Monday, October 12, 2015

Why are we certain that much PR will be automated?

Now to consider the very thought of ‘Automating’ PR.

It is a big subject for quite a lot of us. Automation is coming.

The thought of automating Public Relations is crossed between a joke, a possibility and a certain fearful prospect for most practitioners.

Long in the tooth consultants and senior practitioners are well aware of the range and creative capabilities needed in PR practice day-to-day.

They have the creative and professional capability in campaigns and issues management as well as an ability to bring calm and insights to top managers and interest groups such as journalists.


“You can’t automate it! It's creative!” They cry.



A majority of respondents to the 2015 CIPR survey (76%) revealed that they spend some or most of their time working on media relations. Also, digital knowledge and skills were the weakest competencies among survey respondents – particularly among in-house and senior practitioners.

The reality is, advertising, SEO and social media marketing agencies are combining their ‘paid for’ strengths in with the ‘earned’ capabilities traditionally considered the unique domain of the PR sector. Progressively, more technologies are usurping press relations activities. As we will see, a lot of press relations is being usurped by computers.


US economist Tyler Cowen puts it, machines aren’t only replacing human brawn - as they become more advanced, they’re increasingly replacing human brains. Or to put it another way: if the most precarious place to be working in the British economy in the 1970s and 80s was as a blue collar worker in a factory, today it’s the kind of white collar job occupied by the middle classes.

This is not all. Some social media activities can be automated and are strangely programmable and are not a long-term saviour for the PR profession.

Here we aim to introduce readers to a wide range of capabilities that are wholly or in part automated or automatable.

They go far beyond Facebook, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Search Engine Optimisation.

Automated PR is very close. Lots of people use some of its advantages already. The new users of these capabilities are emerging and are by-passing existing practitioners and agencies.

Automation creeps up on us.

It begins with a capability to assemble resources. It structures or re-structures the resources and then produces the result all without human hand.

I don’t claim that all PR is to be fully automated any time soon. But it is here that I begin to explore the many intrusions now taking over which, in time, will progressively automate most of the practices we now undertake and more.


The machines are far too clever to be left out!



For those who hang their hat on the uniquely creative nature of PR will be disappointed to discover that, progressively, technologies are beginning to automate many of the most creative of aspects of modern civilisation. PR will not be exempt.

Perhaps, over the next few days we can look further and see what is really happening. But here is a taster.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

A Definition of Public Relations

As industries are automated some or some parts of the activity are subsumed into a more robust realm of activity.

For this reason, it is very important that we know what we are talking about when we examine PR Automation.

Perhaps it is now time to be very sure about what PR is and can achieve.

There is a number of definitions flying about:

Public Relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public Relations is the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

Says the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

Lots of people try to define PR. In the digital environment, it is important to be precise and not to drift into other realms of management or to confine the practice to a future of obscurity.

The nature of PR being used in this blog recognises that:


Public Relations requires:

Knowledge and understanding of cultures, (namely “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”) in society;
Knowledge and capability to identify those values that contribute to and define cultures and groups.

The ethically sound ability to align values in a process of refining cultures to the benefit of cultural groups and the client.

Perhaps we need some evidence to give credibility to this for of thinking.

Her I offer some examples including analysis of employees in a company as evidenced in LinkedIn.



(Picture: The skills (values) of Nationwide employees as expressed by them in LinkedIn)

This approach is consistent for consumer PR, Industry and sector PR, Corporate Affairs and HR development and all other forms of PR.

Our ability to identify, for example: cultural icons in Twitter exchanges; semantic themes in social media discourse, locations of participants, and much more through the use and application of online actions (including social media, location mapping, etc) means we can examine such evidence as values that attach to an individual or group. 

It is then possible to look for common values as between a cultural group, many cultural groups and an organisation (lets call it a client) and identify where there is a mismatch and seek to change the values of the organisation and or the cultural group.



(Picture: Where my Twitter followers live - to the nearest city - showing location values) 

The is a much that has evolved for Public Relations. 

The developing technologies offers much more accurate, much more grounded, much more effective and much better value for money PR.




(Picture: Semantically derived values expressed through Twitter about The Bank of England. Snapshot taken in early 2014)

The idea that values defined cultures is a way forward for Public Relations and  is quite a broad remit, but it also has boundaries.


Being bounded by the effects of culture is useful and prevents us being drawn into the debate about advertising or marketing in that if the activity is not to affect culture, it has no place in PR. Thus, hits on a website are not necessarily an indication of cultural change but events, actions or reactions driven by such hits are cultural effects and thereby are a PR issue.

Online PR is is much more definitive than the Grunig and Hunt (1984), proposition 30 years ago but has some common elements:


“The management of communication between an organisation and its publics.”

Or the description provided by search engines:

"The professional maintenance of a favourable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person (is this ethical?)

"public relations is often looked down on by the media." (from what great height, one might ask).

"The state of the relationship between a company or other organisation or a famous person and the public."

There is a need to be more precise because the range of influences on any individual through communication and other drivers is extensive (no WiFi is an example where equanimity in message reception might be missing).

The range of media and mechanisms and means to influence cultures available to public relations practitioners is extensive, growing and powerful. 

Automation is one such development and adds to the power of the profession and its practices.

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

The Press Officer's New Hats

When the President of the CIPR wore a cap to school, there were people employed in big organisations called Press Officers. 

It seemed to me that this is a great time to review the many tasks that now (or will soon) drop on his or her desk.

The Press Officer now needs many hats, it would seem.



It's budget time. She is looking ahead. A future in which she will identify the nature of the sector (culture) and in which her client operates. 

OH!

It has also changed!

The professional in this arena now has to:

  • Identify the sector (culture)
  • Identify the key descriptors (concepts/values) common to, and unique to the sector (culture)
  • Identity changes and the rate of change
  • Identify the media of most significance to the culture e.g. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, digitally enabled channels (from Netflix to Twitter), Internet of Things, Stories and intelligence drawn from Big Data.
  • Develop capability to affect cultures.
  • Deliver
  • Evaluate/extract intelligence




Combined, More news is read - boosted by online

The extent to which people have withdrawn from reading print media is now well versed. The trend is continuing. The Newspaper Readership Survey shows the total newspaper and magazine readership on and off-line covers most of the population of the UK.

In 2015, Digital delivered (year on year):


  • +12.3%  incremental increase in printing readership across newsbrands & magazine brands,
  •  +27.3% incremental increase to print readership across newsbrands and 
  • +18.5% incremental increase to print readership across magazine brands.




By mid-2015, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and The Independent had a larger online readership than print according to the National Readership Survey.
Overall, the readership figures tell a story of traditional print titles not only losing circulation but also losing their relevance online and offline as, for example, women turn to alternative authorities – new blogs, online and tablet brands – for their fashion and lifestyle advice.


Time Online


Ofcom’s Media Use and Attitudes 2015 report, now in its tenth year, shows that internet users aged 16 and above claimed to spend nearly 10 hours (9 hours and 54 minutes) online each week in 2005. By 2014 it had climbed to over 20 hours and 30 minutes.


The biggest increase in internet use is cited among 16-24-year-olds, almost tripling from 10 hours and 24 minutes each week in 2005 to 27 hours and 36 minutes by the end of 2014.


Media Changes


For traditional PR people, this is an issue. For half a century, PR turned used communication to negotiate with groups of people. It remains a  robust if narrow, form of communication and PR as we move towards seeking influence over cultures.


  • The revenues of news channels are disappearing.
  • In the USA, Advertising Age said that measured-media spending fell by 1.8% over the year to June 2015.
  • In July 2015 both the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found that Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics were increasingly using the social networks as news sources. They are however seeking out different types of news content on each platform.
  • There are commercial drivers too. Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print."
  • In 2015, the UK became the first country in the world where half of all advertising spend went on digital media.
  • Just over £16.2bn will be spent on all forms of advertising in the UK. Digital advertising is expected to grow by 12% in 2015 to £8.1bn to overtake TV and become the largest medium for advertising in 2016.
  • Meanwhile, A fifth (19%) of consumer-facing brands and a quarter (27%) of ad agencies worldwide say mobile advertising is a top priority for their business, yet concerns linger over measurement and privacy. xAd polled 574 ad agency across 11 countries in North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
  • Mobile is a manifestation of the Internet of Things. Our press officer will, of course, now want to master communication using the IoT. 
  • The reason advertising revenue has moved from traditional media to digital media is because it is effective. As for advertising, so too for all other forms of cultural influence.

The net effect, says Moeller, ‘has been to decrease the demand for low-skilled information workers while increasing the demand for highly skilled ones.’ 


Creatives Bow to Technologies


As we shall discover, much of what the PR industry thought was creative and skilled has already been usurped by technologies and only awaits mass implementation.

This trend in the labour markets has been documented in dozens of studies by economists: Author, Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, and Daron Acemoğlu, Tim Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and others have documented it. 

Economists call it skill-biased technical change. By definition, it favours people with more education, training, or experience.


This puts pressure on PR now, and it is evident there is a need to look to the future in some detail.

An example of the significance of the above trends would suggest that half of all the Press Relations practitioners in 2005 should now be fully trained and equipped digital media experts.

Another group of practitioners might be more active with mobile capabilities because eApp stores and tablets helped drive 157% year-on-year growth in 2011, according to an IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers report.


Twits for Journos


Meanwhile, the nature of traditional channels is changing fast as well. There is a much wider range of communication platform.

A survey in the UK by Cision in 2014 showed 54% of journalists who responded couldn't carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012). Fifty-eight percent also say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).

If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists are open to a form of communication that is very different to the traditional press release. It is a change that took less than a decade to emerge.

But these developments are but drops in the ocean. There are examples, case studies, if you like, That show how powerful the internet and notably social media, and the application of technologies can be.

So far we have seen publications, broadcasters, journalists and some PR practitioners, together with advertising agencies gently move into the digital arena. 

Meanwhile, the general population is tearing into this new digital environment.


Political leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, can point to successful election campaigns driven by Twitter and Facebook.


Picture: Jeremy Corbyn as James Bond. Photograph: @sexyjezzacorbyn.

The dynamism of the Corbyn social media presence is described by Stuart Heritage in the Guardian In which he describes the elements that add up to internet gold. 


'All of a sudden, you can’t move for Corbyn parodies and memes. Want to see a Photoshopped picture of Corbyn as Obi-Wan Kenobi promising a new hope? Check the internet. Want to scroll through endless pictures of his face pasted onto the bodies of rippling vest models? Check the internet. Want to read a weird stream of mothers declaring their berserk lust for Corbyn, based on the fact that he reminds them of a “salty sea dog”? Check the internet, and then go and scrub your face, hands and brain with Swarfega.'
At one point, the hashtag #JezWeCan was being used once every 25 seconds on Twitter. Over on Facebook, a tentative Jeremy Corbyn victory party was being planned for the evening of 12 September in Trafalgar Square, London.

Many, many personalities, not to mention brands would like to replicate such a movement.

There are other indicators of behavioural change showing a need for attention to the significance of online, including mobile, effects on people.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), and data consultants Springboard, reported high street footfall was down -2.8% in June 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Shopping centres also suffered, seeing a decline of -2.4% year-on-year.
Out-of-town retail parks fared reasonably well, Retail Bulletin reported. 

They are attracting more "click and collect" shoppers and reported a +2.8% rise in footfall, the 18th successive month in which the sector's footfall has increased. Meanwhile click and deliver services are booming.

There are behavioral changes to take into account too.

New cultures are emerging. 

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Big Leaps and Small Incremental Steps - the rate of PR Automation

Progressively more technologies will emerge to automate individual PR functions. 

In turn, these will be integrated into other services that amalgamate a number of such services. 

Today this includes the automation and distribution of press notices and website content.

The engines to automate services such as Search Engine Optimisation activities (SEO); creation of Apps; application of wearables and use of Big Data are now in the wings of ordinary daily PR activity (I will cover these in a few days time). 

In the meantime cross posting of content to many web and social media outlets is common: book publishing is automated. Multi-platforms are updated as common content is published to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn without even a click of a mouse.  

Progressively we need to look at the effects of such developments and how they can be tamed to aid best PR practice.

This progress does mean that practitioners have to be kept informed (e.g. it is essential to keep up with a range of developments for SEO one follows http://searchengineland.com, for marketing http://www.clickz.com etc) and monitor expertise online.

That PR technologies will appear is not in question, what is problematic is the extent to which it automates the PR (and relevant associated activities) and the rate of development.

There will be some big leaps and some small incremental steps.

Monday, October 05, 2015

Automation is creeping up on PR

When we begin to look more closely, we find that there are other instances of automation. For example anyone can use a wiki to learn how to organise an event, and there is software online to help automate the process (e.g. Evenbright and Planningpod etc.) and this means that there are services available that are already beginning to offer automated functionality. Anyone can run events and automate much of the process. 
  
There are commercial drivers too. Our market is growing fast: Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print." 

A lot of this change has, just as with the industrial revolution, affected jobs. Many are no longer needed, but new ones are being created. 
  
The nature of identifying PR process and using the information to increase productivity is now common. 
  
An example of ordinary and elementary PR might be an activity — let's say a new post on your blog. The first step in automation will be that the instant it is posted online it triggers an action, such as sharing that post on Twitter and Facebook. It's a simple automated process  More information is available here (but there is lots all around the Internet). 
  
Profiling, analysing and finding appropriate drivers of client constituencies with progressively enhanced monitoring and evaluation is already being automated, of which more later.

Friday, October 02, 2015

Why are PR jobs so special

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, recently predicted that within 20 years most jobs will be automated. PR commentator Tom Foremski explored the idea and came up with some controversial thoughts for PR.


“Public relations has been pulled into the modern world (complaining about the extra work of social) but not much has changed. It’s still very much a hand-crafted, artisanal business, its use of technology is a Twitter hashtag and a dashboard of likes and shares.

"But without a significant tech component PR is at a big disadvantage because it can’t scale, it can't grow without growing more people. This lack of technical components is also why valuations of PR firms are low compared to their revenues.

"And it makes PR firms vulnerable to competitors outside their field that can figure out and automate technologies of promotion.”

Why are PR jobs so special that some of the work won't be automated?


Well, there is nothing stopping us, we can automate. That is what this book is about. But the warning that if PR does not do it, someone else will is not a hollow statement in Tom’s article. Since he wrote it, AP Dow has started to write articles automatically - up to 3000 each quarter!

"Much of the promise of artificial intelligence is yet to be realised, but in some areas it's already proving its worth. Meet the robot journalists that one day might steal my job,"  Stephen Beckett, BBC Click TV.

"Tencent publishes word-perfect business article on inflation, complete with analysts' comments, crafted in a minute by a computer programme," He Huifeng. South China Morning Post.





Thursday, October 01, 2015

Technologies of Strategic Significance to PR

    

The Lords’ Select Committee on Digital Skills published a report on the 'unstoppable' digital technological revolution, which suggested that 35 per cent of UK jobs are at risk of being automated over the next two decades.

A BBC Panorama programme in 2015 put it bluntly: traditionally middle-class jobs are increasingly vulnerable to technology, and this is likely to have a huge impact on the economy and society. Take Margaret Davies, for example, one of those featured in the Panorama programme. Until recently she had worked in a HMRC tax office in Wales handling tax enquiries for 26 years. Advances in technology mean that more of us are doing our taxes online, which brings big cost savings for Government, but also means that Margaret and 33 of her colleagues have been made redundant, and their office closed.

Over the next few weeks, I will be digging into my booklet 'the Automation of Public Relations' to explore areas of automation that point to the technologies of strategic significance to the PR sector.


I start with a warning. There are a lot of services being offered to the PR sector and mostly to the Digital/Social Media area that uses some interesting technologies that are os considerable value to the industry. Many are based on analysis of Big Data, some use Semantic Analysis and some are just fakes. They need to be independently authenticated. A task for the PR institutions such as PRCA, CIPR, PRSA, AMEC etc.



Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Media Evolution

For Public Relations, a future in which practitioners identify the nature of the 'public' or sector or stakeholder (culture) and in which the client operates is changed.

The professional in this arena now has  to:

  • Identify the sector (culture)
  • Identify the key descriptors (concepts - I will comment on concepts as part of semantics in PR in a future post) common to, and unique to the sector (culture) 
  • Identity changes and the rate of change
  • Identify the media of most significance to the culture e.g. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, digitally enabled channels (from Netflix to Twitter).
  • Develop capability to affect the culture.
  • Deliver 
  • Evaluate.
The historical nature of PR that depended on the media to provide focus on 'publics' has changed.

The extent to which people have withdrawn from reading print media is now well versed. The trend is continuing.  The Newspaper Readership Survey in 2014 shows a dynamic shift from print to digital:

All research is based on National Readership Survey (NRS) data from January 2013 to December 2014, but does not include mobile and tablet app readers.
Print (000s)Website Only (000s)Net Print + Website Total (Net - 000s)Increase with Online (%)
Quality
Financial Times15408632403+56.1
The Daily Telegraph4138750611644+181.4
The Daily Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph4895733412229+149.8
The Guardian3993830112294+207.9
The Guardian/The Observer4544812112665+178.7
The Independent/i395740768032+103.0
The Independent/The Independent on Sunday/i436240148377+92.0
The Times45514114963+9.0
The Times/The Sunday Times66265027128+7.6
Mid-market
Daily Express327325095782+76.7
Daily Express/Sunday Express403924656504+61.0
Daily Mail11232859519827+76.5
Daily Mail/The Mail on Sunday13536803521571+59.4
Popular
Daily Mirror7206490712113+68.1
Daily Mirror/Sunday Mirror8515477513290+56.1
Daily Mirror/Sunday Mirror/Sunday People9010473013739+52.5
Daily Record14809842465+66.5
Daily Record/Sunday Mail (Scotland)18469542800+51.6
Daily Star34389434381+27.4
Daily Star/Daily Star Sunday39229344856+23.8
The Sun13594166215256+12.2
The Sun/The Sun on Sunday15061159316654+10.6

http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/article/1282155/quality-newsbrands-enjoy-readership-highs-2013

By mid-2015,  The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and The Independent had a larger online readership than print.

An example of the significance of the above trends would suggest that all  Press Relations practitioners should now be fully trained and equipped digital media expertise.

Meanwhile, the nature of traditional channels is changing fast as well. There is a much wider range of communication platforms in use.

A survey in the UK by Cision in 2014 showed 54% of journalists who responded couldn't carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012). Fifty-eight percent also say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).

If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists are open to a form of communication that is very different to the traditional press release.

It is a change that took less than a decade to emerge.

But these developments are but drops in the ocean. There are examples, case studies, that show how powerful the internet and notably social media, and the application of technologies can be.

So far we have seen publications, broadcasters, journalists and some PR practitioners, together with advertising agencies gently move into the digital arena.

Meanwhile, the general population is tearing into this new digital environment.

Nearly four in ten UK households bought a tablet in the last year. Mobile now accounts for 23% of digital ad spend and 56% of social media spend.

Among Britons online, smartphones are the most common internet-enabled device (1.7 per household)¹, followed by laptops (1.3) and tablets (1.2). Four in 10 (40%) households now own one tablet, one-fifth (19%) have two, while 11% own three or more. According to the IAB/PwC data, tablet-dedicated ad spend alone² grew 118% to reach £87.4 million.

Political leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, can point to successful election campaigns driven by Twitter and Facebook.

The dynamism of the Corbyn social media presence is described by Stuart Heritage in the Guardian (http://goo.gl/bwcp8e). In which he describes the elements that add up to internet gold. 'All of a sudden, you can’t move for Corbyn parodies and memes. Want to see a Photoshopped picture of Corbyn as Obi-Wan Kenobi promising a new hope? Check the internet. Want to scroll through endless pictures of his face pasted onto the bodies of rippling vest models? Check the internet. Want to read a weird stream of mothers declaring their berserk lust for Corbyn, based on the fact that he reminds them of a “salty sea dog”? Check the internet, and then go and scrub your face, hands and brain with Swarfega.'


At one point, the hashtag #JezWeCan was being used once every 25 seconds on Twitter. Over on Facebook, a tentative Jeremy Corbyn victory party was being planned for the evening of 12 September in Trafalgar Square, London.

Many, many personalities, not to mention brands woul like to replicate such a movement.

The nature of communicating is outwith traditional media relations and the Corbyn example is a very noticeable case in point. 

Picture: Jeremy Corbyn as James Bond. Photograph: @sexyjezzacorbyn.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The Social Impact - part of the PR Automation Series

It is time to put PR into the wider context of automation for the majority of the population.

 The Robots Are Coming by John Lanchester offers us considerable insights. It looks at the future in terms of economic activity.

 He reports on the methodologies now at play and instances Google Translate: Google Translate hasn’t got better because roomfuls of impecunious polymaths have been spending man-years copying out and cross-referencing vocabulary lists. Its improvement is a triumph of machine learning. The software matches texts in parallel languages so that its learning is a process of finding which text is statistically most likely to match the text in another language.

Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A very fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages. Progressively, Translate has improved.

It is still learning but learning very fast and across not one but many languages. Soon (weeks not years) it will be better than even the best humans.

 The new generation of robots are well beyond the rather comic attempts at computing and robotisation (and even word processing) of a decade ago. At the Amazon fulfilment centres’ where it makes up and dispatches its parcels, the robots are slow and marked out in orange. They can lift three thousand pounds at a time and carry an entire stack of shelves in one go. They manoeuvre around each other with surprising elegance. They are inexorable, and they aren’t going away: the labour being done by these robots is work that will never again be done by people.

 Rodney Brooks, who co-founded iRobot, noticed something else about such modern, highly automated factory floors: people are scarce, but they’re not absent. And a lot of the work they do is repetitive and mindless.

 Robert Gordon, an American economist in his paper ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ contrasted the impact of computing and information technology with the effect of the second industrial revolution, between 1875 and 1900 (with inventions such as electric lightbulbs and the electric power station, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, recorded music and cinema). It also introduced ‘running water and indoor plumbing and women were freed from carrying tons of water each year’.

 Gordon’s view is that we coasted on the aftermaths of these inventions until about 1970, when the computer revolution allowed the economy to remain on our historic path of 2 per cent annual growth. Computers replaced human labour and thus contributed to productivity, but the bulk of these benefits came early in the Electronics Era.

 In the 1960s, mainframe computers churned out bank statements and telephone bills, reducing clerical labour. In the 1970s, memory typewriters replaced repetitive retyping by armies of legal clerks. In the 1980s, PCs with word processing were introduced, as were ATMs that replaced bank tellers and barcode scanning that replaced retail workers.

 These were real and important changes and got rid of a lot of drudgery. What happened subsequently, though, was a little different: The iPod replaced the CD Walkman; the smartphone replaced the ‘dumb’ cellphone with functions that in part replaced desktop and laptop computers, and the iPad provided further competition for the ‘traditional’ personal computers.

These innovations were enthusiastically adopted, but they provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labour with machines. In other words, most of the real productivity benefits of the computing revolution happened a few decades ago.

 The impact is already with us. ‘Our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour’ (Keynes) is a form of progress that makes jobs go away through the sheer speed of its impact. As Lanchester puts it: ‘Just to be clear: the disappearance of work happens to individuals, not to entire economies. A job lost in one place is replaced by a new job, which may be somewhere else. In 1810, agriculture employed 90 per cent of the American workforce. A hundred years later, the figure was about 30 per cent (today it’s less than 2 per cent). That might sound like a recipe for chaotic disruption and endemic unemployment, but the US economy managed the transition fine, thanks in large part to the effect of the technologies mentioned by Robert Gordon (plus the railways).

So, by extension and analogy, maybe we don’t need to fear technological unemployment this time either. But maybe we do! A thorough, considered and disconcerting study of that possibility was undertaken by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, in ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’

They came up with the likely impact of technological change on a range of 702 occupations, from podiatrists to tour guides, animal trainers to personal finance advisers, etc. It ranks them, from 1 (you’ll be fine) to 702 (best start re-writing the CV). The evolution is clear: human-to-human interaction and judgment is in demand, routine tasks are not.

Some of the judgments seem odd: is it really the case that choreographers come in at 13, ahead of physicians and surgeons at 15, and a long way ahead of, say, anthropologists and archaeologists at 39, not to mention writers at 123 and editors at 140? Frey and Osborne’s conclusion is stark. In the next two decades, 47 per cent of employment is ‘in the high-risk category’, meaning it is ‘potentially automatable’.

 Meantime productivity has gone up steadily (except for the 2008 recession year). The amount of work done per worker has gone up, but pay hasn’t. This means that the proceeds of increased profitability are accruing to capital rather than to labour. The culprit is not clear, but Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, persuasively, that the force to blame is increased automation.


 For a complete​ article, please go to: http://www.blurb.co.uk/books/6396810-the-automation-of-public-relations

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

A development that could 'do' Public Relations automatically




Deep Mind is the 13th single by the Japanese band Buono and it is also the name of a Google subsidiary based in London using techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general‑purpose learning algorithms.

Two years ago, IBM demonstrated a computer chip that was inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain. These chips provide the building blocks for computers that can emulate and extend the brain’s ability to respond to biological sensors and analyse vast amounts of data from many sources at once.


However, these chips require a very different kind of programming model from the one used in computers today – which is still derived from FORTRAN, a programming language developed in the 1950s for ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer - the software is on its way.

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman gave a rare insight into the work he and his team are doing within Google during a machine learning conference in London in 2015. He leads research at the company.

Google DeepMind is an artificial intelligence division within Google that created after Google bought Oxford University spinout, DeepMind, in January 2014.

The division, which employs around 140 researchers at its lab in a new building at Kings Cross, London, is on a mission to solve general intelligence and make machines capable of learning things for themselves.

Suleyman explains:

'These are systems that learn automatically. They’re not pre-programmed, they’re not handcrafted features. We try to provide a large-a-set of raw information to our algorithms as possible so that the systems themselves can learn the very best representations to use those for action or classification or predictions.'


'The systems we design are inherently general. This means that the very same system should be able to operate across a wide range of tasks.'

 'AI has largely been about pre-programming tools for specific tasks: in these kinds of systems, the intelligence of the system lies mostly in the smart human who programmed all of the intelligence into the smart system and subsequently these are of course rigid and brittle and don’t really handle novelty very well or adapt to new settings and our fundamentally very limited as a result.'

'We characterise AGI as systems and tools that are flexible and adaptive and that learn.'

‘We use the reinforcement learning architecture that is largely a design approach to characterise the way we develop our systems. This begins with an agent which has a goal or policy that governs the way it interacts with some environment. This environment could be a small physics domain, it could be a trading environment, it could be a real world robotics environment or it could be an Atari environment.The agent says it wants to take actions in this environment and it gets feedback from the environment in the form of observations and it uses these observations to update its policy of behaviour or its model of the world.’

What he is explaining is common among humans. We are programmed to learn, and we focus our learning based on a reward system at our mother’s breast.

In PR, we did not really notice the application of Deep Mind. We are impressed with the capability of Google to find images from search instructions described in English in ‘Google Images’. It is just one example of the application of Deep Mind automation.

Automation is already at work in helping practitioners. What is not well established is the nature and benefit of these developments in day to day PR work.

Such developments have not been introduced especially for PR practice. It is right we know about such developments and use it, and it is important that the PR industry can recognise the real thing and the scams.

Also, there is a good case for the industry to seek out developments that will enhance practice (and increase productivity and competitive edge).

Furthermore, the PR industry also need to be driving and rewarding useful development to aid practitioners.


These considerations are important for the PR sector and if it were to take them further could be a significant exemplar for the UK government's initiative, the: ‘Digital Transformation Plan’, 2015. It is an initiative that will set out the actions the government will take to support the adoption of digital technologies across the UK economy including, one hopes, Public Relations.



Monday, August 03, 2015

Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics using the social networks as news sources


In July 2015 both the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found that Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics were increasingly using the social networks as news sources. They are however seeking out different types of news content on each platform.

There are commercial drivers too. Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print."

In 2015, the UK will become the first country in the world where half of all advertising spend goes on digital media.

Just over £16.2bn will be spent on all forms of advertising in the UK, including TV, newspapers, billboards, radio, online and on mobiles and tablets, according to eMarketer.

Digital advertising is expected to grow by 12% in 2015 to £8.1bn, making the UK the first country in which £1 in every £2 will go to digital media. The internet is expected to overtake TV to become the largest medium for advertising in 2016.
The reason advertising revenue has moved from traditional media to digital media is because it is effective. As for advertising, so too for all other forms of cultural influence.

The net effect, says Moeller, ‘has been to decrease the demand for low-skilled information workers while increasing the demand for highly skilled ones.’ As we shall discover in this book, much of what the PR industry thought was creative and skilled has already been usurped by technologies and only awaits mass implementation.

This trend in the labour markets has been documented in dozens of studies by economists: Author, Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, and Daron Acemoğlu, Tim Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and others have documented it. Economists call it skill-biased technical change. By definition, it favors people with more education, training, or experience.

This puts pressure on PR now and it is evident there is a need to look to the future in some detail.


An example of the significance of the above trends would suggest that half of all the Press Relations practitioners in 2005 should now be fully trained and equipped digital media experts.

Another group of practitioners might be more active with mobile capabilities because eApp stores and tablets helped drive 157% year-on-year growth in 2011, according to an IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

Meanwhile, the nature of traditional channels is changing fast as well. There is a much wider range of communication platform.

A survey in the UK by Cision in 2014 showed 54% of journalists who responded couldn’t carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012). Fifty-eight percent also say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).

If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists are open to a form of communication that is very different to the traditional press release. It is a change that took less than a decade to emerge.




Hi all. This is my most recent book It was written in the cloud and published likewise. The reason being is that it will shock a lot of people to discover so much of PR is already or nearly automated!

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Marketing and the Media is Changing

A future in which you identify the nature of the sector (culture) and in which your client operates is changed.

The professional in this arena now has to:


  • Identify the sector (culture)
  • Identify the key descriptors (concepts) common to, and unique to the sector (culture)
  • Identity changes and the rate of change
  • Identify the media of most significance to the culture e.g. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, digitally enabled channels (from Netflix to Twitter).
  • Develop capability to affect the culture.
  • Deliver
  • Evaluate.
  • There is very little future for the practitioner who does not have such skills. The reason is simple. Traditional media has a problem.



The money that once drove most media is now shrinking. The effect of the traditional media as an advertising medium is flagging badly and even the journalists who once enjoyed the services of the PR industry has now turned to Twitter (among other media) to be able to perform well.

There is a lot of evidence.
The revenues of news channels is disappearing.

In the USA, Advertising Age said that measured-media spending fell by 1.8% over the year to June 2015.

In July 2015 both the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found that Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics were increasingly using the social networks as news sources. They are however seeking out different types of news content on each platform.

There are commercial drivers too. Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print."

In 2015, the UK will become the first country in the world where half of all advertising spend goes on digital media.


Just over £16.2bn will be spent on all forms of advertising in the UK, including TV, newspapers, billboards, radio, online and on mobiles and tablets, according to eMarketer.


Digital advertising is expected to grow by 12% in 2015 to £8.1bn, making the UK the first country in which £1 in every £2 will go to digital media. The internet is expected to overtake TV to become the largest medium for advertising in 2016.

To what extent is this reflected in the activities of the CIPR, PRCA and universities?

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

A Definition of PR


A Definition of PR
 

It is pretty important that, as we examine PR and its automation, we should be talking about the same thing.

Lots of people try to define PR. In the digital environment, it is important to be precise and not to drift into other realms of management or to confine the practice to a future of obscurity.
 
The definition being used here recognises that:
 
Public Relations is:
 
The nature of knowing and understanding cultures, (namely “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”) in society;
 
The ethically sound ability to change cultures to the benefit of the client.
 
This is true in consumer PR, Industry and sector PR, Corporate Affairs and HR development and all other forms of PR. 
 
It is quite a broad definition, but it also has boundaries. Being bounded by the effects of culture is useful and prevents us being drawn into the debate about advertising or marketing in that if the activity is not to affect culture, it has no place in PR. Thus, hits on a website are not necessarily an indication of cultural change but events, actions or reactions driven by such hits are cultural effects and thereby are a PR issue.
 
It is much more extensive that the Grunig and Hunt (1984), definition:


“The management of communication between an organization and its publics.”

Or the description provided by search engines:

"public relations

noun

plural noun: public relations

the professional maintenance of a favourable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person.

The state of the relationship between a company or other organization or a famous person and the public.

"public relations is often looked down on by the media"

"companies justify the cost in terms of improved public relations"



There is a need to more precise because the range of influences on any individual through communication and other drivers is extensive (no wifi is an example where equanimity in message reception might be missing).



This means that, when working with the organisation or the client, PR has the reasonable authority to ask of the population affected by its presence. Then we can ask:


Do we understand the culture in which the organisation has presence and influence?
and Can we change it?