Managing Risk to Reputation a PR Dilemma

We live in the age of the risk management of everything. Paradoxically this still leaves organisations that diligently engage in risk management exposed to what Donald Rumsfeld called ‘unknown uncertainty’ which I have commented on before.

This warning about the escalation of the risk management of everything should be taken seriously. In his first Demos book, The Audit Explosion, Michael Power warned against that companies and governments preoccupation with measuring what is measurable – the now discredited ‘targets culture’.

In his more recent pamplet the Risk Management of Everything, he says: “Reputation has become a new source of anxiety where organisational identity and economic survival are at stake And if everything may impact on organisational reputation, then reputational risk management demands the risk management of everything.”

The anxiety about reputation means that experts and professional bodies are increasingly taking defensive steps to protect their own name, rather than managing risks on behalf of the public. One example of this the proliferation of ‘small print’ as professionals ranging from doctors to accountants attempt to hand risk back to customers, clients or society as a whole.

Part of this anxiety is brought about because of a profount misunderstanding about the nature of reputation. Part is in the lack of coherent reputation management which is about internal values and their interpretation by publics.

While it is the duty of the PR planner to asses and develop risk management strategies, one of those duties is the management of risks inherent in abuse corporate value systems from both within and without.

A company with 'small print' value systems will eventually be brought to book, either by the consumer or the regulator. But what of the company that does not have such an ethos but the lawyers insist on the small print?

It is a simple question, the answer is simple but are corporate managers big enough to be good at public relations?

Picture: www.thefunnycats.com

The Future Internet

In 1995, I spoke to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations conference and predicted the Internet would be very big for PR.

Email arrived, web sites arrived and it all happened.

Five years later, in two books I made it clear that the interactive nature of communication for individuals and groups would be very significant for PR practice. Chat, Instant Messaging, Message Boards, Usenet, blogs, MySpace and Facebook (and with a nod towards Second Life) became mainstream and it all happened.

But last year, I went through a patch when I could not see forward. I am more confident now.

My thinking is now going beyond the internet as a place for interaction to a place where we truly become natives.

As a driven social species, capable of seeking and managing change, humans seeking novelty and added capability.

That is, driven by our DNA, the user public will adopt an internet model that is closer to human drivers and because so many people are involved, they will seek and demand change in the area of most internet use - social media.

Technology and regulation is becoming subservient to the online commons. The implications for PR practitioners may be un-nerving. But so too was the advent of the Internet, email and the web and even today, much of the PR industry is nervous about social media.

Each iteration of social media has been richer in content and interactivity. Each has brought more mechanisms for self expression and and ability to display likes and dislikes from favourite films to groups of interest. The social portals offer people a rich array of facilities and content. Much of this self expression is replacing or is a substitute for many of the benefits humans get from direct, face-to-face relationships.

The people who use this media have an agenda described by Stephanie Sanford quite well She argues that there is a changing landscape in polity beyond the collapse of social capital described by Putnam and that there is a kind of online substitute to the social structures that are dominant, if struggling, offline today.

We are a complex blend, a repertoire, of private and social selves and in the last few posts I have been looking at how, we, as human beings, find social media so tempting and why portals like MySpace, Facebook appeal to so many people .

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has examined how we can be completely absorbed in an activity and can 'shut out' other distractions. If you watch a youngster concentrating on a Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), you can see how absorbing some online activity can be. But such effort is linear. It does not cater for a range of 'selves'.

Facebook is very much the same, as is MySpace. Both now offer many ways to express a particular self but not many 'selves' depending on the 'mood' or social frame we are in. Can I please have a Facebook for me as a grandfather and another one as a lecturer – oh! and can I have one as a writer 'self' too. Way back in the 1990's it was evident that many people online had several different online personalities. Even today, most of us have a number of email addresses. My Hotmail account is there for different purposes to my Gmail account and I never use my University accounts at all! Many people have multiple blogs – i.e. different 'selves' already.

So people are involved through their online experience, seek Csikszentmihalyi's engrossing applications and an ability to be the 'self' that matches mood and nature (and the current influences on our lives) look for the next social network to be available online to match the moment when needed.

How big are theses 'selves' in social numbers?

Well, they are not monolithic unless they are social.

Aristotle argued that it was in our interest, given our deeply social nature, to participate in in civic life in order to fulfil ourselves. Jefferson, followed this through when he wrote the American constitution and interpreted it as the 'pursuit of happiness'. He believed that small social groups would build a strong country. There is more modern evidence to support this idea. Robin Dunbar has looked at the nature of social groups across many species and suggests that there is a correlation between cortical size and the actual size of primate species. We are biologically pre-programmed to be personally effective in groups of about 150 people. Small businesses don't seem to need a hierarchical structure until they have 135 employees. Jennifer Muller suggests that teams can function to monitor individuals more effectively than managers can control them. In companies team size is an issue and when a person my have 150 people in their personal 'tribe' working effectively means working with a small section of this tribal whole as Muller notes in her recent paper. The basic military unit is under 150 too and has been for thousands of years (The Roman army First Cohort, called Primi Ordines, consisted of five centuries of 120 men). Political systems that remove social groups (communist Russia is an example) eventually crack under the weight bureaucracy when dealing with big populations whereas delivery of social support (looking out for older neighbours and over the top teens) is delivered effectively when these are sufficient convergent values in a community (a group of actors within a compass of 150 people held together with values that form a a polity) - as suggested by J. Eric Oliver in his book Democracy in Suburbia. He posits that local government is important primarily because it provides an accessible and small-scale arena for the resolution of social and economic conflict. It would seem that the big state, the big business and the national army all have to obey social rules and at a personal level obeying the personal 150 rule in order that the bigger unit (political, economic, social) institution can thrive. To survive big means acting social.

Create a social media network to be of friends, family, tribe and polity (and many other groups) and Facebook would be old fashioned quite quickly. People seek society in different groups, different types of groups and for (sometimes convergent) different purposes and different 'selves'. The portals that provides this will be part of the emerging internet.

One of the amazing things about people is their ability to extent the capability of the body and brain beyond its biological capacity. We can travel further and faster on a bicycle, car or plane because we have extended our physiology with knowledge. We have extended our brain with devices like pocket calculators, digital cameras and computers, that is, we use our brain to make machines do extra mural work. We have also extended our memory with access to wikipedia and the rest of the internet. We have also limited our physical capabilities. A Londoner, and attempting to survive in the Borneo jungle is beyond our ken. We have lost skills and knowledge too. The proverbial Londoner does not have the skill to feel the texture of ground corn to know if it is properly milled into flour (a skill called the 'miller's thumb').

Using the evolving internet will include achieving even more things to facilitate our needs both physical and intellectual (and emotional).

Large brains confer an advantage when responding to variable, unpredictable, and novel ecological demands through enhanced behavioural flexibility, learning, and innovation. (Vrba, E. (1988) in The Evolutionary History of the Robust Australopithecines ). Human have large brains. Better than that, humans like novelty. Humans are quick to learn causal associations between co-occurring environmental stimuli.

The evolving internet is and will continue to be a place where we can experiment with novel things. From Usenet to Twitter and beyond is part of human biology. This means the evolving internet will be a place where people will seek to experiment for simple human gratification.

As a nerve cell in the human brain is stimulated by new experiences and exposure to incoming information from the senses, it grows branches called dendrites. With use, you grow branches; with impoverishment, you lose them. People can even use parts of the brain to do novel things. The ability to change the structure and chemistry of the brain in response to the environment is called plasticity.

This plasticity capability in the adult cerebral cortex can change substantially as a result of practice and experience throughout life (Kolb B, Whishaw I. Q. Brain plasticity and behavior). Furthermore, a specific variant of the gene ASPM (abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated) in humans suggest that the human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution (Mekel-Bobrov et al ).

The evolving internet will be more addictive and people will develop their brains to cope. With the new internet we can expect new skills to emerge (even programming a video recorder can be learned) and we will both learn and evolve to do these things.

Human biology as much as human society seeks to satisfy needs that ensure that the social group can be trusted. We need to be able to trust people. There are dozens of devices that say they offer secure relationships and for people this means more than ever they need to be recognisable. Throughout history, people have recognised people from their looks, voice and mannerisms. But online, its easy to steal identities. I guess that its the next evolution of Facebook and MYMelcrum will have something like eye scanning (biometric iris scanning) built into a security system that allows many 'selves' but only one self.

As the internet evolves into these new social networks, its networking sites will need feeding. Just as Twitter or Last.fm can be embedded in Facebook, so too will services be needed for the future internet. Web Widgets have a fine future. Feeding these places where people hangout is a big issue and big business. The services available for word processing or automatic video download from cell phone to MMORPG or PC is technically possible and cannot be far away. Integration will be important if only to beat the big problem online today - available time.

Finally, there is the question of when.

When will all this happen?

Usenet and IM stood the test of time for five years before the better blog mousetrap came along. MySpace took three years, Twitter a few months. Adoption of new and more 'human DNA' friendly social networks will accelerate.

Look back five years and the rate of change is fast but its the rate of adoption that is more interesting. Usenet was for geeks and sex maniacs. Myspace is for them (still) but mostly for a huge proportion of young people. Most of my friends in Facebook are older and the podcasters are older still! Adoption will become less a generation thing.

So, who will be using this new Internet. To begin with it will be less complicated and thus more available to more people. And the more it satisfies human biology, the more pervasive it will become. Answer - everyone.

The new Internet is a place to live.

Social media CSR and the reptilian brain

This post is about the physiological (evolutionary) and psychological explanations for the success of social media and its relevance to PR and organisations.

Deep in our brain is the ventral pallidum. It is commonly called the 'reptilian' part of the brain.

Over our evolutionary history, the brain has evolved in animals layer by layer. Humans have complex (and big) brains and we carry the baggage of evolution deep in the layers of brain from our evolutionary ancestors. These inner parts of the brain provide most of the unconscious responses to stimulation that are part of our normal existence. We don't have to think about how to walk. We just walk.

But these deeply embedded responses also dictate how we evoke instinctive action to events, people and organisations. An interesting article in the New York Times covers a lot of this ground.

Our problem is that a lot of management thinking is founded on these, primitive areas of the brain. The ideas of Thomas Hobbs (1651 Levanthian ), modified by Freud (Civilisation and its Discontents) and Smith (Wealth of Nations) and provided with an economic application by Neumamn & Morgenstern (Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour), a re-working of Garret Harding's Tragedy of the Commons are no longer enough. We know so much more which is relevant to PR and especially to social media and CSR.

We already knew from the 1970's experiments that people cooperate at a much higher level when exposed to face-to-face communication. To explore this means reading George Williams (The Selfish Gene).

John Allman (Evolving Brains) at Caltech shows that, to survive, humans need both a big brain (oh... that means slow development through childhood to maturity) and an altruistic, co-operative and communication rich relationship with other people to support the long development through childhood to adulthood (family, community and long lasting social cohesion). To do this we have to be social animals. We cannot be selfish. Genetically, we have to cooperate for the survival of the species. Humans prosper and are more effective in groups.

This is why Social Media is so important to people and why co-operation online is so popular? It allows human beings to do what they are genetically programmed to do.

The richer the experience the greater the co-operation and the more productive and cohesive the group is. If you neglect a human, it fades - and the examples come from the terrible 'orphanages' in some countries even to this day (there are harrowing studies that I am not going into here).

Allman has shown that people who look after people live longer! Berkman and Syme have also shown that people with few social ties die younger. Does this mean blogs are good for you - its very probable. The richer and more inclusive the relationship - even an online relationship - is good for us. The 'sad' individuals with big online networks of 'friends' is not as silly (or sad) as many would make out.

This social part of our brain (pre-frontal cortex) is the most recent addition in the evolution of the human brain which adds cognitive sophistication including self awareness, awareness of others as people, long term planning and an ability to shift behaviour in the light of changing social contexts to create a human moral sense.

It has an immense impact and is important when PR people consider corporate values and value systems, their networks and interactions with publics and approaches to social media.

Harvard's Robert Putman's studies (among others) into the nature of richness in relationships show that Social Networks, social norms (values) trust, together making up social capital, is a major factor in economic development. Kawachi, Kennedy & Lochner (1977 - Long Live Community: social capital as public health) also show that low trust (in civic authorities) reduces average mortality rate and we see this in some nations to this day (Zimbabwe?) . It follows that trusting an organisation, for example a company, is good for people and loss of trust is bad for people.

This is where the PR practice of Corporate Social Responsibility, comes into the limelight. CSR cannot be used as a substitute for good governance. As soon as poor governance is exposed and trust is lost, the effect is not just loss of 'reputation' it is denial of social norms and community and the richer the prior experience, the greater loss which is a deeply hurtful thing to human psychology. It is probably an explanation for much anti-corporatism today.

Institutions have to be richly involved in social communities (not just employees, customers, vendors but wider communities too) and they have to be trusted to prosper.

Distinctions between the individual and others begins to fade as the identity of the crowd and the concept of self (which is also context driven) merges into one collective identity with a common set of symbols (values) shared with others, suggest Quarts & Sejnowski (Liars Lovers and Heroes) . By creating collective identities, humans can define groups more diverse than those based on kin, such as citizenship. These groups do include MySpace and Facebook groups and even blogging and other online communities. Some of these groups might be related to organisations but many do not. So people belong to a range of communities through which they can act on an organisation. A recent Wharton study is an example. It examined how these communities create an extensive 'word of mouth' antipathy to organisations.

Acording to Dawes Kragt and Orbell (1990 in 'Beyond Self Interest), "Ease in forming group identities could be of individual benefit. It is not the successful group that prevails, but the individuals who have a propensity to form such groups". Thus the people who are involved in groups online do so as both part of our, human, make up and are important to people's ability (and their belief in their ability) to succeed.

This would indicate that the closer to face to face social media gets (think of photo's and video) and the richness of the experience (a proxy for face to face) with associated trust and the ability to join or form groups is deeply important to the human condition. Online media is becoming much closer to face-to-face relationships. It is getting very rich, a subject I explored in this post last week.

One can begin to see that as, depending on experience of organisations and the social context people find themselves in, the interaction between organisations and individuals and their social groups is now touching on hugely powerful evolutionary and psychological human motives.

The significance of social media from an evolutionary and psychological viewpoint is beginning to emerge and for PR is is much, much bigger than at first thought.

Our responsibility to ensure PR takes corporate social responsibility very seriously (not just a teddy bear given to the local fete - or even millions given to the poor in Africa) because online, the pervasiveness of social media is storing up a heap of trouble for those involved in poor governance. At which point - watch out for the reptilian part of the brain to kick in!


Photo: Forestry insights

Evaluation online is creeping away from us

Every time I look at numbers that may help the PR evaluation industry, I come up with the same answer. Its getting harder. As Brett Crosby, senior manager for Google Analytics, notes for Mark Glaser we will be hard-pressed to cover the wide variety of websites and their functions. “My personal opinion is that it’s going in the opposite direction [from a unified measurement]”.

Perhaps we should stop trying to emulate the advertising industry and start evaluating public relations.

Its not hard. Some organisations have good public relations and some have bad public relations.

Such judgements are inclusive of the organisation and its performance, its communications, its ethos and so on. That is the role of the PR manager. So why not use a PR measure.

That does not mean the 'worlds most admired company' based on journalist column inches and tone or ROI or profits or, even, growth.

The simple measure is would you be thrilled if your daughter got her first job there.

So I am offering a new evaluation metric - the daughter litmus paper.

For those who really want indigestion, the following is a kick start for measuring:

For information about numbers of people online http://www.internetworldstats.com.

Who owns and runs sites is quite easy to look up using 'Whois' services such as this like these http://www.internetters.co.uk/whois.php, http://www.nominet.org.uk/

How the internet is performing can come from http://news.netcraft.com

Research data can be from www.nielsen-netratings.com and Pew Research http://people-press.org, and the National Statistics office. Among others you can find out about web site statistics from http://www.websiteoptimization.com and Site Report Card http://www.sitereportcard.com/.

More tools are available at http://www.toolurl.com

To find out about links into and out of web sites, how many pages a web site has then http://www.google.com/help/operators.html, is very helpful.

To be able to identify words associated with a person, brand, company or other organisation when people search using search engines (top of mind words about the organisation) then the use of Wordtracker or similar.

Most sites should be monitored for their Google ranking http://www.googlerankings.com/

Google Analytics for a web site or Google Trends to find how many people search for your keywords are helpful. Compare the numbers of visitors to sites with Alexa Trafic Ranking (www.alexa.com) and other web analytic information is available fro a Google search “web site traffic analytics”.

Hitwise (www.hitwise.co.uk) offers a lot of data about online traffic and monitors who is doing what online.

A quick free monitor to try out web site visitor tools is available from http://www.sitemeter.com.

For some exciting views of online activity try http://labs.digg.com.

What users do using a service like Clicktale when they vist web sites is also a metric that is helpful when identifying how a site is used. Eye tracking is used to see how web pages are used too. Research is already well established with heat maps too and available for citation.

Podcast data can come from http://www.radiotail.com/ripple And

Then there are some of the monitors and some interesting new ideas including one that looks at a range of metrics from Edelman PR which was first discussed on David Brian's post http://www.sixtysecondview.com/?p=325.