Crisis? Prevention is better than cure

A huge amount of time is devoted to managing issues and crisis and their Public Relations impacts. Crisis is a huge waste of time and the costs are astronomic.

Today, the internet is making reputation risk management a much more significant area in need of attention. It is an area of practice that is developing fast.

Managing reputation risk is neither hard nor rocket science (but rocketeers do use risk management techniques). One issue avoided has two immediate benefits. It saves cost and expensive management time and it helps sustain reputation, goodwill and brand equity. Not a bad return for a few hours work.

This is not something to give to a fresher PR executive. It is a job for senior mangers and is at its best when undertaken with a professional external advisor (and I know a few who are good at it).

In past posts, I have covered the management discipline of risk management here and here.
There is a chapter in 'Online Public Relations' about it.

The methodology I have adopted comes straight out of the risk management models use in many other industries.

What I have not done is to provide a copy of a simple spreadsheet that can be used in risk management assessment and am happy to provide it to anyone who asks.

Essentially, a focus group convened to look at risk is invited to come up with thoughts about risks that may befall an organisation in a number of categories (see below). The process evaluates percived risk to help prioretise the deployment of budget and resources.

Each percived risk is assessed for likelihood and impact typically on a scale of 1 to 5. The result is multiplied and provides a risk factor. The higher the factor, the more likely the risk.

The PR team then come up with methods for mitigating the risk and then the focus group re-assess the risk to see how much risks can be mitigated and where the greatest effort (and risk avoidance budget) goes.

Of course who should do what, when and how to mitigate risk is integral to all risk management and it is helpful to have good data to support investment and activity.

Reputation, and importantly online reputation can and should be managed.

The types of risk that might be considered by a practitioner concerned with blogs, Twitter, discussion boards and all that stuff out there and online that is just about to come as a surprise:


Legislative change
local
regional
national
European
Global
law
regulation
Corporate change of direction
Change in requirement
Change in objectives
Change of output, outtake, outcome requirement
Change in publics/stakeholders
Added publics
Removed publics
Publics change
Implementation impact
Technology change
Content not available
New/changed opportunity
Unexpected change in team
Managment team
Technical team
Operations team
Competitor action
Merger/acquisition,
Competitors me-too actions
Management Directive
Budget
Delivery schedule
monitor, measurement, evaluation requirement
other
Corporate re-organisation
At board level
Departmental re-organisation
Merger/acquisition
Problem not anticipated
Reputation/ethical issue
Corporate, brand, personnel crisis
Server down/overload
System attack/bug
Change in available resources
Budget
Vendor availability

Twitter hath murdered time

This post is not just for Online Public Relations professionals. It is for every practitioner.

The dynamic of public relations has changed. In an short article that Philip Young and I contributed to Kogan Page newsletter recently we examined how, inevitably, Twitter has changed actual practice. I offer an edited version of the content we provided.

Public relations is moving into a new dimension, a scary and thrilling future in which reputation is instant and responses’ times are evaporating.

For pro-active PR professionals, it is not just what you say, or how you say it, but how quickly you can say it too, and ever more dominant social media platforms are bringing challenges of time and geography into ever sharper focus.

Not long ago the news and comment agenda was set by media deadlines. Newspapers published daily and most magazines monthly so PR worked to their publishing cycle.

Today, everything has changed. An hour is a luxury.

New tools, such as Twitter, means the window has almost vanished. We are now seeing real time conversations about organisations, people, brands, events and issues. We discover, subjects that are interesting journalists before they write them. We see public opinion as it changes and morphs in real time. Organisations’ priorities and individuals’ foremost thoughts are on very public view. A Twitter search using tools like Twitterfall or Tweetdeck can be very effective to learn people’s thoughts and reactions immediately.

These nuggets of opinion come together to form reputation and shape relationships. They are public, linked, aggregated and searchable. They matter.

Responding to real time and very public conversations is now becoming one of the biggest challenges facing public relations practice.

Take the experience of one transnational giant I was working with just a few days ago. The organisation, a household name known to all computer users, wanted to promote an event. As is customary, the agency issued news releases to the media and reached out to carefully targeted bloggers. They then began monitoring online conversations. What they saw was a fast-growing discourse on Twitter.

It was clear from the online profiles of Twitterers that a new and significant public was emerging – a group of people, including bloggers, who were unknown to the organisation until very close to the event.

At the same time a number of new issues began to emerge until the event was in the top ten most popular in the ‘Twittersphere’. Over 3000 individual ‘Tweets’ in the space of a week-end was pretty good going and Twitter was setting the communications agenda.

To ensure that it was part of this conversation, the multinational in question had to increase its contribution to the debate in real time and respond to comments (which also involved some criticism) without delay.

The extent to which the Twitter community was engaged with the conversation was very evident. At one stage the ranking of Twitter comment about the event fell to sixth. An appeal via Twitter to the people who had been involved in this speedy conversation created a huge response pushing the ranking of the event in the ‘Twittersphere’ to third within minutes.

Learning to adapt to this rate of operational change is but one example of how quickly management has to respond to new pressures in a digital age.

Next time you issue a press release - even if only to the traditional media, watch Twitter. Did your copy change the agenda? Can you respond?

Public Relations is changing fast.

Evolution or Revolution

In his review of the two new books about online public relations Richard Bailey opens up an interesting point.

He asks “Online public relations: evolution or revolution?”

It is a debate worth considering because it matters to the PR industry if it is and if it is not.

In this post I shall, by using some of the new search tools announced by Google this week, provide evidence and reason the believe that online public relations is probably an industry revolution rather than evolutionary.

What is a revolution?

The OED definition is:

1 a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.
2 a dramatic and far-reaching change.
3 motion in orbit or in a circular course or round an axis or centre.
4 the single completion of an orbit or rotation.

I guess the test should be to see the extent to which online public relations does or does not satisfy the first two OED definitions.

The extent to which online public relations has contributed to the overthrow of a government can be tested from experience. Certainly the Barack Obama election campaign was heavily mediated by online public relations but to say that it was the single of even the most significant cause for his success in the Primaries and the overthrow of the Republican incumbent government is stretching the point.

The public unrest in Iceland was certainly a factor in the proroguing of parliament this year but it is unclear to what extent the internet was the instrument of the over throw of the government. It is probable that it had an effect but whether this was a public relations activity and that it was the prime cause is not evident anywhere.

It's pretty fair to say that online Public Relations is not, yet overthrowing governments.

Perhaps we can look at the extent to which online public relations is evident in the forcible overthrow of a social order. Here we can see the evidence of activist public relations having an effect. In “Change Activist: Make Big Things Happen Fast” Carmel McConnell, the ex-Greenham Common activist turned consultant suggests that planned and sustained interaction (sounds like a re-write of the CIPR definition of PR) can change social order especially in business. But in the wake of humble apologies (did I really write that?) from bankers, one gets the impression that it is an idea that has not got a lot of traction yet.

Certainly, advertised jobs do not seek online skills as a rule.

There are no signs of forceful overthrow in recruitment job profiles. Indeed, there is very little evidence of a need for any online skills at all!

On the first definition. It would seem that the PR industry is not going through a revolution.

Now to examine the notion of revolution being dramatic and far-reaching change.

This should take us first to a definition of the work and role of the public relations practitioner. In 2005, I did a little exercise to see if I could shed some light into what Public Relations is (PDF).

Looking at these definitions and job titles, we can compare and contrast the role of the practitioner then and now and the extent to which online public relations is now a part.

It’s not easy. The self defining methodology based on the job titles given by CIPR members extends from external affairs to publicity manager.

There is a case for examining these definitions one by one to see the extent to which public relations, the designated job title, and references to ‘digital’ or ‘online’ have changed.

This might give us some inclination about the nature and extent to which there is a change in perceptions.

This is a research project that does need doing as the following results indicate based on a swift look on a wet Sunday in May.

One methodology (which I thought might give us some interesting results) could include the use of Google’s time-line tool of mentions of search terms associated with dates.

It would give us a response discovering the user of PR terms associated with dates over time.

This is an example for a search: 'online "public relations" publicity for the UK.

(fig 1)

It seems that there is a growing correlation.

Here is the counterpart for online "public relations" "external affairs" for the UK.

(fig 2)

I think it is fair to say that on a small sample we can see that there is growing association with job titles and online public relations.

From this small example it would seem that there is evidence of PR jobs being associated with online. Using such a tool, one might be able to see the extent to which different PR jobs are being associated with online and digital PR.

The extent to which this is ‘far reaching’ might be tested using such a methodology (although I would want other methods to be included in such research for it to be considered ‘grounded’).

Using this methodology there is evidence that there is a very definite change happening. Using the same method results based on UK searches about

“Online Public Relations” mentioned with dates gives some interesting insights.


(fig 3)

(One has to consider the underlying ‘noise’ in this form of analysis with about a quarter of the results seemingly being unreliable returns)

And “Digital Public Relations”


(fig 4)

(There would seem to be less ‘noise’ in the sample)
This form of analysis suggests that there is change. But is it a dramatic and far-reaching change.

I then searched for references to public relations that did not include the words ‘digital’ ‘online’ or ‘web 2.0’


(fig 5)

This form of discourse analysis would suggest that in recent years the use of the term “Public Relations” has been quite stable but in decline for the last 18 months when not associated with online. Indeed, the number of mentions about public relations is increasing but is in decline when not associated with Online.

This would suggest that there is an important change taking place.

Is this a dramatic and far-reaching change?

I think that if the term “public relations” on its own had been stable for the last 18 months, it could not have been considered dramatic. But the decline suggests that there is a move towards public relations being associated with online public relations. This is ‘dramatic’.

But is it ‘far reaching’?

In the Google analysis we have see a steady rise for a decade for the notion of online public relations. This suggests a long term trend but that is not the only way of testing the notion of 'far reaching'. I thought I might apply a semantic test as well and this gave me an opportuity to try out the new Google ‘Wonder Wheel’ tool. It gives us a related search view of the subject we are searching.

Online public relations is associated with digital tactics is a big way:

(fig 6)

While digital public relations is less broad based.


(fig 7)

With comparative related search capabilities, ‘Public Relations’ on its own has a wide semantic meaning online according to Google.


(fig 8)
Google is showing us that there is an equivalent range of search associations for ‘online public relations’ and ‘public relations’ suggesting there is an equivalency in semantic association.

This is ‘far reaching’. It suggests that there is an association in the presence between online activity and PR in the minds of people looking for PR and that, semantically, both normal PR and online PR have a considerable hinterland of similar force.

Bearing in mind that the web presence of online PR is very new compared to ‘public relations’ this is pretty good going.

I would suggest that this evidence has the hallmark of revolution.

For the sake of clarity, one has to bear in mind that this is based on a UK search. For other parts of the world results will be different.

This is not much more than ‘finger in the wind’ research and drawing any big conclusion from it would be a bit too much but it does give us the basis for a debate and suggests that the PR industry might like to look more closely at how much PR is changing, how fast and where the investment in marketing, training, education and sector development should go.

Thank you for starting the debate Richard.

The Web is in Trouble

The Web is in Trouble

Tweeted about by the Guardian's Jack Schofield almost before the ink was dry we see that Bryan Appleyard, in today’s Sunday Times, is being controversial.

He says:

“The web is in trouble. Last week craigslist, a vast classified-ads site, had to abandon its “erotic services” category because of claims that it was an “online brothel” being used by sexual predators. And in France L’Oréal discovered eBay could not be forced to stop selling cheap knock-offs of its products.”

Well I never. Imagine.... Porn on the Internet. What is the world coming to?

This sounds like the crackdown on Bolton’s on-street vice trade which resulted in more than 150 prostitutes and 115 kerb-crawlers being arrested in the last two years.

As for counterfeit being trades on eBay it’s almost as bad as Hua Xue. He was stopped by police when he was riding his bicycle in Southbourne and was carrying some counterfeit films which had not been released in UK cinemas. Gosh! Is this what happens on the internet too?

Mr Appelyard was doing his best. The internet is giving newspapers a lot of grief. It is giving journalists more. They have to be very good to survive.

So Bryan dragged up the 2006 book by David Edgerton. He writes:

“The internet”, says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, “is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Edgerton is the world expert in tech dead ends. Fifty years ago, he points out, nuclear power was about to change the world; then there was supersonic passenger flight, then space travel. The wheel, he concedes, did change the world, as did steam power. The web is not in that league.

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year’s oil price shock and this year’s recession, not to mention every year’s looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy. In fact, says Edgerton, we may, in retrospect, come to see coal as the dominant technology of our time. China and America have lots of the stuff and they plan to burn it. The web, like it or not, uses energy, quite a lot of it, and that will continue to be made with big, heavy, industrial-age machines.”

An excellent example of a specific viewpoint.

Because it is in the Sunday Times, it will have traction and notably already has online.

This week I, with Philip Young of Sunderland University launch our book (Online Public Relations – Kogan Page) which offers a countervailing view (Twitter #opr2ed)

There are two issues to consider.

The first is that, like coal, the internet offers mankind the opportunity to be more productive. That is, an ability to add intellectual properties to ‘things’ that make people more effective in their lives.

Coal does this by providing energy beyond the capability of human physiology to bring water, food, improved housing, health and facility. By using our big brains we can do this better than other species (none of which have come close to the human capability).

The internet, among other advantages, makes people more productive by reducing the time it takes to bring co-creators together by levering up the human need for social groups sharing common values and facilitates new ideas to extend our physiology in other ways. It extends knowledge freely available to mankind and provides much facility in the use an application of such knowledge.

There is a further advantage for the, still young, internet. It has the capability for very fast, human moderated evolution. A small proportion of the billion or so users of the internet are deployed in developing its capabilities not just in Open Source activities such as Linux or Wikipedia but in the capability to use Open Systems such as Yahoo! BOSS and other such ventures now becoming apparent from the likes of Google, Proctor and Gamble, IBM and many more.

None of these companies could afford tens of thousands of developers but, the Open Movement is harnessing the capabilities of hundreds of thousands.

Some of their inventions will make a big difference to many lives (an example is in development of mobile micropayments for India’s small farmers). Others will be shooting stars and most will have no significance at all.

Internet evolution and the evolution it offers other forms of individual, corporate political and cultural activity is very dynamic.

There is whiff of industrial revolution in this form of change.

Yochai Benkler tells us about these changes in spades and answers Bryan pretty comprehensively on the specifics of values and copyright.

As David Edgerton will remind us, that was a time of social change too and the attack on the rights of people was pretty dramatic too.

People, that is, the members of the species that adapts so well, will resolve the issues that arise including issues of privacy.