne Gregory, Infonic’s Roy Lipski, Alison Clark and some others worked on the key drivers that would be delivered by the Internet (CIPR/PRCA Interet Commission). There were three: Transparency, Porosity & Agency. They are proved right.

Organisations now have all three. There is greater transparency between actors inside organisation. Past departmental silos are dismembered, corporate hierarchies are an ever moving feast and the distinction between an employee and consultant, supplier and manufacturer not to mention factory owner and factory user are a nicety. The boundaries of organisations are crumbling and ubiquitous interactive communication has been the lubricant for this process.

This gave rise to a concept I call the relationship cloud. Transparent values (ethos + tangible and intangible assets) are exercised with transparent responsiveness and the internet facilitates employee relationship clouds with the networked relationship empowered online and offline actors.

There are no organisations any more. The transition is too far gone to make such assumptions.

All we have is the remnants of the 20th century pretending that Toyota is a company, the Prime Minister is Presidential and the shop is the home of retailing. We still use the names and the images but the reality is that the transition is too far gone to plan ahead on such assumptions.

We are already at the point where there is 'Power of Organizing without Organizations' is in daily practice even among the organisations but we all hasten not to recognise it. It is too far out of the comfort zone of all too many?

Next... page 19

Where are the values?

Here Comes Everybody Part 1

I have a review copy of the new book by Clay Shirky 2008 Here Comes Everybody Penguin.

I was going to read it cover to cover and then review it. But it's such a good book that I thought to express my responses as I go through it page by page (ok, few pages at a time).

It is written in a very engaging style and the first page that pulled me up was 17.

There is an assertion he makes that is interesting:

"When we change the way we communicate, we change society."

You have to test assertions like that.

If we look back at the history of changed ways of communicating is there evidence?

Was writing so important. Did those long boring inventories in the ruins of Babylon change that society?

How did the printing press change society?

Is this Middlemarch and the reach of the telegram translated into the 21st century? What of radio's influence in the 1930's, television, tapes and CD's.

Is society so changed? Do the have nots stir? Are communications changes always accompanied by social upheaval? Can common humanity ameliorate the effects?

The questions this simple sentence offers us also predicate social and economic upheaval.

The Battle for Seattle, McSpotlight, Al-Qaeda, Cyber assault against Estonia in 2007 and a host of threats against the systems for delivery.

The sentence has much more to it.

With all our modern systems for communication, are the starving fed, the poor rich?

Do new communications always have to divide peoples?

Do new communications always benefit an elite?

Was it really new communications systems that brought about these ills? Or would they be there without them? Are we really going to see society change, by that I mean, is it inevitable that evil will be exposed again as a consequence of the introduction of there new forms of communication?

Is ubiquitous interactive communication different?

So far, it does seem to be different. There seem to be sets of values that spread through these channels that provide checks and balances that past systems for communication did not seem to have.

Transparency the sword and scales wielded by ubiquitous interactive communication may yet have a part in this saga.

The book has to return to this theme.

The Influentials theory debunked.

Fast Company runs an article in which Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, puts to test the idea that trends are sparked by a handful of highly connected individuals, or the influentials, as they have become known after the best sellers The Tipping Point and The Influentials.

It was Ilya Vedrashko in his Adlab blog who brought me this gem.

The Influentials is debunked. Katz and Lazarsfeld are questioned and Stanley Milgram "Six Degrees of Separation" plays differently when you run the analysis using robust and life size samples.

In an environment where individual values are the starting point and where they are explicated as tokens and when they provide the basis of attraction online which can be proven over and over again, I am with Watts.

There is a ballance between marketing and Public Relations

There is a balance between marketing and hype and public relations, that discipline comprising management of relationships, transparency and communication.

On the one hand there is a part of human nature that makes people want to be noticed in the social order. This is true of companies too. We like and need marketing. On the other, there is a need to share values using communication which is at the core of relationships. Sharing requires transparency to engender trust and confidence among the people in the group - the heart of good PR.

Over the last few weeks we have seen what happens when markets respond to too much marketing and hype without the modifying influence of relationships.

Lets get to the nitty gritty. In the USA and to a less extent the UK (although it led to the actualitie of Northen Rock going bust - what ever one might call the 'rescue plan') the markets believed the President of the USA and the British Chansellor of the Exchequer when they said that these two economies were strong. They believed the political marketing of, well, the politicians.

Within the closed gardens of the financial institutions it is all too easy to believe such hype without digging too deep. That, and a lack of transparency as so many institutions ignore the conversations that surround them, and there is every belief that the West and notably the US and UK will continue to be financially secure.

Just look at the response to the Edelman Trust Barometer which revealed this week that business opinion formers seem to believe that they can trust the marketing hype of businesses when almost anyone who audits the online community conversations can see less than enthusiasm for corporate speak.

What we have seen is the corporate assets based on tangible assets turned into tradeable products and services using Intellectual Properties and process know-how have been hyped. The sub-prime lenders, celebrity brands and extravagant personal and government spending, funded by loans from the savings of ordinary folk and topped up by China and Indian economic surplus is not a receipt for endless success. The interest, if not the principle, has to be paid back.

It is not that we did not know that Gordon had sold gold at the bottom of the market or that he had borrowed endlessly to fund hospitals and city academies. It is that the balancing effects of transparent relationships and communication, the real drivers of added value have been suppressed. In the UK leaks have replaced Parliamentary announcements, Big Tents have silenced critics and EU jobs have extended political sell by dates with labels that look similar to an ad agency designed price sticker.

In the end it required very little by way of transparency, notably in the shakiness of the US sub-prime loans and the exposure of poor banking practice revealed in the collapse of Northern Rock , and the whole edifice collapses. Trust and confidence is lost when the true nature of the relationships is revealed.

Relationships when undone by transparency crack trust and confidence and we are seeing the effect in spades this week.

This is why I believe that the PR industry needs to have a much better understanding of what drives relationships, why they are so powerful and why they can act for an against the interest of clients big and small.

The values that underpin relationships, including those values that surround corporate and government attitudes towards transparency need to be articulated and, in order that people should be drawn towards them, communicated in an honest and trustworthy manner.

Without such governance in PR, we will continue to hurt the most vulnerable and will undermine the nature of our civilisations.

Image: Diseno

Lies, Damned Lies, Opinion Polls

Will Beresford, strategy director at Beyond Analysis, has some interesting comments in Channel Web this week.

His thoughts come at a time when, once again, opinion polling shows its frailty in the US primaries.

Beresford points out that:

Traditional models for businesses to research their consumers are also expected to change. Customer information will be enriched by data found on the social web to supersede traditional research tools such as questionnaires and focus groups.

Feedback and influence from social networks will ultimately become more significant factors in the purchasing decision cycle.

Of course, his view has to be predicated on the niche nature of online communities and the demands, which he outlines in the article, of social networks.

This is not easy. Many organisations are dismissive of online content because it seems to them to be banal. Often this is because they have a search engine view of content which gives one reference point in what is often a longer and more structured, often networked, conversation and at other times, to quote Professor Howard Rheingold: “When you claim to be sceptical of the authenticity of online socializing and advise enthusiasts to "get a life," who made you the authority on what a life ought to be?”

We also have to think in term of flow (Kay McMahon has an interesting paper). The theory helps explain the allure of online games and social networks. Flow is the mechanism that helps engage the user and is powered by basic instincts, something I have touched on. The drivers behind this is distilled into a short video and a lengthier post or two.

So, I agree with Beresford and invite the online community to show how to be effective in finding out more about user generated 'market' segments.

Google hands advertising to the PR industry

The search engine giant is in talks with several newspaper publishers to sell space in their pages to its online clients, reports The Times.

Google Print Ads is an extension of Google AdWords, the auction system that lets companies bid for a slot that appears alongside specific online word searches.

Instead of an auction, advertisers pick a newspaper online through Google and enter a bid for available advertising space on a given page and day.

But rather than offering to pay the list price, customers say what they are prepared to pay. Publishers can choose to accept or decline the offer.

This changes the nature of PR. Lets suppose there is a big story breaking, why not bid for an advertisement on the page? Advertising would then be driven by editorial and PR generated editorial to boot.

Is this the end of advertising as we know it?

Now, lets take the argument a bit further.

Why not use the same technique in others online PR content?

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/