Concerning that complex whole which creates cultural acceptance for people including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society to contribute values through the creation of effective relationships and safe productive environments.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Can PR use ROI as a form of measurement? Its harder than you think
Professor Tom Watson at Bournemouth, Richard Bailey at Leeds Metropolitan University and my co author Philip Young at Sunderland have all made interesting contributions to PR thinking ahead of the the CIPR’s new Research and Development Unit (R&DU) meeting next week.
Before entering into the debate on Grunigian theory presented by Richard and Philip, I wanted to respond to Tom's point.
Tom makes a point: "I still have doubts as to whether ROI, other than in a strictly financial format, can be re-purposed into a more general expression of value creation or contribution to organisational efficiency. Business managers understand what ROI is, so why would they accept a mixed-concept PR ROI."
It is important. As AMEC boldly goes for some form of measurement of PR providing a return on investment. There seems to be a belief that ROI is a simple idea.
It would seem there is a belief that ROI is a financial measure. Of course it is not. ROI is a profoundly Public Relations measure.
Lets have a look at what ROI is. It is defined in accounting terms as:
(Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment) divided by (Cost of Investment)
Can we pause for a moment and explore what 'Investment' means. Investment requires that an organisation has cash flow, capital reserves or some other asset that can be deployed as an investment.
Organisations comprise three principle assets: capital, proprietary process and/or service and relationships. The acquisition of capital, and development of process or service; 'vision, mission and corporate objectives' (Kaplan 2001) are a function of relationships.
It follows that to invest in anything, an organisation needs relationships of a nature that can be invested.
So lets re-draw what ROI means:
(Gain from Relationships minus Cost of Relationships) divided by (Cost of Relationships).
ROI is profoundly about relationships. In an industry called 'Public Relations', this could be of interest. In a sector called 'marketing communications' it will be pivotal because Marcoms depends on 'public relation' to optimise relationships to create capital and cash flow to pay for this, a special area of relationship management, namely marketing. In principle the same applies to the trade of 'Corporate Affairs' and other trades associated with 'Public Relations' in practice.
Which takes us back to Richard and Philip and the Grunigian excellence model coming from systems theory. We can, if we desire stay with the systems theory view because already have a grounded reserach into the nature of relationships in the work of Bruno Amaral (2009).
This, Amaral, hypothesis is that relationships are formed at the nexus of values and using latenet semantic analysis was able to show that where there is a nexus of semantic values there is very strong evidence that they are central to the formation of convergent relationships.This empirical research supports conclusions as to the impact of public relations as relationship management offered, by Ledingham and Bruning (2002).
Convergent values relationships have some resonance with the Grunigian position of Publics forming round issues but in the Amaral study, it was less issues as values that were key which is a broader construct.
What we have done is to extend and develop the ideas of Grunig and Ledingham and Bruning to identify an empirically based idea of what public relations can be which accommodates both theoretical perspectives.
Can we now re-draw ROI yet again.
(Gain from Nexus of Values minus Cost of Nexus of Values) divided by (Cost of Nexus of Values).
Of course, I have only taken one view as to the nature of relationships namely the empirical research of Bruno Amaral. There will be others drawn from Psychology to the Evolutionary Sciences.
What I hope to have shown is that the theoretical concepts of Public Relations have moved on and that we can, should we wish, pursue ROI but that it will require more than an AMEC Commission to come to any meaningful conclusion unless there is a great deal more by way of, notably academic, research.
And the there is the problem of getting such ideas into the heads of the PR industry's clients. But that is another story.
RS Kaplan Nonprofit management and Leadership, 2001 - Wiley Online Library
Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, 1992 IABC Research Foundation Edited by James E. Grunig
Relationship management in public relations: dimensions of an organization-public relationship (1992) John A. Ledingham and Stephen D. Bruning Public Relations Review Volume 24, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 55-65
Thursday, February 24, 2011
How can academia serve the emerging PR paradigm?
Within Europeans online is a deeper need to interact and combined with e-commerce this exceeds a nominal value of 2.250 trillion euros!
It has a role in satisfying these deep needs buried in humanity’s genetic makeup.
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.
From Twitter to Skype and leavened by Slideshare and YouTube, we can see these effects in our everyday lives.
It is already used by online music stores like LastFM to focus the right content to individuals.
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!
An easily wasted opportunity, robust research and development would be very helpful in this area. .
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.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Public Relations - define
For some time I have been thinking about the role of the practitioner in a bank.
It re-defines Public Relations.
I suppose the role of the PR Manager (Public Affairs Chief, Top wogga with some similar title but responsible for PR, CSR, IR, and other acronyms that really mean Public Relations) is now forever changed.
This person really only has one role.
It is to be able to assure the executive, main Board and the regulators (all organisations bend a knee to one or more regulator)that the relationship in any proposed or actual transaction between actors who can affect the long term productivity of the organisation, is robust enough to survive the transaction.
It is really quite simple.
It is probably too rich for CIPR, PRCA and other such organisations.
It will be usurped by Charles Handy and the management guruship.
It is as good for all types of PR from press relations to so called social media relations and sponsorship of the local soccer club.
I just do not know why it has taken me so long to get it!
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Content Is not King - discuss
"Very few gold prospectors made money in the gold rush of 1849; the people who got rich were those who sold Levi's, buckets, shovels and related equipment.
During the dot-com boom, we repeatedly heard the call, "content is king." It was said that those who created compelling content would be the winners in the Internet economy, even while online publications were bleeding money. Even as news organizations were laying off reporters and offering others buy-outs, we were told that content was king.
Yet the people who made money from the dot-com boom were the manufacturers of router and network equipment, web servers and infrastructure related products and services. Those who built the Internet itself did well. The content creators took a bath....."
I agree that content is not the king it may once have been. I disagree with all the rest.
Press Agentry is not public relations.
The value of PR is not derived from content or from relationships derived through third parties (journalists, blogger.com or even Twitter).
The real value of PR is in the ability to understand the nature and value of relationships (of all kinds) to and within an organization and the ability to plan, manage and optimise the organization's ability to benefit from relationships.
Creating and selling-in content has its excitements but public relations, the planned management of organisational relationship optimisation, is a service upon which all organizations depend for survival.
No relationship—no organization.
Public relations provides the service that, among other things, offers a living to content creators.
The role of risk, opportunity and uncertainty management in relationship development has to be a highly developed management science.
Journalism and blogging, even communications, are not Public Relations they are just tools to be deployed.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
"This is your audience you want to attack, fool"
Apparently not happy with how negotiations are going with YouTube and MySpace, Universal CEO Doug Morris is threatening action over what he sees as copyright infringement of Universal's music videos illegally posted to sites. He told an investor conference:
We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars. "How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.
Them's fightin' words says Business2Blog. To which media critic/blogger Jeff Jarvis responds:
This is your audience you want to attack, fool. They are marketing and distributing your music for you. Don’t want them to? Fine. Plenty more where you came from.
Media executives are realizing that there is a lot of advertising money to be made from online videos and their attitude is to try to grab as much of it as they can. But the YouTubes of the world are saying, "Wait a second. Don't just slap ads on this. The videos are a form of marketing in and of themselves."
Monday, August 14, 2006
Stakeholders matter - Sir John Sunderland
Last July, Sir John, currently President of the CBI, talked about the nature of Stakeholderism as it applies today to the Henley Parnership meeting where he gave the keynote address. I have extracted some interesting paragraphs.
What he said is realy the job description of the Corporate Public Relations Chief. Here are words that are wise for all companies and all practitioners in Public Relations in the 21st Century, even if now he may wish he had a public relations member of the Board to add professionally qualified strategy to Group corporate and external affairs.
"Today business is expected to engage with a vast crowd of poorly defined newcomers – its so-called stakeholders. And in the UK, for the first time, these newcomers are set to acquire formal rights over businesses if the Company Law Reform Bill becomes law. It will oblige directors not only to safeguard the financial interests of the companies they serve but also to have regard to their employees, customers and suppliers – and to nurture communities and the environment – in every decision they make.
"In complete contrast to its original meaning to a present-day business a stakeholder can be someone with no formal relationship to it and no obligations towards it - whatever.
"A stakeholder means anyone and any group affected by the activities of an organization.
"A few years ago the US Corps of Engineers found it necessary to define its stakeholders. It listed the Army, the Air Force the Administration, Congress employees, the environmental community, trade unions clients, the media, state and local governments professional organizations, architect-engineer firms, construction companies “and others.” Building bridges to these groups has become almost as important to the Corps as building real ones over rivers.
"Almost anyone can be a stakeholder: it is as easy as posting an entry on the Internet. I did a Google search recently on GM Foods and it produced 6.4 million hits. The entries ranged from governments and scientific bodies to NGOs, pressure groups and individuals. 6.4 million self-appointed stakeholders, and, through Google democracy, each gets the same weight. Even interests which cannot use the Internet – like endangered species – can become stakeholders if the media and pressure groups appoint themselves on their behalf. Through environmental pressure groups, the planet itself has been turned into a stakeholder.
"Essentially, these new stakeholders are claimants, who take no account of how their demands on business will be met. They are mostly unelected and unaccountable and think only of their own constituency.
"Even without the complications of this Bill, the arrival of new stakeholders has dramatically complicated business strategy and relationships with traditional stakeholders, particularly consumers and owners.
"... even consumers and owners have become highly disparate groups of people with conflicting interests which modern business is often hard to put to identify, let alone reconcile.
"Consumer markets are increasingly segmented, not only in conventional ways (region, age, income, class, gender, family status and so on) but in their means of accessing goods and services (conventional shopping, or home delivery, or online). Consumers have also segmented themselves in more elusive ways – in their self-perception and their relationship to products and brands.
"Consumers have a limitless ability to re-invent themselves: one minute caring, the next selfish; one minute self-indulgent, the next self-improving; one minute proud of their origins, the next aspiring to be something new. It has always been a challenge for business to search for new consumers whilst retaining the loyalty of the old. The volatility of modern consumers makes this challenge even more acute and with it the penalties of failure.
"Moreover, this volatility has made consumers even more vulnerable to being got at by other stakeholders particularly government and pressure groups.
"The complexities of consumer relationships are matched by those of investor relationships. One is the sheer number of investors in any public company and the disparity in their power, status and interests. Every shareholder, across the world, is entitled to reports and communication – in itself a significant cost to business. Investors range in size from individuals with a few shares to massive institutions.
"Institutional and large-scale investors review these options every day even second by second in today’s instant, always-open global markets.
"Adding to the complexity, we now have the twin phenomena of the ethical consumer and the ethical investor. These people select from the myriad of available goods and services and investments those which give them the greatest moral satisfaction. Some get professional advice, from ethical investment funds but many more take their information from pressure groups, through the Internet and from each other. The Company Law Reform Bill would give such investors new power without giving them any additional responsibility towards other investors or towards other stakeholders in business. There is nothing to stop such investors taking instructions from pressure groups even those who actually want to undermine the company in which they have bought shares.
"So much for consumers and investors. What of another traditional stakeholder – the employee? Employee relationships too are more complex than ever before. Most major companies have global workforces and every major company now has the possibility of acquiring a global workforce through outsourcing. With or without outsourcing operations, more and more companies are turning to more flexible employment patterns including part-time working and short-term contracts.
"Increasingly, companies survive or prosper because of the talent they command in their workforces, their accumulated knowledge and experience allied to their capacity to create new ideas and with them to conquer new markets.
"Joining ethical consumers and ethical investors are ethical employees – people able to choose an employer who gives them a sense of worth.
"All of these factors give business a huge task in managing relationships and many of them also apply to relationships with suppliers of intermediate goods and services. As with labour forces, global companies have to manage global supply chains with no common interest and subject to disparate laws, customs and practices. It is why our human rights and ethical trading initiatives are so important and followed so closely at Board level.
"Consumers, shareholders, employees, suppliers: all of these present challenges as stakeholders even though they have formal and defined links with business. But how much more complex is it to manage stakeholders without formal links who define their relationship with business in their own terms?
"Let’s examine these.
"The first is government. People still talk about “the government” – but government is not singular but multi-layered. If you do business in London you deal with no fewer than five layers: your local council, the Mayor and Assembly, the shadowy Government Office for London, central government, and the EU. None of these bodies have the same agenda and they are elected or appointed by different methods and on different timetables. And as well there is the plethora of quangos and other publicly-funded busybodies who have relationships with business.
"Within each layer of government different departments have different interests. Indeed a single department can sometimes harbour diametrically opposed interests.
"Now let us add to the stakeholder stew the media, pressure groups, NGOs and the law. All these groups have their own interests and priorities, but they feed off each other and of course off government and they all feed off the climate of suspicion which surrounds business in many countries.
"The law, especially in the United States, has become an independent stakeholder as a direct beneficiary of any stakeholder activity which results in legislation or litigation. Moreover, lawyers can now define their own relationship with business and other stakeholders. They can choose to defend business from the claims of other stakeholders or to offer them a means of pursuing those claims through the courts – a phenomenon vastly expanded by the arrival of contingency fees.
"The media, particularly the new flourishing Internet media, are more ready to circulate hostile stories about business.
"Through their relationships with government, media and the law pressure groups and NGOs have become powerful in their own right. Their claims to represent local communities and other interests are often unverified: all that matters is that government (or media or the law) accept them. From that moment on, the pressure group becomes automatically a stakeholder.
"Pressure groups and NGOs also benefit from an asymmetry between their reputations and that of business. If a pressure group plants an inaccurate story or launches a frivolous lawsuit the worst that can happen to it is to be thought misguided or misinformed. (It may even enjoy the halo of martyrdom if it goes down in court). For business, the inaccurate story or the frivolous lawsuit can damage a company or brand reputation which may have taken decades of investment and effort to establish.
"Stakeholder demands, especially from government, have also required major new governance processes and more importantly they have required the entire business organization to understand and commit itself to high standards of business conduct. Nothing wrong with that.
"There are no simple answers but I think that businesses will not go far wrong if they base their strategy on five simple elements.
"The first is self-confidence. Business should always believe that its core activities are worthwhile and represent a contribution to society.
"The second is consistency. Business process, values and statements should be constantly understood, constantly applied.
"The third is engagement with other stakeholders. Even at their most interfering and self-righteous other stakeholders can have a genuine interest in the decisions it makes and very often genuine new insights.
"Indeed, I believe that business itself should behave like a responsible stakeholder – a legitimate and necessary interest group in all the societies in which it operates. Business should display the same persistence and clarity in expressing its views – if not the same self-righteousness – as the pressure groups and NGOs with whom it has to contend. Indeed I believe that business is the natural defender of values which are deeply cherished in world society including the rule of law, protection against arbitrary power, freedom of thought and expression and social mobility. Let us act as stakeholders for those values wherever we operate.
"For the fourth I will paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: you cannot be loved by all of the people all of the time and business needs to recognize this.
"Fifthly, I believe that business must keep uppermost the vital importance of its and its brands reputation.
"Finally, we have to recognize that stakeholder proliferation and its management paradox is a permanent reality. There is no point grumbling about it. As a business grows its markets and activities, it inevitably engages with more interests in local, national and global society. The complexities this causes should be counted as part of the price of our success."
Picture: Sir John Sunderland President of the CBI