The Conversation - developing a digital strategy part 2

This is the second part of a story which is the synthesis of a number of recent conversations in contributing to thinking of PR strategies.

Mary T who has worked in PR for a generation, the client, represents a number of very talented people entering the realm of internet mediated public relations.

In the first conversation Mary T explained that she suspected that very soon she will be asked to present a plan for her company to rapidly move towards being involved in the wider aspects of online public relations.

We covered some of the aspects that worry a number of organisations only to discover that the organisation had already synthesised many of the issues surrounding digitisation of corporate function over the years. In many respects the issue was of bringing practices uptodate rather then creating new capabilities.

Concerns about outsourcing and passing some control to third parties was put into a wider coporrate strategy context.  

The nature of and implementation of effective internal communication did require some deeper considerations as a consequence of the ubiquity digital communication among employees as well as all other stakeholders.

Mary T’s intern was taking notes and creating a first draft of the Digital Strategy document, Mary would submit to the Board.

In the second conversation, we explored the fundamentals required for approaching the market.

Board Drivers

Mary knew that most of the impetus behind the Board asking for her opinions about the effect of social media on the company was driven by news that online retail sales in the United Kingdom increased 15% year on year in  September 2011. This was worth some £5.5 billion pounds (total retail sales were £31.9 billion). This was in contrast to high street sales which posted a sales increase of a miserly 0.3% according to the British Retail Consortium. The ripple effect throughout the supply chain was not missed on the Board.

The Board had also not missed that  in September 2011 computer information, royalties and license fees showed positive growth (and positive balance of payments)  for nine quarters with turnover growth of £468 million per quarter indicating that  internet based trade was in very positive territory.

Mary, who as a senior PR practitioner was both privy to, and knew only too well that these hard data drive Board thinking.

For a company which  manufactures and licences some manufacturing and sells to wholesale, retail and direct to consumers there is always pressure to focus on where the customers are.

Pretty obviously, the market place now includes an online element. In some instances, the internet has supplanted traditional markets. In other cases, there are new applications for traditional retail and wholesale sales and marketing activities ( Debenhams launched a home catalogue to boost online sales).

Fundamental marketing considerations

In principle, we are aware that selling can be direct to consumer, via a sales agent, retailer, wholesaler, subsidiary company, dealer, distributor. Over the years marketing management had exploited the optimum sales structures. Today, there are a range of regulations that also affect such decisions, not the least EU rules that apply (EU Vertical Agreements Block Exemption Regulation - and accompanying Guidelines).

In addition, there is a need to consider the nature of of Internet Transparency, Porosity and Agency as described by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations/Public Relations Consultants’ Association  Internet Commission (2000) when looking at the optimum sales channels.

To acquire markets and preserve margins there is a need to build trust in the retail chain from producer to consumer and beyond.

With abundant, internet mediated, information about the supply (and value) chain for every form of product and service, much of what an organisation does is evident, even visible to consumers and a very wide range of stakeholders and publics.

There are advantages in organisations being more transparent about products, services and practices. Such policies engender trust and commitment among consumers. Transparency, reports Investor’s Chronicle  is becoming more and more important and also a source of competitive advantage. Supported by a lot of research (from different sources such as Imperial College to PWC), there is significant evidence suggesting strategic adoption of transparency practices is a good thing.

In practice, what this means is that product service and price is discussed by external stakeholders over which the organisation has no control but which is influenced by trusted sources and in turn offers trust across the network.

The inevitable result is that radical transparency (exposing ever more information) has its limitations (see Phillips & Young). and there are consequences. Does the organisation want to expose its supply chain, pricing and other information to all stakeholders including competition? If such information is available will it undermine specification and price differentials that are the lifeblood for success of  agents, dealers, distributors and sales subsidiaries?

Mary could synthesis this into strategy in which the Board would need the company to develop capabilities to explicate procurement, production, distribution and pricing practices to the satisfaction of stakeholders, for example customers, prospects and the people and institutions that influence them, notably online. That is not to say that such considerations need undermine specification considerations or price but they need to be managed for optimum (not maximum) effect. We realise this is quite a complex concept for most managers.

In turn such considerations may affect the sales structure strategies acceptable to both Board and consumer. The public relations recommendation to the Board will invite the marketing managers to take a fundamental approach to the evolution of marketing development based on acceptable levels of transparency to provide volume, margins and an atmosphere among consumers that will engender greater trust.

The transparent organisation

The simple idea that any one and everyone can, but do not necessarily (do they have an issue that creates such interest?),  follow everything that the company is and does online means that the organisation has to make an assumption that every stakeholder and every interested person and group is watching and potentially contributing to company information.

This has significant consequences for the company brand. The brand values given to an organisation spring from what the company represents.

The Vision, Values and Mission of the organisations have to be intellectually honest and clear. If not, with so many potential interested parties and multiplicity of stakeholder agenda’s,  they  will provide an opportunity for third party interpretation leading to diversion and obfuscation.  The Vision, Values and Mission are corporate brand attributes at the heart of every living organisation.

Here Mary could relate to the demands of the marketing managers. They too need this framework for product and brand management.

Marketers instinctively know that  other forms of branding need to be as robust and need to be burnished to ensure that all online (and offline) activity is focused on the single corporate brand concept. Perhaps one needs to go no further than the Forbes article by Jeremiah Owyang, “Greenpeace Vs. Brands: Social Media Attacks To Continue”. It show just how vulnerable organisations can be and the extent to which corporate values need to be thought through.

In addition, with 87% of respondents to a recent survey claiming that positive information they read online has reinforced their decision to buy a product or service that was recommended to them, online reputation is becoming important. Between 2010 and 2011 showed a change in how negative buzz affects consumer buying decisions. In 2011, 80% of respondents (up from 68% in 2010) stated that negative information they read online has made them change their minds about purchasing a product or service that was recommended to them.

The reputation of an organisation online needs to be part of the digital strategy consideration.For the head of public relations this was helpful because it showed the link between reputation and online strategy and why is was so significant.

Organisation are visible in many ways. The shop front pictured in Picasa or Facebook perhaps demonstrates the extent to which traditional and digital are interlocked across so many media. Brand management on and offline needs to be cherished.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34488867957

The extent to which Board members and employees are exposed online is another consideration. While it is often in the interest of an organisation to enjoy the exposure and public commitment of employees in, lets say, social media such transparency brings with it corporate responsibility to support such employees and their circle from those who would do them harm on and off line as a consequence - forever.

As with people, so too with corporate assets.

This, conceptually, is not new. Organisations have traditionally used security services, some in-house and some contracted, to provide security. Strategically this needs to be extended in the digital age as an element of Corporate Responsibility.

Shop windows

As our discussions develop we discover that there are a lot of touch points for all stakeholders. With so much happening in so many places, it is probably a good idea to think of each as a company shop window, or at least a smart reception.

Of course, on each visit occasion the organisation will want to impress the visitor.

In addition, the company will want to prompt the visitor (or employee) to ‘do something’. In the parlance of the web we are looking for ‘conversion’.

Its a horrid expression based on the need for advertisers to get people to website and ‘convert’ the visit into a sale.

Very few visitors ‘convert’. The best sites only achieve low percentages but it is very importnat for managing interactions with online stakeholders. It forms the basis for evaluation.

For an organisation there may be other forms of ‘conversion’ that are almost as valuable as a sale. A conversion that prompts a prospective employee to apply for job, an investor to buy shares or a vendor to offer great service are all valuable ‘conversions’.

More prosaically, no visit should leave the person contacting the organisation untouched. Here then, is a simple way of describing what digital interactions across the organisation should achieve.

Website

The Website is a key shop window. It is not the only one but it is critical.

It is not just a shop window.It is also the means by which investors, prospective employees, vendors, regulators and many other stakeholders find the organisation. Two publics that may not visit this important location very often are the Board and employees. Just asking around we find that it‘s easy to ignore if you are an insider.

Websites are really important and considerable research as well as expertise is helpful when building them. Creating web sites for a range of stakeholders can be cluttered or complicated or both what is probably more important is that the site is designed for users and not the by the organisation.  There may be user responses that will indicate that more than one website is needed or even optimal. Equally, the organisation may have a lot of sites that have been created over the years and which need to be rationalised. Most organisations have some unloved websites out there that need to be looked at.

There are a number of other sites where there is a need for pro-active design activity. The Facebook page, YouTube Channel and many others will need close attention.

It will come as no surprise to find the company has dozens of presences in LinkedIn and Google+.

Research to find out what is needed on sites, who owns them and what will be effective is important.

For standard web sites there are elements that will  include

• Usability testing

Test with real users

• Persona creation

For key audience groups and their goals & needs

• Eye tracking

Showing what users do & don't look at on your website or marketing emails

• Card sorting

To help site map structured around the way users think

• User interviews & contextual enquiry

This provides valuable feed back before going live

• Focus group research

Is there to maintain the relevance of the website for users and helps ind out what people want from the website & how they want it to work

• Accessibility testing

To see first-hand the problems blind & disabled users have on your website

Many such considerations apply to thirdparty sites like YouTube.

The cost of building a web site is probably as mach as reception at the corporate headquarters or the flagship store.

Clear and simple navigation is critical but creating websites that are optimised to help search engines prioritise the organisation's site over competition is critical.

In some instances simple aids to search engine optimisation are easy. There is no good reason to have a lot of website real estate devoted to the history of the company and biographies of its senior staff. Much better that it has the imprimatur of Wikipedia and the inlinks that contribute to SEO.

Professional help is going to be needed an the ‘make or buy’ decision here points towards ‘buy’.

eMail

Mary uses email all the time. Morning noon and night her smart phone is firing emails into the ether. It just did  not occur to her that  email could be made much more powerful in building reputation and relationships.

Every manager, employee, supplier, agency, production department, retail outlet, consumer and past customer will use email. An organisation that is really good at using email will enhance its reputation on every contact.

Research, training and structure in the use and application of email will ensure that every employee will be become an ambassador. While there may be TV advertising, or some other block busting method of promotion, at some point most stakeholders will want to resort to email for contact with the organisation. Making the whole experience easy and welcoming affects the bottom line like little else.

Email is also a really big and useful capability to attract stakeholders including prospective customers. Email marketing is a very useful tool.

Email is also one of the top means by which visitors arrive at specific pages on a website.

There is a case for the organisation to schedule time and investment into optimising email for more potent effect.

SEO

The majority of consumers start their product searches at Google (69%) even if they know the URL and are regular visitors. In addition, Google very often provides the location or navigation to the store or off-line consumer required location.

This means that search engine optimisation is a very high priority.

For the public relations person SEO is a wonderland.

To ensure that all content (words, images, video, voice and music) has key values embedded is an absolute must.

Being sure that hyperlinks are added that link back to the organisations web sites is really important and this applies as much to news stories, case studies, application features, references in media features as well as whitepapers and briefing documents.

Indeed, the more of such content is made available of the organisation‘s site, but more significantly the web sites of other organisations.  Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, YouTube, discussion lists and wikis.

They all contribute to the key values of the organisation pointing to its web site and drawing people with values in common or need satisfaction.

Words in content and in context, tags, labels and similar are all part of this process.

As a strategy to be deployed across the organisation in every discourse (yes, even email) this is important and it has to be deployed sensibly. It is possible to be very proscriptive, tiresome and boring. This is actually an opportunity for creative content development to keep values alive, fresh and interesting to both people and Google.

Creating properties to help the process can of many kinds and offer multiple advantages.

A recent research report developed by TriComB2B and the University of Dayton School of Business Administration provides insight into the B2B purchasers’ decision making process.
Key findings from the benchmark report, for B2B search engine marketers to consider, include:

• Content assets, ranging from B2B blogs through technical data sheets, are critical in the B2B buying process.
• The source of information was most important in the search and evaluation stages of the decision process.
• Mobile websites, discussion forums, and blogs are important information sources for purchasing decisions

Online Advertising

Anja Lambrecht at The London Business School has done a lot of very good research including her paper ‘Reaching online consumers: The right ad at the right moment’ which shows that getting the best effect does require both research and dedicated expertise.

Online advertising has many forms and the Internet Advertising Bureau  is  a great place to start to find it.

There is a tendency to imagine that advertising as being about a product or service but such is the nature of the internet that  online advertising can be used in a much more versatile applications.
Taking online users to a case study using advertising seemed strange for Mary’s media officer but the idea that a case study may be shared by the readers, blogged about and mentioned in Twitter and even gather a crowd of followers in Facebook only shows how valuable some online content can be especially as its every iteration may well add to the SEO of the company web site. Advertsing a case study... well yes.

Advertising an app, video or other property may well be valuable.

Strategically, the organisation may now want to consider advertising in a much more flexible light.

They key here is to have objective withing a time period that will deliver the ‘conversions’ for a given amount of effort time and cost (sometimes called, suggested Mary, ROI).

In conclusion

Mary T and her team were itching to get to all that glamorous Social Media stuff but could see that long before we think about a single tweet or post,there are some really important components that need t be in place first.

A great Twitter campaign that delivered users to a rubbish web site would still be a great campaign but would do very little for the reputation of the company or its Board.

Next time in reflecting on the conversations with Mary and her team and the notes here intern is preparing ready for the Board strategy paper we will be able to look at interesting aspects of social media.

The trust machine

From time to time, I get excited about a future beyond my comprehension.

Imagine a computer chip that can decide, all by itself, if your organisation is trustworthy. Not a computer, not a big system but a chip (ergo, you can put lots of them into a single 'computer'). Imagine this chip gathering all the information on and offline that will allow it to make judgements about you, your organisation, the value of your products brands and the ethic you stand by.

IBM's cognitive chips, launched this week, are part of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project, which aims to create a system that is capable of rewiring itself as it interacts with its environment while still analyzing complex information from several sensory modalities.

The announcement this week of the new cognitive computer chips is a big step on the way.

These systems, which would not be programmed like traditional computers, will learn through experiences like humans. They will create hypotheses, find correlations, remember, and learn from their environments.

As always, the PR industry will ignore all of this as being too technical and of tomorrow and not worth investing time in today.

As ignorant as BP's Tony Hayward was of public relations, the practitioner that ignores IBM's big announcement will be as unstuck. 'I'd like my life back' will also be a closed option for organisations that don't heed an ability for a computer to judge the capability, efficacy and ethics of an organisation.

I realise this is not a subject for journalists' given the job of investment banker or discovering a Higgs Boson particle or, harder still, being a professional PR practitioner, but it is important for the rest of us.

It is important because, unlike a number of practitioners who are obviously one egg short of a dozen, modern practitioners will have to persuade the David Cameron's,  Tony Haywood's and the Metropolitan police that good PR is not predicated on someone being able to write news copy or depend on some "Other Buggers' Efforts'.

Why must we take note now?

Firstly, this is going to have an effect within five years (less time that it took Twitter to master PR). Secondly, it will have a memory that can remember what you, as a practitioner did today (as in right now). Finally its ability to combine radical organisational  transparency with the totality of the organisational environment is now assured with all the organisational consequences that entails.

No doubt, this will take me and a number of other practitioners, and hopefully, some academics, time to think through but it is a significant professional challenge.

The anatomy of news

It was late on May Day 2011 when Kristen Urbahn’s life changed.  At precisely 7.24 in the evening, her husband changed the way the whole world understood that news was no longer the purview of the ‘news media’.  Of course for the Tweeting wife (@KLF0131) with a husband at work and a big house move on her mind, the emerging seismic global realisation may not have been big on her list of top events. After all, she and her husband had been in public life long enough for her to know that momentous events often come from the White House and her interest in the two Dachshunds, evident in her Facebook profile,  probably were a higher priority .

A graduate of University of Kentucky in 2006 Kristen Urbahn  (nee Forcht), a one time staff assistant at the Republican Leaders Office in Washington and treasurer of the Christian Law Society, moved into Capitol Hill North on Aug. 18, 2009. It was time for a move when Yale graduate Keith was catapulted into global headlines.  The imminent announcement of Osama Bin Ladin’s death came from Keith, a one time navy intelligence officer and Chief of Staff for former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted “I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.” 

He was not the first reporter. Shortly after 4pm EST on 1 May Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was live-tweeting a series of helicopter flypasts and explosions and was unwittingly covering the US forces raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Meanwhile somewhere in the vicinity @m0hcin was reporting too.

The news was out.

According to Brian Williams, the “NBC Nightly News” anchor, some journalists received a three-word e-mail that simply read, “Get to work.”

The Horn picks up the story: “At 9:45 p.m., Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communication Director, tweeted “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time,” a message that was shared with White House press corps. The president had not spoken by that time but news outlets like CNN, New York Times, and CBS among others confirmed Osama’s death by 10:40 p.m."

Maggie Fox the founder and CEO of Social Media Group provided a time line of events:

10:25 – Twitter is on fire, with a tweet from a CBS news Producer (Jill Jackson) with fewer than 4500 Twitter followers) confirming a leak that Bin Laden is dead retweeted over 1000 times
10:50 – The White House invites Facebook users to discuss the pending announcement (where the Presidential address is also scheduled to be broadcast)
10:53 – print media demonstrates where it can’t compete so well, with a journalist for a major national magazine noting that this announcement was going to “profoundly screw up” their Royal Wedding edition.
11:15 – Osama Bin Laden’s death confirmed by the White House

At 11:35 p.m, President Obama addressed the nation to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an operation carried out by US Navy SEAL's.

For Kristen Urbahn, thoughts of house moves and the dogs vanished.

Obama’s announcement was more of a confirmation to millions of Twitter and Facebook users around the world who were informed about the Al Qaeda leader’s death through social media platforms.

A soldier in Afghanistan learned about the death of Osama bin Laden on Facebook, reported the Washington Times. A TV producer in South Carolina got a tip from comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter. A blues musician in Denver received an email alert from The New York Times. And a Kansas woman found out as she absently scrolled through the Internet on her smartphone while walking her dog.

A Guardian article revealed that the spike was so large that some news sites were struggling to cope, and seeing their response times slowed so that they took six times longer to respond, or even crashed under the load. Mobile sites were particularly vulnerable as people logged in from smartphones wherever they were to read the news.

Twitter announced that “from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second.” The number surpassed 5,000 at 11 p.m. and remained that way past the president’s remarks with details reported CNN.

At geo-location service Foursquare, more than 185 people in San Francisco had "checked in" to a "Post-Osama bin Laden World" using their smartphones.

Although Keith Urbahn says "My source was a connected network TV news producer. Stories about 'the death of MSM' because of my "first" tweet are greatly exaggerated," He is in the spotlight.  The confirming Tweet from Jill Jackson created the storm.

It was Twitter that fired off the media coverage and required fast work from the traditional media to catch up to compete and feed the social media frenzy. The mix of media interaction and aggregation  is also fascinating with the BBC using Google Maps to show the site of Bin Laden’s hideaway. This is complete change in media dynamics as we understood it only months ago.

The reach of this story is astonishing and reflects so much of what we understand about how social media in particular takes information from organizations and spreads it round the world. No one could doubt that the media, and ordinary people, fed the frenzy fast. Some information passed on and was fresh, some was a bit old (in internet time) before it was shared. The timeliness of response and reaction is a study in how fast information is now shared.

We know that organizations are porous and that information leaks out of organization, including the White House. Keith Urbahn and Jill Jackson  not only knew, they made the intelligence public really fast and to a fast growing audience.

What makes this story so fascination is the extent to which we can explore the lives of the actors.  Such is the transparency provided by the internet, we even know the names of Kristen Urbahn’s dogs and a very human story is told.

The abundance of information and necessary curation needed to bring the strands together is part of the process of understanding what is useful  and helpful but what  happened in the hours and days after the event are equally fascinating. The nature of internet agency has changed people’s lives.  

Keith and Kristen Urbahn have become inextricably linked to the events in Pakistan and Washington.  Coffee shop owner, Sohaib Athar a graduate of Preston University, has been plucked from obscurity and will forever be associated with the events of May 1 2011. "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it," he tweeted after connecting president Obama's announcement to what was taking place in his neighbourhood.

While this story is one of our times, the nature of Reach,  Timelessness,  Transparency,  Porosity,   Aggregation,  Abundance,  Curation and Internet agency are by no means a mystery.  

Five years before Kristen went to university, in a shed/come office in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge,  the notion of these drivers formed into the book Online Public Relations which is now a best seller with a third edition already on its way.

Some research questions

Now is the time of year when students begin to look forward to their next steps in education.

I am fortunate to be able to help some students with an interest in online public relations and at this stage, we are exploring ideas.

Without giving away any of my students work but just exposing some of my thinking to them and a wider audience I seek criticism from real experts.


The first of the conversations I have had is challenging. It is for a work in social media.


We know that there is a lot of practitioner experience available from all over Europe and the United
States in particular.  However, there is much less well grounded academic research available. This is a fast moving environment and traditional academic publishing is, by comparison, slow.

This means that the student has an opportunity to add to the body of knowledge as part of a Masters degree by submitting their own papers.

While, at face value, one may like to look at so called 'social media' as it is used today there are some early decisions one would have to make.

Perhaps it is a good thing to first of all think about what we mean by  'social media'.  Is this truly a media, or is is a defined range of communications channels used by people (after all FTP is not social media but is used a lot). If so which people?

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and bulletin boards, Blogs, wikis, Foursquared, Augmented Reality, video and other sharing channels (like, for example, YouTube, Slideshare and Picasa) are available on many communications platforms such as PC's laptops, smart phones, games machines like Nintendo Wi and Xbox and slates like iPad. Some are good on one channel and not so good on others.

The range of platforms offers us a view as to what sort of people access which channels and under what kind of circumstance. We still need more research in this area.

From this we might understand that people without the relevant platforms or channels might be disenfranchised. But we know that there are intermediaries (who has not seen a child show a grandparent
something 'cool' on a mobile phone). 

Thus I think it is worth exploring what we think we mean by social media. 


We have to define the channels that  exemplify social media and then explore the  platforms on which these are available.

A student will need to find sources  that can inform an understanding of channels that are available, useful and are or can be (or have been) popular.

A student will need to explore the recent academic works from the PR, marketing and communication academic journals.


The extent to which these disciplines are new suggests that it will be useful  to look  at a number of other academic disciplines.

I find that the behavioural sciences and neuro-psychology research is informative and is beginning to
explain people's use of platforms (for example people watch television and use a laptop and a mobile phone concurrently under a number of circumstances) and these activities use a wide range of parts of the
brain that normally would not be active using only one platform/channel.

This involves a lot of searching and research - and playing with lots of digital toys too :)

At an early stage, it is helpful to look at how much content there is available to the public and how much of it is about, for example, a specific brand. Here is some software that gives us a quick overview http://www.trackthisnow.com/.

I would not be at all surprised if, at an early stage, a researcher did not discover that there is a lot of content discussed and shared about almost every thing in many channels and across a lot of platforms.

Experience suggests that most organisations do not and actually probably cannot engage their communities at such a hectic pace across so many platforms and channels. This is an interesting consideration when thinking about the role of both PR and marketing in an age of near ubiquitous interactive communication.

For one student this  may help in a finding as to how relevant Social Media is as a brand communication instrument. In the totality of all the conversations of all the people using a range of channels and platforms, it may be that research will explore any opportunity to be part of such conversations and if, in addition, the brand can be 'inserted' into the conversation. 


My view is that it will quickly becomes noticeable that this is much more difficult than most believe (and challenges much current practice).

A proposal to consider the future is one that has me hooked.

A student might be extremely brave to consider the future and the evolution of Social Media communication past, present and the new trends for the future. 


 It is a fascinating subject. The amazing first burst of Usenet and BB's activity three decades ago was astonishing. It showed that people want to engage with each other online, globally and in a new and dynamic way. 


I know it has taken the communications industries a couple of decades to see how dynamic the whole concept is and there is a long way to go among leaders in industry and commerce (and academia and government).  Equally, I recognise that there is the potential for a radical revolution as potent as any in prospect or history.The Bourbons discovered what happens when eating cake is no longer an alternative to recognising social change in 1792. Such revolution is in prospect for a lot of countries, economies and governments not to mention companies in the next few years.


The extent to which near future developments such as the Semantic Web with automated ontology creation will affect corporate transparency and porosity  is an interesting thought.

The development of virtual realities such as 'walk in' Augmented Reality will change personal relationships, experiential marketing and even replace some travel and meetings and is an exciting prospect. I can bet, and history is on my side, that it will become popular in personal relationship experiences long before commerce really gets its head round the wider applications.

The ability to, at will,  identify clusters of online values (words, pictures, experience values) and their proponents, supporters and interested constituents will transform marketing. But much more important will change the nature of relationship building, commerce and even the nature of value.

Yes, the future is interesting.

There is another tack that has been presented to me. It is the consideration and strategic analysis’s of brand
communications in different social  media platforms. I am sure this will be fascinating for people in PR and Marketing. 


Its drawback is that it will need updating every six months or so and so the challenge is be to find a replicable methodological approach - but, of course, each time results are report, they will create a sensation of interest as long as the methodology is robust.

Being able to'listen' to the totality of conversations of a sample in each channel and across a number of
platforms has its challenges and then to try to identify the extent to which the brand is implicitly or explicitly part of these conversations is not impossible and there will be a lot of people who will find this capability really helpful.

A researcher would have to deploy some heavyweight technologies but they are available.


No one can imagine how excited I am at working with bright enquiring young brains in such an array of new thinking that will soon be available to the public relations practitioner - well, those who are following there new developments.


I am, of course interested in comments and insights from you..... One thing we do know is the power of the network to help answer hard questions.