Of course, its absurd but legislation to do that is in process in the USA already and we might fear for democracy and our loved ones if it all went away.
It is possible for you to stay connected. You might like to use https://www.torproject.org and downloading it now is a pretty good idea while HMG is being benign.
Of course, if you are really paranoid, you may want to protect yourself from snoopers and this can be done with http://www.privoxy.org/.
So here is a a really useful job for that old computer that you don't use any more and, believe it or not, action now will help people in Egypt connect back with the world today.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
We need to take a more fundamental look
I am writing a paper examining why it is important for the PR industry to take a more profound look at the internet. It is, even by my standards, pretty controversial.
I thought that I might expose where I have got to progressively and invite you to comment as the thinking emerges and I refine its presentation.
Here is the first part.
A large part of the public relations industry is now actively involved in some form of, or the management of, what is described as social media (Curtis et al 2009).
In addition, a significant proportion of academic papers and not a small part of student and practitioner education is devoted to internet mediated communications studies. “On the skills side,” noted long time academician Kevin Maloney, “the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney 2010).
This paper takes this as a theme to explore both the practice and more fundamental drivers that can be explored by the public relations industry and academia.
“On the skill side” is a telling comment. It would suggest that the legitimacy of these new media or the internet’s societal significance is not as pivotal or central to public relations practice or theoretical development as its recent practitioner popularity would suggest (Fortune Magazine 2010).
The contribution and involvement of the public relations (and communications industries in general) in the recent European Commission study ‘Envisioning Digital Europe 2030’ (Misuraca et al 2010) was notable by its absence. Such fundamental deliberation was not supported by the public relations industry or with PR academic or industry supported involvement. With so many organisation’s constituents affected by the communications industries’ digital activities both current and in the future, there is a case for examining the fundamental significance of the internet to public relations.
The considerations are underpinned by the European Union funded CROSSROAD Project (CROSSROAD, 2010a), which identifies a research area taxonomy that classifies research in ICT for governance and policy modelling. The considerations into 5 categories:
1. Open government information and intelligence for transparency;
2. Social computing, citizen engagement and inclusion;
3. Policy making;
4. Identity management and trust in governance; and
5. Future internet for collaborative governance,
The fact that so much future gazing has resonance with the objectives of the public relations’ client base and The Global Alliance Stockholm Accords (The Global Alliance 2010) is significant.
This paper explores the legitimacy of the public relations’ sectoral internet mediated interaction beyond the mere ‘skill set revolution’ and examines its significance at the heart of any future evolution of PR practice.
It is not that there is a dearth of evidence as to the influences of the internet and its societal, economic or even social media effects in either attitude or behavioural change.
The use of social media enabling users to interact, create value and influence commercial and public institutions has been well documented (Huijboom et al. 2009). Social media facilitate creation of social identities (Castells 2001); creates a process sometimes called social contagion or viral activity (Lewis et al. 2008) and comparison (Grevet and Mankoff 2009) by allowing people to share and amortise personal effort in the process of delivering behavioural change (Garrett 2006).
Indeed the empirical evidence of behavioural change wrought through the use of social media is also documented (Cugelman et al 2009) with some considered views on influence (Cugelman et al 2009 /2) and the impact of initiatives driven by the internet including social media as a disruptive force that may affect the power balance between markets, governments, consumers / citizens and NGOs (Langley et al 2010). Other evidence from health (Richardson 2010) to business (Gillin 2010) shows how behaviourally affective internet mediated communication can be and cannot be (Christakis 2010).
From the abundance of reported evidence it would appear that internet mediated communication can and does act in changing values, attitudes, behaviours and, thereby, relationships.
There is significant anecdotal evidence of under reporting of these effects (Phillips 2011).
The evidence suggests that Internet mediated PR has a fundemental, if under-rated, place in considerations of public relations theory.
In its 2008 White Paper, the Authentic Enterprise, the Arthur Page Society (Iwata, J 2008) noted that, at the same time that, as the multinational organisation and its management systems “were taking ever clearer and more defined shape, three countervailing trends were arising that have revolutionized the environment in which businesses operate: the digital network revolution, global integration and stakeholder empowerment. Together, they call into question many basic assumptions of the 20th century corporate model.”
The Society, in promoting its 2011 conference, makes this point on its website “The world is changing faster than many of our organizations are prepared to handle, and increasingly falls on the Chief Communications Officer to help management teams develop and remain true to their culture and values, while staying on top of the dynamic pressures of an increasingly transparent and digital world.”
There is considerable literature to support evidence for such trends. As far back as 1995, when Nicholas Negroponte (1995) explored the early influences of social media to the Clue Train Manifesto (2000) to Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams recent book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010), a range of academics and business leaders have been reporting on a range of extra ordinary internet driven changes. These changes are affecting organisations in every sphere as well as a high proportion of the world’s population.
The nature of such change provoked by the network effects of internet communication is empirically validated in PR literature by, among others, Amaral and Phillips (Amaral and Phillips 2009). Global integration is reported as a corporate pinch point at the start of 2011 according to a Forbes report (Forbes 2011), In addition, in PR literature Van Dyke and Vercic, (Van Dyke and Vercic, 2009) offer a well argued case.
Evidence offered by Patrizia Nanz Jens Steffe as far back as 2003 argued the extent to which democratisation of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an internet mediated transnational public sphere and is well documented in the PR literature from Dahlgran (2005) to Jackson (2010).
The forgoing offers considerable evidence to demonstrate why the internet is important to PR and PR theory. It demonstrates that, without much by way of the PR industry’s actual engagement, the effects of these technologies have begun to changed the practice of managing relationships, reputation, constituent engagement, development of trust and organisation’s licence to operate. Equally one must not dismiss the significance of the changing face of all forms of media.
The evidence suggests that the PR industry has some way to go. In the UK, consumers used the Internet extensively to buy things in December 2010.
Graham Charlon at eConsultancy in a report ‘Christmas e-commerce stats round up’ (Charlton 2011) revealed that consumers had continued to engage with ecommerce at a very considerable rate.
• 44% of Britain's online adult population upped their online spending this Christmas compared to 2009, pushing the total amount spent online to £2.8bn.
• 45% of those who shopped online encountered website problems while doing their Christmas shopping, and 32% abandoned purchases as a result.
• 86% of UK consumers logged onto the internet over Christmas Day and Boxing Day this year, an increase of over 10% when compared with figures from 2009.
• 22% of online users accessed the internet on their phones, confirming the importance of mobile commerce for retailers.
• 30% of online consumers used the internet to shop online on Boxing Day, while 62% of online consumers shopped for sale items and discounted products across the two days.
• Online sales at John Lewis reached £500m this year, and sales in the five weeks to January 1 were up 42% on the same period last year.
• On Boxing Day, eBay and Amazon were the most visited e-commerce sites, with 9.96% and 7.02% of visits respectively.
These data would suggest that social media among many other things had some considerable effect (Gillin 2010) which would lead the observer to imagine that advisors to companies would be making the case for significant activity.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
The 2010 Econsultancy's Social Media and Online PR Report (eConsultancy 2010) revealed that:
• Some 40% of companies say they have “experimented with social media but have not done much”, while just over a third say they have done an “average amount”.
• Around a quarter of company respondents (26%) said their most senior managers were “very interested indeed” in social media, compared to 19% who said there was “very little interest”.
• Social network profile creation and management is still the most widely used social media tactic, although the proportion of companies who do this has decreased from 65% last year to 56% this year.
• Direct traffic (72%) is still regarded as the most important metric for assessing social media activity. Almost three-quarters of respondents say this is one of the three most important metrics they use.
• 45% of responding companies don’t have any policies or guidelines for the use of social media.
This is not a British phenomenon. Online retail sales in France grew 24 percent in 2010 to 31 billion euros ($43.31 billion) according to the French e-Commerce Federation (Fevad) and reported by Reuters (Reuters 2011).
It is reasonable to ask if the PR industry is supporting such sales evidenced in near comparable growth.
The PR industry has been, it might be said, dragged along by a force it does not comprehend very well.
Maloney (ibid) suggested that “On the skills side the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.”
In many ways PR is overwhelmed by the pace, extent and implications of this change and has to include and develop skills in response to this evolution.
Skills are by no means enough. The industry has to understand the economic, societal, political and technological developments as well and must prepare for even and evermore fundamental change. To be taken seriously, the PR sector has to invest in developing theory and practice before it is overwhelmed by each successive evolution.
For any industry sector to invest heavily in anything radical it has to be sure that such an investment is grounded.
Perhaps, given the evidence we can challenge the assumption that “new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney ibid).
Is it that the rise in use and application of ‘new media’ is a revolution? Indeed, is it that the internet and its technologies are revolutionary or, in human evolutionary terms, a human an inevitability?
To be able to argue that the $ multi-billion PR industry needs to take a more fundamental look at the significance of the internet, we need to address some of the assumptions about the internet and its effects.
There has to be some consideration as to why the internet evolved and the nature of its evolution in human as well as technical terms to be able to identify if new media is the extent of the revolution.
Will the internet die and go away?
What will there be when search and social media, as it is now known and recognised today, loses its current relevance?
And what does the industry and notably its research base need to know and do in preparation for such evolutionary events?
As things stand, the PR industry urgently needs to recognise it has to do more, collaborate with other initiatives and develop an agenda that will take it from failing to recognise the significance of the internet to a point where it can play a complete, even leading role, in societies’ evolution wrought by the still growing power of the internet.
David Phillips (2011)
Bibliography
Amaral B, Phillips D 2009 A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. Available at http://www.bledcom.com/home/knowledge last accessed 10th Jan 2011.
Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (forthcomming 2011) A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Princeton University Press
Boyd R and Richerson P J. (2006) Culture and the evolution of the human social instincts. In: Roots of Human Sociality, S. Levinson and N. Enfield, eds., Berg, Oxford
Castells, M. 2001 The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford University Press
Charlton G. (2011) Christmas e-commerce stats round up http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7026-christmas-e-commerce-stats-round-up-2 accessed 11th Jan 20011
Christakis, N (2010) The networked nature of Twitter weblog http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/12/nicholas-christakis-on-the-networked-nature-of-twitter/?=sidebarpromo accessed 10th Jan 2010
Clue Train Manifesto (2000) Basic Books; ISBN-10: 0738202444
CROSSROAD, (2010a). Deliverable D 1.2, Analysis of the State of the Art of Research in ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling (available at www.crossroad-eu.net)
Cugelman, B., Thelwall, M., & Dawes, P. (2009) Communication-Based Influence Components Model. Persuasive 2009. Claremont, ACM
Cugelman, B., Thelwall, M., & Dawes, P. (2009, under peer review) The Psychology of Online Behavioural Influence Interventions: a Meta-Analysis.
Curtis, L. Edwards, c, Frazer K. L, Gudelsky S, Holmquist J, Thornton K, and Sweetser K,D. 2009 Adoption of social media for public relations by nonprofit organizations Public Relations Review 36 (2010) 90–9.
Dalhlgren, P. (2005) The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation Political Communication, 22:147–162
Doherty P (2003) U Thant Lecture: science, society and the challenge of the future http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/59/3/325.full accessed 2010
Dunbar, R. 1996 TES http://goo.gl/VvY1w downloaded Jan 2011).
Forbes (2011) Tech Firms Unprepared For Global Expansion weblog http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2010/12/28/tech-firms-unprepared-for-global-expansion/ accessed 10th Jan 2011
Fortune Magazine 2010 Are social media jobs here to stay? http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/21/are-social-media-jobs-here-to-stay/ accessed 10the Jan 2010.
Garrett, R. K. (2006) Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs. Information, Communication and Society, 9(2), 202-224
Gillin P. (2010) The New Conversation: taking Social Media from talk to action, a Harvard Business Review Analytics http://hbr.org/hbrg-main/resources/pdfs/comm/sas/16203-hbr-sas-report-r3.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2010
Grevet, C., Mankoff, J. (2009) Motivating Sustainable Behavior through Social Comparison on Online Social Visualization, HCI conference 2009
Huijboom, N.M., Van den Broek, T.A., et al. (2009), Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services, edited by Punie, Y, Misuraca, G., Osimo, D., JRC-IPTS EUR 2408 EN, Luxembourg: European Communities. Available at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2820
Iwata, J 2008 The Authentic Enterprise Arthur Page Society available at http://www.awpagesociety.com/images/uploads/2007AuthenticEnterprise.pdf last viewed 10th Jan 2011.
Jackson, N. (2010) Political Public Relations: spin, persuasion or relationship building. http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2010/1192_1076.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2010
Langley, D and van den Broek, T. 2010 TNO The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research Internet Politics and Policy Conference 2010, 16-17 September, Oxford Available at http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/ipp2010/system/files/IPP2010_Langley_vandenBroek_Paper.pdf last viewed 10.01. 2011
Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., Gonzalez, M., Wimmer, A., and Christakis, N. (2008) Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com. Social Networks, 30, 330–342
Maloney, K 2010 PRMoment.com weblog accessed 10 Jan 2011 http://www.prmoment.com/kevin-moloney-tutor-for-bournemouth-uni-s-pr-course-on-why-pr-degrees-are-popular-with-students-and-great-for-employers.aspx
Misuraca, G, Broster D. Centeno C, Punie Y, Lampathaki F, Charalabidis Y, Askounis D, Osimo D, Skuta K, Bicking M (2010) Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling EUR 24614 EN. Luxembourg (Luxembourg): European Union, 2010. Available at http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC54203.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2011.
Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital Coronet Books ISBN: 0 340 64930 5
Phillips D (2011) Online PR delivering sales weblog http://leverwealth.blogspot.com/2011/01/online-pr-delivering-sales.html accessed 10th Jan 2010
Reuters (2011) French online retail sales rose 24 pct in 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE70J0TB20110124 accessed 26th Jan 2011
Richardson, C. R, Buis L, Janney A.W, Goodrich D. E, Sen, A, Hess M. Mehari K. (2010) An Online Community Improves Adherence in an Internet-Mediated Walking Program. Part 1: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial Journal of Medical Internet Research 2010;12(4):e71 http://www.jmir.org/2010/4/e71/ accessed 10th Jan 2010.
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A (2010) Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World Portfolio Hardcover ISBN-10: 1591843561
The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, Stockholm Accords http://www.wprf2010.se/draft-of-the-stockholm-accords/ accessed 2010
Van Dyke, M. A. , Vercic, D (2009) The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research and Practice pp 822-824 Routledge.
I thought that I might expose where I have got to progressively and invite you to comment as the thinking emerges and I refine its presentation.
Here is the first part.
A large part of the public relations industry is now actively involved in some form of, or the management of, what is described as social media (Curtis et al 2009).
In addition, a significant proportion of academic papers and not a small part of student and practitioner education is devoted to internet mediated communications studies. “On the skills side,” noted long time academician Kevin Maloney, “the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney 2010).
This paper takes this as a theme to explore both the practice and more fundamental drivers that can be explored by the public relations industry and academia.
“On the skill side” is a telling comment. It would suggest that the legitimacy of these new media or the internet’s societal significance is not as pivotal or central to public relations practice or theoretical development as its recent practitioner popularity would suggest (Fortune Magazine 2010).
The contribution and involvement of the public relations (and communications industries in general) in the recent European Commission study ‘Envisioning Digital Europe 2030’ (Misuraca et al 2010) was notable by its absence. Such fundamental deliberation was not supported by the public relations industry or with PR academic or industry supported involvement. With so many organisation’s constituents affected by the communications industries’ digital activities both current and in the future, there is a case for examining the fundamental significance of the internet to public relations.
The considerations are underpinned by the European Union funded CROSSROAD Project (CROSSROAD, 2010a), which identifies a research area taxonomy that classifies research in ICT for governance and policy modelling. The considerations into 5 categories:
1. Open government information and intelligence for transparency;
2. Social computing, citizen engagement and inclusion;
3. Policy making;
4. Identity management and trust in governance; and
5. Future internet for collaborative governance,
The fact that so much future gazing has resonance with the objectives of the public relations’ client base and The Global Alliance Stockholm Accords (The Global Alliance 2010) is significant.
This paper explores the legitimacy of the public relations’ sectoral internet mediated interaction beyond the mere ‘skill set revolution’ and examines its significance at the heart of any future evolution of PR practice.
It is not that there is a dearth of evidence as to the influences of the internet and its societal, economic or even social media effects in either attitude or behavioural change.
The use of social media enabling users to interact, create value and influence commercial and public institutions has been well documented (Huijboom et al. 2009). Social media facilitate creation of social identities (Castells 2001); creates a process sometimes called social contagion or viral activity (Lewis et al. 2008) and comparison (Grevet and Mankoff 2009) by allowing people to share and amortise personal effort in the process of delivering behavioural change (Garrett 2006).
Indeed the empirical evidence of behavioural change wrought through the use of social media is also documented (Cugelman et al 2009) with some considered views on influence (Cugelman et al 2009 /2) and the impact of initiatives driven by the internet including social media as a disruptive force that may affect the power balance between markets, governments, consumers / citizens and NGOs (Langley et al 2010). Other evidence from health (Richardson 2010) to business (Gillin 2010) shows how behaviourally affective internet mediated communication can be and cannot be (Christakis 2010).
From the abundance of reported evidence it would appear that internet mediated communication can and does act in changing values, attitudes, behaviours and, thereby, relationships.
There is significant anecdotal evidence of under reporting of these effects (Phillips 2011).
The evidence suggests that Internet mediated PR has a fundemental, if under-rated, place in considerations of public relations theory.
In its 2008 White Paper, the Authentic Enterprise, the Arthur Page Society (Iwata, J 2008) noted that, at the same time that, as the multinational organisation and its management systems “were taking ever clearer and more defined shape, three countervailing trends were arising that have revolutionized the environment in which businesses operate: the digital network revolution, global integration and stakeholder empowerment. Together, they call into question many basic assumptions of the 20th century corporate model.”
The Society, in promoting its 2011 conference, makes this point on its website “The world is changing faster than many of our organizations are prepared to handle, and increasingly falls on the Chief Communications Officer to help management teams develop and remain true to their culture and values, while staying on top of the dynamic pressures of an increasingly transparent and digital world.”
There is considerable literature to support evidence for such trends. As far back as 1995, when Nicholas Negroponte (1995) explored the early influences of social media to the Clue Train Manifesto (2000) to Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams recent book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010), a range of academics and business leaders have been reporting on a range of extra ordinary internet driven changes. These changes are affecting organisations in every sphere as well as a high proportion of the world’s population.
The nature of such change provoked by the network effects of internet communication is empirically validated in PR literature by, among others, Amaral and Phillips (Amaral and Phillips 2009). Global integration is reported as a corporate pinch point at the start of 2011 according to a Forbes report (Forbes 2011), In addition, in PR literature Van Dyke and Vercic, (Van Dyke and Vercic, 2009) offer a well argued case.
Evidence offered by Patrizia Nanz Jens Steffe as far back as 2003 argued the extent to which democratisation of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an internet mediated transnational public sphere and is well documented in the PR literature from Dahlgran (2005) to Jackson (2010).
The forgoing offers considerable evidence to demonstrate why the internet is important to PR and PR theory. It demonstrates that, without much by way of the PR industry’s actual engagement, the effects of these technologies have begun to changed the practice of managing relationships, reputation, constituent engagement, development of trust and organisation’s licence to operate. Equally one must not dismiss the significance of the changing face of all forms of media.
The evidence suggests that the PR industry has some way to go. In the UK, consumers used the Internet extensively to buy things in December 2010.
Graham Charlon at eConsultancy in a report ‘Christmas e-commerce stats round up’ (Charlton 2011) revealed that consumers had continued to engage with ecommerce at a very considerable rate.
• 44% of Britain's online adult population upped their online spending this Christmas compared to 2009, pushing the total amount spent online to £2.8bn.
• 45% of those who shopped online encountered website problems while doing their Christmas shopping, and 32% abandoned purchases as a result.
• 86% of UK consumers logged onto the internet over Christmas Day and Boxing Day this year, an increase of over 10% when compared with figures from 2009.
• 22% of online users accessed the internet on their phones, confirming the importance of mobile commerce for retailers.
• 30% of online consumers used the internet to shop online on Boxing Day, while 62% of online consumers shopped for sale items and discounted products across the two days.
• Online sales at John Lewis reached £500m this year, and sales in the five weeks to January 1 were up 42% on the same period last year.
• On Boxing Day, eBay and Amazon were the most visited e-commerce sites, with 9.96% and 7.02% of visits respectively.
These data would suggest that social media among many other things had some considerable effect (Gillin 2010) which would lead the observer to imagine that advisors to companies would be making the case for significant activity.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
The 2010 Econsultancy's Social Media and Online PR Report (eConsultancy 2010) revealed that:
• Some 40% of companies say they have “experimented with social media but have not done much”, while just over a third say they have done an “average amount”.
• Around a quarter of company respondents (26%) said their most senior managers were “very interested indeed” in social media, compared to 19% who said there was “very little interest”.
• Social network profile creation and management is still the most widely used social media tactic, although the proportion of companies who do this has decreased from 65% last year to 56% this year.
• Direct traffic (72%) is still regarded as the most important metric for assessing social media activity. Almost three-quarters of respondents say this is one of the three most important metrics they use.
• 45% of responding companies don’t have any policies or guidelines for the use of social media.
This is not a British phenomenon. Online retail sales in France grew 24 percent in 2010 to 31 billion euros ($43.31 billion) according to the French e-Commerce Federation (Fevad) and reported by Reuters (Reuters 2011).
It is reasonable to ask if the PR industry is supporting such sales evidenced in near comparable growth.
The PR industry has been, it might be said, dragged along by a force it does not comprehend very well.
Maloney (ibid) suggested that “On the skills side the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.”
In many ways PR is overwhelmed by the pace, extent and implications of this change and has to include and develop skills in response to this evolution.
Skills are by no means enough. The industry has to understand the economic, societal, political and technological developments as well and must prepare for even and evermore fundamental change. To be taken seriously, the PR sector has to invest in developing theory and practice before it is overwhelmed by each successive evolution.
For any industry sector to invest heavily in anything radical it has to be sure that such an investment is grounded.
Perhaps, given the evidence we can challenge the assumption that “new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney ibid).
Is it that the rise in use and application of ‘new media’ is a revolution? Indeed, is it that the internet and its technologies are revolutionary or, in human evolutionary terms, a human an inevitability?
To be able to argue that the $ multi-billion PR industry needs to take a more fundamental look at the significance of the internet, we need to address some of the assumptions about the internet and its effects.
There has to be some consideration as to why the internet evolved and the nature of its evolution in human as well as technical terms to be able to identify if new media is the extent of the revolution.
Will the internet die and go away?
What will there be when search and social media, as it is now known and recognised today, loses its current relevance?
And what does the industry and notably its research base need to know and do in preparation for such evolutionary events?
As things stand, the PR industry urgently needs to recognise it has to do more, collaborate with other initiatives and develop an agenda that will take it from failing to recognise the significance of the internet to a point where it can play a complete, even leading role, in societies’ evolution wrought by the still growing power of the internet.
David Phillips (2011)
Bibliography
Amaral B, Phillips D 2009 A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. Available at http://www.bledcom.com/home/knowledge last accessed 10th Jan 2011.
Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (forthcomming 2011) A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Princeton University Press
Boyd R and Richerson P J. (2006) Culture and the evolution of the human social instincts. In: Roots of Human Sociality, S. Levinson and N. Enfield, eds., Berg, Oxford
Castells, M. 2001 The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford University Press
Charlton G. (2011) Christmas e-commerce stats round up http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7026-christmas-e-commerce-stats-round-up-2 accessed 11th Jan 20011
Christakis, N (2010) The networked nature of Twitter weblog http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/12/nicholas-christakis-on-the-networked-nature-of-twitter/?=sidebarpromo accessed 10th Jan 2010
Clue Train Manifesto (2000) Basic Books; ISBN-10: 0738202444
CROSSROAD, (2010a). Deliverable D 1.2, Analysis of the State of the Art of Research in ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling (available at www.crossroad-eu.net)
Cugelman, B., Thelwall, M., & Dawes, P. (2009) Communication-Based Influence Components Model. Persuasive 2009. Claremont, ACM
Cugelman, B., Thelwall, M., & Dawes, P. (2009, under peer review) The Psychology of Online Behavioural Influence Interventions: a Meta-Analysis.
Curtis, L. Edwards, c, Frazer K. L, Gudelsky S, Holmquist J, Thornton K, and Sweetser K,D. 2009 Adoption of social media for public relations by nonprofit organizations Public Relations Review 36 (2010) 90–9.
Dalhlgren, P. (2005) The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation Political Communication, 22:147–162
Doherty P (2003) U Thant Lecture: science, society and the challenge of the future http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/59/3/325.full accessed 2010
Dunbar, R. 1996 TES http://goo.gl/VvY1w downloaded Jan 2011).
Forbes (2011) Tech Firms Unprepared For Global Expansion weblog http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2010/12/28/tech-firms-unprepared-for-global-expansion/ accessed 10th Jan 2011
Fortune Magazine 2010 Are social media jobs here to stay? http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/21/are-social-media-jobs-here-to-stay/ accessed 10the Jan 2010.
Garrett, R. K. (2006) Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs. Information, Communication and Society, 9(2), 202-224
Gillin P. (2010) The New Conversation: taking Social Media from talk to action, a Harvard Business Review Analytics http://hbr.org/hbrg-main/resources/pdfs/comm/sas/16203-hbr-sas-report-r3.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2010
Grevet, C., Mankoff, J. (2009) Motivating Sustainable Behavior through Social Comparison on Online Social Visualization, HCI conference 2009
Huijboom, N.M., Van den Broek, T.A., et al. (2009), Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services, edited by Punie, Y, Misuraca, G., Osimo, D., JRC-IPTS EUR 2408 EN, Luxembourg: European Communities. Available at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2820
Iwata, J 2008 The Authentic Enterprise Arthur Page Society available at http://www.awpagesociety.com/images/uploads/2007AuthenticEnterprise.pdf last viewed 10th Jan 2011.
Jackson, N. (2010) Political Public Relations: spin, persuasion or relationship building. http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2010/1192_1076.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2010
Langley, D and van den Broek, T. 2010 TNO The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research Internet Politics and Policy Conference 2010, 16-17 September, Oxford Available at http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/ipp2010/system/files/IPP2010_Langley_vandenBroek_Paper.pdf last viewed 10.01. 2011
Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., Gonzalez, M., Wimmer, A., and Christakis, N. (2008) Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com. Social Networks, 30, 330–342
Maloney, K 2010 PRMoment.com weblog accessed 10 Jan 2011 http://www.prmoment.com/kevin-moloney-tutor-for-bournemouth-uni-s-pr-course-on-why-pr-degrees-are-popular-with-students-and-great-for-employers.aspx
Misuraca, G, Broster D. Centeno C, Punie Y, Lampathaki F, Charalabidis Y, Askounis D, Osimo D, Skuta K, Bicking M (2010) Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling EUR 24614 EN. Luxembourg (Luxembourg): European Union, 2010. Available at http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC54203.pdf accessed 10th Jan 2011.
Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital Coronet Books ISBN: 0 340 64930 5
Phillips D (2011) Online PR delivering sales weblog http://leverwealth.blogspot.com/2011/01/online-pr-delivering-sales.html accessed 10th Jan 2010
Reuters (2011) French online retail sales rose 24 pct in 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE70J0TB20110124 accessed 26th Jan 2011
Richardson, C. R, Buis L, Janney A.W, Goodrich D. E, Sen, A, Hess M. Mehari K. (2010) An Online Community Improves Adherence in an Internet-Mediated Walking Program. Part 1: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial Journal of Medical Internet Research 2010;12(4):e71 http://www.jmir.org/2010/4/e71/ accessed 10th Jan 2010.
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A (2010) Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World Portfolio Hardcover ISBN-10: 1591843561
The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, Stockholm Accords http://www.wprf2010.se/draft-of-the-stockholm-accords/ accessed 2010
Van Dyke, M. A. , Vercic, D (2009) The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research and Practice pp 822-824 Routledge.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Online PR delivering sales
In research for Google, Boston Consulting revealed that the UK ecommerce sector is worth £60 billion and is growing at the rate of £6 billion every year.
For companies and their agencies, this is a huge opportunity. For organisations harnessing the power of social media this is an awesome opportunity (http://goo.gl/cPYDQ).
This post explores how effective social media interventions have been in delivering real tangible returns and how effective and knowledgeable consultants working as social media partners can deliver effective results.
Traditionally the relationship between most PR activities and sales has been tenuous. Today, the direct link between online activities and very tangible outcomes, including sales outcomes is pretty common.
Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
“Old Spice Body Wash sales jumped 27% in the six months to July 2010, 55% in the latter three months and 107% in July, according to research firm Nielsen Co,” reported Emily Glazer, of Dow Jones Newswires. (http://goo.gl/oKDuK).
It would seem that the old output, outtake and outcome model of PR measurement has lost the outtake road block. Online PR delivers customers.
We know from eConsultancy research that the majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring ROI (http://goo.gl/lPJnf).
However, working closely with people who do have the numbers, including website traffic data, marketing and sale returns as well as using effective monitoring, the stumbling blocks to finding the cause and effect derived from online interactions is not quite as hard as many believe.
More generally we can use results based case studies that cover a wide range of PR sector practice to get valuable insights from Olde Spice to computers.
Lauren Fisher writes in The Next Web that ‘Sony have proved the power of Twitter with a fairly covert social media campaign that incentivised people to purchase their products and it worked. They reported an increase in Sony Vaio sales from Twitter in that period of $1.5 million. This is a pretty impressive figure and also puts into action this new way of buying – social commerce,’ (http://goo.gl/GD5B).
Of course, many people look at the claims that have come across the Atlantic but the results are just as compelling from case studies in the UK.
For Asos, a Facebook campaign achieved s 2.6% increase in ASOS Denim sales and a significant increase in the number of weekly new fan sign-ups during the 2-week campaign period, (http://goo.gl/6K2XI).
While the UK may have fewer case studies, there is every reason to believe that the UK should be even more responsive.
The Boston Consulting report shows that the UK is exporting internet goods and services at the rate of £2.80 for every £1 imported with an online advertising sector worth £13bn.
What is more, its per capita internet involvement (including online purchasing) is globally competitive and ahead of the USA, Germany, France and Italy.
Bearing this in mind, it is useful to examine best practice worldwide. They offer experience and ideas that can be adapted and re-purposed by the savvy consultancy. There are any number of such examples and we have chosen a representative few in this paper.
Domino's credits Facebook and Foursquare promotions for lifting online sales by 61 percent in the U.K. and Ireland during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2009. The international pizza chain also announced on Monday that web-based sales now account for 33 percent of its revenue, compared to 26 percent in 2009.
http://goo.gl/yI4ob
There is no doubt that practitioners’ do need to have a comprehensive view of the facilities that are available for best practice online. The lines are blurred between different communication practices and the adoption by a PR consultancy may be equally used by a marketing promotion company or other agency.
Shoppers using the Wet Seal mobile phone tool are 40% more likely to buy something, and buyers spend 20% more. "Shop with friends" users become buyers at 2.5 times Wet Seal's average conversion rate online.
The iPhone app generates about 5% of Wet Seal's overall Web traffic, and the app has been downloaded more than 65,000 times. Girls look at about 500,000 outfits a week with their iPhones -- traffic that spiked to about 750,000 a week the two weeks before back-to-school.
Facebook has become one of the largest marketing bases for store traffic, thanks to coupons and campaigns, and one of the biggest drivers of traffic to WetSeal.com
http://goo.gl/Xr1uu
The value of using social media marketing is not confined to the biggest of clients. As one might expect big consumer tech companies should do well. But it comes as something of a surprise that they can be sufficiently light of their feet to create real returns using Twitter.
Dell’s big announcement that they tracked $3 million in sales through their Twitter account came over a year ago in June 2009. What we are seeing now though, is a shift in user behaviour that shows we’re now more likely to purchase through social media. http://goo.gl/QANW
Even the smallest enterprise can benefit which means that consultancies with social media ready practitioners can help contribute sales to even the smallest account.
Curtis Kimball, the man behind the enormously popular Creme Brulee Cartin San Francisco, has quickly amassed over 12,000 Twitter followers
Last October, Dentist Dr. Vaksman signed up for a Groupon deal in San Francisco, and received 320 new patients because of the deal, which was for a patient exam and x-ray. The Vaksmans say that the deal propelled the five month old business in the right direction and boosted its patient base significantly.
The ability to adopt ideas from around the world is important for clients and consultancies and there are any number of examples to choose from.
Examples include Delta Airlines which introduced a flight booking option through their Facebook page.
Gap recently ran an offer with Groupon that offered users the chance to purchase a $50 giftcard at $25. This earned them $11 million in revenue.
Public relations, using social media can come up with really creative ideas that can even help turn underperforming capacity into a marketing win.
Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account
In less than a year, Joie De Vivre has booked over 1,000 room nights through these types of deals—rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty.
One of the most common responses consultants get is that social media is confined to consumer facing PR. A study by eConsultancy reveals that this is not true. Their research shows that there is not a significant difference in the extent to which B2B and B2C organizations are engaging with social media marketing (http://goo.gl/KWMgJ). Perhaps this shows that even B2C has a long way to go and justifies the Boston Consulting Group’s projection of growth at the rate of £6 billion per year.
The Direct Marketing Association expects digital marketing channels, driven by social media, to overtake traditional platforms, in a new report.
While direct mail is currently the top avenue for businesses, online channels are expected to surpass it within the next 12 months, according to TMCnet. Social media is the top emerging platform for many B2B firms, with 88 percent maintaining a social media presence. Professional sites, such as LinkedIn, are the most popular, followed by microblogs, including Twitter.
TMCnet quotes the DMA as saying, "these results clearly underscore the recognition that marketers see the need to experiment with new marketing channels which offer the opportunity to break through the marketing clutter with more personal and engaging messaging."
While direct mail is currently the top avenue for businesses, online channels are expected to surpass it within the next 12 months, according to TMCnet. Social media is the top emerging platform for many B2B firms, with 88 percent maintaining a social media presence. Professional sites, such as LinkedIn, are the most popular, followed by microblogs, including Twitter.
TMCnet quotes the DMA as saying, "these results clearly underscore the recognition that marketers see the need to experiment with new marketing channels which offer the opportunity to break through the marketing clutter with more personal and engaging messaging."
Social media is part of a multi- billion explosion of marketing and sales activity. It is effective at delivering very tangible results. There are case studies from around the world that have relevance in the UK, one of the top most active e-economies worldwide.
Every sector can benefit and there is significant evidence that growth in this sector is set to outperform other marketing communications sector over the next few years.
The online marketing model has gone through many transformations in the last decade. The turn of the century idea that ‘in your face online advertising’ would work was quickly dismissed as users just left such sites in a huff. Pay per click remains useful but as the power of search emerged as the number one way to find new information, Search Engine Optimisation came to the fore. Now, we have seen that the power of the online community and how it can translate into real sales and behaviour changes. The shift from broadcast to community plays into the hands of the online PR practitioner used to holding conversations.
Understanding this transformation is really important because of what is at stake.
Online sales are predicted to grow at the rate of 10% per year. Put another way, which organisation can pass up an opportunity to take a slice of £6 billion next year and which organisation can withstand the shock of consumers disserting their traditional marketing effort by going online.
This is a journey. A chunk of Facebook and trickle of Twitter is not a strategy. If the objective is to take a slice of £6 billion, it may mean some serious conversations about business models as well as development of essential social media strategies to participate in exploitating the fastest evolving part of a growing economy.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
PR can ignore if you like but the internet is now for turning
It offers four scenarios:
In the Open Governance Scenario, users
will enjoy unprecedented access to information
and knowledge. By shifting cognitive capacities,
the work of memorizing and processing data
and information will be passed onto machines,
while humans will focus on critical thinking
and developing new analytical skills. This will
enhance collective intelligence (both human
and ICT-enabled).
This is something we know and many prefer.
The Leviathan Governance Scenario assumes
that an ‘enlightened oligarchy’ will emerge
that uses high-tech tools and systems to collect
and manage public information and services.
Judgment and decision-making will be based
on analytical processing of factual information
from the many by the few for the benefit of
all.
This is not so far fetched as its seems. Europe went there twice in the 20th century.
In the Privatised Governance Scenario,
society will be shaped by decisions taken by
corporate business representatives. Discussion
on social issues and about the role and behaviour
of citizens will be muted, as people will be
pawns whose needs and desires are managed by
large corporations.
How far do we trust our clients in such a scenario? Can we adopt the Stockholm Accords and engage clients with them sufficiently for this scenario to be tolerable?
The Self-Service Governance Scenario
envisages a society where citizens will be
empowered to play the role of policy makers. In
small expert communities, citizens will devise
policies in accordance with the do-it-yourself
principle; they will choose from a menu of public
services those they need and consent to. This ICTenabled, self-organised society will be able to
address emerging problems faster than traditional
government could.
This has its attractions and I can see this as being possible.It will be very disruptive, of course, and society will need to be brave led by ethical PR practitioners operating in quite distinctive constituencies that cluster round values not unlike brand values we know today.
As the paper explains, in such a scenario "The process of gradual disappearance of institutions and lack
of trust in government will result in the need for new trust providers. Reputation management, for content and people, will play a significant role in service provision."
PR is now at a crossroads if these ideas are to be believed (and the people involved are at the top end of internet thinking). We choose between taking sides between these ideas.
Do we have the leadership to guide us?
Friday, January 07, 2011
The value of values
People explicitly and implicitly fill its pages expressing what their values are and share them among people who have similar values. It has made the site very valuable.
According to the Economist Facebook’s implicit value has risen fivefold since mid-2009.
The article goes on to say that sceptics doubt that a firm whose business model is unproven is worth more than established media giants such as News Corp and Time Warner.
What we know of Facebook is that if it was to fail, it would leave a big hole in the lives of millions of people. Not only would they loose a lot of the time and effort vested in their profiles, they would loose all that social interaction and community activity that humans have valued through the evolution of our species (Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson).
This is a value beyond measure if it is to be counted in mere money terms.
This idea is significant for public relations.
It goes to the heart of trust, reputation and those core social needs we are beginning to understand more precisely than ever before.
The value of community, of being part of an interrelated civilisation and being a member of a social environment including our closest friends, neighbourhood and work colleagues is so important that, as recent studies have shown, we go into a decline when cut off from wider society.
In A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (forth coming) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis say:
Our ancestors used their capacities to learn from one another and to transmit information to create distinctive social environments. Resulting institutional and cultural niches reduced the costs borne by altruistic cooperators and raised the costs of defection. Among these socially constructed environments, three were particularly important: group-structured populationsThis sounds very much like Facebook to me and puts its value well beyond the valuation created by Digital Sky Technologies (DST), a Russian group, and Goldman Sachs.
with frequent inter-group competition, within-group leveling practices such as monogamous reproductive pairing and the sharing of food and information, and developmental institutions that internalized socially beneficial preferences.
In public relations we have a role in creating the opportunity for constituencies to create communities and many of them will be in image of Facebook. It is in these circumstances that PR really does create value.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
BP, issues management and 150 million adverse internet citations
Shares are holding up well after BP and its partners were accused of a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the oil spill that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast over the summer, the White House oil spill commission said on Wednesday.
What is coming out in the aftermath goes much wider than the loss of life, an unprecedented environment disaster, threat of being taken over and the loss of some top executives.
Over and again, we hear criticism of poor communication. BP might expect some criticism in PR Week but is now in the spotlight as a poor communicator in the Wall St Journal, Financial Times, and BBC and has been associated with poor communication over 30,000 times online in a week.
The Monthly report will be un-nerving with critical coverage in news sites (5,000 articles this month), blogs (50,000 posts), Twitter (11,000 times), Facebook (14,000 times) - yes they have all be there. This mountain of criticism is now online and will not go away any year soon. long after the beaches are pristine again, the online aftermath will be there.
I am not going to criticise whoever was the manager in-charge of PR at BP (it could or perhaps should be among these people). I am going to offer a view of the two million online citations that have been generated in this last terrible year for the company.
Crisis management is about preparation and the PR industry does have some very good tools to help in this regard. Planning and managing for crisis is hard work but not hugely complicated (compared to other areas of PR management). BP did not have much of a crisis communication plan in place according to the US commission report.
Recovering from a crisis is much harder and often one crisis sparks another (death - oil spill - share price fall - top executives desert - takeover threat - pressure on other operations - cost of being in the spotlight - legal costs/management disruption). The level of added distraction for the Board, cost and range of threats is now significant and for some organisations such pressures can be crippling.
What is to be done?
Well, after the PR crisis management plan has been put in place and the complete review of how BP and its industry moves towards improving transparency (oh no! not another TV series about the oilmen) and next shuffle of the Board, there will have to be a change of structure (retail separate from exploration and production for example) name and identity.
Why change of name and identity? Basically BP has to find a way to escape from the mountain of adverse online content that will follow it round like a bad smell for years.
The question is what is the timing for all this.
What is coming out in the aftermath goes much wider than the loss of life, an unprecedented environment disaster, threat of being taken over and the loss of some top executives.
Over and again, we hear criticism of poor communication. BP might expect some criticism in PR Week but is now in the spotlight as a poor communicator in the Wall St Journal, Financial Times, and BBC and has been associated with poor communication over 30,000 times online in a week.
The Monthly report will be un-nerving with critical coverage in news sites (5,000 articles this month), blogs (50,000 posts), Twitter (11,000 times), Facebook (14,000 times) - yes they have all be there. This mountain of criticism is now online and will not go away any year soon. long after the beaches are pristine again, the online aftermath will be there.
I am not going to criticise whoever was the manager in-charge of PR at BP (it could or perhaps should be among these people). I am going to offer a view of the two million online citations that have been generated in this last terrible year for the company.
Crisis management is about preparation and the PR industry does have some very good tools to help in this regard. Planning and managing for crisis is hard work but not hugely complicated (compared to other areas of PR management). BP did not have much of a crisis communication plan in place according to the US commission report.
Recovering from a crisis is much harder and often one crisis sparks another (death - oil spill - share price fall - top executives desert - takeover threat - pressure on other operations - cost of being in the spotlight - legal costs/management disruption). The level of added distraction for the Board, cost and range of threats is now significant and for some organisations such pressures can be crippling.
What is to be done?
Well, after the PR crisis management plan has been put in place and the complete review of how BP and its industry moves towards improving transparency (oh no! not another TV series about the oilmen) and next shuffle of the Board, there will have to be a change of structure (retail separate from exploration and production for example) name and identity.
Why change of name and identity? Basically BP has to find a way to escape from the mountain of adverse online content that will follow it round like a bad smell for years.
The question is what is the timing for all this.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
For good financial reasons, who will get stuck in for the sake of future PR
It is the time of predictions and finding out how good we were last year. Most predictions are not much more than fun but there is good reason for more serious analysis of trends that lead to effective insights.
It is these insights, when they are accurate, that provide the basis for confidence and investment in the future of organisations, and economic sectors.
I am not shy about forward predictions and the brickbats that come when I get it wrong. Equally, I get very frustrated by peers whose view of the future is too short term, narrow or based on ill considered facts.
Being critical of the PR industry's lack of performance over the last 15 years is not based on 20:20 hindsight but on a combination of professional institutions, academic and industry failure to appreciate predictions made, for example, 15 years ago and empirical often self/shoe-string funded research (like this) which demonstrate modern capabilities that can allow the PR industry to fulfil predictable potential.
The key here is in knowing how good we are at predicting the potential. I had a go at looking ahead 20 years in 1995 and here is my, verbatim, contribution:
‘The new media will enfranchise the individual with more one-to-one, one to many and many to many communication which will be easy by personal ‘phones, E-mail and video conferencing.
'Person-to-person-to-machine and database communication will be more important, electronically managed and more global. Increasingly this broth threatens brands and corporate reputation and needs professionalism to immunise (our organisations) or doctor the effects of the brew.
‘In its most perfect form, reputation management sustains relationships with publics in a state of equilibrium during both evolution and in crisis. This enhances corporate goodwill (a tradable asset).
‘The big change is that many-to-many global communication brings with it loss of ‘ownership’ of language, culture and knowledge and that there is a breakdown in intellectual property rights, copyright and much plagiarism. This is already a major problem.
‘News now travels further and faster and is mixed with history, fantasy and technology. Reputation in crisis is even more vulnerable. At a growing rate, the new media uses reputation as ‘merchandise’, stripped from the foundations which created it, then traded for pieces of silver - and at a discount’. ...
(David Phillips CIPR symposium in 1995)
A decade ago, some contributors dealt with what seem to be modern issues such as crisis management mediated by social media. Here is Alison Clark's 2001 contribution:
Corporate reputation managers need to put new systems in place to permit timely and appropriate response to the increased level of comment on significant issues that the Internet enables. Collecting the commentary is a preliminary step only. Most of public commentary is on the World Wide Web or in usenet. The originator?s choice of medium is revealing of their objectives and motivations. The management response may be pre-emptive or consequential, but essentially it is limited to six options, which may be supported by protocols prepared for timely response.
Perhaps the time has come to do more research and backfill some of the old prediction with new research to show the provenance and reasons for the industry to invest in its own future.
I shall start at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011 with some new thoughts. It will be interesting to see which practitioners, consultants and universities can look beyond 'online' to identify whether Public Relations is adapting, evolving or failing.
The real question here is to seek evidence of contributions by practitioners, consultants and universities.
Is it Dell, Robert Phillips, or a university leading the charge? Will they provide insights to guide this under performing industry.
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