What difference does social media make.

I, and no doubt others, have some difficulty trying to explain just how significant the change in marketing and communication, but most notably PR, is in the Internet mediated era.

Once upon a time it was quite easy. There was a framework of interactions that were governed by a range of institutions that allowed the media, governments, and a range of other institutions that offered a link between the dominant coalition and the publics (stakeholders if you like) and it was relatively easy to maintain the status quo.

The model looked like this:


Progressively a number of capabilities have allowed people to comment interact and form ever morphing but culturally close communities. They form round individuals at the nexus of the groups in one of more social media environments.These environments are characterised by MySpace and Digg or Podzinger and Second Life. There are many (oh! so many) forms of community environs. Each forms a relationship cloud. And, as technologies and fashion dictate, these clouds bubble up and absorb energy from participants. The nature of these clouds is that the basic software and service is relatively cheap But the combination of participants, their content, their tagging, their involvement with other participants and their 'Google Juice' created value (Google bought YouTube for $1.6bn and thereby gave us a clear view of how much a corporation values these 'clouds')

This many people have knowledge and insights, a thirst for information and interaction (including buying stuff). To accommodate these people and to gain energising knowledge and interactions, organisations make information ever more transparently available. I agree, not always willingly - as the music industry attests (and is punished for).

The effect is that even the nature of institutions is changed as information empowers different coalitions inside organisations. The wider values of organisations become transparent and all forms of interaction become mediated by the Internet.

In addition, the very interactions in and around the organisation are transparently available for all to see and if not, the newly porous nature of organisations allows the information to leak out into the blazing netshine.

The role then of public relations changes as it navigates the relationship clouds and interacts in such a way that all but the merest whisp of turbulence can be observed. The role is in empowering the relationships in and between the relationship clouds.

The organisation too becomes a relationship cloud and by the marriage of values among the users of the clouds, a merging and morphing of interests, satisfies the newly morphed and combined interests. Sometimes for a fleeting moment or for a long, long time.

Offending in this space brings down the might of the relationships bound together by common values.

Does this help us understand?

Here is just one tiny example that all in PR can understand. Where once a press release would do, the authentic voice of social media is now doing better. More praise is heaped in print on more organisations than ever before without the lifting of a PR finger or, for the most part, its practitioner's knowledge. To see this in action, just look out of the window and see the sparkle.

The end of PR as you know it

Chris Anderson has an interesting post.

He says: I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves. Take Microsoft's 3,000 bloggers who are, for many of us, a welcome substitute for Microsoft PR. Internal project managers like Major Nelson of the Xbox 360 team are a trusted and timely source of information, and have largely replaced the formal press release with blog posts. He and other Microsoft bloggers like him are part of a transparency movement that grew out of the company's developer relations team, but it could have just as easily been driven by an enlightened PR team.

Yes, this is a legitimate argument as far as it goes. It does not take into account the rest of PR such as the analysis and explication of the values relevant to the organisation in relationship clouds among the nexus of values that represent the organisation. Nor does it explore the role in developing the use and application of channels for communication b eyond blogging.

Consumers 'get it' - So PR has to as well

"Consumers get it; they understand technology and they are adopting it accordingly," analyst Sean Wargo told the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

More than $155bn (£80bn) in consumer technologies is expected to be sold in the US in the next 12 months.

"Driving the industry is the transition to the new breed, the next generation of technologies," Mr Wargo said.

The industry says consumers' love affair with gadgets will continue despite a US/global economic slowdown and a prediction that growth in the US market would halve in 2007 from last year's figures.

Is this true of the UK?

The evidence is that adoption in the UK is, if anything accelerating. The jump from consumer to corporate application is moving ahead too.

What this means is that ordinary people and corporations are using all manner of new web services, gadgets and widgets

It also means that communication practitioners now need at least a basic understanding of what is involved otherwise the population as a whole will accelerate out of the reach of the press relations oriented practitioner.

The £12 billion economy

Koopa is not the first to be top of the pops online. Its just that the rules for counting what's in and what's not have changed. In fact online markets have been encroaching on the high street fast and for a long time.

What is important is that the power of the online community is such that the dusty institutions like Entertainment Retailers' Association have had to acknowledge the reality of online interactions and sales.

I am still wincing over the UK retailers sluggish response to online markets in the last ten weeks of last year. Not being able to cope because of logistics problems is plain daft.

If one does a quick analysis of each of the sectors in the UK economy, it is possible to get an insight into how much is mediated by the Internet.

I have been doing just that

The current value of the Internet Mediated economy is now approaching £12 billion.

Or, to put it another way more than one £ in 10 of the UK economy is mediated by the Internet. Put another way, if the .net went down for a full year the UK economy would shrink 10% with a knock on effect on all other parts of the economy.

What this means for PR is this. If practitioners are not involved in this part of the economy, they are not part of a big slice of the action and because it is the fastest growing economic mediator (faster even than financial and construction put together - both of which are dependant on the Internet).

This is why the CIPR needs to be taking it much more seriously.

BL Ochman's 12 Marketing Tenets

As always bang on the money B L Ochman has a great view of modern marketing - or is it public relations.

Today, organisations have to be interested in the 'Relationship Cloud'.

Examples of Relationship Clouds could include YouTube and MySpace and we know how valuable they are by looking at the accounts of thier owners. But they are just two among many.

Nosy retailers lost 16 million orders

Keep you nose out of my business and listen to what I want. So say the UK's online shoppers according to Webcredible.

Webcredible, asked Internet users what would be most likely to make them abandon an online purchase. Hidden charges topped the list of frustrations for 36% of respondents followed by having to register before buying a product, which polled 31% of the votes. Other annoyances were: not providing clear delivery details (13%); not offering telephone details (10%); and lengthy checkout processes (9%).

The person in charge of relationship management among retailers need to get gritty with the margin chasers, control freaks, and email address collectors (normally un-reconstructed marketing managers and brand managers).

If the PR manager is not being robust with the control freaks they should be fired. Now!

This year, their soppy attitude cost sales and they did not tell the board to get ready for the boom in online retail sales we all knew was going to boom.

Its simple barriers are breaking down. People are getting active in social media. They share their holiday snaps, videos and location details with millions and so are not going to be shy buying online. PR people should not tolerate ninny heads who want to create barriers because they were taught to collect 'customer information' and do something stupid like have a data base for 'customer relationship management', spam and scream marketing.

I blame the PR industry. It needs something stiff up its spine instead of pink fizzy down its throat.

The biggest cocktail party in the world

he IPA in a report in 2007 suggested that: "In the future agencies must recognize that traditional advertiser/agency/consumer relationships will be challenged with new models of engagement coming to the fore. As traditional advertising continues to decline, by 2016, the hypothesis is that media owners of all kinds, including online search, all networks, gaming environments and interactive digital TV, will be integrating brands directly into content and editorial." (Re-invention is key if agencies are to survive).

Huh! 2016 is too far away. Try the end of next year, or at latest 2009.

The idea that there are market segments and stakeholders as described by Porter and Friedman come up against a mum commenting on social and domestic life, friends and locality for a small family circle. Such a diary, fascinating to son and daughter who have left home, does not describe a demographic segment. Its influence is personal and of limited circulation. If written online in a blog it disappears among the millions of other blogs also written by individuals. But, because it is public and can be viewed by a billion people worldwide, its potential audience is huge. The writer is the nexus of a tiny community but only at a time and in a context chosen by the community. The casual inclusion of a brand in this conversational medium is incidental and yet powerful. One aspect of this power is that the comment can move from beyond the family circle to other friends through the same medium or others and spread viraly. Sometimes at speed and others in a more leisurely fashion. The power is in conscious inclusion in 'small talk' at the biggest cocktail party in the world. Sometime this will be in the 'bloggersphere' and at others in others social media as diverse as YouTube and email. As with such comments there are occasions, from time to time, when the conversational cacophony pauses and the single voice is lone and clear and its message taken up by others. Online, this can count in millions and in seconds.

What we see in these interactions is not a 'market segment' or a 'stakeholder group' we see people with an interest in the values expressed. This convergence of values brings people together in wider, often short lived, social groups, a will-o-the-whisp emergence of both values and relationships. For brand and traditional stakeholder managers, this is too ephemeral, too counter to their training, unmanageable and yet mysteriously familiar.

It is about relationships and is powerful. Where the role of public relations is to interact with latent, aware and active social groups, it can now find them online.

Business leaders underestimate the web

The IMRG figures for online sales in the run up to Christmas show that forecasts underestimated demand. Forecasts of £7.5 billion compared to the actual outcome of £7.66 billion and that is only part of the story. Sales were limited because online retailers could not deliver.

Last year online sales were £30.2 billion with an increase during 10 weeks to Christmas up 54% on 2005.

Well this is not much of a surprise to some of us. What is disturbing is that so many people are still in denial. Online PR is still a fringe activity. Online advertising is inyerface. Web sites are horrid and lack interactivity and response to the power of social media lacks imagination to a degree that makes users cringe and rage.

As an industry the PR business just has to get stuck in.

Poncing around in the hope it will all go away led from behind by the PR institutions is no way to run an economy, industry sector or business.

The response to the power of the Internet in the UK is akin to the response to the realities of manufacturing in the 1960's, R&D and education in the '70's, the global economy in the run up to the millennium and show lack of foresight and fuddy duddy thinking.

The lack of knowledge about online interactivity across UK management and the creative services is appalling.

There is a need for leadership.

Planning communication

Planning communication has taken on a new dimention in the last five years.

Developing a communication strategy even two years out means we need to consider a wide range of communications channels and they are changing very fast. For example, YouTube became a mainsteam channel in less than 15 months!

What chance do communications planners have with projects going out just a few years? What will be the important channels for the London Olympics will it be Myspace or YouTube or something else? In truth no one knows. Television may be marginalised by user bandwidth. Even search engines could be marginalised by syndication, social tagging or proprietary sematic web services. It is all guesswork.

Social media has now reach such a critical mass that it has to be part of communication planning for most organisations.

The core prediction of 'Communication - The next decade' published by the UK communications regulator Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/commsdecade/), is that the next generation of upgraded networks (the so-called NGNs) are likely to be based on the IP (Internet Protocol), leaving the historic differences between different network infrastructures far behind. We are already seeing this change in practice. It means that all media except print is competitive and on a level technical playing field. Daily UK domestic IP penetration will move up from 37% to saturation at 89%. Television as well as radio becomes technically indistingushable from the Internet. The commincations channels will have only two paradigms print and IP.

Broadband will not be up to 8meg as now but over 100 meg and the range of devices, especially mobile devices will allow the Internet to escape from the ubiquitous PC.

The timescale is very short. 100 meg broadband, now being rolled out after trials last year, will cover most UK homes served by cable in 2008, meantime of the 86% of the population who use mobile phones 22% already use IP mobile photomessaging and IP based mobile uptake is now showing signs of rapid accerloration.

As the twin cuves of newspaper circulation and online news page views passed each other in Europe last year communicators saw the maginalising of the only competitor to IP based communication. The decline in relevance for old media is now obvious but we know that online media is disruptive even more than its 17th century print counterpart.

Because of the extent and speed of adoption of Internet Procol devices and communications channels, how will professional communicators wrest the technology from geekdom and transpose it into mainstream education and practice.

How do we find new ways to manage communication. It will have to be an approach that factors-in the prospect of new, unknown and yet deeply influential channels for message interactions becomming hugely signifcant in months and will also have to face the prospect of cataclismic communication channel demise, a phenomenon we have not yet encountered except in the trial run, proof of concept demise of Fax.

Finally, what role is there for communications specialists in circumstances requiring integration of the desires and wishes of an online community empowered with huge capacity for distruption and capability to change how organisations are managed at both strategic and proceedural levels?

If you look at the economic contribution of the Internet in the UK, sector by sector, it ranges from a few percent to over 50% and my current guestimate is that Internet mediation contributes between £100 and 150 billion to the UK economy each year. By extrapolation that is something of the order of $4 trillion globally. This commercial power is bound to be a factor affecting communication management.

The Internet is ubiquitous as a means for communication of all kinds for over a third of the population now and this penetration will grow to 80% as broadcast progressively moves towards Internet Protocol based delivery.

Do we, or should we make time to monitor these shifts in communication technology and application. Most people involved in the communication business are busy dealing with the hear and now and are quite successful using traditional techniques anyway.

Before we start making predictions and second guessing the future channels, we will have to use the established management techniques developed for the management of change, the uncertain, crisis and emergencies.


I suppose we first have to deal in what we do know.

What we do know is that all the channels for communication that were available last year, ten years ago and 100 years ago are still there and many of them have high audience penetration as well.

We also know that some media will be much less significant than now. Can we write off fax or will we see it re-emerge in a new form? Among the junk mail, is a letter going to be significant? Will emails just go into the ether because of spam filters? What we know, is that we will have to continue to ask such questions.

What we also know is that there will be many more new channels to use in the next four years. We know that most will be digital?

We know that we don't know how the new channels will be delivered? Certainly some will be delivered by PC's and some will be delivered to browsers that won't have much by way of processing power but which ones? Some communication will use near field communication and so will video and podcasts morph becsue of these developments?

We can be certain that timescales will have changed. Already we have a doppler effect at play. Bloggers will be aware of thier own content comming back at them as news sometimes morphed, added to or truncated sometimes weeks or months later. The frequency and content of messages plus the time it takes for content to be news or part of the long tail will change message perceptions, reach and understanding. That is another thing that we know we have to watch.

Picture: Glooo

Risk management for PR and New Media

Public Relations is not publicity and is not propaganda and, to be effective it has to be planned.

Of course there are routines one can use in the development of PR planning and management but few of the standards include the need for risk analysis to be part of the process.

In social media, the need for proper risk analysis is greater than ever and it occurred to me that it would be fun share some thoughts on this with you.

Of course, first off you might like to see the lecture slides followed by a trial I am trying out.

The slide show below is not the full version but gets the point across.



Here is an experiment in providing a risk assessment matrix for new media. I have taken a standard template that has to be edited for the medium (e.g. Blogs, RSS, Games, Podcasts etc.) and for the organisation/campaign but it does give an idea as to how pretty standard risk management techniques can be applied to PR management.



Let me know what you think.

Edelman 'New Media Release' is a PR exercise

PR spin, especially from 'Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm' (would it, could it be anything else - the marketing boiler plate from the marketing boiler just has to be added), has announced that it has a new template for press/social media story announcements - A sort of replacement for the old fashioned press release. Fantastic!

The concept of a social media news release, says Edelman, 'has been a key topic of discussion within the public relations profession during the past several months'.

Of course, had Edelman been awake, they would known that this has been a key topic of conversation for half a decade and that there is already a 'social media release' and it has been available for four years from Yellowhawk.


This would have saved Edelman’s me2revolution team (part of the world’s largest independent public relations firm) development of the StoryCrafter software (to help accelerate the industry’s adoption of the social media news release) years (okay - minutes) of revolutionary fervour.

One, of course cannot get a close look behind this revolution. In an open source aid to adoption of social media the command and control me2revolution (the technical brains behind the world’s largest independent public relations firm) did not acquire the ethos that goes with being a revolutionary (ahh for the good old days - where are the anarchists?).

Probably more important is that this has all the trappings of an underfunded, me-too, 'Public Relations Exercise' into the fashionable world of 'my new media is bigger than your new media releases' or Todd Defran 1.0. with (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) Edelman spin.

Here are some things one might expect in a NMR:

The Todd Defran layout
Content in format that can be re-purposed for print, web, blog, podcast, vcast, sms alert, mobile web, iTV. With full content for editorial mashup (including two-shots etc), deep briefing by way of searchable, editable wiki content.
It has to be XPRL compliant, NewsML compliant and must be able to have NITF tags the IPTC words need to be identified for the news agencies and for the business community there has to be an XBRL schema interface.

For authentication there is a need to have automated (duel key?) security and these days it is simple to include trace, tracking, monitoring and evaluation components.

Plug-ins might also include auto notifications to:
Backflip BlinkBits Blinklist blogmarks
Buddymarks CiteUlike del.icio.us digg
Diigo dzone FeedMarker Feed Me Links!
Furl Give a Link Gravee Hyperlinkomatic
igooi kinja Lilisto Linkagogo
Linkroll looklater Magnolia maple
Netscape netvouz Newsvine Raw Sugar
RecommendzIt.com reddit Rojo Scuttle
Segnalo Shadows Simpy Spurl
Squidoo tagtooga Tailrank Technorati
unalog Wink wists Yahoo My Web

I did not see the button to 'blog this release' , I did not see the 'vlog this' button or the podcasting buttons. There does not seem to be an 'email to a friend' capability or 'turn this into a PDF' for (the the dead tree paper) freaks in your office button.

I just have a feeling that this is another 'fire from the hip and to hell with the consequences' PR approach to an important issue.

Edeman (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) wanted to be seen to be the web 2.0 leader. Its WalMart problems show a lack of training in-house. Its pitching policies to bloggers show an even bigger training gap and now it is showing that it has only a shaky grasp of new media and its opportunities.

As far as I can see, this announcement is nothing more than a digital version of a 1970's backgrounder press brief with tags instead of tabs. Big Deal!

Being relevant - PR does not need to be

On Friday I will be involved in a CIPR Senior practitioners round table breakfast. Of course it is going to be fun meeting up with Hugh Birley, Justin Hayward, Larry Webber, and Michael Blowers among others.

What can one say in such highly respected company.

I suppose a lot of what I want to (say is summed up in David Dunkley Gyimah's video and web site. The video is the winning International Jury independent video journalist award held in Berlin called 8 Days.

Against a backdrop of:

Declining (media ad) sales figures; increasing pressure from multimedia news deliveries; citizen journalism; Philip Meyer's assertion that newspapers are heading towards redundancy; and the BBC's plans to introduce a more localised form of news in the regions, what do you do if you're a newspaper publisher?

The story is of how eight local newspaper journalists learned to create video news stories.

What I find compelling about this is the speed and extent to which local newspaper journalists can bring television style reporting to their 'newspaper' 'readerships'.

Charlie Westberg , Cleveland Police's veteran media manager was deeply involved (and notes that Cleveland Police now knows it will have to alter the press conference room to accommodate this new breed of print journos with cameras). It was a learning experience for him too and he also found out that the new breed of 'print' journalists could also use CCTV footage because now they are videojournalists.

You see, my view is that the PR professional does not have to change. The 'press release by post or email... phone call... I will get back to you...' model still exists.

It does not have to change.

The journalists and publications will change but PR's don't have to.

They may become less relevant when their unchanging ways are set against Alan Yentob's programme on BBC1 last night. Yentob met Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web - and explored how TBL's creativity has fuelled the creativity of millions of others.

He showed Dandy blogger Dickon Edwards and sex blogger Abby Lee; the hardcore members of the Arctic Monkeys message board; masked animator David Firth - whose cartoons have been watched by millions on the web - and Ewan Macdonald, the young Scot who wrote the millionth entry in Wikipedia - all feature alongside figures such as veteran director Ken Russell - currently making a film to upload to YouTube.

I know there are those in PR who still want to use paper; who believe that this online craze is a fad or marketing or just not for them. So be it.

How will they respond to the video journalist? How will they be relevant to the Arctic Monekey, David Firth and Ken Russell generation? Is it by being relevant to the Daily Telegraph generation housed as it is in a new multi media press centre?

Valerie Grove of The Times puts this point of view:

Like Paxo sneering at Newsnight’s podcast, I recoil at infinite choice/infinite accessibility. If “too much information” is now a conversational mantra, why unleash more of it? Who wants a Christmas round-robin from everyone on the planet? Yentob gave us a glimpse of the website someone has created in his name (Darth Yentob) and countered with his own online version of his virtual self — tall, skinny, smooth-suited, able to dance and fly: “the possibilities are infinite”. What fresh hell is this? He left me baffled, and happy to flee back to my finite world.

It's an understandable argument but its flaw is that she wrote it on The Times web site a long day before the print version hits London's Gentleman's Clubs. Her argument failed in its delivery.

For the publisher it is print, web, sound, video, blog, wiki, virtual space as well as conference, exhibition and bound keepsake annual. Mix and match at will to get eyeballs and those elusive advertising shillings, groats, pounds or euros.

The internet will account for a fifth of all UK advertising revenue by 2009, and will almost match the amount spent on TV advertising, according to figures from ZenithOptimedia. The group's Advertising Expenditure Forecast reveals that the UK has the world’s highest proportion of online ad revenues, at 13.5%. The need for publishers to be online is compelling. It is where to advertise and is a place where tempting people to your web site or other internet medium is critical. More on-line editorial vehicles means more opportunities to sell advertising. Its quite simple.

“Every pound withdrawn from traditional media either to be saved or spent online, where supply is in handsome surplus, exerts more deflationary pressure on the total market,” said Group M in a recent report on the British ad market. “And if online proves more productive, advertisers have the option of investing less.”

These media bucks that are powering the move online is aimed at a very active audience. On average, Britons spend 23 hours a week on the Internet, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, says the New York Times. The Internet accounts for about a quarter of Britons’ time spent with all media, according to Citigroup, nearly double the percentage in the United States. Americans use their computers an average of 14 hours a week, reported by Nielsen Media Research.

Does this mean that the PR industry can afford not to respond. Yes absolutely.

Does this mean that it will be relevant?

Oh yes, perhaps I can suggest that there are compelling reasons for the adoption of social media without the PR industry having to get involved as bloggers or podcasters or vloggers. They have to get involved because their primary journalistic publics have to be online and have to be able to use social media tools. Commercially the driver is too big not to. We just have to create the tools that will make life easier for journalists.

It is just that normal PR practice 20 century style is changing. The press release, for example is being updated and in a variety of forms.

The further opportunity of using social media for direct interactions with our constituencies is just a bonus. A big one, but a bonus.

Public Relations the strategic management function - not a communications strategem

Three weeks ago Professor Grunig put his thoughts about what public relations is to the New York Yale Club.

I quote:

Simply put, I have come to understand public relations as a strategic management
function that uses communication to cultivate relationships with publics that have a stake in the
behavior of the organization—either because they benefit from or are harmed by what Dewey
called the consequences of that behavior. Public relations has value to an organization because it
provides publics with whom it develops relationships a voice in management decisions that
affect them.
...

Quality relationships have both financial and nonfinancial value because they reduce the
costs of regulation, legislation, and litigation; reduce the risk of implementing decisions; and
sometimes increase revenue. They also have the secondary effects of improving the reputation of an organization (what members of a public think about it) and reducing negative publicity
because there are fewer bad behaviors for journalists to write about. The only way to “manage a
reputation” is through managing the organizational behaviors that are reflected in that reputation.

Some critics argue that the interests of organizations and publics are incompatible.
However, a great deal of research shows that organizations that interact with their publics
responsibly are also the most successful—based both on financial and nonfinancial criteria.

Cutlip and Chase identified a gap between elite practitioners and the mass of tacticians
and technicians who massage the media daily to make organizations and their products look
good. Some theorists might say that the elite practitioners have a theory of the nature of public
relations and its value and values whereas the mass of technicians fly by the seat of their pants or simply do what employers or clients ask them to do. I would say, in contrast, that both groups have a theory—just different theories. I believe there have been, and still are, two major
competing theories of public relations both in practice and in the academic world. I call these
approaches the symbolic, interpretive, paradigm and the strategic management, behavioral,
paradigm.

Scholars and practitioners following the symbolic paradigm generally assume that public
relations strives to influence how publics interpret the organization. These cognitive
interpretations are embodied in such concepts as image, reputation, brand, impressions, and
identity. The interpretive paradigm can be found in the concepts of reputation management in
business schools, integrated marketing communication in advertising programs, and rhetorical
theory in communication departments. Practitioners who follow the interpretive paradigm
emphasize publicity, media relations, and media effects. Although this paradigm largely
relegates public relations to a tactical role, the use of these tactics does reflect an underlying
theory. Communication tactics, this theory maintains, create an impression in the minds of
publics that allow the organization to buffer itself from its environment—to use the words of
organizational theorists—which in turn allows the organization to behave in the way it wants.
In contrast, the behavioral, strategic management, paradigm focuses on the participation
of public relations executives in strategic decision-making to help manage the behavior of
organizations. In the words of organizational theorists, public relations is a bridging, rather than
a buffering, function. It is designed to build relationships with stakeholders, rather than a set of
messaging activities designed to buffer the organization from them. The paradigm emphasizes
two-way and symmetrical communication of many kinds to provide publics a voice in
management decisions and to facilitate dialogue between management and publics both before
and after decisions are made.

Francesco Lurati of the
University of Lugano, distinguished between the strategic role of corporate communication in
defining organizational objectives and its tactical role in supporting organizational objectives. He
pointed out that practitioners of public relations are eager to assume a strategic role, but they
typically define strategic public relations as communication that supports the implementation of
organizational objectives that corporate communicators had no role in defining. In his words:
“From this perspective corporate communication is considered strategic when it pursues
objectives which are merely aligned with the corporate ones. The term ‘strategy’ does not change
the tactical nature of the task communication fills. In other words, the communication function
here makes no contribution to the defining of corporate strategy.”
If we truly want metrics that show public relations has value to an organization, the
measurements required are deceptively simple. We should measure the nature and quality of
relationships to establish and monitor the value of public relations. And we should evaluate
public relations strategies and tactics to determine which are most effective in cultivating
relationships. In his book, Corporate Public Relations, Marvin Olasky, a conservative critic of
public relations, argued that before the invention of “public relations,” corporate executives
engaged in “private relations” by being personally involved in the community and civic
organizations. With the advent of public relations, which he equated with the interpretive
paradigm, Olasky said that public relations practitioners intervened in this relationship to
manipulate the media and to participate in camouflage techniques of supposed social
responsibility to isolate executives from their publics. Olasky thus identified the importance of
relationships in public relations. Today, we must use social, mediated, and cyber relationships as
well as the interpersonal relationships of Olasky’s ideal time in the past. Relationships are the
key to effective public relations, however, and they can be measured to show its value.

Excellent!

The way we are

I am not in the habit of 'lifting' big blocks of content from other blogs or newspapers. I would rather the source speak for itself. But I am going to steal a big chunk of John Naughton's contribution to the Society of Editors conference reproduced online at the Observer.

Today's 21-year-olds were born in 1985. The internet was two years old in January that year, and Nintendo launched 'Super Mario Brothers', the first blockbuster game. When they were going to primary school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee was busy inventing the world wide web. The first SMS message was sent in 1992, when these kids were seven. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. Hotmail was launched in 1996, when they were heading towards secondary school.

Around that time, pay-as-you-go mobile phone tariffs arrived, enabling teenagers to have phones, and the first instant messaging services appeared. Google launched in 1998, just as they were becoming teenagers. Napster and Blogger.com launched in 1999 when they were doing GCSEs. Wikipedia and the iPod appeared in 2001. Early social networking services appeared in 2002 when they were doing A-levels. Skype launched in 2003, as they were heading for university, and YouTube launched in 2005, as they were heading toward graduation...

...Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?).

I think he is a trifle harsh. OK, so the new Telegraph facility is a trifle poky for the journalists and the BBC is buying video clips from local newspapers. The key is that the publishers are now beginning to see that content is only king when the king serves his people.. Hidden behind some walled garden the best that can be expected is a peasants revolt.

Now look at the PR courses offered by the CIPR, Universities and training organisations. There is scant recognition of the real channels for communication and an obsession with gaining admission to the walled garden.

The Online PR opportunity

A study, commissioned by Bluestreak, reveals consumer behaviour and attitudes towards emerging technologies including podcasts, text messages (SMS), RSS, blogs and message boards as well as the more traditional email platform.

The rate of adoption for new communication technologies represents a huge opportunity for Public Relations. The findings of the survey help us find out why.

People use a range of channles: 100 percent of respondents currently use email compared to 88 percent using text messaging; 71 percent using message boards; 63 percent using blogs; 36 percent using podcasting and 28 percent using RSS.

There is acceptance of adjunct messages and even advertising as the trade-off for good content and a further willingness to accept ads and "sponsored" content as long as the information is relevant and high-quality. As always, over-communicating can have an adverse effect both on the marketer's brand and their bottom line.

The proliferation of sponsored channels seems to have an impact on consumers’ usage (30 percent would stop reading a blog they know it is sponsored, 34 percent would stop reading a sponsored message board). Text messaging advertising is cited as the most unpopular form of advertising communication among these five emerging channels (77 percent of respondents say there is too much text advertising and 80 percent feel negatively towards text message advertisers).

A majority of respondants expressed a feeling thta ads are either “random” “get in the way” or “are not directed to me”

Although consumers accept the existence of advertising, most do not respond unless they feel the offer is "personalized" or "useful"

Although podcasting is included in this criticism, it also had the highest score among its peer set on relevance/personalization with 25 percent feeling the ads accomplished that goal.


Consumers are mainly concerned about viruses, identity theft and spyware as byproducts of using such channels (64, 56 and 53 percent respectively). Spam concerns were listed below these at 44 percent.

Respondents consider “emails they once signed up for but no longer want” as spam.

Building communities would still seem to offer the best opportunity.

Telegraph.co.uk launches bloggers 'style' guide

Telegraph.co.uk, which has 14 bloggers, has published an editorial style guide for its bloggers.

THE PR search engine

Contantin has done it again.

Here is his introduction:

If you want to search across all the PR blogs, wikis, and news feeds included in the PR & Communications Blogs List, you can use a custom search powered by Google Co-op:

http://301url.com/prblogsearch

Keeping up with like minded people - marketers note

BL Ochman reports that most big brand sims in Second Life are empty or have little traffic despite massive MSM media coverage, and many events are poorly attended. "That's because brands aren't creating or joining groups -- the most fundamental aspect of the metaverse's social structure, says Linda Zimmer in Business Communicators of Second Life."

At the same time she has reported on how Penguine, the publishers and others are opening a new presence, a virtual one, in SL.

It goes without saying that there is no point in moving in and then not joining the community. Its just like moving house. Some people just don't know how to get out and become a member of the community - I wonder how the marcom executives get a life if they can't get one in a virtual community?

Why blogging matters - six expert views

Dan Greenfield - VP Corporate Communications - EarthLink – Bernaisesource

Invites you to join a converastion with:

David Armano - Creative VP - Digitas – Logic + Emotion

Peter Blackshaw - CMO - Nielsen Buzz Metrics – Consumer Generated Media

David Churbuck - VP Global Web Marketing - Lenovo – Churbuck

Dan Greenfield - VP Corporate Communications - EarthLink – Bernaisesource

Eric Kintz – VP Global Marketing Strategy - Hewlett-Packard – Marketing Excellence

Will Waugh – Senior Director, Communications - ANA – Marketing Maestros

Introduction

Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.

How to influence nespapers 'social media' experiments

The moves by some publications into 'social medi' was examined last Saturday by Erick Schonfeld. He posted about how people can influence some of the ideas currently being tried by some publishers and how they can be influenced.

He writes:

Gannett newspapers are turning to their readers to help research and write stories in a new "crowdsourcing" initiative. The idea is to tap into the knowledge, and even investigative zeal, of readers to help cover stories for the papers. It sounds like USA Today wants to look more like Digg.

But figuring out how to tap into the culture of participation without abandoning journalistic objectivity is going to be tricky. Once people figure out that they can influence what goes on the front pages of Gannett's 90 local papers across the country, they will try to game the system. As Digg is finding out, giving the crowd a voice comes with its own set of issues.

Watch out for some people in the publicity industry using these idea - and comming to grief.