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 is the UK PR industry only achieving a tenth of its potential?

In the next two weeks the CIPR will elect its next president. Will the next one be able to look over the horizon or will the leadership in the PR industry continue to muddle along missing every opportunity on the way?

Poor leadership, lack of good research and timid practitioners have, and continue to, miss the big industry opportunities and, worse, re-enforce practices that may have a very limited future.

PR has to find some way out of its obsession with media relations. It is a reasonable question to ask if the PR industry is too big for the size of traditional media available. 

In the meantime, the industry turns its back on the really big opportunities.

In 1995, in response to a request to look 20 years ahead I spoke to the CIPR annual conference about the significance of the internet and suggested that the newly emerging World Wide Web offered a new and profitable communication opportunity for PR practice.

Today, the internet industry is worth £100 billion. If it were an industry in its own right, the internet would be nearly as big as the financial services sector, which accounted for 9% of GDP in 2009.

In 1999, I wrote Online Public Relations (first edition) saying that gaming as a form of communication was an important communications channel.  The economic contribution of the UK games sector is significant: in 2008, global revenues generated by UK video games were worth £2.03 billion, and contributed £1 billion to GDP.5 It is worth bearing in mind the economic contribution of the sector as an employer: the industry directly employed 10,000 people (and a further 18,000 indirectly) in 2008

In 2000, the joint CIPR/PRCA internet Commission made it clear that interactive online communication was a big opportunity for the PR industry. Ten years on, the tiny tip of revenue earnings from social media activity, advertising, was worth £2bn in the first half of 2010.

In 2006, I was blogging furiously about the content opportunities offered by mobiles.  This year the new communications platform, tablet and slate technologies, will achieve 20 million units sold while there were 346 million mobiles sold in the third quarter of 2010. These platforms are content hungry with associated App and content industries worth many millions.

There are many more examples of the PR industry failing to grasp the opportunities.

Perhaps the missed opportunity is a fraction of the above but at least half was within our grasp when the notion was first mooted. That is £52 billion and today the PR industry is, perhaps a tenth of that size and with the decline in print media, its threatened.

Why is the PR industry so reluctant to look ahead and learn enough to be part of these phenomenal opportunities for relationship building, content creation and take the centre ground?

Could it be that it is not able to bring together practitioner, consultant, futurologist and skill sets?

These are opportunities, not for the geeks and tech heads.  They touch on practices in politics, corporate affairs, internal communication and in every sector of enterprise.

It is about time that all the institutions including the CIPR, PRCA and the academics decided on a strategy that would inform the industry as to how it can and should thrive and grow over the next ten years.

This is all about money, big money and an industry at least ten times bigger than today.

Stockholm Accords and Sustainability

This is second of a series of lectures notes I am preparing about the Stockholm Accords.

Some months have passed since the World Public Relations Forum discussed and approved the Stockholm Accords. It was the culmination of an intensely participated collaboration process which involved some 1000 leaders of the global public relations community from 42 countries by the PR industry's Global Alliance.

There is a Stockholm Accords digital HUB that you may visit here at: www.stockholmaccords.org. The discussions are worth following and I recommend all practitioners to visit and get engaged.

You can access the Accords here. I have also provided a text version here (for all those people who like to copy 'n paste and not get irritated by the use of PDF)

The Accords offer us a view of sustainability in these words:

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions*.

In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity* to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Public Relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders* contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
· interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate)*;
· creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener)*;
· ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter)*;
· going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).

Reviewing each of these elements in turn, we can extend the debate.

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions is a bold and, I suggest, a late 20th century view. It will hold good for some time to come but the move towards greater competitive transparency, the evolution of the semantic web and ever more effective 'Blazing Netshine' that allows us all to search and expose the minutia of human endeavour will challenge economic, environmental and social dimensions with added elements.

The nature of value is being challenges in many ways.

What is 'free' (i.e. not paid for with today's monetary currencies) is frequently challenged in today's society. Patents and Trademarks, copyright and personal assets are exposed in near ubiquitous interactive communication and yet many things seemingly 'free' are much valued.

The 'Free' search engine Google has immense value for most people well beyond the irritation (and much ignored) advertisements. Its value as part of a new form of memory and access to knowledge is huge and dwarfs the utility of Library of Congress and all the other libraries in the world combined.

The nature of value is changing so fast, one might begin to consider coinage as being of lesser utility this year compared to last.

We are beginning to understand value differently. We are beginning to understand commonly held values as being the element that aids/is the essential ingredient for relationship creation (paper by Bruno Amaral and me) and meta values commonly held between two or more people as an indication of the strength of relationships.

Indeed, we are now seeing such values attached to ideas and artefacts as a description of their value and utility for individuals and communities.

It follows that basing anything on economic needs may have to face up to a new form and understanding of economics that truly are (in a process of becoming) dimensionally different. Here is a simple example of what I mean. What is the value of Google to humanity in this generation? Google valued by markets at $165bn  gets two trillion site hits per year. It is a lot of knowledge transfer and priceless (if sometimes trivial).

This leads one to imagine the environment for the existence of organisations.

In an era of developing ubiquitous access to knowledge, corporate environments will have difficulty being an entity. The nature of transparency, porosity and agency as described by the PRCA/CIPR Internet Commission a decade ago (and revised by Philip Young and myself in Online Public Relations) mean that organisations become less bound by a corporate 'hard shell'. We already see this in organisation where 'contracting out' and the use of agents such as PR consultants to act on behalf of and in the interests of an organisation is commonplace. As each employee gets a Twitter Account, the evolution of this transparent and even porous nature of organisations becomes ever more, and publicly evident. The changing environment militates against the structure of organisations as we know them today and we see this in a range of manifestations where the boundaries between one organisation and another is blurred.

An organisation’s sustainability based on balancing demands in social dimensions is also a significant challenge. The social constructs for much of society is changing.

The emergence of Brazil, India and China as big and developing (and more open) economies, the ability to communicate across borders at will and the dynamic of  social groups formed in the silicon sitting rooms of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are very different social dimensions. Add smart phones and location based micro communities and society looks very different. These are considerations for all who signed up to the Stockholm Accords and have to be thought through by the professional bodies as well as their members.

The professional bodies also have to re-act or be left on the shelf.

The Accords postulate that, in this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Sustainability to be long lasting has to be flexible and enhancing reputation is not limited to economic, ecological and social advantage.

I have already suggested that economical advantage my be difficult to quantify as values take on a different role and are probably better viewed in relationship building terms than monetary value.

Environmental and social advantage may then also be measured in their capability to bring relationship values to the fore. This is not a tautologous argument. Environmental and social values are not the same and current practice needs a lot of new and additional work to achieve 20th century gaols. To be effective in the 21st century, PR has to evolve a triple line that can extend into the much more complicated world of individual, corporate and environment relationships and their value drivers today.


Oddly enough identifying, involving and engaging key stakeholders is very easy. We have not yet developed the technologies sufficiently well but espousing values will quickly build relationship clusters with people holding similar values. In the bast it was a little understood but effective brand empathy matrix. Today, we understand it as a not wholly different, but stakeholder derived values matrix.


As we move towards greater competitive transparency and learn to manage organisational porosity it will become much harder for an organisation to determine what information should be transparently and authentically reported. The stakeholder not only has the whip hand by virtue of a wider view of values porosity will inevitably reveal and the community will punish any organisation that lacks authenticity. Secretive accountants and pharmaceutical companies are going to have to find a values driven accommodation with society to remain as they are.


It is professionalism that develops a capability to go beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow and, in addition more emphasis on todays word among PR teachers.

Semantic Public Relations

I am taking the first steps in developing a Semantic Public Relations theory. At a recent celebration of the 21st year of the Bournemouth PR BA course, I bent Tom Watson's ear about how narrow I though PR research was. He was polite as I ranted away and my lurid arm waving did not help the furtherance of the idea on the British South Coast.

The trouble is, they have lots of students and enough to help in the development of, as Kevin Kelly puts it, connecting all the nouns.

Underneath all this is a thought that there is a way to demonstrate that reputation is able to turn intellectual properties, intangible and tangible assets into tradeable value in a relationship (and only in a relationship).

It is a nice thought because it is good for PR and very good for the evolution of Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web.

My question is: Using online discourse and automated semantic analysis, can elements of platform, channel and values be identified to show attributes of reputation that affect the value of people, products, services and organisations.

This is how the scenario goes:

You have a pretty looking (intangible) car (tangible) and you know how to make it (know how) and you know what you need by way of components and logistics (know what) and now you want to sell it.

But until you tell people about it, you cant't sell it. 

So advertise.  You have reach - hooray!  But you did not sell anything. So now you start to tell people about how pretty, how well made, how you acquire components and deliver it to customers.  You make your organisation more transparent.  This transparency means you expose the values that are so important to you. 

There are people out there who find these values coincide with their own and they want to know more about your organisations. They check up by searching for you on Google. If they find nothing, they do not think you have much of a reputation and so don't buy your car.

You do lots of online work and get more of a presence talking about  your values and more people now find you and like your values and the values that make the car pretty. They also can see your online presence and like what they see. 

Here is the catch point. At this stage have you done enough to share your values and build enough reputation for people to trust you and take that extra step and buy your car.

Reputation turns your car from a bunch of tangible and intangible liabilities into an asset.

If we only knew what values comprise reputation so that we can build reputation, then people will pay to acquire those values.

In the scenario above we have a number of clues.

• We need reach. Lots of coverage. 
• We need to be transparent and expose values in value rich posts and web pages. 
• We also need that gossip by third parties about us.The sort of insider endorsement. The stuff of porous corporate walls. 
• We need richness. Richness which exposes our values. Not just a few brand values but values about the way we work and interact across a wide range of activities.
• We need to use a lot of online channels where people can find out about our values and use the networks, in and outlinks and search engines to seek out the source of these much loved values. The internet acting as an agent brings the public to us and us to them.

For the last ten years we have known that transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach are important. They were elements that came out of the work of the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission.

We have very powerful evidence from the work of Bruno Amaral that the words found using latent semantic indexing act like (and are) semantic values. We also know from his work presented at Bled last July that these semantic values work in networks to draw people under their influence into relationships (we live in an era of near Ubiquitous Interactive Communication which makes the internet network very powerful).

The new element I want to put in the Amaral equation is trust and I am not sure how to identify what it is that engenders trust in internet mediated relationships.

I guess, I am looking for people who would be interested in taking this thinking further.

We are fortunate to have access to Girish Lakshminarayana's LSI software which has the ability to identify semantic values in discourse, we can begin the research on what components are involved in the development of reputation in internet communication.

What is so cool about this is that we already have the corpus (its in the Google cashe), already have the automated semantic tools to identify values and we can create relationship models on pre-existing online discourse to test and evaluate in weeks not months or years.

In a few months, a dedicated research team would have a more than a working hypothesis to change the value of organisations through enhanced reputation management.

In this research we would get tantalisingly close to a new type of value (probably more than one) to compete with money but which also could be exchanged for money in an open market.

Hello Semantic Public Relations. You are very exciting.

The Death of Public Relations

In a few days time I will be presenting at Euprera. The title for my talk is "The semantic anatomy of a crisis."


I was going to talk about the nature of a crisis from the aggregation of terms (concepts) derived using automated  semantic analysis of the day by day newly indexed web pages in a year long  research programme using The University of East Anglia's issue over the quality of scientific rigour. This is an interesting study that allows us to see the differences in concepts as they change in frequency month by month. 


In recent weeks, with my colleagues at Klea and Publicasity I have been able to monitor the nature of the Toyota issues as concepts arise day by day. Now we can see not just the anatomy of a crisis month by month but the DNA of an issue emerging every day. Today, I noted that the word humphrey had become significant to Toyota and by using Goole to backwards verify the relevance of the word could see the provenance of the concept as it is affecting the Toyota corporate brand. It is the sort of insight that a corporate affairs manager (or her agency) or academic researcher might find valuable.

These are the kind of data that, one would hope, is pretty well bog standard among universities with an interest in reputation management, corporate and brand reputation, public relations etc. Using these data and matching them the Toyota's responses for the press   and through social media etc, is now really easy and allows the researcher to identify:

Cause and effect across different media:

Fig 1 Share of alerts by web media for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or by sentiment:

Fig 2 Share of alerts by automated PoS (Part of Speech) sentiment analysis for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or perhaps one might want to compare these effects against other third party responses such as share price:

Fig 3 Five day share price taken from Yahoo Finance.

What made me pause was the latter chart.

I would not mind betting, that there are people in Toyota who would be more than happy if all this damaging content online would just go away.

What would happen if the 152 million web pages mentioning Toyota indexed by Google or the billion pages indexed by Yahoo or the 278 million  pages indexed by Bing just vanished?

What if only the printed pages in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, posters and brand promotion was the visible evidence of the company and Toyota was erased from the internet  (and would the media find this comfortable or even part of its approach to news distribution - it seems not)?

If the 'Toyota Way' was not in so much trouble and the distribution of coverage in the media was more competitive, would the internet presence be more interesting?

Fig 4. Woldwide online media distribution over the last week for Kia Motors  (courtesy Publicasity) .

Would Toyota forego the two million visits to its North American web site each month?

Perhaps it would be happy not to be mentioned in 140,000 blog posts or even the 800 pages and groups it got covered in Facebook during a typical (2009) February.

These pages (and many others) represent a lot of brand exposure.They create the opportunities for those Google ads to pop up when people think about cars when browsing and much, much more.

What we are discovering is that these pages online are useful, give competitive advantage and are really an asset. But that is not how Toyota sees it? In reality, once engaged the social media is mostly helpful.

The issue here is who owns the online asset?  Does the company?  It would seem that this is an asset that does not appear on the Balance sheet. In fact its not a line item (PDF).  Is this because the head of, well, corporate affairs/public relations has not made it clear to the Board that online presence is an asset. It is an asset that can be both positive and negative on the balance sheet. Last year the line item would have been part of  prepaid expenses and other current assets....................................................  $6,439 million.
This broad sweep of  assets is  part of  total current assets of $115 bn. So not much as a proportion of the whole. There is no line item for brand assets - try running a company without them! But that aside, an asset never-the-less.

We do get a better view from Juergen H. Daum who has examined the intangible assets (PDF) of Toyota. 

Relationship capital is now hugely internet mediated as are all the other intellectual properties and online relationships.

There is no escaping it: the internet asset is very significant for organisations.

So, who is the manager responsible for this asset?

If it is the PR manager, so much to the good.

If not, the responsible person will ask the PR manager to 'fix' the bad online content or get more coverage to force criticism 'below the line'.

My talk to  Euprera will be a question: are we teaching, researching and supporting the PR  industry to be asset managers or functionaries?


If, PR is at the 'Fix' end of asset management, it has no future - this is not even agentry, it's mostly computer programmes.

X-Factor Directors Beware

An open letter the corporate managers

Dear Director

For all but a few company directors, the breathtakingly successful money making machine, The X-Factor, must have seemed as much a fairy tale as father Christmas. That is until Jon and Tracy Morter, launched a successful campaign to prevent The X Factor notching up yet another Christmas number one and replaced the top spot with Rage Against The Machine, a rap metal act.

At that point the rules were broken. All that marketing investment, with an average of 16 million people watching a brand on line every week, surely must mean that it will be the brand leader.

BBC News Entertainment correspondent Colin Paterson said “It is simply one of the biggest shocks in chart history.” Bookies for the last few years have only been taken bets on who would be Number 2, because X Factor always won by a clear margin. It only took a campaign from a Husband and his Wife, to take away the strangle hold that Simon Cowell had on the festive charts.

Rage Against The Machine had set two new records, for the first single to reach Christmas No 1 from purely download sales, and for the fastest selling download single ever. This is not because everyone suddenly got honest a British Phonographic Industry (BPI) survey has revealed that despite stringent measures for controlling illegal music download, one in every three consumers still get their music via illegal web sites.

This is a really high profile warning. It is alarm bells sounding for every board room.

Why is this?

It is because Internet agency, transparency, richness and reach, crushed the establishment and established management thinking in a few days.

This is not a new phenomena, all manner of industry sectors have been changed by the internet.

Cast around and look at retail banking or fashion or logistics and distribution, or perhaps the mail. Even the darlings of the digital age are being caught off guard.

The UK’s first home online banking services were set up by the Nottingham Building Society (NBS) in 1983. But it was not until 2007 that the electronic banking system changed banking forever in an unusual financial panic event. A banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot honour its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic.

Like the Christmas number one, the nature of the event was unexpected. It was a manifestation not so much of the web but of the internet at work. Big internet enabled systems are essential but their use has to be managed.

No one believed you could sell clothes online but today Jaeger said its online retailing operation now ranked as its second largest store after Regent Street in London. The ‘Threshers’ name is to disappear from the High Street tomorrow as the remaining stores close because of online competition.

2010 will continue to be tough for retailers, according to a new report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), and yet online retailing will continue to outperform high street shops. But we will continue to see manufactures spend more on Point of Sale than Point and Click.

Should the public know what is in the warehouses of transport companies? UPS.com makes a virtue of declaring the most up-to-date information about the status of shipment. Shipment movement information is captured each time a tracking label is scanned in the UPS delivery system. This is serious transparency and a different way of managing. But when will we see it applied to the last mile delivery or how long will the Government be able to support Royal Mail's pension deficit of £6.8bn before a big change upsets the apple cart.

“Everyone is selling something they don't have possession of, and the cost and revenue are not linked,” said Andrew Bud, chairman of mobile billing company mBlox at the Future of Mobile event, run by Westminster eForum in October. “There will be an initial boost but it will then come crashing down, unless there is a radical change in the business model,” reported eWeek in the wake of a huge data failure by O2 this weekend.

The OECD presented evidence three years ago of blurring of the distinction between manufacturing and services (PdF). It’s simple to understand why. Manufactured goods are, by historic standards, wholly reliable. When buying a car, does one buy the design, an intangible, the chassis, engine or wheels? No. We buy the service package. The regular servicing, the automated fault finding from the on board computer and so forth. Do you really know where your car was made? Did the engine come from South Wales or Mr. Tieyan (Tony) Xing from Shanghai Tongxiang? You see, I know his name but not the name of the company representative from Ford at Bridgend. Trading with Mr Xing is fast and I buy from the man not the company.

So that is how Jon and Tracy Morter upset the marketing traditions of more than a century. They are people more real in Facebook that Simon Cowell with 177,000 fans with whom he can have no conversation at all (too many people).

By comparison the Morters have lots of interesting people involved and offering stuff and a manageable number of friends and the interesting Rage Factor page and site.

We have, after a very long time, reached a tipping point. The levels of involvement of ‘the commons’ are such that they have real power. The power is irresistible the Bastille will eventually fall. This is as powerful as the near revolution that brought about the Reform Acts combined with the advent of the Edmond Burke’s forth estate. It is a power that will be more potent because it is still evolving in very dramatic ways ten times faster and, after a pretty average period of development, sooner than most believed.

The lessons are all there. If you are a traditional company or not:

• The next internet event will affect the most conservative industries as well as the most ‘with it’.
• Your company will have to face a very big marketing and organisational shock soon.
• The internet is now being taken over with masses of information not of your making but about you, your company and its stakeholders and its impact is direct and fast.
• Someone in your organisation must be monitoring the internet in real time.
• If your company managers do not have digital plans for 2010 ask them to justify why not.
• If you do not see significant re-structuring of management budgets and personnel deployment this year, you should ask why your organisation is immune from Internet effects – and get back a very convincing argument.
• Take down the silo walls when talking about the internet because its affects everyone (young and old, men, women, skilled and unskilled, graduate and school leaver).
• There are no digital experts but there are some well informed people who try to understand.

Last year was the last year to experiment, that window is now gone. It’s time to take the internet very much more seriously.

Public Relations - define

For one minute, I would like all those people who do not believe that PR is about relationship management to suspend belief.

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!

The Next Big Thing

The development of Open Source, Open Systems and Open Access is coming to a device near you at the speed of Jensen Button with the force of the Atlantic Shuttle.

Yochai Benkler spells it out, Clay Shirky explains it well, Creative Commons, founder Lawrence Lessing has been broadcasting about it. Yahoo! did it this weekend, Google has a ton of it and yet few are prepared to explain it in newspapers. Journos just don’t get it. Tapscott and Williams put it quite clearly.

Perhaps they are limited by the poor (and out of date) descriptions in Wikipedia.

Open source, as in open source software, or public collaboration on encyclopaedia or open debate in blogs, releases capability, knowledge and insights to the world. Its free.

Open systems provide computing power, platforms and methods that can be used to re-cast and re-model information.

Open access like an Application Programming Interface (API)

The important thing is that anyone with the inclination can both access this ‘openness’ and can build on the information and capability offered to create new things.

This year the Cabinet Office started to push the idea.

OSS Watch funded by the JISC at the Oxford University Computing Services is working hard to develop UK capability.

The whole idea is controversial. It touches on the debate about copyright and trademarks, and patents.

In essence the argument goes thus:

Knowledge which is held in a walled garden is only available for further development to those in the garden. This is fine when organisations have the capability to tease out all the opportunities such intellectual properties offer. A case in point is the telecoms company BT. It had a patent that covered the concept of a Hyperlink and just could not see the huge commercial opportunity such a capability could offer the company. It was not until the hyperlink was generic to the use of the internet that it realised the benefits and by then the cat was out of the bag. Not all people in organisations have the time or imagination to bring all ideas (even patents) to market or into wider use. Indeed few companies have enough people with the time to do such things.

The alternative is to make such knowledge available to all. The creative genius of a population of enthusiasts drawn from the billion users online and their enthusiasm for new things like attempting to develop new applications, products services and knowledge is prodigious. They do have both time and enthusiasm to tease out the opportunities.

The ability of a lot of people, the commons to interact is the key.

Where organisations open up to this community of enthusiasts, the outcomes are astounding as Benkler explains in his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (The book is online, downloadable, available as a PDF and, in printed form, a best seller – new media did not kill-off old media). With Helen Nissenbaum, he describes ‘commons based peer production as a socio-economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. “Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise.”

By standing on the shoulders of giants these people can collaborate and use existing knowledge, processes and content. Where is it’s not available, the commons size and ability to collaborate allows them to re-invent and at an incredible rate.

This is a new parallel economy and social driver. It is the next really big thing online and it affects Public Relations.

I will write a lot about this in the near future because it will be so important to PR.

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.

A Grunigian view of modern PR

Thinking through how PR can approach its online responsibilities one might want to use the1984 Grunig and Hunt model and it works quite well.

I have attempted to do it graphically and, no doubt you will want to change my perspective but I thought it time to extend the debate and examine some of the practical applications of social media that this view opens up.

(click on graphic for a full view)

The implications in terms of cost and control are, I think, relevant and important when advising clients. Being interactive does cost time on the one hand and having an effective website these days has high cost associated with design, production, hosting and management.

There is a myth about which claims that web2.0 use is low cost but the time and attention required is high but the effect seems disproportionately higher.

That is not to say that presentation is forfeit, far from it. A well designed blog is all the more readable and appealing as long as it is not crowded by bling and advertising.

Perhaps too, there is a consideration on the effect of using different channels.  Certainly there seems to be greater internal and external engagement as organisations move toward the two-way model but at the extreme the case is less well made. Moving in that direction has its advantages but it needs to be progressive.

One gets an impression that as an organisation moves towards two-way symmetrical communication combined with high levels of community interaction (and per force less involvement as a proportion of total activity by the organisation - think Facebook, YouTube, Linux, Procter and Gamble) there is a tendency towards higher performance in terms of long term sustainable organisational growth. The reverse is also true (do banks fall into this category?).

To enlarge the thinking....

It would seem that, as a generality, the further one gets towards two-way symmetrical, the more growth and corporate sustainability one can expect.

There is precedent for this kind of thinking. 

Taking a long historical view, the political systems that are more open and interactive have tended to last longer and brought more wealth to people.

Companies like IBM have re-engineered themselves in this way and have become stronger for it (Microsoft's reputation changed dramatically after Robert Scoble opened up the company). There are also the examples offered by Clay Shirky in his book 'Here Comes Everybody'.

The converse is true. Highly controlled political systems tend to have a finite life and the very closed companies suffer the same fate. A brief spectacular followed by a quick decline.

Sorry is a word

John Varley The Chief executive of Barclays Bank says that the banking industry is going through what he calls a public relations crisis, that it must apologise for what went wrong - because banks will not regain the vital trust of customers unless and until they own up to the sins of the past and say sorry.

Apart from pointing the finger at the failures of the banking industry (see my last post), one can ask what he really means by sorry.

He has a long way to go.

People confer trust on organisations. To do that they need some form of relationship. Progressively such relationships can become a trusted relationship based on experience of behaviours.

Banking behavious in all manner of relationships has a track record. It is diverse. It is networked between different publics and stakeholders. Relationships are not always two way and many relationships are formed beyond the control or wit of organisation.

For example, of the 42 new web pages about Barclays Bank today, only two were directly under the control of the bank perhaps a further ten included content mediated by the bank and all the rest were prompted by a community commenting in various ways about the bank.

At this stage, one might ask if John Varley means the banking industry is sorry for corrupting relationships because by looking at the range of people and institutions commenting about just one bank, close scruteny suggests that there is a long way to go before effective working relationhips (two way semetrical?) have been established and even further to go to identify trusting relationships.

The sinners of the past whose practices created toxic relatiohips are still in post and will have to change a lot if they are going to have any impact on relationships (first) and trust.

Perhaps they could start with transparent engagement.

One thing that they are going to have to come to terms with is the nature of wealth. John Varley made me wince when he said that:

"As soon as asset prices stabilise, then we will see the financial economy recover. And when will that occur? That will occur some time over the course of the next 18 months."

One can only wonder what he means by asset price.

An asset price is the measure of the value of an exchange between a willing seller and willing buyer.

There are lots of stable asset prices like the price of photo assets on Facebook. The price is measured in the enhanced value of relationships brought about by the photo.

A hyperlink in Delicious is an asset and such assets have a value and a price. The asset price, once again based on relationships has not changed much this month - or even this year and so there is asset price stability.

Looking at the asset price of a steel works or houses also depends on relationhip networks.

So is John Varley suggesting that he is really looking for stable relationships?

Good man!

Who is his relationships manager?

The relationship management model may also be of some help too.

Picture: The William Heath Robinson Trust http://www.heathrobinson.org/

Watch the growth and growth of online retail

This weeks news from IMRG Capgemini was a real problem for the news media agenda. Far from a slump in retail sales, economic Armageddon and the end of markets as we know them, retailing is fine and, especially online, is doing better than ever.

Growth in online spending for November surged 26% on October and was up 16% on last year.

But I think there is a now a good case for following the rate of growth of online retailing as a major economic indicator.

What is happening online does not suite the doom-sayers and the media agenda which is a bit of a problem for them. The bloggers and people with an interest in what is really happening in retailing have a different agenda.

The propostion that retailing is dead is not helpful or true. There is a adjustment and the markets are uncertain but this downturn like many before it is now over-hyped.

Unemployment levels will continue to grow and others will join Woolworths. The news media will have a bleak agenda and market will adjust but these are symptoms of what was happening in the real economy months ago.

What we are seeing online is the real economy. This week we have see a change in the growth curve and it is up.

I think that this curve will be the one to watch this year if we want to understand what is happening in the real economy.

Online PR Hypecycle - where are we?

I have been wondering where online PR has got to in the Gartner Hype Cycle.
It would be nice to believe that it has already arrived in mainstream practice in the UK.

But, I don't think so.




The tale begins with the 1995 CIPR annual conference in, I think, Warwick when Jon White, Reggie Watts and I expressed opinions about the future of PR. We were sked to look ten year out. Reggie and Jon were about right with CSR and the role of PR in management. I, on the other hand was about five years to ambitious.


The CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission did brilliant work only to be sidelined by the year 2000 internet bubble crash and it was only when the 'Web 2.0' hype began to bite that the PR industry began to look at online PR again.

Now, with to research published by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) showing that 25-34 year olds spend 13.9 hours per week online (up from 13 in 2007), 36% are heavy daily users and almost two thirds are online daily there is considerable incentive for companies to shed Web 1.0 and take part.

Even more compelling is the latest AOP research, released this week which shows business websites emerging as a highly valued and indispensable source of information for business decision makers. The survey, conducted in association with IPSOS Mori, revealed:

* B2B websites are ubiquitous among business decision makers, 97% stated that this is the media most used for work
* 60% ranked business websites as an essential source of information in their work
* 60% consider business websites as providing information that they couldn’t get elsewhere

Of course, there is a lot more similar data showing how important online selling, marketing and opinion forming has become. The evidence is now overwhelming and inside many companies is the uncomfortable feeling that they are now very wrong footed.

But we are not there yet. The demand is building but not compelling.

The focus is on how the economy will survive the 'Festive Season' and then the cold reality of January will make people look much harder at where their future lies and that is when there will be the big change.

PR Facing $10 billion plunge?

There is a hush about the impact of the Crunch on PR.

We have to face up to it.

Yes there are opportunities but if you take out a quarter of the revenue that supports any industry sector, it has an effect all round.

In February 2009, the number of advertising pages in print publications will be reduced. The pre-Christmas advertising will have gone and sales advertising will have vanished.

It is hard to guess by how much the decline will be but let’s be optimistic (as I think this week’s media reports have been) – print media ad spend will decline 50% across Europe in 2009.

When will the recovery come? April? June? September? Or, as media report in the UK has it, perhaps 2012 (http://xrl.in/12n8).

And if by then, the newspapers and magazines have not found a new way of engaging readers they will be dead or next to it?

While we are imagining this Armageddon, let’s call it 50% fewer editorial pages.
Perhaps 50% of PR activity is predicated on contributing to editorial pages.

As the blood spreads on the editorial carpets so too does it spread to the miltch cow 25% of the PR industry. That is 25% of Press Relations PR jobs, revenues, support and so forth.

In the UK this represents a loss of PR sector revenues amounting to about £0.3 billion (for the Global Alliance lets imagine perhaps $10 billion worldwide).

This is a big issue for the industry and its associations. We do need to start talking about it.

The Nature of an Organisations

As many will know, I have a problem with the theory that most people still to describe an organisation.

In the light of the exchanges on Toni's Blog, it seems a good time to re-phrase where I am coming from.

Coarse' concept of a nexus of contracts is now stretched to the point that it is no longer practical (and Sonsino's idea of a nexus of conversations is too lightweight).

At every level and in every department, organisations have become porous. They lease the office, factory, computer and machine tool, Like Procter and Gamble, Lego, or IBM they use open source Intellectual Property to compete with products. Manufacture is shipped to another company/country and even the means for payment and distribution belongs beyond the institutional structure. It is not that this is some cyberspace phenomena. It is not a virtual phenomena. This is about hard bricks and mortar, real machines and products you find in every home.

The organisation as it could have been described in 1958 no longer exists. In 50 years it has become an institution held together by relationships. So when we in PR talk of public relations being between an organisation and its public's, we need to have a better idea of what we mean by organisation.

But the changed nature of an organisation does not stop there.

In the past, we recognised the militaristic nature of corporate structures. There were managerial divisions such as R&D, Manufacturing, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Transport. There were ranks such as labourer, clerk, foreman, supervisor, manager, department head and director. Contact between organisational division was discouraged. They were kept in separate locations and often had to make a journey or (expensive) telephone call via an operator to make inter departmental contact.
A clerk would never talk to a manager because the manager knew everything and past on the information that a supervisor needed to know, who in turn told the clerk what to do. You can see it laid out in its perfect symmetry in the Swindon Railway Museum. In 1958, just 50 years ago, that is how it was.

Today the newest, youngest employee can communicate to anyone of any rank in any division or department at will. With a really bright idea, that person can also create a small group of enthusiasts for something that will be just great to make them all rich and the company prosper. The old idea of an organisation is now different. Communications inside the company has changed that.

But hang on.... the organisation outsources lots of stuff.

So this new, junior person and his group of enthusiasts may well be dealing with an external institution (who might also work with competitors).

The nature of this group is that they have built relationships, are able to act independently and within and beyond the boundaries of the organisation. They have wrested control from the organisational 'dominant coalition' and the structure of organisations is changed.

Great theory.... is there any evidence?

Three months ago people who lent money to banks had almost no say in how those banks should be run. Then tax payers money was leant to banks. Now the editor of every newspaper, every Parliamentarian and, it seems, every bar room bore is affecting how banks are run. Outsourcing access to capital to taxpayers changed the way banks are run. The rise and rise of Management Buyouts (still an active market worldwide despite the credit crunch) is a manifestation of control moving inside organisations.
So far, I have avoided including the impact of ICT. But lurking in the background are things like email, low cost telephony and fast data transfer that made all this happen.

For many organisations, there is every appearance that they are monolithic until you look at the bottom of their website, look at the extent of off-balance sheet financing, examine the services they outsource such as recruitment, competitor research (most people don’t realise that Google is the most used form of competitor research in the world) and now we can see just how much control organisations have ceded to institutions beyond their control.

You see, this disintermediation of the 'organisation' comes at us a many ways.

The Value of Relationships – a PR opportunity?

The wise men comment on the financial tsunami that has broken over the financial world in the last few months on the BBC.

They are worrying over the future of capitalism which is a sideshow compared to the other changes happening around them.

As readers here know, I have been talking about such shock waves for some time and I have been yelling into the void that we have to come to terms with intangibles and notably the value of relationships. When relationships break down the commercial consequences are, as we can see, dire. But history also tells us that when relationships fail between peoples the consequences are far worse.

It seems to me that too many people are too aloof to see the present danger.

In an era of internet driven transparency, the lack of it un-nerves many and so it is to be expected that bundles of "special investment vehicles" would eventually un-nerve people. In this case the people are bankers.

But this is insignificant compared to the next shock wave and the ones after that.

In business the practice of 'off balance sheet' finance from lease and lease back at one extreme for companies large and small to cloud computing for mostly small organisations, there is a similar shock waiting just round the corner. The question about assets that underscore the value of the company is a very real one and is not measured in the flights of fancy or terror at the LSE. It is measured in the cloud and the relationship value of the relationship networks on and off line..

Financial reporting has to change and it has to recognise the intangible assets that are the basis of most enterprise. There is plenty of evidence that the intangible values in and of organisations is both in-house and beyond. There are many case studies showing that beyond the corporate firewall there is greater value. The examples are not 'high tech' or special and they cut across sectors as diverse as gold prospecting (Goldcorp), education (MITOpenCourseWare), pharma (Procter & Gamble) and computing (IBM). No form of human endeavour is exempt. Each of the above examples are deriving huge value and enhanced assets through community and 'open source' interactivity with huge numbers of none-payroll people involved.

These relationships assets need to be represented in the financial and management reporting conventions on across the world. They need to be reported in company accounts. At best such value is expressed on the stock markets of the world and yet, as we are seeing today, this is a poor measure.

In politics too, we see how relationship assets are exposed to transparency and, driven by the internet, can have far reaching effects. The US presidential election may seem to be an exemplar but compared to the DDoS attacks on NATO countries like Estonia and Georgia there is more than elections at stake. Garry Warner notes some of the motives and user mobilisation techniques available. This is cyberwar between peoples and not necessarily governments or politicians. Our economies, society and polity are now dependant on the internet and yet, unless we can reach out to all communities on a global scale, we will soon be fighting another war with a very different, if just as effective Blitzkrieg taking conflict to the people.

The rise and rise of user created value and wealth through collaboration seems to be passing sensible people by. It may seem that the content of MySpace or Bebo or even blogs is of little consequence and at first sight that is understandable. But every post is of consequence to at least one person if not a huge crowd. It has value. This stuff is being generated at the rate of millions of (over 1.5 million blog posts, over 3 million Twitter Tweets perday, 50,000 Facebook transactions per second) items a day. Each has value (at least to one person), value that cannot be ignored and has to be counted as part of the world economy.

Whether capitalist or not, it's there. The capitalism debate needs to be put back in its 20^th century box. It is no longer relevant.

Meantime, what is a relevant lands in the lap of relationship management. This could be public relations 2.0 and 3.0 but right now is well beyond the scope of most PR research and practice.

Who will take up the challenge?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMRG Capgemini - online retailing to top 50% by 2011

Online shopping is poised to take 20p out of every UK consumer pound by the end of the year, a landmark milestone that analysts believe will make the channel a critical business for many high-street retailers.

An IMRG Capgemini E-Retail report notes that online retail sales amounted to £26.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 38 per cent from the same period in the previous year and projected online retail sales would be as high as 50% by 2011.

In B2B because of the growth of online trading, IT workers, now have to be creative, world-aware and business-savvy to succeed. They are now a central part of the wider workforce and drive future development in sectors as diverse as retail, transport, finance and hospitality, reports Retail Bulletin.

Booming e-commerce means sectors not traditionally linked with IT are creating brand new technology-related job roles throughout their businesses and working much more closely with IT workers to help them succeed.

Of course, this also should include the PR sector. But figures are harder to find here.

Next results

The results from retailer Next today suggest that there is a lot more work to be done by the Group to boost its online sales.

The FT reports that Next’s online and catalogue business sales were up 5.6 per cent last quarter with high street sales down 2.4% over the same period.


No one will pretend that online sales can beat the downturn. There will be casualties and for a lot of organisations their online sales still remain only a small fraction of total sales.

So there are things to be done.

The first is to optimise online sales now. This will help with the immediate issues that will plague retailing for a couple of years.

Next is to plan for next year when the online experience and commitment to the brand from the online community has to be of a different order.

And then, as retailing begins to recover, it will have changed for all time because the experience of online shopping will be well established.

The immersive internet will be at hand.

Online Retail - Its a disaster in the making

Today, a crisis broke out in retailing.

The BBC reported "Wedding present firm Wrapit says it is experiencing financial difficulties and is in talks with banks and advisers to avoid going into administration."

This is really bad news for retailers. Online retail has been the one bright light for retailers according to the latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.

It shows that UK shoppers spent over £26.5 billion online in the first six months of 2008 despite the credit crunch – up 38% on the £19.2 billion recorded for the first half of 2007. Capgemini and IMRG report that for the first half of 2008, 17p in every pound was spent online. This is roughly equivalent to half of all supermarket sales and larger than all retail sales for clothing and footwear.

What the online retailers really don't want is anything to shake confidence in online retailing and especially this demographic sector at this time.

This is a PR issue for all retailers and I am happy to hold a meeting next week at the CIPR in London with practitioners to discuss the issue but in the meantime, this is a matter for fast work across the retail sector at a corporate level.

Is there a relationship between profitability and web presence

I have been looking at relationships between numbers of pages indexed by search engines each year and the financial results of companies.

There are a lots more to do before one can draw conclusions but hear is an example from one company.

The key here is to see the relationship between numbers of pages that include reference to the company and the profit indicators.

Does this mean that having a big online footprint aids profits>