Semantic progress

Yesterday Philip Sheldrake gave a talk to the Chartered Institute of Public Relation Social Media gathering (anyone can come - it costs £10 and is at 5pm every Thursday) on the semantic web. It was excellent and you can access it here.

Among the things he showed us was the work of Philipp Heim (University of Stuttgart), Steffen Lohmann (Carlos III University of Madrid), Timo Stegemann (University of Duisburg-Essen).
They have taken existing structured data to allow you to go and find relationships between two entities (I chose to find the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron on this page).

The work they have done is important and uses existing structured data sets.

At Klea Global my colleague Girish has been working towards a way of creating structured data sets using Natural Language Programming including LSI to build (RDF) structures on the fly from content derived from newspapers, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc.

He already has gone quite a long way and you can see an example of how it is possible to create this process with some very new and pretty smart tools. One of which is available for you to try here.

OK, so what is this for, and why is it relevant to Public Relations.

I guess the secret is in the second part of the name of our profession: relations.

Using these capabilities, we can find out all manner of relationships between two entities (subject - object). When, using the Semantic Web, these relationships make sense, all this data will be ever more powerful.

To get some idea of how much data, here is another 'toy' you can play with from Klea Global labs (and yes, I have started to put it all in one place at last): Track This Now. Using this free 'search and scope presence' software, you will see that an amazing amount of information is accumulating about your company, client, university etc.

Knowing how much there is, and knowing that most of what is said online about organisation does not come from the company or traditional media is only half the battle. There is so much accumulating out there that we are overwhelmed.

If only we could find out what the relationships were between all those tweets and press articles, we would have some chance of influencing them, building up huge SEO for clients and lots of other marvellous things. Worry not... salvation is at hand.

These are very early days for these developments to bear fruit for the PR industry but next year they will be quite astonishing. We already know how to do it and in less than a year will be doing it.

This is so exciting for our industry and my only regret is that we don't have a single university in the UK with a capability to do this sort of research.

The Death of Public Relations

In a few days time I will be presenting at Euprera. The title for my talk is "The semantic anatomy of a crisis."


I was going to talk about the nature of a crisis from the aggregation of terms (concepts) derived using automated  semantic analysis of the day by day newly indexed web pages in a year long  research programme using The University of East Anglia's issue over the quality of scientific rigour. This is an interesting study that allows us to see the differences in concepts as they change in frequency month by month. 


In recent weeks, with my colleagues at Klea and Publicasity I have been able to monitor the nature of the Toyota issues as concepts arise day by day. Now we can see not just the anatomy of a crisis month by month but the DNA of an issue emerging every day. Today, I noted that the word humphrey had become significant to Toyota and by using Goole to backwards verify the relevance of the word could see the provenance of the concept as it is affecting the Toyota corporate brand. It is the sort of insight that a corporate affairs manager (or her agency) or academic researcher might find valuable.

These are the kind of data that, one would hope, is pretty well bog standard among universities with an interest in reputation management, corporate and brand reputation, public relations etc. Using these data and matching them the Toyota's responses for the press   and through social media etc, is now really easy and allows the researcher to identify:

Cause and effect across different media:

Fig 1 Share of alerts by web media for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or by sentiment:

Fig 2 Share of alerts by automated PoS (Part of Speech) sentiment analysis for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or perhaps one might want to compare these effects against other third party responses such as share price:

Fig 3 Five day share price taken from Yahoo Finance.

What made me pause was the latter chart.

I would not mind betting, that there are people in Toyota who would be more than happy if all this damaging content online would just go away.

What would happen if the 152 million web pages mentioning Toyota indexed by Google or the billion pages indexed by Yahoo or the 278 million  pages indexed by Bing just vanished?

What if only the printed pages in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, posters and brand promotion was the visible evidence of the company and Toyota was erased from the internet  (and would the media find this comfortable or even part of its approach to news distribution - it seems not)?

If the 'Toyota Way' was not in so much trouble and the distribution of coverage in the media was more competitive, would the internet presence be more interesting?

Fig 4. Woldwide online media distribution over the last week for Kia Motors  (courtesy Publicasity) .

Would Toyota forego the two million visits to its North American web site each month?

Perhaps it would be happy not to be mentioned in 140,000 blog posts or even the 800 pages and groups it got covered in Facebook during a typical (2009) February.

These pages (and many others) represent a lot of brand exposure.They create the opportunities for those Google ads to pop up when people think about cars when browsing and much, much more.

What we are discovering is that these pages online are useful, give competitive advantage and are really an asset. But that is not how Toyota sees it? In reality, once engaged the social media is mostly helpful.

The issue here is who owns the online asset?  Does the company?  It would seem that this is an asset that does not appear on the Balance sheet. In fact its not a line item (PDF).  Is this because the head of, well, corporate affairs/public relations has not made it clear to the Board that online presence is an asset. It is an asset that can be both positive and negative on the balance sheet. Last year the line item would have been part of  prepaid expenses and other current assets....................................................  $6,439 million.
This broad sweep of  assets is  part of  total current assets of $115 bn. So not much as a proportion of the whole. There is no line item for brand assets - try running a company without them! But that aside, an asset never-the-less.

We do get a better view from Juergen H. Daum who has examined the intangible assets (PDF) of Toyota. 

Relationship capital is now hugely internet mediated as are all the other intellectual properties and online relationships.

There is no escaping it: the internet asset is very significant for organisations.

So, who is the manager responsible for this asset?

If it is the PR manager, so much to the good.

If not, the responsible person will ask the PR manager to 'fix' the bad online content or get more coverage to force criticism 'below the line'.

My talk to  Euprera will be a question: are we teaching, researching and supporting the PR  industry to be asset managers or functionaries?


If, PR is at the 'Fix' end of asset management, it has no future - this is not even agentry, it's mostly computer programmes.

Developing Post Digital PR Practice

Many people tell us how the new online paradigm offers data and transparency which can be used in PR.

What most don't tell us is that this is fine for some media (on and off line) for other media its not quite as comprehensive as it might seem. A lot of the measures are not as transparent as they might be and the opportunity for measuring apples as oranges are even worse that AVE's.

As a Klea Global director I have been looking at how existing technologies can help and how measures can be developed that are both communication platform and channel agnostic.

This is work in progress and I some of the processes proposed are still in development but will be available (if not common) by the end of the year.

Of course, there is a lot to add but it is a beginning for the student and practitioner.

What most will find amazing is the modern capability to collect all new media citation in fractions of a second and in only a few fractions of a second more, to be able to fit this content into the overall pattern of an organisation's presence.

There are a number problems that still exist. Semiotics covers text, images and video as well as Augmented Reality added content etc and so we have some way to go.

The key, as always, is to have drill down transparency, comprehensive and timely motoring, evaluation and insights.

Pictures and video is much less amenable to semantic analysis at present which will be really powerful when it arrives. However, we can see how powerful semantics can be with the results that are evident using the 'Reputation Wall' and other semantic analysis of content.

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I will be delighted to see how far this form of PR goes.

The Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for non geeks the Real Time Web has become fashionable. It's fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance, a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November noting that

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

Code named Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service that will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media.

Very few services are real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services. Topsy (http://topsy.com) is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month. Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/) offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results.

Meantime, People like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the Real Time Web..

Modern Day PR Monitoring and Evaluation

Practitioners have monitored the environment affecting their clients forever. It’s what we do. Today we have more to monitor and we have to do it faster.

Most know how much of a challenge monitoring this is. Most have their ‘Google Alerts’, their blog and Twitter monitors and the daily updates from Linkedin groups. These are augmented with online media (web based publications) and media online (print publications with online content) and subscriptions to all manner of news services to supplement the daily John Humphreys pre-breakfast fest, newspaper, magazine, radio, TV and press clips.

The internet stream of consciousness seems endlessly oppressive because the practitioner needs to follow all the conversations while the users only follow one or two. It is, all too often, unmanageable and is, mostly, not very comprehensive.

Even with Tweetdeck and Feedreader going full blast, professional communication and relationship advisors are blithely ignorant of all but a fraction of web pages that mention their clients. Does, for example, PR Week see all of the citations that are published about it online at the rate of one every 90 seconds 24/7?

The truth is that after the news, blog, twitter, social networks and discussion list citations, the string of website references, comment in new channels and machine generated content is mostly factors larger. The client’s online web cloud grows every day. It is a competitive asset and creates a footprint for all to follow and affects the algorithms of search engines that make organisations searchable and famous. Klea Labs which is a new interest of mine has interesting capabilities such as its Web to IM service which provides real time monitoring of 'everything'.

For most organisations, more than half of online content appearing each day online is not monitored, measured or evaluated. In addition in an era of Real Time web, Twitter, is the nearest most organisations get to following the movers and shakers of internet reputation in real time.

Too much Too much, I can hear a whole profession cry. Yes, we do have to bring order to all this stuff and this is where there can be a happy marriage between PR and technology. All the content can be sorted into the different generics such that your Facebook content is not confused with your tweets.

Even when some practitioners get this information, is it enough in a digital age?

Far from it. In fact such a view of client publics would probably be misleading. The impression would be, as Colin Farrington once described it “ill-informed, rambling descriptions of the tedious details of life or half-baked comments on political, sporting or professional issues. They read like a mixture of the ramblings of the eponymous Pub Landlord and the first draft of a second rate newspaper column.”

But this is to take and overview of all the conversations of all the Pub Landlords and all columnists. Out of context they do seem banal. But once you are immersed in the community where these comments are made, they make sense and are about real people and the issues in their lives.

This means that monitoring is only part of the story. The content we read needs to be evaluated and evaluated in context.

As long ago as 2007, Read Write Web was discussing the importance of semantics to Google. It is semantics that allows us to make sense of content in context. For ten years I have been involved in semantic developments which provided the technology behind the relationship management research presented at the Bledcom PR conference this year. In PR, semantic analysis is a boon. It provides ways in which computers can mimic human needs. It is not able to completely second guess human understanding but it takes a lot of the hard work out of gaining actionable insights.

We have now come a long way from monitoring online content using tools like Google Alerts and RSS feeds to monitoring all web content in near real time then evaluating for actionable insights in context.

In 1995 it was quite hard to speak to a public relations audience to get understanding that the internet was going to change PR practice. Not many in the industry waited with bated breath for the findings of the CIPR/PRCA internet Commission in 2000. Few practitioners believed the world wide web was more than a fad. Only a minority agreed these developments would change our profession forever. Fourteen years and three online PR books later it still remains challenging.

Asking readers of PRWeek to move to a point where you can begin to believe that technologies will mediate in PR practice is a big ask but that is where I believe we are going.

What our web sites say about us

Over the weekend, Brono Amaral have been showing off some of our latest research into network effects for PR management at the Bledcom conference.

It has been fun.

One of the things we have comparing is the difference between word counts about web sites and the semantic (important concepts) in a web site.

To show what I mean the next two extracts are a word count and a concept count of what I have said about research and evaluation on this blog.

This is a word count:

able advertising applications ave blog comments company content conversation david editorial ethics evaluation google identify internet labels links management measure media news number obama online organisation pages people per phillips pm post pr practice public relations relationship research results search semantic significant site social twitter value view web work yahoo

created at TagCrowd.com

and this is the semantic view:

conversations deadlines dimension edited evaluation geography journalists label media morals morphs newsletter opinion page philip platforms posts pr priorities professionals public relations research showing tools version young

created at TagCrowd.com

The difference is huge.

The word count shows words that are common in the discourse while the semantic view is about meaning and the drivers of my posts.

Of course, there is a role for both forms of analysis but by far an away the most informative is the semantic analysis.

In bigger corpora my experience is that word counts become ever less helpful and semantic analysis offers real insights.

At Blecom, Bruno and I showed this form of analysis as a proof of concept for some pretty big networks (in real time too) and the results were very interesting.

More Stuff

While we are looking at our online toys, it may be an idea to look at some of the others we have been looking at such as some tracking software like TrackThisNow.

Monitoring update

There are some standard methods for monitoring online activity.

For basic free monitoring there are recommendations and more for bought-in services.

Publicasity has some cool tools in its Publicasity Netvibes pages which aggregates a wide range of monitoring services and is up to date in real time.

There is also sentiment analysis for Google natural search at MediaDash and a prett comprehensive instant audit at TrackBuzzNow

There are some other service and the one with big buzz is TweetDeck capability for Twitter.