Monday, June 30, 2014

Evaluation of PR leads to the value of a CEO

Jim Macnamara  has offered an evolved way to evaluate some PR activities. It is very timid.

He can go much further and it can turn from a cost into a high yielding investment.


It seems simple to measure but is much more daunting than most will believe.

Audit

There is a need to maintain an audit of the organisational constituencies and the environment in which they interact.  Without such knowledge it is very hard to identify the nature of the tangible, but much more important, intangible value of corporate activity.

The need to consider intangibles is as relevant as being able to measure the value of a printed £10 bill. This is the ultimate manifestation of trust and reputation and is adopted by every citizen and corporate leader every day. The ten pound note is worth nothing. It is backed by nothing it is the epitome of paper having a value which is disproportionately valued by citizens.


So too the press clip and tweet.


Here then is the basic mind-shift for most corporate managers and especially the AVE led marketer.


There is a need to audit what is evidently in the public domain and to examine its intangible value.


The Barclays Bank Twitter stream shows exactly why the bank is so weak in global terms despite holding so many assets. Trust and the Bank are not great bedfellows at present and neither is reputation. Perhaps this is why it performs so badly and is the target for every regulator and financial ambulance chaser across the world.

Monitor


The next part of this process is monitoring. What is the norm? What is the norm among competitors and what is the norm for organisations with similar constituents. That is simple. Next up is what are the variations. Monitoring variation is a very good way of evaluating an organisation and its competition.

Measure

There is so much to measure and it is here that we can begin to see where the real intangible value lies.

Oddly enough the marketers got some of it right when they tried to use AVE's. 


There is a measurable relationship between good, extensive, independent and timely coverage and the ops and experiences of people using Facebook or Google+ to express their view of the organisation and its products or services.


The extent to which Anthony Jenkins reputation is better than Barclays Bank reputation is noticeable and the same can be said of other Banks and their leaders. They are also different as between Twitter and LinkedIn. There is a form of market, an exchange rate, between reputation quotients. What would it cost the Barclays PR people to buy the Jenkins Twitter reputation and sell it to the Daily Mail? Who might be the auctioneer?


Could it be Google? Could it be that one can use Google's findings to show the relative relationships between various media and their coverage of the client? Who then is going to explore such exchanges?



Value

Across all this media, how does trust and reputation compare between different corporate leaders? Is this an intangible market place that offers a view of the value of CEO's

But wait, we know how much they are paid... there is a cross over between the intangible reputation and the intangible we call money.


So it would seem there is a theoretical way we can evaluate trust and reputation, and the intangible value of public relations which is as robust as the value of the CEO's salary.


Without such a measurement is is very hard to gauge the value of the management team or even a ten pound note.


So, Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC, Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney it may be time to put your PhD's to work to explore the value of PR as tightly as you would an Australian Dollar.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Return On Investment



Return On Investment (ROI) is an accounting valuation method.

In PR we use it a lot. I am not sure we realise what we are talking about.

But it is not very robust.

Because the numerator (Net Income) is an unreliable corporate performance measurement, the outcome of the formula for ROI must also be unreliable to determine success or corporate value.
However the ROI formula still keeps showing up in
many annual reports...

The degree to which Return On Investment (ROI) overstates the
economic value depends on at least 5 factors:
1. length of project life (the longer, the bigger the overstatement)
2. capitalization policy (the smaller the fraction of total investment capitalized in the books, the greater will be the overstatement)
3. The rate at which depreciation is taken on the books (depreciation rates faster than straight-line basis will result in a higher ROI)
4. The lag between investment outlays and the recoupment of these outlays from cash inflows (the greater the time lag, the greater the degree of overstatement)
5. the growth rate of new investment (faster growing companies will have lower Return On Investment )

Formula: 

Net Income / Book Value of Assets = ROI

(Better) alternative:

Net Income+Interest (1-Tax Rate) / Book value of Assets = Return On Investment

You may find more information like this from Steven M. Bragg in his book  Business Ratios and Formulas : A Comprehensive
Guide  and Ciaran Walsh - Key Management Ratios 

Monday, June 09, 2014

Mobile revenues 10% of Newspapers is a threat to... democracy?

The future of traditional PR is now in serious doubt.

If there are no newspapers, journals or magazines and when academic publishing is seriously threatened, there will be little by way of independent media for the media relations model.

We see the scenarios with Tom Foremski when he discusses the effect of mobile on news publishing and Dylan Tweney as he talks about academic publishing.

At worst, the PR industry has to put a range of added skills, capabilities and strategic abilities within the grasp of the practitioner.

This is not as simple as being technically competent in Facebook and Twitter applications. We have seen reports of declines in the use of both. The whole area of defending relationships between clients and their constituencies is now a much bigger business than anyone would have imagined ten years ago. PR is re-defined.

As for publishing, there are other societal issues.

For centuries, we have depended on newspaper publishing to lubricate the role of government and social interaction. We have used newspapers as mainline defence against threat to democracy. Today, this is no longer possible and we do not have any idea of the emerging model other than it is evolving and is not called Facebook.

Formeski's point is well made and needs some further consideration: A solution has to be found on an industry-wide scale in order to halt the media's crumbling business model and to begin to reverse the trend and rebuild its fortunes. Individual media ventures, no matter how well funded, or how much high quality content they produce, will not succeed as self-sustaining businesses unless there is a new media business model available to all.

We don't have it. And it's the biggest failure of our digital age because media informs and educates all citizens and governments, and influences the many complex decisions that have to be made."

Thursday, June 05, 2014

Managing risk - a crisis in PR

Some years ago, I commented on FIR how we can manage uncertainty.

Risk Management is methodology to reduce exposure to risk and is a well known and established discipline in high risk environments. Today, social media has exposed most companies to high risk.

It is time to plan for such occasions

The methods that have been refined over the years can be applied to all forms of activity and where the cost of risk is likely to be significant, prudent companies use it.

Reputation risk is, for most organisations, a crisis. It escalates very fast and for most entities has disproportionate ill-effect on the organisation and people involved.

Most people try to behave honestly and justly and are deeply affected when issues arise or crisis hits. The actual cost to organisation in terms of lost confidence throughout the organisation is immense.

With the writable web, organisation have begun to discover that there is the potential for immense harm to come swiftly.

I have been reviewing my approach in the last few weeks and have come up with some added content:

The nature of risk and crisis


In developing a policy, it has to be noted that social media is very volatile and needs a very responsive capability to manage risk.

The nature of risk and crisis is well documented and often characterised as four steps towards danger:


Variation 

All plans/activities have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning. Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. This is normal day to day management. We all do it. In social media it is manifest in day to day chatter; planned outputs; anticipated message devolvement and community building and supportive commitment. This is part of the daily norm and planned activity that typically has modest variation to the anticipated result.


Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the management team cannot be sure will occur or when. They can be planned for and are part of management.  Like coping with unexpected staff illness – managers cope. Such issues can be identified from past experience and brought into this category with a developed mechanism to reduce impact or turn disadvantage into advantage. An ability to monitor the the organisation, its competitors, working environment and people commenting on them is a method for seeing evolution at an early stage. There are other such issues such as evolving consumer offerings; mobile phone effects; not to mention the implications for, and responses of the organisation and its competition at home and abroad as potential to create issues. It is not unreasonable to use scenario planning to manage foreseen circumstances even to the extent of imaging new forms of product/service management derived from digital evolution, criminality and radical religious and political threat.


Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B. Good management has crisis management planning in place to mitigate effects.  The ability to implement capabilities that mitigate such events have to be developed. For example, a capability to monitor volume and semantic focus of conversations will help identify an issue gaining pace. A capability to do this dynamically with an alarm trip for incidents that seem to be different from the norm is a good start (variance alarms). Having a capability to reach experts, spokespeople and management quickly is another. Scenario planning and ‘war games’ also offers a capability to develop expertise.


Unknown unknowns 

Sometimes referred to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. It is possible to push unk unks further away with good crisis management tools in place. Developing capability  to manage Unknown Unknowns is also part of the work of the PR practitioner. With a trained management team is becomes possible to identify an unknown risk and alert the organisation  and its constituents to the environment. It is, thereby possible to 'plan' for Unk Unk's.


The elements of a plan

The elements of a plan need to be in place at an early stage and include the following:

  • Broad and well versed issues and crisis team to develop plans and maintain capability
  • Comprehensive and regular audits
  • Integration with wider BoE issues and crisis systems
  • Comprehensive monitoring and alarm systems
  • Development of responses to different (known, projected) forms of issues and crisis.
  • Escalation/de-escalation policies/practices/planning. 
  • Regular reporting



Steps to be taken


There is a need to create a formal response to issues and crisis. 

This will form a formal plan to progressively identify the nature of issues and crisis across a range of social media (YouTube, Twitter, etc) and eventually covering the majority of such media.

There is some crossover between media and other operations, these need to be explored and planning developed to optimise monitoring, reporting and response.

The extent to which issues can be significantly dangerous and mitigation can be developed needs exploring and formal policy developed and implemented.

The continued evolution of policy and activity needs to be developed to mitigate less helpful public contributions:

There is a strong strategic case for the organisation to develop alternative forms of communication. For example the some organisations are very dependant on the leading reporters in their field and the views of  a small journalistic elite. They have a particular view of events. 

There is a case for developing alternative channels to the wider population using social media. 


Equally, there is a cadre of  writers in academia and the management consultants shaping opinions and strategic application of social media can offer the means to address their audience without dependence on their outputs.

Because we can identify a large part of their audience, it is possible to use social media to go direct to a wide and interested audience and still avoid the traditional opinion formers.

There is much we can do in planning for issues and crisis management




Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Eight in ten CEO's don't 'Get It'

In a blistering indictment of Public Relations Managers, research firm Forrester found only 21% of CEOs in firms with more than 250 employees have set a clear vision for digital.


This fell further to 17% among CEOs in charge of companies with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees.


Not being able to see, or worse, not being able to convince management that digital and social interaction is critical to corporate mission is a complete failure of in public relations management.


It is not that there has not been enough warning or even consideration of the matter. In 1999, the CIPR held and internet Commission into the significance of the internet to PR practice.


The findings were uncompromising.


Today, with 700 social media management jobs currently being advertised by organisation like Nationwide, Sky, L'Oreal and National Trust in LinkedIn, there seems to be serious demand to capability but it looks like same old same old. They are reporting to marketing managers who, it would seem, are tarred with the same brush.


They too have been caught out and so the blind lead the blind and Boards of Directors blithely lead their companies along the same path.


When it comes to strategic contributions to corporates it seems that PR is, at best, batting a bad third.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Digital PR up 47% or missing the target by half?


The UK has the highest share of total media spending on digital channels worldwide. It is estimated to grow by 47.5% this year. 

Is this reflected in the development of the PR industry?

For example, is the PR industry able to generate 300 Social Media Managers (see my post on the recruitment bubble).  Have the Universities created the courses to feed the need? Are the PR institutions investing in education of members at this sort of rate? Have senior managers in industry and commerce invested in in-house training to develop the necessary skills base and strategic capability?

For example, would one imagine the need extends to: 'how we might expand our digital and social media activity – and which platforms are the most appropriate for us to use.'  It is the CIPR answer to the need. Perhaps, a more strategic approach might be helpful.

Amazingly half of the PR consultants knew a year ago that they had a skills shortage. Now that number has grown by half if they want to compete. A quarter of agencies are not even going to increase marketing budgets for digital services.

To get some idea of the under ambitions of the PR industry, many agencies are expecting to grow their digital revenues to 21-30% this year says the Public Relations Consultants Association.


Is this an industry working hard to flop?




See report: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736#sthash.h7ZC0juH.dpuf

Frantic recruitment bubble for Social Media Managers

I was a little taken aback to be presented with requests to respond to advertisements for the job of social media manager.

I am, as they say, a little older than most!

So I looked up LinkedIn to see how many vacancies there are. It is a vindication of the online PR courses I have been teaching over the last eight years.

Please feel free to select your next job.





Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Radical Porosity - a vendor example

Today, I received notification about the journey of a small parcel of goods ordered yesterday, in the UK made in the Netherlands and shipped via Germany to my home.

I did not know that the product originated in Holland.

In order to deliver the product, UPS disclosed to me the location of the manufacture and it took me  a few seconds to locate the company using Google.

This is an unintended consequence of USP's transparency system but is evidence of how a vendor can contribute to Radical Internet Porosity.

Is this a PR issue?

Does the manufacturer want such third party systems to affect them? Of course, UPS is very aware of the dangers of intercepts and has ways of limiting exposure (here is the system) but others are no so well organised.

Is such disclose a good thing ?

How do we prepare management understand about the significance of Internet Porosity? Is it inevitable? How can it affect reputation and what can we do to prepare for the big Nobel Award leak which one day will happen?




1Z06694R0411139292

  • Updated: 29/01/2014 7:06 Eastern Time
 
 
 
 
Wednesday, 29/01/2014, By End of Day
Bristol, United Kingdom, Wednesday, 29/01/2014

Additional Information

28/01/2014
Package
1.10 lbs

Shipment Progress

LocationDateLocal TimeActivity
Bristol, United Kingdom29/01/20147:25Out for Delivery
29/01/20147:15Arrival Scan
Castle Donnington, United Kingdom29/01/20144:45Departure Scan
29/01/20143:02Arrival Scan
Koeln, Germany29/01/20142:40Departure Scan
Koeln, Germany28/01/201423:46Arrival Scan
Eindhoven, Netherlands28/01/201421:15Departure Scan
28/01/201417:45Origin Scan
Netherlands28/01/201411:55Order Processed: Ready for UPS

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Chaos theory and radical transparency and organisations


 

In a chaotic world organisms try to create order. This is true from the basic amoeba to the sentient human. In the case of the human we developed the idea that organisations are the preferred form of organisations. Tribes, governments, companies, associations, regulators... all are organisations to help provide order.
 Organisations have boundaries They built the intellectual property wall.

Then came the internet. A form of competition evolved when radical transparency was used as a weapon. Declaring the price of a product online was good for selling products to customers but also told competitors the complete list of inventory retail prices, bargains and even slow moving stock discounts.

As transparency developed it became more extreme and there was more overt, covert and accidental transparency.

Today, it is possible to identify a high percentage of employees by name in LinkedIn and the relationship between a person's Twitter account, Facebook comments and friends across most of the nation. With such intelligence big data analysis shows up all the employees and their interests, friends, fears, motivations and much more. The organisation is thus radically transparent. It is no longer an organisation. At best it is a coalition.

The order that the living organism, the human being, sought is now subject to a myriad of variations.

Organisations are now chaotic and subject to more variables than at any time in the existence of mankind.

The internet profiles of organisation are sensitive to the actions of its employees; the actions of employees can be in any form online and affect offline as a matter of course and the range of effects of actions is very dense.

Organisations are now facing a future that is chaotic.

Such thoughts are significant for PR theory.


Friday, November 01, 2013

Spying or gaining commercial intelligence

The Edward Snowden fallout over what the intelligence services can or can't do with our content is an issue for PR.

You see, the PR industry is already at it. We are collecting information from newspapers (clippings) and processing them. Of course, we have done this for a very long time. Interpreting the news has been part of the PR job forever. But now, its not quite so civil and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has to come to grips with the new environment.
http://nod3x.com/
Interpreting content
We can dig much deeper and, we are digging quite deep already.

Very gently, we are sliding into an area where ethics and best practice will collide.

The programme shown on the left is a nice representation of numbers of citations, pretty pictures of the community, some graphs and a word map.

Pretty innocent huh!

But hang on a minute. The pretty pictures are of people. Did they give anyone permission to have their photo in a business report?

Then there is the information about location. Who said I wanted to have my home address included?

So far pretty innocent. But now we come to the intelligence bit. I see that a number of people I know are associated with other people I know in the circle. Did these people  really want to make it that obvious?



The  graph on the right represents my contacts in LinkedIn. It shows clusters of people who are active in different spheres and I have highlighted one person who has links across a number of areas of my life. This graph is about me. LinkedIn do not allow you to create a network about, for example an organisation or several organisations. But... yes you guessed it, this is not hard to do. Within four hours I can have people from locations as far away as the Philippines and Bolivia who have  all the software available to do it and they cost so little it's embarrassing.

Yes, again, did the actors in this graph realise that they could be used as pawns in such representation. Is it good?

This is only the first step. I have tested a number of companies to find out what proportion of employees have a LinkedIn profile. 88% is not unusual.

Using the same capability it is possible to build up a picture of the departments inside a company and compare that with other companies. We can identify the comparative levels of expertise between organisations. It is possible to find out the skills base of Basingstoke and Brighton, Birmingham and Bristol (OK, anywhere you like - even, if you are a lobbyist, Grangemouth and all of the major employers in the area).

But now lets have a look at a picture of the people who tweet about a company and especially those who re-tweeted a report published by the BBC's Robert Peston (the cluster near the middle).

They are now a PR target. A PR person would know that these people are opinion formers and will know the precise subjects that interest them.

That sounds cool huh! Is it ethical?

But what if these data was about  a supermarket and drawn from tweets about the six competitors. Then the PR person can target the top most opinion formers, the really active customers or the people who continuously complain.

Does this mean that there is room here for some bullyboy tactics? Yes it does. Is that ethical. How is it to be managed?

But this is really not BigData analysis, this is SmallData analysis.

Imagine you wanted to finger the most potent political advisor's in the world? That would be big data and on issues like slavery, the environment, international trade and even war. Is it worth it?

It is absolutely possible to identify the build-up of skills being recruited and developed by organisations, industry sectors and much more. Is this how we can measure how the PR industry is gearing up to meet the demands of its client base? You see, this is a many sided debate.

So far, I have not mentioned photos and videos, location analysis or semantic inference capabilities (which Google uses all the time - but do you - can you?)

Neither the CIPR nor GCHQ are going to stop people putting stuff online and neither of them are going to stop people mining and manipulating this content and the data that is being extracted to gain political and commercial advantage.

The genie is out of the bottle.

What we have to do is know it is happening, create rules of engagement and certainly work towards an accord that will not disadvantage ethical practitioner or advantage those who would take advantage of the innocent.

I call on the CIPR to take a lead and at worst have a Commission to examine where it stands.

Friday, October 18, 2013

RTB Public Relations

We are used to automated bidding on the Stock Markets of the world.

Enter the same thing for advertising:

According to MAGNA GLOBAL research, programmatic buying of digital media inventory will reach $7.4 billion this year in the US, of which $3.9bn will be transacted through Real-Time Bidding (RTB), and another $3.5bn will be transacted through other programmatic/automated platforms (including social media).


This is obviously not something to worry the PR person is it?

Well, um.... yes it is. The gene is now out of the bottle. There was a time when there seemed to be a lot of trivia online and it did not count for much. Then two things happened. People like PR people started to churn out deep, rich and worthy content providing opportunities to create computerised semantic understanding and, almost at the same time, we discovered that using BigData techniques, even trivial posts had a shape and structure that gave us considerable insights into the authors when taken together (guess what, they start chatting at work stuff at 0800 on their way to work).

So, all of a sudden the content that is about conversations and interaction and, and this one is for Jim Grunig, issues becomes part of the digital landscape.

Now, we have content that can be used through a range of outlets just like advertising.

This is an area of PR that is around the corner but will be really valuable once we have worked out how.

Do I approve?

Yes!

Thursday, October 17, 2013

What do Students Need - n'genPR

This post was inspired by a comment by Richard Bailey in which he suggested that students might do unsupervised work.

I asked if we are teaching a trade at university and go back to the last cohort I taught in the UK.

Rhetorically I asked:


  • Did I challenge thinking about privacy in a Big Data era?
  • What are the PR consequences of machine understanding in an age of semantic computing? 
  • Was the idea that the statements students make with their dress code are also a statement that their clothes could make to each other (Internet of Things doing PR)?
  • Is the idea of digital ghettos an issue for public relations as big as ethics in corporate affairs?


These are big questions for today's students because they will have to face the answers within five years after leaving university.

For the practitioners who want to see students coming to them ready made to stuff press releases into envelopes and tweet sweet nothings for a client, this is not good news. Neither it should be.
This is normal PR that is taught to junior practitioners with five 'O' levels. It is something the graduate learns in the her six week induction along with the fire drill.

 For the practitioner who wants an employees with an understanding of the rate of change in our society, then students need to have thought through 'next generation PR' (n'genPR) practice.

In writing proposals for a client this month, did you consider the influence of employees contribution to LinkedIn Groups? This is a very important media and you can find out how it signifies using semantic search.

You need Big Data PR to  find the right employees and then how to motivate them without being unethical?

Woah! Ethics, Semantic Search, Big Data, LinkedIn (a media outlet in its own right) what?

Now, this is not tomorrows' PR. This is this weeks' proposal and already you are venturing into so called n'genPR.

Ooops, now what about the same thinking applied to - the client's key constituent's umbrella - you know, the one that 'listens' to the weather forecast and tweets to be taken out on rainy days (and back again when its fine) and has your PR message on it? Hey! There you go, the Internet of Things PR.



Wednesday, October 09, 2013

The Nature of Public Relations - Semiotic

Today there are millions of people building new platforms and channels for communication. Many are awful, some are a duplication of some, now passed over, idea. Others gain a brief following and fade away. A few, a very few, survive for some time. Email and SMS are examples of durable channels while MySpace and Facebook are examples of interim social media that survived and gained considerable presence. But internet properties last only as long as they reflect the needs and satisfy the desires of their constituency. It is cruelly darwinian and is, as a result, a fast changing reflection of human drivers.


The things we see online and the ones that prosper online have elbowed their way into our consciousness and if they are useful and satisfy needs can survive. Most do not. Only the very fittest can make it.


An influential tradition in media research is referred to as 'use and gratifications'. This approach focuses on why people use particular media rather than on content. In contrast to the concern of the 'media effects' tradition with 'what media do to people' (which assumes a homogeneous mass audience and a 'hypodermic' view of media), use and gratification can be seen as part of a broader trend amongst media researchers which is more concerned with 'what people do with media', allowing for a variety of responses and interpretations. Some commentators have argued that gratifications could also be seen as effects: e.g. thrillers are likely to generate very similar responses amongst most viewers. And who could say that they never watch more TV than they had intended to? Watching TV helps to shape audience needs and expectations.


Use and Gratification theory is old but in the 40 years since the most recent manifestation was explicated, social media has brought it to the fore again. It presents the use of media in terms of the gratification of social or psychological needs of the individual (Blumler & Katz 1974). The mass media compete with other sources of gratification, but gratifications can be obtained from a medium's content (e.g. watching a specific programme), from familiarity with a genre within the medium (e.g. watching soap operas), from general exposure to the medium (e.g. watching TV), and from the social context in which it is used (e.g. watching TV with the family).


Theorists argue that people's needs influence how they use and respond to a medium. Zillmann (cited by McQuail 1987: 236) showed the influence of mood on media choice: boredom encourages the choice of exciting content and stress encourages a choice of relaxing content. The same TV programme may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs are associated with individual personalities, stages of maturation, backgrounds and social roles. Developmental factors seem to be related to some motives for purposeful viewing: e.g. Judith van Evra argues that young children may be particularly likely to watch TV in search of information and hence more susceptible to influence (Evra 1990: 177, 179). Translating these ideas into online and in particular social media is very attractive and with the research we have already (Amaral 2009) using semantics, has a lot of close similarities.



The internet is being created in the image of human interest, needs and desires. Tinkering with this driving force is dangerous. Some politicians believe they can, others in management try and governments fervently wish they could. But, as the Arab Spring showed, switching off the internet is far too difficult when living with the consequences.


This evolutionary development of the internet has made it very robust.


So many people have tried to prevent this evolution in the past that it has considerable and hugely complex defensive capabilities.


The UN agency was updating its International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in December 2012, but some member states feared it would lead to centralised control of the internet by the UN.


A wide range of organisations and academics raised even deeper concerns about the plans to seek to establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder internet governance entities, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).


For many the WCIT threatened the "free and open internet". It caused a furore, largely because no one really knew what the outcome would be. It had the potential outcome ranging from tinkering at the edges to the potential global disruption of communication as we know it.


The ability to move from mere digital interaction to analog and physical interaction using the internet as a semi intelligent platform or channel is now adding a lot to the way we live.


It is offering a lot to the practice of PR and a wider range of semiotic markers that can be used in the practice of public relations.


The mobile phone app that controls a camera using bluetooth or wifi connectivity is an adjunct to a visual PR tactic that can be applied at any product launch by an intern. Furthermore, a photograph taken in this way can be uploaded automatically to a photo sharing site or other cloud based facility without a human hand in sight. Such is the digital real time press pack and the idea is not new.


The Google Driverless Car is a significant step further and between these two extremes lies a wide range of PR PR tactics.


We are already aware that semiotic PR is being practiced. Almost by accident, it has crept up on the profession. It is now commonplace for a Public Relations programme to be multi media.


The PR industry has strayed into the semiotic web as a discipline for affective relationship intervention. As a result, it faces the new realities of the complexity of semiotics (as opposed to media -including social media - based PR) and the precept of PR using the perspective of constituents and their affective technologies.


Google offers a semantic capability. It shows us how semantics has entered into the relationships we have in the media and between ourselves. Semantics can add values atsuch as the type of media, date and even country. These added elements are semiotic and can be technically as well as user created.


We also know that this information is passed along between one person and another and often shared with a wider community.


The drivers for building, creating and optimising the efficacy of online communities has been the subject of considerable research.



A very detailed study by Matthew Rowe, Miriam Fernandez, Sofia Angeletou, and Harith Alani showed that, in online communities, users interact with one another around a shared topic or interest and exhibit behaviour that can be used to label them with their roles in the community. By deriving the role composition of a community - i.e. the percentage distribution of different roles - the composition can be associated with signifiers of health, such as activity, and used to identify what worked for the community and what did not.


For public relations, this means that practitioners can become more effective when they use such signifiers.






This is becoming the norm for much social interaction. It is network communication. Citations, such as tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn and G+ content, blog post or web pages even emails and SMS messages, carry a lot of information much of this is part of the structure of content and media and is called meta data.


As citations are exposed on line they are automatically available through a lot of protocols and so enter the network. Networks have intersections where a citation becomes available to be found by search engines, lists and channels like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and many many more.


We find that at each intersection of the network values are shared. Each citation carries with it a lot of information. These data are significant and contribute value. They are values. Some of these values are about the media. Is it Twitter, a newspaper, Facebook or a blog? This kind of information is passed on by the software in use. It could also be that some of the content comes in the form of other tags such as Facebook 'Likes' or Google +'s.


Research shows that a) users' motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Such fndings are relevant for 1) the development of tag-based user interfaces (even in public fora such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+) 2) the analysis of tag semantics and 3) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems.


These are the additional semiotic elements in addition to the semantic concepts inherent in the text.


Of course, all web pages (and each Tweet and Instagram picture is a web page) has meta data.


Historically, as Aaron Bradley at Search Engine Land reports, meaning has been given to pieces of text on the Internet by use of the ‘meta’ tag, short for ‘metadata’. Metadata is a word that can be defined as contextual information about a piece of content, such as an individual page on a website.


An older example of metadata would be a library’s card catalogue – at least if you can remember back to the delightfully primitive days before computerized databases were installed in libraries. Each card in those drawers represents a book that exists within the library, and has the name of the book, the author, the subject, and the Dewey decimal system subject category number.


The card for a book is not the book itself, but it describes the book in a way that it can be found – the information on the card gave the book a meaning that could be understood by the ‘process’ or ‘mechanism’ of finding a book using the card catalogue.


The meaning conveyed by the card catalogue, that allows one to find a book in a library, is only an identifier for a book – that description is not necessarily included in the contents of the book itself.


In a similar manner, meta tags have been used to give a webpage a meaning that could be ‘understood’ and acted upon by a process or mechanism depending on the nature of that meaning.


The words or their meaning in the meta data do not affect or appear in the content that they describe – they merely describe the content just enough to help them be handled by a process that, like the library card catalogue, most often involves finding that content.


Meta tags were originally used in the form of HTML elements with attributes like ‘keywords’, ‘description’, and ‘author’.


The words used in those tags were not part of the human-visible content on the webpage they described, but they did assist search engine crawlers in describing them just enough to figure out whether or not they had anything to do with a user’s search query. In some cases, they still do.


Over the years, innovations have come about and progress has been made in finding ways to describe content in a better and more detailed manner. From ‘alt’ attributes describing what is depicted in a particular image, to XML, RDF, microformats, Dublin Core metadata, and HTML5, these descriptions of content are becoming more and more detailed, and consequently more and more useful to browsers and the technical community.


In 2012 Google announced e-commerce meta tags from the GoodRelations project have been integrated into schema.org. This vastly increases the number of schema.org classes and properties available for e-commerce websites. It is worth keeping an eye on such developments for  the opportunities it offers for PR. In this instance fashion PR will find that campaigns using the GoodRelations project  syntax will get to target constituents more and in a richer format.



Each of these elements describe the citation and help in its distribution. To get some idea of how these elements can be used metadata search engines are useful. An example of how metadata can affect search results is shown using http://harvester.kit.edu. It provides some examples of different findings using different tags ( a list of meta search engines is available from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines).


As each citation passes through the network there is a form of ‘negotiation’ that takes place as to whether the citation is accepted by a potential recipient or not. A blog post will not be accepted by Twitter but a short sentence and URL might be. The technology looks at the signs to identify whether the citation will be accepted.


In addition, there is a human element. Has the person set up their online presence to accept the citation (for example have they signed up for a social media channel of not)? Is this the right time of day for the person to be receptive to messages (perhaps the citation was published in a different time zone)? Are these the messages that the person wants to see or have they set up barriers to stop the content getting through.


The next part of the process is whether the citation prompt the recipient to do something? Doing something will, of course, also affect the message. It will add a tag, a semiotic marker, showing that the software or person has shared the content including the semantic and semiotic content.


Sometimes the person will edit or add to the content adding or taking away values associated with the message. The nature of networked communication is that as it passes through the network it is changed.


This is one of the big changes in Public Relations. Practitioners are now moving from linear, informational,  communications to networked communication. The nature of online public relations is that any control that a practitioner may have had in other times have now evaporated. The internet is the arbeter.


As we will see, network communication can be very powerful, even viral in nature.


Although few communication theorist would still accept it, the informational approach has  been a most influential model of communication. It reflects a common sense (if misleading) understanding of what communication is.


Shannon and Weaver's original model consisted of five elements:
  1. An information source, which produces a message (Keith Urbahn)
  2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals (Twitter)
  3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission (the Internet)
  4. A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal (Twitter, email, Tweetdeck etc)
  5. A destination, where the message arrives (laptop, smartphone etc)
A sixth element, noise is a dysfunctional factor: any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static' on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent.


Lasswell's verbal version of this model: 'Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect ?' was reflected in subsequent research in human communication which was closely allied to behaviouristic approaches.


In the networked model, which is closer to conversations held in a community or group, a  richer transaction takes place. The internet offers extra semiotic content that can be equated to body language in face to face communication.


In the networked communications model, meaning can be passed on without much by way of change other than it is associated with a technology or a person adding the endorsement inferred by passing the values to a third party or many third parties in a group or network.


Alternatively, the meaning may be changed by adding or taking away semantic or semiotic values or tags (an activity that can be done by human or technical agents) .


The circumstance of the author may change the way a social media is used and is seen in how people used Twitter after the Great East Japan Earthquake. First, we gathered tweets immediately after the earthquake and analyzed various factors, including locations. The results revealed two findings: (1) people in the disaster area tend to directly communicate with each other (reply-based tweet). On the other hand,(2) people in the other area prefer spread the information from the disaster area by using Re-tweet.


The combination of network communication and semantics is shown to outperform other forms of communication and information distribution in many cases.


We know, from the research of Bruno Amaral, that when people have common values, they tend to cluster together online. Such clustering is found as common aims and values of organisations and in movements on and off line. Other research in different media contribute to this thinking including Twitter where we find semantic tags are influential. The nature of semantic cues in facebook also support this hypothesis. The use of tags or signifieres is is a common practice and adds to the values associated with the content. There is a significant effect from the post /content type and category on likes and comments  as well as on interaction duration. The posting day has an (limited) effect too.


As values are added without degradation of values extant (existing semiotic tokens) a viral phenomenon occurs.


 



Perhaps one can reflect on the two models with the contributions of Daniel Chandler who writes:


“As Reddy (Reddy M 1979) notes, if this view of language were correct, learning would be effortless and accurate. The problem with this view of language is that learning is seen as passive, with the learner simply 'taking in' information (Bowers 1988: 42). I prefer to suggest that there is no information in language, in books or in any medium per se. If language and books do 'contain' something, this is only words rather than information. Information and meaning arises only in the process of listeners, readers or viewers actively making sense of what they hear or see. Meaning is not 'extracted', but constructed.


............
References

  • Blumler J. G. & E. Katz (1974): The Uses of Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
  • McQuail, Denis (1987): Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn.). London: Sage
  • Evra, Judith van (1990): Television and Child Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
  • Brandt, P. Aa., Meaning and the machine: Toward a semiotics of interaction. In: P. Bøgh Andersen, B. Holmqvist & J. F. Jensen, eds., The Computer as Medium (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 128 - 140. 
  • Chandler D 2011 http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html accessed July 2011)
  • UNDERSTANDING WHY USERS TAG: A SURVEY OF TAGGING MOTIVATION LITERATURE AND RESULTS FROM AN EMPIRICAL STUDY. Markus Strohmaier, Christian Körner, Roman Kern Journal of web Semntics Vol 17 (2012)  http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/article/view/318
  • http://searchengineland.com/e-commerce-seo-using-schema-org-just-got-a-lot-more-granular-139236 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2141571
  • http://www.fastcompany.com/1367870/report-nine-scientifically-proven-ways-get-retweeted-twitter
  • http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167923612001996
  • The virtual geographies of social networks: a comparative analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn Zizi Papacharissi New Media & Society, February/March 2009; vol. 11, 1-2: pp. 199-220. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/1-2/199.short
  • Baresch,B. Knight, L. Harp, D. Yaschur, C. (2011) Friends Who Choose Your News: An analysis of content links on Facebook. presentation at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, Texas,
  • April 2011.
  • http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3880702
  • http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-24704-0_21?LI=true