How can academia serve the emerging PR paradigm?

In Public Relations there is a tendency for academia to explore the nature of practice. We seldom become involved in broader blue sky research. As a consequence, this powerful and significant sector tends to respond to events with poor academic consideration of the much deeper fundamentals that drive future or even emerging practice.

We do have a present opportunity to look more deeply than ever before into the nature of relationships, reputation and the values that attach to tokens such as polity, brand and emerging social trends.

This paper will provide an approximation of the value of the internet economy across Europe. It will explore the extent to which social interaction is significant and will provide a view of the relationship value of social interactions online.

From this base,  the paper explores approaches for the PR sector to examine how it can identify the approaches to fundamental research into the nature of relationships as they pertain to the organisation with particular emphasis on the changing nature of online relationships

The value of the internet across Europe

Research commissioned by Google and undertaken by the Boston Consulting Group  (The Connected Kingdom 2010) suggested that, in the UK, internet activity contributed £100 billion per year (€ 650 bn) in 2009. This value is equivalent to approximately  7.2% of national GDP. Growth was estimated at 10% per year.

Some 60% of the UK internet economy consists of consumption with consumer e-commerce  at about £50 billion,  £10 billion contributed by  internet service providers and device access and 40% being government and private investment in internet related technology.

Using data from Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm ),it is possible to offer a Europe wide perspective. Using the data of the UK’s 51 million people online (82.5% of the population) and assuming that every person online across Europe is as active online (rounding down the data and ignoring European wide growth in 18 months since publication) it is not pretentious to estimate a European internet economy at € 1.5 trillion.

Of this figure consumer e-commerce would represent some € 750 billion.

The nature of social interactions

Robin Dunbar (1996) , writes: “Primates in general differ from other species of animals in respect of their social skills and there is now considerable evidence to suggest that primates owe their large brains to the need to manage and manipulate large quantities of information about social partners.

“Some of the evidence for this is provided by the fact that, in primates, group size correlates directly with neocortex size: living in larger groups requires proportionally more ‘computing power’ to keep track of what is going on. In contrast, purely ecological variables do not correlate with neocortex size once the effects of group size have been statistically removed. The primate brain is a social brain.”

Humans are genetically programmed to be social.

For humans with brains designed to communicate most effectively in, relatively large,  groups of about 100-150, there is a need for more brain power than is available to do what other primate do. They use grooming.  People use a more energy consuming capability, namely, language.  If language evolved to allow us to gossip, we ought to see evidence of this in what people talk about in informal conversations with friends and acquaintances. And, indeed, Dunbar’s studies of natural conversations reveal that, for both sexes, around 70 per cent of all conversation time is taken up with matters directly related to personal experiences and social relationships. ‘Work, philosophy, politics, culture, instructions, ethics, religion, even sport - all these are crammed into the remaining 30 per cent. Even highbrow newspapers devote up to half their column inches to what they loosely describe as "human interest" stories and features’.

In internet terms online shopping, news consumption, finding out what and where to shop, book holidays, download music, trade on eBay as well as computer and mobile information access  can be attributed to what Dunbar might ascribed to ‘Work, philosophy, politics, culture, instructions, ethics, religion, and even sport’ and be of the 30% ‘online work’ element of human lives.

What of the remaining 70%?

The rise and rise of social media can well be a symptom of people in Europe using time ‘directly related to personal experiences and social relationships’.

There is considerable evidence to provide a view of the time people in the UK spend online. Research by uSwitch.com, a price comparison and switching service in 2009 showed internet use extending to 30 hours per week (Hooked Online 2009).  The 2009 findings showed that at work the average person spent  5 hours online - 2 hours for professional  or work  purposes and  3 hours  for  pleasure and leisure. In addition a further 2.7 hours is spent during weekends or a ratio of 2:4.7 between ‘work, philosophy, politics, culture, instructions, ethics, religion, and even sport’ and related to ‘personal experiences and social relationships’.  Such an assumption would suggest that 56.53%. of time spent  online is devoted to personal experiences and social relationships. As Dunbar notes, such time consuming activities are in the nature of humankind. They are driven by our DNA.

The value of social activity online

From such data, it is not unreasonable to identify that a very high proportion of online time is spent in social activities unrelated to the need to work (or be a modern hunter gatherer).  Perhaps not 70% but, even without the internet delivered interactions like mobile phone calls, or sharing pulse rate data at the gym with sporting buddies, not unrealistically, fifty per cent.

From such evidence one might ascribe 30% of activity of online users is in the realm of day to day e-commerce and other modern survival needs and perhaps 50% is spent in building and sustaining relationships in one form or another online.

If the former, based on the  Boston Consulting Group findings, is worth € 750 billion, then a measure of European online social activity might be valued at € 1250 billion. This will lead us to a conclusion that online social interaction is a € 1 trillion  activity every year and growing at a rate of perhaps 10% per year!

Such analysis is not provided as perfect data or the actuality but is offered as an indicative indicator of the relevance and importance of online relationship activity.

It is not that being social online has come out of the blue.

In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Bowles & Gintis 2011) show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced the human species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers.

Is it that we have evolved to share information.?

Are embedded hyperlinks and Bitly.com an evolutionary necessity? Do they satisfy a need buried in our DNA? Is this why humans are attracted to forums, blogs and social networks where there is room “make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers”. Are such activities no more than technically enhanced evolution of being a human?

In his Saturday Essay in Wall Street Journal in May 2010, Mat Ridley (Ridley 2010) encapsulated the whole process rather well. He wrote:

“Trade is to culture as sex is to biology.”

 “The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex”.

There is a lot more in this research, but suffice to say that the value of online activity from both social and evolutionary perspectives is driven, it seems, by deep needs buried in humanity’s genetic makeup.

Within Europeans online is a deeper need to interact and combined with e-commerce this exceeds a nominal value of 2.250 trillion euros!

Public relations and internet activity

Public relations, and that growing element of public relations dealing with online work has a role to play in facilitation of online interactions associated with organisations.

It has a role in satisfying these deep needs buried in humanity’s genetic makeup.

On the one hand we have the practice of public relations at work engaged in facilitating management practice,  governance, organisational values, marketing communication, applied ethics, and religion.

On the other hand we have pure play public relations engaged in relationship facilitation.

These then  are the two sides of the PR coin, evidenced online, exposing our very humanity, the nature of our species.

Granted that the measures identified here are crude; granted that this approach uses the currency metaphor which many will find hard to come to terms with. It shows a need for more detailed research but, for the purposes of this essay, it suffices to say, that online social activity across Europe can be estimated even in financial terms that run to hundreds of billions of €s.

Using the financial metaphor also allows us to get some idea of the public relations opportunity for contribution to these astonishingly high numbers.

Equally, such an approach opens up a much wider, largely unexplored and exciting realm for research and PR practice.

What is the new realm of online public relations?

Now that we have some form of measure for online activity, we can examine what role might be assumed by the online practitioner.

There may be a role for the practitioner looking inside and organisation to aid in identifying the organisation’s view of its corporate, product and service ‘brands’.

The online practitioners may want to take a different view from the traditional marketer who might regards a brands as ‘a name, term, sign, symbol, or design or combination of them which is intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them those competitors’ (Kotler 1991 pp 442).  

In online public relations, there would be a view that the convergence of brand values and constituent values are more significant. We have already seen evidence of this from the extensive empirical research by Bruno Amaral (Amaral 2009). Online PR research has already taken us beyond the rather superficial marketers view to the view of a practice based on the nexus of human values as may be relevant from time to time.

There is a role in finding values that can be encapsulated in brand identities. One possibility is in using the  semantic  rule  to  relate  the  compatibilities  between words and values as  a  composite  linguistic  value (Zadeh, 1975). 

These are significant matters. Online they help identify the webpage metatags, keywords for client and competitor search and monitoring, concepts for semantic attribution in on-the-fly evaluation and more detailed strategic and tactical activities. Better than that, they help identify those values that are convergent as between and organisation and its constituencies. For the future Kotler-style brand differentiators will be about values of all descriptions and mediated by a range of constituents because they satisfy the selfless attributes of humans described by Bowles and  Gintis (ibid).

A role for Public Relations describes a view by the client of its values to a range of constituents. It is these values implicit and observable in relationships and in relationship building that describe the tokens (brands) that are the corporate or product /brand identity (Phillips 2005) and, once again, we can see the need for convergent values that emerge as between brand and constituencies.

The marketing communications role for PR is in in supporting organisational activities to manage constituencies’ expectations of the brand. Today, that is, the values constituents'  attach to the brand on  Twitter, Facebook and  Wikipedia. In addition now that much media is reliant on social media for intelligence and background, media relations.

This level of practice is described in current practitioner advisories and books such as the CIPR book ‘Online Public Relations’ (Phillips &Young 2009).

Uniquely, PR has the role of managing the expectations and relationships in which the brand’s values are spread between constituencies and, on occasion, with the client in an environment that is not dominated by mass (or any other single) media. It is described by Clay Shirky as cognitive surplus (Shirky 2010) and is manifest among  the 1 in 10 Europeans who are ‘Multi-Screeners’ – watching TV, using the internet on a PC or laptop and using the internet on a mobile phone or PDA at the same time (European Interactive Advertising Association 2011).

Kline and Boyd (2011) suggest that much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations.

Because the internet offers excellent population connection on a scale humanity has never seen before and with the evolution of cognitive surplus, we have seen the effect on availability of ever more ‘diverse and complex tool kits’.

With the exchange of values between actors across the globe, this layering effect can gain traction very fast.

From Twitter to Skype and leavened by Slideshare and YouTube, we can see these effects in our everyday lives.

Being aware, involved with and sometimes of the values in conversation is not a role for any other discipline other than PR. 

Offering the organisation’s brand values in its offline and online social context is the largest part of successful social and commercial activity. It is the essence of communicative organisation.

What part does public relations play

How much of the € 2 trillion online ‘economy’ should be engaging PR academia?

This year in the UK more computer games were bought and downloaded online than were sold in retail outlets.

More newspaper articles were read on line than in print. 

Electronic Kindle books outsell both hard and paperbacks on Amazon.com

The total online retail sales across Europe is a tiny fraction of European GDP. It was worth £145,600 million (€ 173 billion) in 2010. Online retailers in the UK, Germany and France accounted for 71% of European online sales. In 2011 online sales in Europe are forecast to grow by 18.7% to a new total of £171.8 billion or €202.9 billion (Centre for Retail Research 2010).

There is a case for looking to PR academic community’s involvement in identifying such trends to identify potential opportunities for PR practice.

Knowing that for the 54% of the European population which is online and that more than 10% of their purchasing will be via the internet in the near future would suggest that the part of the PR industry serving the retail sector would be representative in practice and growing faster than its current 10% per year organic growth.

With most of the publically quoted PR companies reporting turnover growth at best of no more than 10% for the last three years, despite many proclamations of digital credentials and online advertising spend up by only 7.6 per cent in 2010  (European Interactive Advertising Association EIAA 2011), it would seem there is a disconnect between growth in online retail activity and its retail marketing communication and advertising and PR partners.

In the UK, France and Germany, it would seem that here is an opportunity that has, so far, been missed and for the rest of Europe it is an opportunity to be grasped.

Such an opportunity suggests forms of online PR practice that are an extension of current practice.

Meantime, there does not seem to be much involvement by the PR industry in the rate of cultural and economic progress that depends on “the rate at which ideas are having sex.”

Evolution is never linear – some indicative examples

There is an assumption that internet evolution will be linear. This would be impossible.  There is far too much evidence of new and evolved forms of communication and transactions made possible by internet technologies.

One example will suffice for many. The Microsoft Xbox Kinect, a computer game, enables the computer to recognise individuals and their movements. In addition it is able to translate such data to provide imagery of interactions between one of more humans and inanimate and animated real and virtual objects. This is a new form of communication. As such it offers practitioners in communication a wider palette of communications methodologies .

In such circumstances one might expect European PR  research to be exploring the opportunities for such technologies in the practice of public relations. Instead, there are schools of practice in universities developing things like internet mobile applications beyond the PR context.

Intel announced its Light Peak product in 2011. It is significantly faster than USB 3.0, carrying data at 10 gigabits per second in both directions simultaneously. Connection speeds will not be affected by the transition to copper. Future, Light Peak may scale to 100 gigabits per second. The ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations, the whole paraphernalia of communication and more is significant.

Embedding the internet into devices is now simpler.  In the Spring of 2011, the protocols will be agreed for embedded SIM technology. It is not meant to replace the removable SIM cards used in today's mobile phones, but used in various consumer electronics devices to connect them to the Internet. It's the another step to building an "Internet of Things."

One simple example of the “internet of things” will suffice to explain the potential. Researchers from UCL (UCL 2011) have developed a digital tool that allows people to attach memories to objects in the form of text, audio or video by simply using a bar code. They see this as a means to provide historical values to objects. In PR, there are many more applications. Attaching news, information brand values, contact information and many other content tokens requires no great leap of imagination. The communicative organisation (see Stockholm Accords ibid) may soon be able to deploy communicative objects to further serve PR practice.

This month Zabaware announced its artificial intelligence technology known as Ultra Hal for Twitter (Zebaware 2011). It comes alongside  Klea Global (the author’s company) which is developing auto learning/teachable software for online monitoring and evaluation. The extent to which teachable (‘thinking’) software will and can be used in development of online social relationships and traditional PR evaluation is out of the lab and in beta testing.


It is already used by online music stores like LastFM to focus the right content to individuals.

These non-linear developments take PR into completely new media and applications many of which are already available.

It is not that such media will not develop without PR. They will. The key here is what kind of academic will spot the opportunities, the communication opportunities for relationship building and potential applications in practice.

If some universities can develop and harness new science and technologies, drugs and treatments for the medical profession, why can they not do the same for Public Relations? The social and economic advantages are just as important.

The value of knowing value

The internet in its many manifestations is, for many, becoming ubiquitous.

Populations are not, nor need to know whether the train timetable on their smart phone is delivered via internet technologies. In the midst of a personal exchange on Skype or Facebook, the internet and its manifestations are not part of the user’s conscious thought processes. The value of such social interactions is singular.

The internet and even social media is now of much less concern to the consumer that the facility it provides. Online PR should not be an expression used by PR people. Online is as significant to PR as ink. It's just there!

On the other hand, a financial view is helpful for PR academia. It offers a dimension, a metaphor for our activities couched in a currency most understand.

Knowing that digital consumer activity is growing at a rate in excess of 10% across Europe alerts the informed commentator that the PR sector has failed to keep up.

The sector may like to put 30% of online activity down to marketing communications and news distribution and the remaining 70% to being able to understand the nature and opportunity for being engaged in personal experiences and social relationships.

For the communicative organisation as outlined by the Global Alliance in the Stockholm Accords (2010) these are significant ideas. The potential to build relations with the whole person is a very exciting prospect.

An easily wasted opportunity, robust research and development would be very helpful in this area. .

Most certainly research funding covering such important elements of economies will be rewarding.

In addition, the extent to which exploration of the €1.250 trillion  internet related personal experiences and social relationships has a much more tangible feel to it when it is compared to the lesser € 750 billion marketing communication and information activities such as work, philosophy, politics, culture, instructions, ethics, religion, and sport!

This allows us to think well beyond the present consideration which comprises academic rationalisation of PR practice to look at new paradigms. It opens up huge challenges.

Social Media and the Challenges to Academia

First of all, a little context.

Of course, internet mediated civilisation is not the be all and end all of all human activity or public relations. But its very pervasive existence affects all PR practice.

Equally, without fundamental research into internet mediate relationships, the PR industry has nothing but a reactive, technically antiquated, narrow and desultory future.

Soon, the PR industry will not be able to sustain a PR practice led academia.  Without internet engagement at a much deeper level PR, as practised today just cannot survive. Is it already the case that there are more PR press agents than employed journalists?

With such a weak PR industry, both theory development and the sustaining in-house and agency careers for students will be found wanting.

As media titles fall or attach to electronic devices beyond electronic paper,  iPlayer and Kindle and as the evolution of internet mediation creates new ways of living, much of current practice just won’t exist.

How common, for example, is the practice of writing letters among practitioners and academics? When last was the first port of call to find a newspaper article the local library?  Who now has to offer a journalist a telephone at a press conference to call in copy? When last did practitioners lick stamps?

Ordinary life is changing very fast.

There remain, even in academia, those who do not consider that the internet mediates their speciality. They may like to ponder that the number of people online in the third most populous nation in Africa, Egypt, has fewer internet users than Europe’s third smallest country, Luxemburg - and yet the internet had a role to play in bringing down the long established regime. A 21% internet penetration of the population (compared to 85% in the UK) was affective.

 I described the first phase challenge of the internet for public relations in 1995 at the IPR annual conference (Phillips, D. 2001) with these words:

The new media will enfranchise the individual with more one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication which will be easy by personal ‘phones, E-mail and video conferencing.

Person-to-person-to-machine and database communication will be more important, electronically managed and more global. Increasingly this broth threatens brands and corporate reputation and needs professionalism to immunise or doctor the effects of the brew.

In its most perfect form, reputation management sustains relationships with publics in a state of equilibrium during both evolution and in crisis. This enhances corporate goodwill (a tradable asset).

The big change is that many-to-many global communication brings with it loss of ‘ownership’ of language, culture and knowledge and that there is a breakdown in intellectual property rights, copyright and much plagiarism. This is already a major problem.

News now travels further and faster and is mixed with history, fantasy and technology. Reputation in crisis is even more vulnerable. At a growing rate, the new media uses reputation as ‘merchandise’, stripped from the foundations which created it, then traded for pieces of silver - and at a discount.

That phase of internet mediated public relations is past. If universities are not teaching and practitioners are not practicing PR to cater for this, older form of online PR, they will face hard times sooner rather than later. It is time, even late, to move forward.

The internet is now a functioning sub-strata. It is mediating all human endeavour in Europe.  For the consumer internet technology is almost as irrelevant as making your own ink. The internet is all but invisible in delivering a huge range of benefits.

I have given some insight into my best guess as to a value we can place on the present potential for PR in the context of online economic activity of some €750 billion and have assessed an online  relationship ‘economy’ with an annual ‘value’ of  €1.250 trillion. Both such figures are growing at more than 10% per annum which makes them commercially attractive to academia and private practice.

The extent to which the PR industry can service these activities cannot be assessed in terms of existing online PR practice, research or teaching because the industry and academia has been so very slow to respond to the opportunity.

 It is extremely unlikely that current market facing online PR is engaged in even 0.1% of online commercial relationship services. Online PR across Europe is by no means a €750,million a year practice and will not even approach this number any time soon. In the wider (more valuable) social activity of the online relationship ‘economy’ activity has hardly begun.

In the next phase, even basic knowledge is hard to come by from PR academics and there is even less academic interest in finding out what it entails.

The semantic web, the internet of things, and the internet of intelligent software are big challenges.

Even bigger is the area of relationship interactions. They are even more important. They affect the very foundations of democracy and the survival of The Enterprise as we know it. The nexus of contracts (Coase 1937) gives way to the nexus of relationships (Phillips 2006) in order that the organisation can survive and prosper.

Identifying the relevant evolution and its application to relationships between constituencies and organisation is a big task.

 Developing the means by which such research can cascade to the organisations that want or need better online public relations and education of  is another area for potential academic activity.

Finally there is the nature of practice as it is and can be. The steep learning curve for practitioners, engagement of the PR institutions and representative bodies alongside the professional courses is another big opportunity.

Bibliography

Amaral, B & Phillips, D. 2009 A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. http://www.bledcom.com/home/knowledge accessed Feb 2011

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (forthcoming 2011) A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Princeton University Press

Centre for Retail Research 2011 http://www.hallam.biz/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Online-Retailing-Statistics-Britain-€pe.pdf accessed Feb 2011

Coase, R. H. 1990  “The Nature of The Firm” Economica 4: 386-40

Dunbar, R. 1996 TES http://goo.gl/VvY1w  accessed  Jan 2011).

European Interactive Advertising Association http://www.eiaa.net/news/eiaa-articles-details.asp?id=224&lang=1 accessed Feb 2011

Hooked Online: Brits Spend 30 Hours a Week Online  uSwitch.com http://www.uswitch.com/press-room/press-releases/hooked-on-the-internet-brits-spend-30-hours-a-week-online--1160.pdf accessed Feb 2011

Internet World Stats http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm  accessed Feb 2011

Kline, Michelle A. and Boyd, Robert 2011 Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania Downloaded from rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org on 4 Jan 2011

Kotler, Philip H. (1991) Marketing Management: Analytics Planning and Control 8^th ed. Englewoods Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall Inc.

Phillips, D. 2006 Towards Relationship Management, Journal of Communications Management  Vol 10 No 2 pp 211-226

Phillips, D. 2001 Managing Reputation in Cyberspace, Thorogood available online http://ebooksgo.org/computer/ManagingReputationinCyberspace.pdf

Phillips D & Young P. 2009 Online Public Relations Kogan Page

Ridley, M 2010 Humans: Why they Triumphed  Wall Street Journal http://farrington1600.wikispaces.com/file/view/WhyHumansTriumphed.pdf accessed Jan 2011

Shirky, C. 2010 Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Allen Lane

Stockholm Accords The Value of Public Relations and Communication Management 2010 http://www.wprf2010.se/draft-of-the-stockholm-accords/ accessed Feb 1011

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Zadeh, L The concept of a linguistic variable and its application to approximate reasoning  Information Sciences, Vol. 8, No. 3. (1975), pp. 199-249. doi:10.1016/0020-0255(75)90036-5 Key: citeulike:3929504

Zebaware http://www.zabaware.com/ accessed Feb 2011

In response to Tom Watson

Dear Tom. It is very kind of you to comment in such detail and to explicate the work of Bournemouth University in such detail.

I am concerned that you or anyone can imagine that I could possibly wish to imply that any PR academic or tutor is somehow cheating students and agree that such a view would be offensive. I do know how hard they work, their dedication to students and some of the absurdities they have to put up with.

I recall attempting to up-date a module about internet mediated PR and finding (I was told) that there was neither budget (time) nor sufficient flexibility in the system to make this possible in the year when Twitter burst upon us with all its potential for speed of communication and news gathering. The university in question could not provide any time for research, preparation or course development over and above direct teaching hours.

Of course one still finds this is the case in other courses demanding utilitarian approaches to education.

My original post came from a comment I made on Stephen Waddington's blog in which I expressed amazement "that the CIPR could not even refer to its own publications and the work of Gregory, Theaker, Tench and Yeomans and others".  I might have added Watson & Noble and Malony etc all of whose work is evident (truncated and sanitised) in the document.

I am aware of the time it takes to develop such theory to guide practice which is a million miles away from the 'shoot from the hip' methodologies propounded by oh so many people offering ill considered quick fire answers to real issues.

The CIPR Toolkit borrowed extensively from such research which in now inculcated into much practice and the Toolkit and yet failed to recognise the contribution made by academia.

I have no doubt that teaching budgets are tight. That is exactly my point. This narrow view of PR is in stark contrast to other courses and I am sure you are more aware than I of this short sightedness.

As you may have noted from other posts in this blog, my view is that the PR industry is firing well below its potential for want of vision (and consequentially is  performing at less than a fifth of its true potential). 

I agree that, for a majority of students, the year placement is a very valuable experience and great preparation for industry as well as that crucial final year transition from learning to thinking.

As for the level of research, while applauding the work of BU, and I do within the constraints imposed, you must agree that PR research in the UK is pretty small beer. For an industry sector that had  (in 1995) and has today and will again have in the next evolution of communication,  the potential to contribute as much or more than the financial sector to the UK economy we have to do much better.

Twice in the last 15 years, I have suggested a route for the industry which it has ignored to its cost (at best £100 billion, at worst £50 billion) and we now have a much greater opportunity.

Stirring the industry is hard when its sights are set so low and its opportunity to excel is not rigorously explored   (and I am in admiration for the History of Public Relations initiative which is strategically important and notably so for the UK industry).

Rigorous research into such opportunities are few and far between especially when compared to, say, the financial sector or even (am I allowed to say it), marketing (now in turmoil as a discipline), business studies (which are so good that its pupils saw a search engine more capable of automating car driving ahead of the auto industry) and publishing (which has the exemplar of the Times Group which has more difficulty gaining a market (and revenue) that a 140 character iPhone App).

Having, controversially, opened the debate I trust that it sparks some interest among many more people.

Richard I am grateful for your comment. I think you are right in saying that PR degree courses are under threat (as I well know) because they haven't necessarily reached the size or maturity of other, easier to teach, disciplines.  We now have size (more PR’s than Journalists?) but I agree about maturity, which is my point. PR academia has yet to delve into the potential and yet is not investing in the research. It is seriously cheap for the universities. Can one compare the (relative value and) cost of DNA research to knowing more about the nature of relationships (one of many PR disciplines) in this war torn and often starving world.

Duncan, I am surprised to find your comments relating so closely to the arts of Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire when your practice is promoted for rigorous research. But there is a solution. LMU used to have a skills course which taught the basic skills of PR agency. I hope you had an opportunity to employ them before the course was abandoned. 

Why does the PR industry ignore PR academics?

After a comment I made on his blog, Stephen Waddington, a candidate in the CIPR Council Elections, asked why is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? He notes that this is not the case in places such as Sweden and the US, for example?

Could it be that PR academics are wilting flowers? Is it that they follow rather than lead PR practice? Does this mean limited research that is none contentious? Is it the case that such milk and water teaching  and research reflects mostly recent (and largely American) history and is thus of so little consequence to the industry or are the reasons more profound?

Perhaps we should look inside the universities for its response. This is an era of rapidly changing platforms and channels for communication. Can the universities (and the PR industry) cope with the consequences? The hard science which explores the human brain to aid psychologist identify human drivers would seem to be beyond current teaching and hardly figures in PR courses or research. Computerised part of speech analysis which reveals semantically the values attaching to organisations and brands is becoming very advanced and yet PR academics seem to know so little about it. Access to technologies, that driver of human evolution, is changing the very nature of organisational structures and is better explored by other disciplines despite the obvious significance to PR practice. There are many other such issues facing all communications research. Have such changes pushed real PR beyond the limited wit of academia.

Maybe there is another reason. It is possible that the PR industry has been ripped off by academic administrators? The contribution undergraduate PR degree courses have made to Universities is huge. A real milch cow. Easy money. Cheap to run degree courses. Just under 200 PR students in one university contribute £600,000 from their own pockets every year. This means that diverted government contribution is funding other activities. This university is spending a fortune (£3.2 million) on teaching jobbing trades such as journalism, publishing, radio and TV.  Perhaps we await an academic who dares blow such a whistle?

Could it be that academia is truly frightened by the effort and (by historical standards very, very high) cost of the grants and sponsorship it needs to fund and execute ground breaking research for one of the key disciplines of modern management, namely Public Relations?

There could be a further conspiracy founded on the discipline taught in the universities being so threatening to the other institutions they dare not acknowledge the contribution? The PR trade association that publishes a guide that does not acknowledge its academic underpinning; the consultancy feeling more comfortable to provide safe haven for an ex FT journalist than a trained practitioner and the bank that employs a communications expert (even when provided with the evidence - PDF) is incapable of insisting that a breakdown in relationship and trust would lead to the collapse of the financial sector. These university taught practitioners are jolly dangerous folk!

Why, Stephen asked, is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? 

As part insider and part outsider, I think it is all these things and a few more. But the question still stands and perhaps, as universities re-examine their role, this is time for a proper and properly informed debate.

A small contribution for the Stockholm Accords

I am delighted at what I have seen of the Stockholm Accords

The dynamism of Toni Muzi Falconi is breathtaking and I am full of admiration for the efforts of Ronél Rensburg and Anne Gregory in their explication of the change that is taking place in the world today.

But I am not without concerns.

Perhaps, as we look to the next two or three years of PR practice it gives us a clue as to the life of the Acccord. It is a bold effort but, in my experience, will have a struggle to survive or have any impact.

My interest is in how the internet affects the world and PR in particular. I did predict its significance to the CIPR in 1995 and was involved in some of the papers for the now long forgotten 1999 CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (some of the papers are here and some are here Journal of Communication Management; Volume: 5; Issue: 2; 2000 ).

I am a practitioner, researcher and teacher and so am part of this industry. Part of me is agast at how little we regard the future. Students leave university with scant understanding of internet implications for their future work. At best they are told about something called 'Social Media' (a module that could equally be called etiquette). I see some agencies 'sliming down' because of the 'recession'.  They don't recognise that they are being by-passed. There is some form of belief in this industry of ours that the internet is, progresively, having a greater effect on our lives and has effects that mediate everyone's life. The big thinking concerns online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement. This is a linear view, a straight line graph of change.

The reality is much more potent.The influences brought about by the internet are not straight line, they are exponential. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will now be doubling every 11 hours. Some years ago Kevin Kelly explained the effects of exponential growth of hyperlinks in network rather well when he told of the prior and future 5000 days.

Some clue to this change can be seen in the consumer/tech cell phone in our pocket or handbag. The move from phone/text to email to hand held mobile computer has been quite quick and as quickly has become passe. Another clue may be found in changed consumer habits and annual growth of online retail sales of 25% plus every year. The biggest development is from, effectively, no cloud computing four years ago to common place corporate application with, in the UK, companies like Rentokil Initial replacing all their email into the cloud in two years, Insurance giant Aviva, Logistics firm Pall-Ex and Universal Music already implementing mass internal and extrernal communication in the cloud and tiny tiny organisations like mine with mega computing power for pennies.

Should it care to use it, the Centre for PR Studies at Leeds Met now has unlimited computing power available without making the lights dim. In the last month, the capability for my research into semantic public relations has moved from being stalled by the high levels of media coverage for the general election to being able to provide both semantic analysis of text and an automated taxonomy to find infered links. This is not a mega university reserach institute it is, literally, in a shed at the end of my garden.

In three years we will have both inference of relationships and predictability of discourse at very high levels of accuracy routinely using massive cloud computing power.

These capabilities will change how governments and societies operate because they will provide near complete radical transparency of every organisation. You and I will be able to find out the precise nature of the common values that hold disperate organisations, their financial backers, customers and other stakeholder in thier networks.

As for companies, so too for terrorists, wayward governments and so forth.

As the leading thinkers in the world explain in this video, we very nearly have the knowlege and we do have the computing power.

It may possibly be that it is the PR industry that benefits from these developments but linear thinking however ambitious the growth projection may be, is not enough.

From the values lecture, I gave in Lincoln four years ago to Bruno Amaral's Euprera discourse this year to cloud capacity for semantic PR development in the last month is pretty impressive.

But this thinking has drawbacks. It is not a conversation one can have with practitioners. They both could not understand nor have the inclination to want to stare so much change in the face. Equally, I know of only one Masters course world wide which is prepared to entertain such radical thought (I don't know of a PhD doing such work - but would be thrilled to find one).

It is for these reasons that I think the Accord, like the CIPR Internet Commission will need re-thinking from scratch in three years.

But it is a great start that can be developed in June.

Day 1 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)
This is not a full 24 hours so we can expect the returns to vary over a few days.

Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

What is most interesting is that this is already showing major differences. I am curious to know what happened to Gordon Brown in his own analysis?

Semantic Public Relations - a future PR discipline or just future PR?

Over the last week, a number of people have asked me to explain what I mean by Semantic Public Relations.

I could spend a lot of time writing a definition of semantics  or the semantic web.  I could show how the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee finds it all absorbing, why Google thinks its is essential to its future survival, and how some serious thinkers see how it is important for the future of society.

It's a much more fun to put on a practical demonstration. That is what I am going to do.

The demonstration will seek to show that it is possible to identify as a moment in time the key semantic notions that define a genre and individuals in the genre.

The methodology I shall apply is listed in this post but I shall also provide the practitioner with the tools that allow practitioners and researchers to replicate  the findings.

To ensure that this is a relevant case study, I shall take an example of major competitive public relations campaigns, the UK General Election. Specifically I shall look at the semantic similarities and differences of the three leaders: David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.

This is a big project and we are limited (by the technological challenge I face) to sampling the corpus. In the future we do not have to be limited by such constraints.

The methodology I am able to use is as follows.

• Every 40 minutes I shall use and automated bot to interrogate the internet to identify new web pages published in a day which mention each of the three major party leaders. I anticipate this will be of the order of 200,000/300,000 every day (or more). Of these I will select 1000 pages (citations) on the basis of number of views and mentions of the leaders in headlines and first paragraph. This content will include publicly available items of:  news media pages in online newspapers, magazines and other news outlets (offering news that is not hidden behind robot blocks and paywalls); blog posts, Twitter tweets, Social Network contributions, wiki pages, Bulletin Boards, discussion lists, List Serve, Sidewikis, comments about photographs and videos, slideshows and other web based pages.
• Each of these selected citations will be parsed (software available here) to extract the the contiguous text which will be retained for further analysis together with an audit trail giving date found and URL.
• Each citation will then be parsed using latent semantic indexing software which will identify the semantic concepts in each citation (here is software that you can use to extract concepts from web pages).
• I will then rank the concepts in order of frequency of use in the citations for each day. This will provide a rather boring list of words and their daily count.
• To make it easy to see the result and to compare the three Party Leaders, I will use a wordwall for visualisation purposes so that you can compare the most significant semantic concepts for each of the three selected leaders.
• These will be posted on this blog every day until polling day.

What do we anticipate this is going to show?

1. This is a proof of concept demonstration showing the semantic differences between the three competitors. 
2. This will show how using a sample of online content selected for its reach and readership the web reports the three campaigns.
3. The analysis will show how these citations represent an online view of the competitors' similarities and differences.
4. It shows how all manner of online influences can represent the three candidates.

As the evidence appears day by day, it will be interested if there is any advice that a PR professional would propose to a candidate based on what the online community is 'thinking'.

Of course some of the PR response will be based on the relationships at play; values that attach to the candidates and the extent to which these responses are driven by people who are motivated to do thinks (like post comments or vote?) and other factors.

Then, we have Semantic Public Relations.

I suspect that what I will be showing in this demonstration is that the online community is driving the agenda and what I think we will find is that the competitors are ignoring a large part of that agenda.

I suspect that the PR response that I hope you will provide will be in near real time and will interpret the results as part of a process in working out what future, internet mediated, ubiquitous interactive communication will look like for effective PR practice.

Enjoy.

It should be remembered that the methodology has not been fully tested (mostly so that it can be available quickly for the CIPR SM committee to see how the internet is moving on and in support of Philip Sheldrake's work). If this was to be a research project to provide a research base for PR practice, it would be conducted differently But this is a nice demo (and, of course, I am very happy to help anyone who wants to do this work for the PR sector).

Developing Post Digital PR Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Monitoring Tool - Real Time

Greg Cohn is the Director Strategy & Business Development at Yahoo! Today, he is making a big thing about Real Time Web and I am delighted.

The reason I am thrilled is that a company I am associated with, Klea Global, has launched a Real Time Monitoring service called NextMention. The basic service is free... as you would expect and a raft of commercial services are due out soon.

What is does is simple. It monitors everything. News, Blogs, Twitter, social networks, web sites, Google's Sidewiki and lots more and if your organisation or issue is mentioned it alerts you. The alert can be by instant messenger or email and for paid for services by SMS, Skype and lots of other communications channels and platforms.

For PR, monitoring clients 360 degrees of internet content is a big deal. You will be surprised at how much there is.

Twitter hath murdered time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Relations is changing fast.

The Ethics of AVE’s

There are elements of the publicity industries that use Advertising Value Equivalents described by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication as the "Equivalent cost of buying space devoted to editorial content".

As I wrote in "Evaluating Press Coverage" in 1995.

"The relationships between reader and publication and between editor and reader is symbiotic, and invited with permission by advertisers - advertising value equivalent (AVE) and editorial are not the same and you can't use the same tools to measure effectiveness. There is no advertising equivalent to editorial nor is there a measure of advertising avoided because of editorial coverage. There is no common measure for advertising and editorial. Measurable factors include whether it is timely compelling, relevant, useful authoritative."

Today I would add 'in context'. These arguments would have a lot more traction these days.

This year I was criticised for my work on online advertising opportunity by Katie Paine who obviously had not read my views on the relationship between advertising and editorial but, these days, her views are quite valid.

The contribution of Jim Macnamara, Professor of Public Communication University of Technology Sydney, is one of the most significant (PDF).

There is very good research into PR evaluation here and there are some excellent blogs on the subject which are listed on Katie's blog under 'Best Sources for more measurement info'

Well, now we know where I stand.

Now for the Ethics part.

I suppose its worth looking at different approaches to ethics and ethical behaviour.

Ethics in PR is quite complicated and I outline some of the considerations in slides to accompany my ethics lectures to undergraduates.

AVE's are a utilitarian approach to publicity. They provide happiness and least pain for the greatest number of people involved. Namely the agency and the client managers involved. However the consequentionalist use of AVE's, if determined solely by consequences or production of the greatest good consequences and least bad, have to be considered as does the need for everyone affected to have universal and equal consequential benefit. If you like, this might be how John Stuart Mill, might take a view of AVE's. He might like them especially because of the quality of happiness they bring to so many.

All well and dandy, until one begins to apply Bentham's theory. If AVE's are not proven and the company auditor says they cannot be added to the value of the company's goodwill, then they are bad from an ethical standpoint even from a utilitarian perspective.

A Kantian view would ask if such actions are universalisable. If they are, then they would apply in every case. We know this is not possible (how would one apply AVE's to a BBC post on one of its many blogs?).

Bernard Williams would, of course have a fit. He would see the doctrine of negative responsibility for the fact that AVE's are OK as a measure but only among a small clique of publicist as an affront.

Perhaps we should use descriptive ethics and do what people think is right. We might choose normative ethics and ask how should people (practitioners) act or perhaps we might consider applied ethics and take moral knowledge and put it into the practice of using AVE's.

So where do PR practitioner get guidance?

The CIPR code of conduct asks of members to respect the customs, practices and codes of clients, employers, colleagues, fellow professionals and other professions in all countries where they practise.

Thus it would seem that if a client likes to use AVE's that's fine and ethically utilitarian.

On the other hand the Institute says its members deal honestly and fairly in business with employers, employees, clients, fellow professionals, other professions and the public. This would suggest that practitioners will honestly reflect the advertising value of editorial coverage and will apply integrity (part of the code) by checking the reliability and accuracy of information before dissemination. That makes AVE's bad ethics.


This is not unlike the PRCA code which says its members have a positive duty at all times to respect the truth and shall not disseminate false or misleading information knowingly or recklessly, and to use proper care to avoid doing so inadvertently.

And PRCA member agencies also must have regard to all the circumstances of the specific situation and in particular the complexity of the issue, case, problem or assignment, and the difficulties associated with its completion such as, for example, measuring editorial as though it was some form of advertising.

Now, if we take the view of people like Jim Macnamara that there is no such thing as editorial and advertising equivalency add to it a view of ethics (utilitarian or otherwise) then members of the CIPR and PRCA will not use AVE's because it is unethical.

Is there then an ethical case for using AVE's and is it ethical to use them in contravention of the codes of conduct which are the ethical basis of membership of the professional bodies?

At a time when the banks and UK parliamentarians are facing ethics issues as never before the questions associated with AVE's are significant, as is much management practice, now a potential problem for the practice of publicists and public relations practitioners.

An (online) Advertising Potential Value

How much is the page worth where your online content has appeared?

Interesting idea?

Most of us have seen advertisement in online newspapers. They now form a significant part of publishing revenues.

In exploring the price of online newspaper advertising, it is no great leap of logic to try to attempt to satisfy the question of the difference between price and value.

This is quite an open and transparent market. The rates are published and in a form that equates exposure and price. This suggests that the market is not just active but transparent as well. The Guardian article yesterday puts this space into perspective even if it is gloomy about the prospects for the publishing industry.

Value and price, measured using the exchange rate of monetary currency, would seem to be a reasonable measure for online newspaper advertising.

But it is not a good currency for editorial and social content. There do not seem to be transparent markets or effective exchange rates that convert online conversations into a currency that can be used in most modern commercial environments.

In this research project, I have taken the price of online newspaper advertising and by using the published rates, numbers of visitors from ABCe and have worked through an Alexa comparison of user visits. This has given me an algorithm to provide a figure that would project the value of an advertisement on web pages that are not online newspapers.

In other words if you were going to advertise on that page, how much would it cost you?

If you like, an Advertising Potential Value!

In testing, I have played the results back into online newspapers and the results are pretty good. The formula got within 5% for the Telegraph and Guardian and within 10% of the price charged by Mirror Group.

I know that context is different and I know that web pages are optimised for purpose and thus not all web pages would be suitable to carry advertisements (and many blog pages and other content is not suitable either). I am also aware of the issues we have as between different web sites indexed by Alexa. This is not going to be a micron accurate measure but is will be, at worse, indicative.

However, this allows me to test an approximation of advertising value potential for web pages were they in competition with newspapers for advertising revenues.

NOTE: the return you get will be the value based on the UK audience figures only. The global equivalent will be bigger and based on a different base point.

Over the next few days, I will build a widget so that you too can have a look at the results and will post it here.

The Value of Online Content

So you ‘Goole’ your company to find that Google has indexed 200,000 pages that have a reference to it.

These references have a value. Some are pages on your web site; others will be orphaned pages, some are pages that reference your organisation because you have a commercial link arrangement. Some are references in newspapers and magazines that have written about the organisation because of PR or other newsworthy activities and some will be blog post, LinkedIn references, information sharing sites, YouTube videos, Twitter mentions, social network reference and there will be a lot of others too.

Some of these references will link back to your organisation’s websites/s and many will be a mention in passing.

Individually and collectively, all these mentions have a value. They are assets even though they do not appear on the balance sheet. Without them, your organisations will be invisible to most people who want to know about your organisation and others that do have such links will have a competitive advantage.

The problem we have is finding out what this asset is worth.

Worth can only be established at a time of transaction between a willing seller and a willing buyer and as most online references are not monetary by nature we face a problem in valuation.

The big problem is in knowing the nature of the currency.

A mention of an organisation in a blog post or a visible sign in the background of a Flickr photo provide brand presence but may not have any intent to offer value (monetary or otherwise) by the publisher or, conversely, the intention may be absolutely commercial in intent.

In PR, we have always had a problem of converting such intangibles into monetary values. It is why some practitioners use Advertising Values, a very rough and ready (and mostly misleading) transmogrification from one set of values into another in an attempt to find a common monetary currency.

Online there are a number of transactions that have monetary value. For example, we know the cost of advertising on the web pages of newspapers. There is the value of Pay Per Click advertising which is well established as well. The price of banners and other commercial online devices are pretty easy to ascertain.

However, they have the same problem that editorial in newspapers have. They apply to advertising and only in a tiny fraction of web sites and internet channels.

 It would seem that the problem we have in identifying the value of online assets is pretty complicated.

 Working with my friend Girish Lakshminarayana  I have been looking at ways we can approach this problem and over the next few months hope to find currencies and a means of developing currency conversion that will allow us to offer robust metrics.

It will not be easy but there are some ideas that we have that make me think this is doable.

In the meantime, we will also be looking for examples of expression of relationship and the currencies that apply.

If there is PhD student out there who would like to join the fun, let me know.

PR - Is it about relationship management?

Tomorrow, thanks to Mafalda Eiró-Gomes (who is always so charming), I will be giving a lecture on the role of Public Relations as a relationship management discipline at the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal. My chairman is Nadim Habib, Managing Director of Hill and Knowlton Portugal who I am looking forward to meeting.

I shall begin with a hypothesis about what happens if an organisation loses its relationships with its publics, how much would it cost?

I thought that I would quote Sir William Rees-Mogg's article in the Times today where he recalls the story of the Clydesdale Bank many years ago and the first Mr McAlpine. He writes: “When asked for security for a loan to develop his building company, Mr McAlpine turned up at the bank with a group of his sons. The bank lent on the security of the character and potential of those young men. This turned out to be very good business for the bank and made possible the success of the McAlpine business.”

He continues: “Where relationship banking still survives, there have been relatively few problems of bad debts. The problems have arisen in transactional and unsecured credit card banking with one-off or completely unknown customers. Of course the customers have often behaved badly; if a bank does not know its customers, who are only blips on a computer screen, some of them will behave badly. The bank only has itself to blame.”

The loss of relationships has serious consequences.

The loss of relationships between banks and their depositors and between banks is casting a long and very black shadow across the world and thus, I shall explore the nature of public relations as a relationship management discipline.

Perhaps now we should accept that relationships both personal and corporate are precious assets but where does such wealth come from, what is its nature of the relationship asset and how extensive is this value?

Furthermore, in organisations, who has the role of relationship understanding and management?

For much of its history, public relations in one guise or another has claimed this space and now there is evidence that economist, accountants, marketers, knowledge managers and, all of a sudden, bankers, also seek to understand and deploy relationship value in the organisational context. But the idea of ‘relationships with publics’ is inherent in public relations theory and practice. Its management is sought by many practitioners.

Now, more than at any time since the Great Depression, we need to reflect on the nature of relationship management and who has the corporate responsibly for its governance.

In extending the concepts in Ledingham (Ledingham et al 2000), the paper embeds the practice of public relations deeper into management. As such, it becomes the function for wealth creation and, with misuse, for its loss. In this respect one examines relationships beyond Grunig's and Huang's view that “Public relations makes organizations more effective by building relationships with strategic publics (Grunig and Huang in Ledingham 2000) and views relationship management in a more potent role within the organisation by acting upon its wider intangible and tangible assets to meet corporate value protection and value enhancing objectives.

In the tradition of public relations as relationship management process exposing organisational assets to affective publics to affect wealth, I argue that we need a re-definition of organisations in an era where they are becoming more porous, to an extent more transparent, and with high levels of contracted out services and global partners.

In turn, this points to a practice that accepts relationships as both valuable in their own right and pivotal to wealth generation.

From this postulate, the concept opens up the practice of public relations to offer solutions to the new forms of management in the creation of wealth.

Accompanying the lecture is a 7000 word paper re-worked from the one I gave at the Alan Rawl conference in 2006. It is now even more pertinent and explored the economic value of relationships from a number of perspectives.

Image from Farsight http://www.farsightglobal.co.nz

Experimenting with web monitoring

In this era of social media management, we are often asked to monitor everything online.

The drawback is normally that we have to monitor the world to find out stuff that really only applies to a few counties or even just one. In addition, there are now so many different channels for communication, that we end up with some pretty complicated RSS fees and searches that it has become very time consuming and especially so when monitoring for multiple issues, brands or names.

There is another way. We can monitor everything that is newly indexed by search engines.

They limit what can be found by area, number of citations and a whole host of other limitations or simply do not index enough of the web each day to offer reliable data and, worse still the volumes can be very high.


Over the next few days, I will be doing tests on the pre-alpha edition of new software that, I hope will resolve most of these problems.

It is a programme that, theoretically finds new pages about a search term each day in individual countries.

The returns will, of course, include new entries in all manner of web pages but the experience we are gaining is helpful for future development.

There is a case for monitoring all new citations to provide comprehensive intelligence about a brand which can then be drawn into the online conversation.

Here are the first few returns for a test I did today for Yahoo and they give some idea as to where we have reached so far.

NKorea off US blacklist after nuke inspection deal - Yahoo! News After North Korea relented on nuclear inspection demands, the US on Saturday erased from a terrorism blacklist the communist country President Bush once ...
Yahoo Launches Analytics : ISEdb.COM As its latest attack to Google's supremacy in the search engine business, Yahoo! recently launched its own Web Analytics tool, a Web application enabling ...
Icahn Once Again Trying To Throw Yahoo's Yang Out On Ear? A reader insists that Carl Icahn is polling Yahoo's institutional investors to gauge support for another go at a palace coup (specifically, throwing Jerry ...
YouTube offers full-length CBS shows : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech We've told you about Joost, Hulu, and Veoh, but all these sites may soon be forgotten now that YouTube has signed a deal with CBS and will start offering ...
Yahoo Developer Network at Future of Web Apps London (Yahoo ... This is an account from the perspective of us as exhibitors - there'll be coverage of the talks attended by Yahoos - Rajat Pandit to be exact - later on. ...
Yahoo seen as declining, while Microsoft looms : Technology ... SEATTLE - When Yahoo Inc. co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang spurned Microsoft Corp.' s rich buyout offer this spring, he promised that brighter days in Sunnyvale ...
Gamble fuels Burton's victory - NASCAR - Yahoo! Sports Opting to take fuel only on his final pit stop helped Jeff Burton win the Bank of America 500 and put himself back in title contention. - NASCAR news.


We can refine this quite a lot already but are the findings comprehensive.

I hope to find out over the next few hours.

Helpful ideas and suggestions will be welcome.