PR's winning ways in recession

Despite assurances from the British Prime Minister yesterday, there are a number of commentators reflecting on the prospect of recession. Comments by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Joachim Fels of Morgan Stanley are but two and public opinion in the USA is of a similar mind.

If the US goes into recession, the world has to tighten its belt too.

In these time of universal interactive communication when intangible assets have a greater influence in the economy, what do we need to consider? The first is that the knowledge economy goes much further that the exchange of arcane patents and processes deep into the the interactive crowd of Facebookers and bloggers. They are participants in knowledge of organisations, intellectual properties, products, processes, trade, products and services as well as confidence and mood. In the last four years, this extension of social media means a much greater part of the population is involved in the knowledge economy offering added direct and indirect corporate assets.

The extent to which organisations can use the combination of transparency and porosity to gain advantage in economic slow down depends on the extent to which they can use interactive public relations and gain advantage from the relationship cloud.

As economies slow, there is a ripple effect and experience will tell us that the process begins with worries over sales. Recruitment is stopped, travel budgets are squeezed, inventory is tightened, R&D is focued on the short term and marketing budgets slashed. A question mark will hang over PR.

As the brochure print run is reduce, film and photographic budgets slim, exhibitions and conferences are eschewed and everything is turned to face the shop window or is shunted out of the back door, times seem very hard.

Typically in these times, such steps will go through two or three iterations as the red ink keeps coming.

The loss of confidence, that most intangible of harbingers, means this belt tightening will go on far too long after the recovery is under way and economies begin to grow again.

The best companies will stay in touch with the market, retain and re-deploy the most tallented employees, and will hang on to the best ideas and developments and those assets that are of greatest value beyond some of the less productive corporate icons. In addition they will work with the most agile and innovative vendors.

Where in this mayhem is the PR advantage?

We have the advantage that corporations are more aware of the value of relationships and that the web is now interactive and we can achieve things that were not possible before.

The first addresses the problem of employees.

In recession, more people are more available as and when they are needed using online communication. The empty desks no longer means loss of capacity. The capacity, as and when it is needed is a mouse click, Skype conference or wiki post away. This does mean that companies have to become more porous. The communications professional should be in a position to aid this process, developing interactive solutions to create, build, sustain and motivate employees.

The cost of travel can be largely replaced in the effective interaction of the web. Not the dreaded video conference but the humanly interactive, richness offered in online social networks. by which I do not mean MySpace or Facebook, but similar deployed packages.

The once tight knit R&D group can lever up both the wisdom of crowds and huge opportunities available from the concept of open source participation applied not just to software but to almost any developmental innovation.

Meantime those so valuable but under utilised experts we used to find in mundane occupations, often dressed up as added responsibilities during recessions can now face front. People like product managers who are less active in a world where the supply chain is less active are a typical example. They are the authentic voice that can have such influnce in writing and interacting in the bloggersphere and using wiki's. They can now be deployed in creating a much closer and directs relationship with key markets and other publics.

Many marketing activities can be moved onlne with the advantage of being a less costly but more direct relationship building activity. The power of YouTube and Linkedin and their competitors are now available to in place of exhibitions. The cell phone can come into its own for web sized photography and video.

The natural discipline for this brand of relationships and communication professional, a person who understands the simplicity of VoIP, wiki's, blogs and the social side of social media. It is the person who sees widgets in place of data bases..


This is a corporate advisory role from is the person who can convince the corporation that niche is nice; the cultural disruption role of PR is significant and that PR has a specific role as a relationships management discipline (and is what is says on the tin).

This then is the big opportunity for PR when times are tough.

Exciting huh!

Image from: http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/

The nature of modern PR

Neville Hobson alerted me to Eric Schwartzman’s interview with Colin Farrington in the On The Record Online podcast.

Neville's point is that:

Colin Farrington, the director general of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), simply does not understand the role of social media in public relations.

By chance, I have been involved in an exchange with Simon Wakeman discussing the role of Public Relations and made the following points:

I do not hold with the idea that PR is a 20th century practice. Even Press Agentry combined with lobbying and celebrity was practised by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in the 18th century but PR goes much further back in forms of diplomacy.

It is not that this is a new idea. I assembled some of the roots of relationship management as a PR practice in ‘Towards Relationship Management’ (2006 Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Page: 211 - 226).

The problem is that we have very little to guide us as to the nature of relationship (which I touch on in the paper) but there is light at the end of the tunnel (as in ‘watch this space’).

It does mean that when we look at relationships and the practice of acquiring, developing and optimising effective and affective relationships, we discover that without relationships the client counts for naught.

PR then becomes the (diverse) pivotal practice ( in the mould of medicine, another very broad range of practice) in delivering, sustaining, ensuring health and vigour of the organisation.

That then is our business and is different from the amateur practitioner (e.g. the CEO) because we have (or should have) the expertise, or reach to specialists, who can deliver such benefits.

The point at issue is where we stand in the post-Bernays era and my contention is that PR practice operates in and with the widest understanding of the social domain in which values are germane as a key to human relationships and Public Relations. I put my case thus:

There is a body of work that examines value systems and organisations have a number of values systems. They might include the values associated with optimising investor returns; they may also include employee related values systems, product, customer, environment values etc. In each case there is a domain of PR practice that encompass and operates among such values.

Public relations management which deploys all these PR domains of practice using a range of tools (including most notably, but not exclusively, communication in its execution) is the practice of Public Relations in its highest form.

I accept that most practitioners are specialist and work almost exclusively in a domain of practice often with no more than a communication facilities role, but that need not distract us from the true nature of PR.

That the institutions like the CIPR, the Universities teaching PR and other institutions choose to exclusively grub around in the undergrowth, does not mean that we should not enjoy ambition among the stars with a wider view of the significance of relationships which is fundamental to the social nature of humanity.

From that perspective, we can better understand the significance of the social media revolution and not be constrained by the narrow view given to us by 20th century agents and propagandists.

If we choose to remain in the undergrowth, our view of ubiquitous interactive communication will be that it is but a channel for communication (to be controlled and channelled). If we choose the higher calling, we unleash the interactive, creative human spirit with the wider human state for each to elect to be of, or contribute to, the nexus of their personal social networks.

For me, that is the vision for Public Relations.

The contribution made by Colin Farrington to Eric Schwartzman is perfectly legitimate for a Bernasian practitioner rooted in 20th century PR. The PR that gave us the proto Bernasian mass media manipulation with consequence manifest in Nazism, Communism.

Command, control, de-humanised, 'one value system fits all' approaches legitimise propaganda and the suppression of diversity in the of human state. Today, because of ubiquitous interactive communication, a process that has been gaining ground for 50 years (telephone, multiple broadcast channels, fax, email, social media are drivers) , there are apologists for the practice of public relations as an extension of propaganda. Among them Kevin Maloney at Bournemouth University.

These apologists suggest that because PR practitioners (by this they mean political and business PR practice) are countering each other's propaganda, then there is a legitimate form of practice which Colin gave voice to in his interview with Eric.

The concept is flawed.

It suggests that the citizen is to be controlled in every sphere of life by an everlasting all powerful elite. In all history, this has never been the case (if so, what was IX Hispana, the Roman 9th Legion, doing in Briton 900 years ago and how come there are foreign soldiers in Iraq) Omnipotence is fleeting and all the more so with the democratising and social reconstructionism brought about through ubiquitous communication.

The difference between the people 'who get it' and those that don't is in understanding the human voice which, as it is liberated, emerges from the shadow of the propaganda veneer and its associated counterpart propagandists (scream) advertising. In post World War society, applying mass psychology to the masses was once effective. Once the masses become individuals and can see, join, create and interact with networks of social groups, the power of the elite is changed in direction from control to engagement.

Today, an elitist view of the diversity of mankind, expounded by Colin a year ago is an example of the Bernasion view of PR which suggests that blogs are the:

...... 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. The concern of some public relations people as they worry about this new media for consumer comment, engagement and reputation destruction is a bit overdone.

He missed the point.

Progress towards ubiquitous interactive communication which briefly gave 20th century propagandist tools for suppression, is, contrary to Colin's assertion, influencing the very fabric of life. To pick one medium (a global news magazines or blogging) is to miss the bigger picture. People do affect political and commercial outcomes (do we already forget 'The Battle for Seattle', the first mass political activist programme driven by the internet?).

The 20th century practice of PR as a form of competitive propaganda war waged through to pages of the monoculture we called 'The Press', is no longer possible. The very institution 'The Press' is now heavily mediated by other forms of public human voice (including blogs).

The lobby practice of PR, and I think of investor relations as well as politics, depends on a well researched persuasive voice. To believe that an elite to elite conversation is not mediated by the biggest (and publicly available) knowledge repository ever known (the internet) suggests an elite that cannot respond by way of engagement. 'Let them eat cake' is not a good practitioner approach for public relations or lobbying.

For these and many other reasons, I refute Colin's version of effective PR and the PR practitioners who continue to subscribe exclusively to Bernasian PR.

All I can suggest to the CIPR, of which I am a Fellow, is raise the sights for your profession. Look to a vision of PR that is able to contribute to engagement and aspirational values systems or, with the people you support, you will cede to the likes of the Taliban.

Make the message simple - stupid

Chip Heath in an interview in McKinsey Quarterly (free subscription), offers a lot of very useful and well researched, tips on how to make messages compelling.

One of the insights I liked a lot is:

When messages are abstract, it’s frequently because a leader is suffering from the “curse of knowledge.” Psychologists and behavioral economists have shown that when we know a lot about a field it becomes really tough for us to imagine what it’s like not to know what we know—that’s the curse of knowledge. If you’ve ever had a conversation with your IT person about what’s wrong with your computer, you’ve been on the other side of the curse of knowledge. The IT person knows so much that he or she can’t imagine knowing as little as the rest of us. And we’re all like that IT person in our own domain of expertise: prone to be overly complex and abstract.

As one who does this a lot, Its a very helpful idea.

A recommended read because of the quality of research behind his thinking and a lesson for everyone in PR.

Xbox and the future of the social animal

Imagine a place that mixed Facebook, World of Warcraft, Second Life, podcasting, video, Twitter and Skype.

Such a place would be a magnet for already huge and seriously interactive communities online.

Such a place would be of interest to Chris Kimble, David Grimshaw and Paul Hildreth who have already shown that the online context is important.

What I am suggesting is context that would be hyper rich and more important that other places to go.

Such a rich environment would be very important because, as Elizabeth Shove, and Alan Warde at Lancaster University note, social theorists maintain that ‘people define themselves through the messages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display. In an environment of games, avatars and Facebook-like display added to a wide range of channels for spoken, music, video as well as text communication, people will be able to satisfy their deeply embedded human needs online like never before.

That is why I think that the Microsoft announcement a couple of weeks ago is so important.

Microsoft is to add a social network element to Xbox. It potential offers a mix and match of sensations that are now only speculative.

This has the potential to mash the real and virtual person in a fashion we are not really prepared for.

People, that's us, manipulate and manage appearances and thereby create and sustain a ‘self-identity’ as part of their need to be effective as social animals. Its part of our DNA.

This is part of the evolution of the human species.

These new developments offer a real and virtual combination.

In an answer to the question: "What sort of person is s/he?" will shortly be answered in terms of a combined real and virtual lifestyle or visible attachment to groups rather than by personal virtues or characteristics alone and on a globally networked scale.

In such an environment, the many selves and the picture of the world we modify through inputs from our senses hark back to Featherstone who in 1991 reflected upon the tendency for the same individual to seek to present him or herself on different occasions in two or more ways, as bohemian and conventional or as romantic or formal and now, as the internet evolves, there a possibility to do so in many manifest ways in hyper virtual worlds.

It is an extension of a not uncommon practice we have see online for a couple of decades but now it will be much more dramatic, entertaining, emotionally absorbing and above all infective across the whole online experience.

This is futureology, guess work and musings.

Why would people do this? Why should sane people spend hours gazing at a computer screen? Why should people be engrossed in blogs, social networks and games?

There is a deep itch in our human make up that make such activities compelling. In our millions we already do it. But add even greater richness – a step change as great as from Newsgroups to blogs, to MySpace to Second Life and it seems that such change is inevitable.

Perhaps the big question for us now, is: dare we think of such things and be, just a little prepared, - well - Just in case.

The year of the mobile -

Maggie Holland at IT Pro comments:

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

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

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

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

So how does the organisation respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A web outage is a relationships issue

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

Tiny lost customers and its reputation was tarnished.

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

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

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

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

The circle of relationships is fractured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I (ahemmm) expect so!

Sleletons in cupboards - how do they get there?

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

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

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

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

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

The model for engagement

“We are seriously under-valuing certain things in advertising,” says Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy Group UK. “We don’t distinguish between what consumers ask for and what they don’t. Instead, we just target people by demographic, which is patently daft.

He went on to say

“A website with 700,000 users isn’t necessarily less powerful than a digital campaign seen by seven million people.

“Those 700,000 users are visiting the site of their own accord, and they are visiting when they have an interest in the content of the site. They are far more susceptible to relevant advertising than a larger group that just fit the target demographic.”

Sutherland likened “old marketing” to ten-pin bowling, with one message looking to “knock down” a large amount of consumers. Modern marketing, according to Sutherland, should follow a pinball analogy, with the message kept high on the agenda by factors other than just a brand’s input.

Sharon Shaw e-commerce manager at Standard Life adds:

"Developing a new digital strategy can be a daunting experience, especially considering the lack of case studies and benchmarks out there," and proposes an Attract, Convert, Support, Extend model.

Well welcome to the real world.

What they are talking about is developing relationships and I am not convinced they are on the right track yet.

Before we attract, there has to be worked through value systems and then, the model is to Listen before anything else.

That is why I believe that the planning model has to start with a proper audit of organisational values, the values of the online community and levels of dissonance.

It is only then that attracting the community is possible.

Just believing that 700,000 web site visitors are all happy campers is nieve and attracting people who don't want to go there is counter-productive.

The death of music?

I loved JP Rangaswami's post "Which have eyes, and see not: Musings about the music industry and The Because Effect" in which he shows how copyright and music are parting company.
But there are issues.

First, how can we be sure that people will be tempted to find out about what they desire. How do people find out about Radiohead in the first place?
Its getting harder to help people understand the significance of value systems but there lies the key.

Those people who have or acquire the complementary value systems that makes them scramble for a Led Zepplin gig is the critical issue that PR faces in order that they can attract eyeballs and action.

At the same time, we have to be able to convince clients that this is the way forward.
They have to learn the value of knowledge and those value systems that make it valuable.

It is action on two fronts and requires long and serious and cerebral conversations with leaders in organisations. This is not for a marketing manager attempting to hype the very name of an organisation through the courts. Its far more important.

What is more valueable trust or knowledge?

Slashdot announced today that

"After months of promises to IP-holders, the long-awaited filters system for YouTube has gone online. The new system will make it easier, the company claims, for copyrighted clips to be removed. 'YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.'"

Which, of course is hard work for the copy holders and YouTube.

Why?

Because there are lots of copycat sites like YouTube where the copyright material can go, folk will get fed up with being fed what the studios let them have (Stalin would be proud) and will, eventually punish them and the bright young things will have alternative entertainment anyway.

Its a question of understanding the nature of the value of knowledge.

Knowledge is expensive to produce and has no value at all.

Making available information that some knowledge exists is expensive too and has high cost and low value associated with it.

If a person or organisation has trust assets, people might believe them if they say they have knowledge and should that knowledge be of interest, it may have some value.

What is the most valuable trust or knowledge?

Knowledge in the form of copyright such as films only has value when the recommender makes it so.

'King Kong' is a film. It has value because we trust the view of people who have seen it. Among a trillion films, there will be a need for some very powerful and much trusted recommenders to give king Kong future value. After all, now that films have a 'Long Tail' who has time to see all the movies?

Perhaps the studios and broadcasters will eventually understand that citizen critics are seriously important and will stop the idiocy of trying to protect valueless copyright.

Picture: Wikipedia

Turning a communication channel into a movement

Bloggers unite to tell world how to clean up environment

Organizers of the Oct. 15 U.N.-backed “Blog Action Day” said about 15,800 sites had signed up and were offering ideas to millions of people via blogs, or online diaries, ranging from planting more trees to how to recycle plastics.

“Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future,” according to www.blogactionday.com.

Says Canada's National Post.

The interest in environmental matters has a resonance (a set of values) with a wide audience that seems to want to crusade.

This seems to be another example of the effect of working with the grain of people's values.

Looking at PR's role in the Northern Rock fallout

Northern Rock, the British bank that defied a 140 year tradition when customers besieged its branches on the streets and crashed its web site to get at their their money, was under a lot of pressure when the Chief Executive, Adam Applegarth, was reported on 17th September to say "Your money is safe with us ....

If a British banker says such things they are true. Bank managers are people to trust, aren't they?

If The Bank of England, says it 'fully backs' a bank, and it gave that assurance about Northern Rock, then 'Old lady of Threadneedle Street's' mighty reserves are there to offer confidence and support the rhetoric. This is 'money in the bank'. Surely?

The same goes for the Financial Services Authority, which declared the Northern Bank was 'solvent' and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's called for calm. These are people and institutions whose reputation we can surely trust, aren't they?

The consequences of belief in such assurances are far reaching, bring the Prime Minister's reputation into question and even affect the biggest economy in the world.

But the sober citizens who save money, have bank deposits and who read newspapers and listen to reporting from the BBC just did not believe them last week and trotted down to their local bank and politely asked for their money back - in their thousands.

The words 'trust', 'confidence' and 'reputation' are bandied around and a failure in 'public relations' is blamed.

The Business says: "...a textbook case of how not to manage investor expectations and public relations...."

The FT noted: "But instead of shoring up public confidence, the public relations gaffe managed to shake it.

Douglas MacWilliams, head of the London-based Centre of Economic Business Research, said the Treasury, along with the Bank of England, had botched their response to the market crisis, damaging their reputation for economic competence.

"The public relations of all concerned has been extraordinarily bad and has exacerbated the crisis of confidence."

The Northern Rock incident is not a one off, it is symptomatic of malaise affecting organisations and people of all sorts.

The 'public relations' of these organisation and people is such that they are not trusted. People do not have confidence in them and their reputation counts for very little.

From today's headlines the same can be said of Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury and Tesco who are reported to have colluded to raise milk prices, according to an Office of Fair Trading report.

The same can be said of your local grocers who are said to add dangerous chemicals to our food and the same can be said of the medical profession.

In one day, like almost any day, the issues of trust confidence and reputation are affecting people's relationships with our institutions.

Now, as in all these cases, it is not that the organisations involved do not have public relations expertise available and at hand. They do. They have big PR departments and PR advice at the top-most level.

These cases of loss of trust, confidence and reputation is with the advantage of PR expertise.

These failures are the failures of PR professionals.

For PR people to evade the issue is, at best, disingenuous probably shameful and at worst, terminally damaging. The industry has laid claim to reputation, confidence and trust. It has had time to research, explore and develop the issues and practices involved. This is a matter for individuals but also for a wide range of privately and publicly funded organisations.

Who, then can take responsibility and who should be professionally concerned with developing trust, confidence and reputation among our leading institutions upon which our social, political and economic survival depends?

The Northern Rock episode brings into focus the failures of the whole profession involved in the practices associated with trust, confidence and reputation and none more so the representative trade associations in the field such as the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the Public Relations Consultant's Association, AIBC among others. What are these institutions doing to provide capability and resulting belief in what their members do, say and influence?

Perhaps the Universities are culpable having churned out people with PR degrees and who yet are not equipped to affect corporate, not for profit, public sector and personal trust, confidence and reputation among their stakeholders. Are there competent teachers available to explicate the practices that the profession must have?

Perhaps we can turn to a panel of experts from five continents, representing academics, practitioners and senior executives of professional bodies who set the research agenda and the academics involved. Is their research up to informing and aiding the profession and its clients?

What of the people who monitor these things? How competent are they are in identifying the problems as they develop? What of the UK Media Monitoring Association comprising a wide range organisations that monitor newspaper, magazines and the web? Can they find the tell tale signs ? Is this something that its Chairman, the CEO of Durrants, and the members should be looking at?

It may be that there is a need for an early warning capability to show when organisations undermine their ability to create, sustain and develop trust, confidence and reputation from professional advisor's such as the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. Are their analysts up to the job? Have they an agenda that will help the profession?

My point is that there are a lot of institutions which, at the highest level bear a significant responsibility and who need to act to ensure that the nature of trust, confidence and reputation is taken very seriously for securing belief in the social, economic and political influences on us all.

Shoddy products and services, hype and spin, dissembling comments and obfuscation, may be at the root of the problem and that is down to individual markers, professions, politicians publicist and journalists and we may need to assemble the evidence and practices that refute such practices and offer more powerful and effective capabilities.

It is now time to develop the capability the PR industry needs and I have identified a number of organisations that need to get together and show that the reality matches the rhetoric.

If a representative of the profession, academic, teacher, monitor, evaluator, or practitioner, its time to put your hands up.

failing to do so means that forever you loose the trust of both our clientèle and the public that they so desperately depend upon.

In an economy founded on intellectual property, intangible assets and confidence in professional knowledge, skill and judgement this is an issue greater than any other in the public, commercial and private arena.

Tomorrow is available today - beyond Facebook

Lee Hopkins has seen a Social Network site that is very important to Public Relations. It does so many of the things that emerged from the thinking I posted about a couple of weeks ago and contributed in this podcast item for FIR.

The significance of the thinking offerd by these developments are Web 3.0 for this simple reason: They allow people to express themselves as multiple personalities.

Humans, being social animals behave differently in different contexts and among different groups in order to 'fit in' for the common 'good' at home 'master of all he surveys' at work; at work 'servant of the firm'.

Add this to a capability to display, adopt and adapt, the value systems of others, the unique values of the individual in social frame of the moment and to offer all this with semiotics as varied as photo's video, text, podcast/voice mail, tags, smilies and much more and we have something closer to face to face interactions.

These are drivers that make us a successful species and we yearn to use them in our societies. Its in our DNA and this is why I am with Lee. This is Web 3.0. This is about social networks doing the things that humans want to do - and its availble with ubiquitous communication.

Managing Risk to Reputation a PR Dilemma

We live in the age of the risk management of everything. Paradoxically this still leaves organisations that diligently engage in risk management exposed to what Donald Rumsfeld called ‘unknown uncertainty’ which I have commented on before.

This warning about the escalation of the risk management of everything should be taken seriously. In his first Demos book, The Audit Explosion, Michael Power warned against that companies and governments preoccupation with measuring what is measurable – the now discredited ‘targets culture’.

In his more recent pamplet the Risk Management of Everything, he says: “Reputation has become a new source of anxiety where organisational identity and economic survival are at stake And if everything may impact on organisational reputation, then reputational risk management demands the risk management of everything.”

The anxiety about reputation means that experts and professional bodies are increasingly taking defensive steps to protect their own name, rather than managing risks on behalf of the public. One example of this the proliferation of ‘small print’ as professionals ranging from doctors to accountants attempt to hand risk back to customers, clients or society as a whole.

Part of this anxiety is brought about because of a profount misunderstanding about the nature of reputation. Part is in the lack of coherent reputation management which is about internal values and their interpretation by publics.

While it is the duty of the PR planner to asses and develop risk management strategies, one of those duties is the management of risks inherent in abuse corporate value systems from both within and without.

A company with 'small print' value systems will eventually be brought to book, either by the consumer or the regulator. But what of the company that does not have such an ethos but the lawyers insist on the small print?

It is a simple question, the answer is simple but are corporate managers big enough to be good at public relations?

Picture: www.thefunnycats.com

The Future Internet

In 1995, I spoke to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations conference and predicted the Internet would be very big for PR.

Email arrived, web sites arrived and it all happened.

Five years later, in two books I made it clear that the interactive nature of communication for individuals and groups would be very significant for PR practice. Chat, Instant Messaging, Message Boards, Usenet, blogs, MySpace and Facebook (and with a nod towards Second Life) became mainstream and it all happened.

But last year, I went through a patch when I could not see forward. I am more confident now.

My thinking is now going beyond the internet as a place for interaction to a place where we truly become natives.

As a driven social species, capable of seeking and managing change, humans seeking novelty and added capability.

That is, driven by our DNA, the user public will adopt an internet model that is closer to human drivers and because so many people are involved, they will seek and demand change in the area of most internet use - social media.

Technology and regulation is becoming subservient to the online commons. The implications for PR practitioners may be un-nerving. But so too was the advent of the Internet, email and the web and even today, much of the PR industry is nervous about social media.

Each iteration of social media has been richer in content and interactivity. Each has brought more mechanisms for self expression and and ability to display likes and dislikes from favourite films to groups of interest. The social portals offer people a rich array of facilities and content. Much of this self expression is replacing or is a substitute for many of the benefits humans get from direct, face-to-face relationships.

The people who use this media have an agenda described by Stephanie Sanford quite well She argues that there is a changing landscape in polity beyond the collapse of social capital described by Putnam and that there is a kind of online substitute to the social structures that are dominant, if struggling, offline today.

We are a complex blend, a repertoire, of private and social selves and in the last few posts I have been looking at how, we, as human beings, find social media so tempting and why portals like MySpace, Facebook appeal to so many people .

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has examined how we can be completely absorbed in an activity and can 'shut out' other distractions. If you watch a youngster concentrating on a Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), you can see how absorbing some online activity can be. But such effort is linear. It does not cater for a range of 'selves'.

Facebook is very much the same, as is MySpace. Both now offer many ways to express a particular self but not many 'selves' depending on the 'mood' or social frame we are in. Can I please have a Facebook for me as a grandfather and another one as a lecturer – oh! and can I have one as a writer 'self' too. Way back in the 1990's it was evident that many people online had several different online personalities. Even today, most of us have a number of email addresses. My Hotmail account is there for different purposes to my Gmail account and I never use my University accounts at all! Many people have multiple blogs – i.e. different 'selves' already.

So people are involved through their online experience, seek Csikszentmihalyi's engrossing applications and an ability to be the 'self' that matches mood and nature (and the current influences on our lives) look for the next social network to be available online to match the moment when needed.

How big are theses 'selves' in social numbers?

Well, they are not monolithic unless they are social.

Aristotle argued that it was in our interest, given our deeply social nature, to participate in in civic life in order to fulfil ourselves. Jefferson, followed this through when he wrote the American constitution and interpreted it as the 'pursuit of happiness'. He believed that small social groups would build a strong country. There is more modern evidence to support this idea. Robin Dunbar has looked at the nature of social groups across many species and suggests that there is a correlation between cortical size and the actual size of primate species. We are biologically pre-programmed to be personally effective in groups of about 150 people. Small businesses don't seem to need a hierarchical structure until they have 135 employees. Jennifer Muller suggests that teams can function to monitor individuals more effectively than managers can control them. In companies team size is an issue and when a person my have 150 people in their personal 'tribe' working effectively means working with a small section of this tribal whole as Muller notes in her recent paper. The basic military unit is under 150 too and has been for thousands of years (The Roman army First Cohort, called Primi Ordines, consisted of five centuries of 120 men). Political systems that remove social groups (communist Russia is an example) eventually crack under the weight bureaucracy when dealing with big populations whereas delivery of social support (looking out for older neighbours and over the top teens) is delivered effectively when these are sufficient convergent values in a community (a group of actors within a compass of 150 people held together with values that form a a polity) - as suggested by J. Eric Oliver in his book Democracy in Suburbia. He posits that local government is important primarily because it provides an accessible and small-scale arena for the resolution of social and economic conflict. It would seem that the big state, the big business and the national army all have to obey social rules and at a personal level obeying the personal 150 rule in order that the bigger unit (political, economic, social) institution can thrive. To survive big means acting social.

Create a social media network to be of friends, family, tribe and polity (and many other groups) and Facebook would be old fashioned quite quickly. People seek society in different groups, different types of groups and for (sometimes convergent) different purposes and different 'selves'. The portals that provides this will be part of the emerging internet.

One of the amazing things about people is their ability to extent the capability of the body and brain beyond its biological capacity. We can travel further and faster on a bicycle, car or plane because we have extended our physiology with knowledge. We have extended our brain with devices like pocket calculators, digital cameras and computers, that is, we use our brain to make machines do extra mural work. We have also extended our memory with access to wikipedia and the rest of the internet. We have also limited our physical capabilities. A Londoner, and attempting to survive in the Borneo jungle is beyond our ken. We have lost skills and knowledge too. The proverbial Londoner does not have the skill to feel the texture of ground corn to know if it is properly milled into flour (a skill called the 'miller's thumb').

Using the evolving internet will include achieving even more things to facilitate our needs both physical and intellectual (and emotional).

Large brains confer an advantage when responding to variable, unpredictable, and novel ecological demands through enhanced behavioural flexibility, learning, and innovation. (Vrba, E. (1988) in The Evolutionary History of the Robust Australopithecines ). Human have large brains. Better than that, humans like novelty. Humans are quick to learn causal associations between co-occurring environmental stimuli.

The evolving internet is and will continue to be a place where we can experiment with novel things. From Usenet to Twitter and beyond is part of human biology. This means the evolving internet will be a place where people will seek to experiment for simple human gratification.

As a nerve cell in the human brain is stimulated by new experiences and exposure to incoming information from the senses, it grows branches called dendrites. With use, you grow branches; with impoverishment, you lose them. People can even use parts of the brain to do novel things. The ability to change the structure and chemistry of the brain in response to the environment is called plasticity.

This plasticity capability in the adult cerebral cortex can change substantially as a result of practice and experience throughout life (Kolb B, Whishaw I. Q. Brain plasticity and behavior). Furthermore, a specific variant of the gene ASPM (abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated) in humans suggest that the human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution (Mekel-Bobrov et al ).

The evolving internet will be more addictive and people will develop their brains to cope. With the new internet we can expect new skills to emerge (even programming a video recorder can be learned) and we will both learn and evolve to do these things.

Human biology as much as human society seeks to satisfy needs that ensure that the social group can be trusted. We need to be able to trust people. There are dozens of devices that say they offer secure relationships and for people this means more than ever they need to be recognisable. Throughout history, people have recognised people from their looks, voice and mannerisms. But online, its easy to steal identities. I guess that its the next evolution of Facebook and MYMelcrum will have something like eye scanning (biometric iris scanning) built into a security system that allows many 'selves' but only one self.

As the internet evolves into these new social networks, its networking sites will need feeding. Just as Twitter or Last.fm can be embedded in Facebook, so too will services be needed for the future internet. Web Widgets have a fine future. Feeding these places where people hangout is a big issue and big business. The services available for word processing or automatic video download from cell phone to MMORPG or PC is technically possible and cannot be far away. Integration will be important if only to beat the big problem online today - available time.

Finally, there is the question of when.

When will all this happen?

Usenet and IM stood the test of time for five years before the better blog mousetrap came along. MySpace took three years, Twitter a few months. Adoption of new and more 'human DNA' friendly social networks will accelerate.

Look back five years and the rate of change is fast but its the rate of adoption that is more interesting. Usenet was for geeks and sex maniacs. Myspace is for them (still) but mostly for a huge proportion of young people. Most of my friends in Facebook are older and the podcasters are older still! Adoption will become less a generation thing.

So, who will be using this new Internet. To begin with it will be less complicated and thus more available to more people. And the more it satisfies human biology, the more pervasive it will become. Answer - everyone.

The new Internet is a place to live.

Social media CSR and the reptilian brain

This post is about the physiological (evolutionary) and psychological explanations for the success of social media and its relevance to PR and organisations.

Deep in our brain is the ventral pallidum. It is commonly called the 'reptilian' part of the brain.

Over our evolutionary history, the brain has evolved in animals layer by layer. Humans have complex (and big) brains and we carry the baggage of evolution deep in the layers of brain from our evolutionary ancestors. These inner parts of the brain provide most of the unconscious responses to stimulation that are part of our normal existence. We don't have to think about how to walk. We just walk.

But these deeply embedded responses also dictate how we evoke instinctive action to events, people and organisations. An interesting article in the New York Times covers a lot of this ground.

Our problem is that a lot of management thinking is founded on these, primitive areas of the brain. The ideas of Thomas Hobbs (1651 Levanthian ), modified by Freud (Civilisation and its Discontents) and Smith (Wealth of Nations) and provided with an economic application by Neumamn & Morgenstern (Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour), a re-working of Garret Harding's Tragedy of the Commons are no longer enough. We know so much more which is relevant to PR and especially to social media and CSR.

We already knew from the 1970's experiments that people cooperate at a much higher level when exposed to face-to-face communication. To explore this means reading George Williams (The Selfish Gene).

John Allman (Evolving Brains) at Caltech shows that, to survive, humans need both a big brain (oh... that means slow development through childhood to maturity) and an altruistic, co-operative and communication rich relationship with other people to support the long development through childhood to adulthood (family, community and long lasting social cohesion). To do this we have to be social animals. We cannot be selfish. Genetically, we have to cooperate for the survival of the species. Humans prosper and are more effective in groups.

This is why Social Media is so important to people and why co-operation online is so popular? It allows human beings to do what they are genetically programmed to do.

The richer the experience the greater the co-operation and the more productive and cohesive the group is. If you neglect a human, it fades - and the examples come from the terrible 'orphanages' in some countries even to this day (there are harrowing studies that I am not going into here).

Allman has shown that people who look after people live longer! Berkman and Syme have also shown that people with few social ties die younger. Does this mean blogs are good for you - its very probable. The richer and more inclusive the relationship - even an online relationship - is good for us. The 'sad' individuals with big online networks of 'friends' is not as silly (or sad) as many would make out.

This social part of our brain (pre-frontal cortex) is the most recent addition in the evolution of the human brain which adds cognitive sophistication including self awareness, awareness of others as people, long term planning and an ability to shift behaviour in the light of changing social contexts to create a human moral sense.

It has an immense impact and is important when PR people consider corporate values and value systems, their networks and interactions with publics and approaches to social media.

Harvard's Robert Putman's studies (among others) into the nature of richness in relationships show that Social Networks, social norms (values) trust, together making up social capital, is a major factor in economic development. Kawachi, Kennedy & Lochner (1977 - Long Live Community: social capital as public health) also show that low trust (in civic authorities) reduces average mortality rate and we see this in some nations to this day (Zimbabwe?) . It follows that trusting an organisation, for example a company, is good for people and loss of trust is bad for people.

This is where the PR practice of Corporate Social Responsibility, comes into the limelight. CSR cannot be used as a substitute for good governance. As soon as poor governance is exposed and trust is lost, the effect is not just loss of 'reputation' it is denial of social norms and community and the richer the prior experience, the greater loss which is a deeply hurtful thing to human psychology. It is probably an explanation for much anti-corporatism today.

Institutions have to be richly involved in social communities (not just employees, customers, vendors but wider communities too) and they have to be trusted to prosper.

Distinctions between the individual and others begins to fade as the identity of the crowd and the concept of self (which is also context driven) merges into one collective identity with a common set of symbols (values) shared with others, suggest Quarts & Sejnowski (Liars Lovers and Heroes) . By creating collective identities, humans can define groups more diverse than those based on kin, such as citizenship. These groups do include MySpace and Facebook groups and even blogging and other online communities. Some of these groups might be related to organisations but many do not. So people belong to a range of communities through which they can act on an organisation. A recent Wharton study is an example. It examined how these communities create an extensive 'word of mouth' antipathy to organisations.

Acording to Dawes Kragt and Orbell (1990 in 'Beyond Self Interest), "Ease in forming group identities could be of individual benefit. It is not the successful group that prevails, but the individuals who have a propensity to form such groups". Thus the people who are involved in groups online do so as both part of our, human, make up and are important to people's ability (and their belief in their ability) to succeed.

This would indicate that the closer to face to face social media gets (think of photo's and video) and the richness of the experience (a proxy for face to face) with associated trust and the ability to join or form groups is deeply important to the human condition. Online media is becoming much closer to face-to-face relationships. It is getting very rich, a subject I explored in this post last week.

One can begin to see that as, depending on experience of organisations and the social context people find themselves in, the interaction between organisations and individuals and their social groups is now touching on hugely powerful evolutionary and psychological human motives.

The significance of social media from an evolutionary and psychological viewpoint is beginning to emerge and for PR is is much, much bigger than at first thought.

Our responsibility to ensure PR takes corporate social responsibility very seriously (not just a teddy bear given to the local fete - or even millions given to the poor in Africa) because online, the pervasiveness of social media is storing up a heap of trouble for those involved in poor governance. At which point - watch out for the reptilian part of the brain to kick in!


Photo: Forestry insights

PR Research Prioreties - the official list?

Tom Watson at Bournemouth University has been trying to find out what the PR industry would like researched most.

He has consulted widely (globally even) and his respondents (all senior people in management and PR) came up with a dozen subjects.

I have some thoughts about where we go based on his findings.

1. Public relations’ role in contributing to strategic decision-making, strategy development and realisation, and organisational functioning.

The significance of disintermediation, the value of intangible assets, enforced transparency, management of unknowns and porous organisations is not much discussed in PR circles. It will be interesting if this study brings these issues into the debate.

They require a comprehensive understanding of ICT and social media mediated business and economic theory and advanced management tools.

The practitioner who is not able to plan for the unexpected and to manage risk across all the channels for communication (think not just of newspapers and TV but YouTube, Blogs, Facebook, SMS and many more) will leave the company exposed.

Uncertainty and risk management are now essential tools in the PR toolkit to aid stategy management. A range of platforms and channels for communication are tactical tools that just have to be mastered.

The question suggests that PR has a role in contributing but in reality (whether practised by a 'PR person' or, more likely, a CEO), as corporate transparency moves closer to radical transparency (I offer IBM and Microsoft as two companies that have and continue to be subject to such pressures – and which have strategically changed as a result), strategy becomes ever more re-active.

To contribute to strategy we need to improve the management tools used. There is a need for structured risk and opportunity management that can mesh with corporate direction which in turn will inform realisation and contribute to operations.

2. The value that public relations creates for organisations through building social capital, managing key relationships and realising organisational advantage.

Is there such a thing as 'key relationships' any more? In an era of ubiquitous communication the inter relationships are now networked which means that the value of PR is in its ability to contextualise organisational values in a networked society.

3. The measurement and evaluation of public relations, both offline and online

Online communication depends on a range of platforms (PC, Cellphone etc.) and a very wide range of channels (blogs, wiki's, podcasts, Facebook, Second Life, Instant Messenger, SMS etc). Just monitoring Social Media is a challenge. Measuring the contribution or effect of 1.1 billion people involved using these platforms and channels in a networked environment and potentially being involved is going to be interesting. The reality is that we live in a very different world to one where social segments (publics, market segments, stakeholders) were identified by PR people and marketers and the mass media held sway.

4. Public relations as a fundamental management function.

As long as the word 'Relations' has a meaning that involves relationships, then the the fundamental of relationships that are the organisation and the (ever more porous) external relationships that facilitate organisational survival and success, then PR is the premier management function. No relationships – no organisation.

5. Professional skills in public relations; analysis of the industry’s need for education.

The PR industry let slip the Web 1.0 and XML. It is now fundementaly dependant on both but had little say in its evolution for relationship effectiveness. Web 2.0 is even bigger by comparison in terms of both public relations and communication practice. There is NO relationship without the Internet. The SMS message as one goes into a face to face Ministerial meeting can be critical to its outcome. The skill set we now need has to be better than a 16 year old who can be as effective as Laurie Pycroft who was more effective than all the PR's employed by all the Pharmaceutical companies in retaining their licence to operate in the UK. The new online age empowers anyone to compete with PR practitioners. Does the industry need more by way of education or are practitioners and academics prepared to cede capability to the Internet enabled 'amateur'.

6. Research into standards of performance among PR professionals; the licensing of practitioners

In an age of Internet Richness, Reach, Transparency, Porosity and Agency backed up with the mass, engaged and capable online population (one in six in the UK), the licence for PR to operate is under more scrutiny than ever before. Our standards are progressively questioned and visibly so.

7. Management of corporate reputation; measurement of reputation

Reputation is not owned by organisations. The value systems and sticking to the value systems of organisations is now critical for survival of most organisations. As people perceive value systems of an organisation, they will give it its reputation. Is this, as a subject, really about managing value systems? The era of hype, spin and bling is at its last gasp. Calling the ethic of organisations 'reputation' is typical self inflicted PR spin. Some sense of the dissatisfaction with it can be summed up by 100 comments in the last 18 hours about David Cameron's marketing and (ex – journalist managed - publicity (called PR, but obviously not). It never ceases to amaze me that practitioners monitor so little of their organisation's 'reputation'. The 280 YouTube videos about Bournemouth University or the 28,000 about public relations, an interesting view to enlighten the Global Alliance, just show the extent to which every organisation is exposed in a range of social media as well as in more traditional content such as newspapers, TV, radio and blogs. .

7. Ethics in public relations

Ethics are as good as honesty of management. There will always be weak PR practitioners

9. Integration of public relations with other communication functions; the scope of public relations practice; discipline boundaries

This is extra-ordinary. In most organisations there are more people who can harness more media than the average PR manager. Most practitioners in the UK do not know how to blog, podcast or even use Facebook. Is this a suggestion that PR practitioners should integrate their activities with these employees? As most marketing and advertising managers are just as far behind. A merger suggests thrice as much ignorance and prejudice.

10. Management of relationships

While it is something of a misnomer to talk about 'Managing relationships' this is much closer to where PR can go. First of all, there is a need to understand what is meant by relationships. This blog is mostly about the Relationship Value Model, an approach to understanding relationships. I have yet to meet a practitioner who is remotely interested.

11. Client/employer understanding of public relations

This, presumably, means that someone – um... CIPR, Global Alience, PRCA, IABC....... is prepared to stand up and say that Cameron has no PR just a bling merchant ex- journo massaging the ever less relevant mass media. Or is that too much to ask for.

12. The impact of technology on public relations practice and theory.

PR as we know it is being disintermediated and at a rate of knots. Anyone can create a message and their message is as good as any a PR person can create. Anyone can distribute a message to 1.1 billion people. If the message has 'legs' it will be change behavious and it does not matter if it comes from a 10 year old in MySpace or 60 year old veteran press agent.

The theory is under severe pressure and the practice as we know it will not be in play in five years.

A bookish view of the value of facebook

Facebook, myspace, bebo and other social media portals are just growing and growing in the conciousness of the population. An extension of blogging and before that instant messaging and Usenet. Why do they succeed and the older forms not?

There are some who believe that social media is driven by a desire to control. Which is based on the thinking of Max Weber, the 19^th century sociologist. Basically, the idea is that participants are attempting to put over their view and get acceptance and therefore rise up in the social ranking. Some say that this gives both the illusion and, in some instances that actualitie of control over people and, most significantly, organisations.

I am not so sure. I don't believe people are that shallow.

The psychologists will tell us that we are not a single stable self, but a repertoire of selves who react and respond differently under different circumstances.

I like to try to explain it in terms of a space. This space has four dimensions. One is time. And so at a specific time we are a particular self. Governed by our environment, our ability to interact and use the the value systems that are relevant to the 'self' at that moment.

Value system include knowledge available and which are relevant to the current self including emotional and social elements. Thus our value systems are of the self at a moment in time, environment and interactive capability.

What we understand about our value systems is that they include our personal view of the world we see. Such a view will be different to everyone else (see Richard Gregory). I see a field and woods as a country person, they are not threatening. To many friends in town, they are threatening places. I walk across the field, they will look for a path. We see the same thing and interpret it differently. Our value systems are not the same.

However, when we talk about our values systems we seek common values with people. It is what makes us social animals. We are pretty good at it and can pass on these values to other people (who in tern will interpret them) and will then pass them to others.

Value convergence, the process that brings people together (and bridges generational divides) include values that are the social norms in societies (social media groups and 'friends') see (Kelly, 1955 ). The evaluative criteria represented by values derive from conceptions of morality, aesthetics, and achievement. That is, a mode, means, or end of action can be regarded as good or bad for moral, aesthetic, or cognitive reasons and often for a combination of those reasons (Kluckhohn 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951).

The nature of interaction and group formation which develops when values are strongly held and expressed is also a consideration in the extent to which people cluster round values. In experiments, people are found to prefer to seek convergent values (PDF). In relationships there is bound to be a compromise, a subordination of some values and the strength of a relationship is determined by the level of compromise involved. A lot of compromise will weaken the relationship. Interdependence values can conflict with independence values in this process (Keller, & Eckensberger, 1998) but there are the normative social influences that are important for social groups to prosper.

These are the same drivers we use online. We are as a person with values and able to interact in an environment that includes a PC and subscription to facebook. There is a lot going on here. Sometimes we will want to rant and or seek to gain power. But that is not all. We also want to... seek to... work hard at finding common values with other people to satisfy a deep urge to be inside, within a group.

Social media is is a phenomena because it provides a host of different ways to show off and also see the values of others to create social cohesion and a group with values we have in common.

It is not just control, it is the means by which we satisfy a deep need that is literally built into our DNA.

The key for social media is the means by which users can express values with photos, comments, and the images that reflect the values they think are interesting at a moment in time. Social media confounds the richness reach trade off. These portals offer many ways to add and express values with rich verbal, textual and semiotic richness.

That is why social media is so addictive and why 6% of the online community can spend 10 hours a week in, for example, Facebook.

This richness extends the Cluetrain Manifesto. There is, for example an emotional involvement beyond the conversation, and as Maslow puts it something beyond esteem and closer to self actualisation..

In the early days of online chat and even today with Instant messengers we seek to have a conversation. Sometimes these can be a one way affair. But when there is engagement, that is, when there are common values to explore a conversation emerges. Social media portals have gone beyond the conversation.

In the conversation, we seek to exchange and explore the values that we find acceptable and interesting among others. After a while, we discover that this interaction creates new ideas and concepts if you like – new values.

For those of us that blog and follow bloggers, we see this happening all the time. We see people commenting and the repost and exchange offering broader, wider, more fun, concepts. Sometimes this is in the form of recommendation to do something, sometimes it includes a call to action.

When this is done among a group of people the process is accelerated or made more diverse or, and here is where the marketer has his work cut out, where there is convergence in the values expressed ... “Oh! Thats a good idea”... is a phrase that every marketer should watch with care. What we are seeing are the brand values of a product or service being expressed in terms that are of the consumer and not to the producer.

This is more than a conversation this is the development of new concepts, ideas, even ideologies but in marketing terms this is about the values people express about brands.

Dr Cynthia McVey, lecturer in psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University, says:"There are going to be some things missing from electronic interaction such as the use of body language and expression. But we are seeing ever more richness in social media portals. Not quite body langage yet, but many things that have a form of equivelency – just try shaking or poking a 'friend online to find out what I mean.

Professor Robert Johnson says " Humans clearly have an incredible ability to recognise, remember and store huge amounts of information about individuals - even individuals we have never actually met. This ability is the core of circuits that one might call the social brain." This is another reason for social portals to suceed. It allows us to build pictures of people in our minds. Using MySpace means that out 'social brain' is at work. We like that!

Elaine Hatfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii reports that emotions whether positive or negative are passed from person to person without even the notice of the receiver. The comments seen in Bebo or Facebook often have emotional tags. These elements really do scratch the psychological itch and just to complete the picture, we also know that the brain is quite capable of adjusting to the new paradigm which may be why some people are puzzled and others thing they just 'don't get it'. Being a 'Facebook native' is mind bending!

If you put all this together, it suggests that PR has to be much more sympathetic and empathetic to the online consumer. Probably more so than face to face. Bling, hype and spin will be a big turn off and probably damages brands. Value systems need to be considered much more.

Inside these portals are user generated social groups (aka market segments) based on the values they, not the organisation, give to brands, products, services, political parties and even ideologies and religions.

So now we know why MySpace works and why, with its extra capability to allow people to show off their values, Facebook is gaining ground.

Facebook with its photos music, text and tweets with a little YouTube and Skype, now needs the textures and smells for the range of richness enhanced personal and group values to grow.

How the BBC teaches PR a lesson in values

Mark Thompson the Director General of the BBC is facing a blizzard of criticism of the Corporation for unethical practices in entertainment, documentary and news outputs.

There is so much PR practitioners can learn from this debacle.

He has responded by saying that the corporation and its contractors need to understand and perform to meet the values of the Corporation and has put in place a number of programmes to help make this happen.

Part of his problem is that the abuse of values is hurting the trust people place in this iconic institution. The effect in audience, financial and regulatory outcomes is going to be adverse and will become ever more dangerous to the future and futures success for the corporation. Action now can mitigate some of this bad news - but, by no means, all.

At the core, and quite rightly spotted by Thompson, is value systems. It is these values that are at the centre of relationships. Corrupted values will upset many people and will only be acceptable to those who will accept corrupt relationships and the organisation will falter and fail.

How can we understand and explain values?

First of all lets be under no illusion, we all have a view of life and what we hear and see. We modify that image or idea of reality. These 'Perceptibles' are what reach the brain, but they are not what may be perceived. Rather, perceptibles reach intuitive awareness through the cultural schema and the cultural system of meanings and values.

This is a schema that consists of the fundamental culture-given values for making the perceptibles intelligible and the cultural framework for their interpretation. The values are individual to each person.

Perceptibles like a coloured cloth, a man and worman moving, an earthquake may be perceived as a flag, John chasing Mary, or a gods vengeance (R.J. Rummel ).

We can perceive events (even emotions) in a similar way. By using a set of values our brains make sense of most things.

"As the TV phone-in programme progresses its has been a success but no one has yet won the top prize, the clock is ticking, a bright young assistant in the control calls the phone line and wins the prize. There is closure, the excitement is great TV, the prize money is there until next time, everyone is happy. Except, of course, months later when people find out that they were taken for a ride and the assistant feels a bit grubby about how she saved the programme. The circumstances are the same but the context, is different."

Erving Goffman described this phenomena as "schemata of interpretation" that enables individuals "to locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences within their life space and the world at large" [1974].

Thus perceptibles are one thing and how we interpret them is another and will change from time to time dependant on the values we apply to them.

For organisations, some things remain the same and some change. There is a set of values that can change and set of values that do not/should not change.

If we use a rose as an example. It is a perceptible, a token. It represents so much to so many and it is recognised for its many values all over the world.

Let me tell you about one particular rose.

It is a fine long stemmed rose. Its petals are pert and leaves glossy and fresh.

You see... already I can conjure up in your mind your view of a long stemmed rose. You add your own idea about the rose such as how long, colour, scent and may be some memories of giving or receiving one. What you are doing is adding a value system to this rose. Your value system and mine can be completely different.

If I were to see you give this magnificent rose to you partner, I could draw a range of conclusions and they too would be based on a range of value systems I attribute to the stem rose but this time with a range of value systems that I apply to your partner. My wife watching this may have an altogether different view about what is going on. She is using her sets of rose/partner related values available through her value systems.

The shopkeeper seeing this may be pleased not for the romance of the moment but for the opportunity to sell more such roses in the future, here we see a further set of value systems in the mix. After a week, the maid might not like this droopy stick in its vase and throws it out, clean the vases and yet still think of how much joy it had brought the household. Here is another completely different range of values at play. The rose has many value systems and they mostly depend on the values of third parties.

The rose is still a rose.

It has some enduring values as a scented flower. It's powers are immortalised in poetry, It has universal appeal and these value systems can be relied on.

What is more, the perception of the values provide the basis for relationships to form. A loving look. A knowing look, a comment in fact all manner of interactions.

Translated to an organisation.

Organisations have value systems. These are about products and services, how it treats people, customers and suppliers. Organisation value systems are how people recognise the organisations.

These values systems are the values people rely on. If organisational value systems are abused it upsets the relationship. People tend to have a very stable range of values (Rokeach) and so if an organisation changes its value systems, if forces people to adjust - or not. In the latter case they will believe that the organisation is not what it was.

While people can interpret organisational values in a variety of ways, they become unsettled if the values change. At the same time the Social Frame of the individual will influence the interpretation of the organisational values.

At one moment the user may laugh at a statement about the 'world leading, premier provider of.....' at another time this sort of marketing speak will just be irritating and getting in the way of a transaction. The context (Social Frame) changes the way people use their otherwise stable value systems (see Clive Seligman on the psychology of values.

This is why, when planning any PR campaign the practitioner should examine the value systems of the organisation from the perspective of the organisation and from the perspective of the organisation's constituency from a range of perspectives or contexts.

Creating dissonance by offering changed values only leads to alienation of the audience.

They loose trust, they turn away 9often to a competitor) and they can respond against any of the organisations' value systems.


Mark Thompson is right to focus on values.

Values are the glue and the lubricant of relationships.

No relationships = No BBC

Picture: Nick Sung