The year of the mobile -

Maggie Holland at IT Pro comments:

Next year will be the year of the mobile customer, with a range of services and technologies on offer that are much cheaper and easier to use, as well as being much more sociable, according to predictions from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

I have to say that its been a long time coming. It was in 2001 that I included mobile as an important part of online PR (in Online Public Relations - Kogan Page). Then, SMS was the issue but now the a wide range of Internet Protocol is available on many mobile devices from phones to laptops, games and even SatNav platforms.

This means that the ever widening range of platforms and channels in intertwined networks become much harder to monitor and interaction is across a wider range of touch points.

Building relationships with so many forms of communication affecting constituents attitudes and interactive behaviours becomes more challenging.

So how does the organisation respond.

Relationships, built on values and the exchange of mutually interesting values becomes the key element.

Companies, nay all organisations, only have one thing to offer - their values.

In organisations there are many value systems at play. These centre on the culture, products, services, social interactivity and other drivers that sustain existence. They are the bedrock of the organisation.

They should be explored by the PR professional and need explication to be included in the scudding clouds of internet interactivity.

As we go more mobile they play locally and globally and all the time. Now they are much closer to the individual and for one very specific reason: people have an emotional relationships with their mobile phones of the same nature as once pertained to newspapers and magazines as described by Guy Consterdine.

Values and ethics now clime further up the ladder importance in PR practice.

Reputation Reputation Reputation

This post is about reputation in three parts.

First it is about the reputation of Allan Edwards at Chameleon PR.

He pitched me a story in an email that said:

Hello David,

I noticed you mentioned last year’s Blast Radius UK’s Best online report on LeverWealth. This year’s report is now out, the release is below. This year’s research has shifted to look higher up the chain.

Best regards

Allan

Of course he got my interest and I quickly went back to the post on 22 November last year.

The next reputation involved were the companies involved : Jaguar Cars Tops Blast Radius Best UK Online Experience Survey 2007, Magnet, Reebok, Burberry and SSL achieve best overall ratings; Avon, Cisco, Clarks and IBM trail in `best of the best` analysis.

The third reputation is of course Blast Radius who commissioned the report.


Everyone wins.

It was excellent PR because it was about my interests, reflects what I write about and is pitched at a level that just caught my attention at the end of the day (and I even spent time on their site - which I did last year too). I also looked into their background this years to discover that WPP had bought them a year ago (another example of johnny come lately advertising groups buying into what they should have developed in-house five years ago instead of going for short term cash hoping to buy companies instead of developing cultures - watch this space).

The work is good and the survey was done by Informars, a sister company to Datamonitor, and subjective panelists to come up with the 'best online consumer experiences of 2007'.

The car companies did well:
1 Jaguar Cars Ltd. www.jaguar.co.uk
2 Magnet Ltd. www.magnet.co.uk
3 Reebok International (UK) www.rbk.com (UK)
4 Burberry Group plc www.burberry.com (UK)
5 SSL International plc www.durex.com/uk
6 Saab Great Britain Ltd. www.saab.co.uk
7 Volkswagen Group (UK) Ltd. www.volkswagen.co.uk
8 Colgate-Palmolive Ltd. (UK) www.colgate.co.uk
9 Reckitt Benckiser plc www.veet.co.uk
10 Peugeot Motor Co. plc www.peugeot.co.uk

IBM took the 20th spot.

It is worth reading the report and visiting the websites.

If, like me you believe that a lot of reputation is tied up in web sites, their design, responsiveness and ability to act as a major part of the transition from visitors to ambassador, then this report will be of interest.

The picture is a screen shot from the magnet web site which is a great toy to play with.


Thanks Allan.

A web outage is a relationships issue

Yesterday the www.tiny.com service was down. In a few hours there was a mass migration to a range of other comparable services.

Tiny lost customers and its reputation was tarnished.

This is a lesson for us all. If our online presence is not maintained it affects our reputation. It also means people go elsewhere to solve their problem. In the case of Tiny services like http://snipurl.com, http://urltea.com and http://paulding.net and the Firefox add-on all came to the aid of the online community.

When reputation is in the news so to are obscure commenst like this one from Slashdot.com

"Thanks to twitter, SMS, and mobile web, a lot of people are using the url minimizers like tinyurl.com, urltea.com. However, now I see a lot of people using it on their regular webpages. This could be a big problem if billions of different links are unreachable at a given time."

There is a ripple effect and a raft of different issues become relevant.

The circle of relationships is fractured.

But what if your organisation is the UK airport owner BAA?

What is the consequence of its sites being affected especially in times of crisis, as for example when there is a security scare?

This is not a Webmaster issue. Webmasters will be at the coal face trying to get it back up. Its a PR issue because it went down. It will also be a marketing issues, a finance issue, an internal relationship issue and a vendor relation issue.

A web site is a big public relations responsibility. It always was. But now its is a critical area of PR practice - a full lecture and seminar for year two in any BA PR degree.

Using a service like http://www.periscopeit.co.uk, a host data about the performance of a web site plus SMS and email alerts is a simple precaution.

Hopefully, this big issue is part of the CIPR advisory to its members and to its approved course lecturers and courses.

I (ahemmm) expect so!

Web 2.0 explained

Sleletons in cupboards - how do they get there?

JP Rangaswami is one of the more interesting commentators online and he came up with this utter gem today.

Sometimes I look at what we do, and I think to myself: First we take living things and make abject skeletons out of them. Then we carefully build cupboards around the newly formed skeletons. And then we wonder why we have skeletons in cupboards.

In building relationships we display our values and the things we value and judge others by the values they hold. This is true of people and organisations and very true of organisations and their stakeholders.

We are also conditioned (its part of our DNA) to judge those who hide their real selves or who try to deceive us with false values, obfuscation or untruths.

The abject skeleton of overdone brevity in the marketing in an attempt to 'grab attention' is a case in point.

An economic ramble

If one were to take a economic geography perspective of the Internet and imagine places where people meet, converse and trade ideas, products and services (OK... Facebook is an example) then the picture of different Internet Domians and their values changes. These places are large 'real' cities. Microsoft (in part) and NewsCorp bought cities. NewsCorp is, in effect, the City Fathers of MySpace.

The value of a city is one of many faces and is not comparable with a value chain of raw materials, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer or consumer.

Paying to buy a city, and countries and nations have done this in the past, is not part of the rest of conventional economics and should not go into calculations about the value of the properties and interactions in them.

Now, if you separate the nature of knowledge and things (Evans a & Wurster) the value of the Internet (and the value of the trade in the virtual cities) can be included in economic calculation.

If the value of a raw material is dependent on knowledge to turn it into a commodity, it has no value. The value is in the knowledge.

The extent to which that knowledge is dependant on the Internet, gives one a view of the value of the Internet.

The extent to which conversion of things is dependant on an Internet mediation in a 'virtual city' is a real value and so 'virtual cities' can be identified as a component of the 'real' economy.

If Facebook has markets trading in 'real things' it has an entrepôt value. It is a component of the real economy.

Perhaps we have to learn to think about these online 'places' and 'services' in a different light.