Four strategies for social media campaigning

Setting online objectives is as traditional as beef and Yorkshire pudding. Online, objective setting remains the starting point of all activity. It is good management practice and objective setting is as basic as being specific, measurable, achievable, resourced and time bound.

But we seldom see what the next step is before approaching the tactics we need to deploy.

Strategies are important and we don't very often see examples.

I thought I might share some that I have found useful in some of the approaches to client social media management.

In future posts, I will add to this list but this is a start and if you have strategies you would like to add, that will be good too.

It is not reasonable to imagine that a generic post such as this one will cover all exigencies. Each organisation is different but to give a flavour of the strategies that might well be put in place by an organisation, a number are outlines below. Some are useful for meeting most objectives others fill basic needs of good corporate governance while yet others are drawn from experience and have more specific application.

Communication planning, says Anne Gregory in her book ‘should include both systematic and creative elements. Both are essential to information interactive communication work’.

With such a wide range of communications channels the selection of media has a lot to do with the reception of an organisation's stance. Ensuring that the relevant messages chime with the most suitable media is important.

The ‘internet has made interpersonal and mass communication instantaneous’ and care needs to be taken when engaging the organisation's values with stakeholders'. Once interactions are public in the online landscape it will is impossible to retrieve or erase them completely.

For this reason, it is important to have a number of strategies in place to arm the organisation with capabilities and a range of options to meet ambitions and contingencies.


Media Selection Strategy

It is really easy to elect to use some social media because it’s fashionable and cool. Twitter and Facebook come to mind.

Some media are more appropriate to achieve objectives than others. Consideration of audience use and application is essential. For example a podcast has some appeal for the visually impaired while the use of a photo sharing service would need to be used with care.

Part of a media strategy will need to include reviewing the wide ranging landscape of communications platforms and channels. Some will be well known, others less so and many useful new channels emerge from time to time.

In considering media, it is worth looking further and at how the selection of media can interact one with another. For example, many Facebook pages include a Twitter feed. It’s not compulsory but adds interest.

In addition, consideration of time and resource are important. Facebook and Twitter require a lot of attention.

Setting up a presence and proselytising values requires constant attention. For the most part, social media presence will require a minimum of an hour per day for each channel and in some cases, much longer.

In essence, using one of these channels, once created, will require content and, in time, people will respond to it. They in turn often need a response as part of an online ‘conversation’.

Once channels have been decided upon as a strategic decision, the tactics can be thrashed uot and will be informed by a number of other strategic approaches.


The key elements of a media strategy are:

• Knowledge of the audience
• A review of the range of relevant and practical platforms (PC’s, laptops, mobile phones, slates etc)
• Interest in the many channels such as Blogs, Facebook, Wiki’s Twitter and many other services.
• Media interactivity
• Time and resource needed to maintain the channel/s
• Capability to maintain a ‘conversation’

Timed and timely programme strategies

Used correctly, social media programmes are a great way of bringing awareness and attention to initiatives, events or projects.

Unlike traditional media communication, the advent of social media has changed the nature of timing communication.

Once, an organisation might issue a press release or press briefing which in due course would be published.

Once read, the resulting article would be discarded with the paper or magazine. Today, that same story would probably be published online, might attract online comments and or may be references in a blog, social network or microblog immediately or at any time in the future. The life of a story is now potentially much extended. Stories from long ago can quite suddenly reappear. The internet ‘time shifts’ content. Not just content from a newspaper but all online content.

In addition, as most social media programmes use more than one channel for communication, the timing for issuing content or responding to content may have to be co-ordinated such that all audiences see it at the same time or, depending on the campaign, at different times.

The key thing is that the activity has a timeline and is planned to meet the key objectives. The strategy should outline the timescales and activities to achieve the level of interaction to meet the objectives.

Then there is the opportunity to develop a story over time. The plan may be to develop a story over time and to engage a community progressively as the story develops. There is no reason why, using social media, an organisation might not involve its constituencies in the development of an initiative, story line or announcement. The online community will then be involved and will act as ambassadors right from inception.

Timing strategies have two other dimensions.

One is time of year and seasonality. Most organisations have a time of year when they are at their most effective. In addition, there are times when competition is at a peak. For example during October and November the BBC charity event ‘Children in Need’ provides both focus and overwhelming competition for a host of charities involved in child based charities. In the chill of a British winter, there are good reasons to promote holidays selling family holidays in the early Autumn is not a great idea.

• Timing strategies have to be created to deliver objectives on time.
• Timing will take account of the range of modern multimedia communication.
• Timing can be aimed at a single time/event or can be an evolving number of activities with goal posts.
• Time of year and competitive activity will affect strategy and has to be considered.

Internal communication strategy

Even with small teams the need for effective, timely and transparent communication is important. As the internet forces organisations to interact with an undoubted and existing online presence, internal audiences can and are affected. It is better that any online communication is both available and well under stood by employees and other stakeholders.

The strategy covering internet usage in the organisation should cover the explicit policy for employees and volunteers which should carry the full weight of the dominant coalition.

Most people are more productive when they can access the internet. As a rule, people access the internet using work computers, home computers and mobile phones. The device in the pocket or purse has now removed the ability for organisations to build communication walls round internet access at work and so the implications have to be managed.

This means that there is a need for employment to know about and policies to cater for the new online environment.

At the same time this also affects the management and other internal stakeholders.  This would suggest that a strategic decision on whether internet access policies and expected behaviours should be made internally or publically online.

Such policy statements about attribution, confidentially, respect for the law, notably copyright and much more can be considered as part of online strategy.

In brief, internal strategies need to consider organisations’ access policies, what access and behavioural policies shall be made available internally and externally and how people can be expected to represent the organisation and behave online in the interest of the organisation.

The Importance of Auditing, Monitoring Measurement and Evaluation strategies

Monitoring online presence is important. Much of what is written about or represented in images and videos online is provided by third parties.

As part of setting objectives there will be a need to audit presence and there are a number of ways this can be done. Many such tools are made available here.

In addition, watching how many visitors there are to the charity’s web site, how long they dwell, numbers of pages seen and from where they depart is very useful to identify what activities have prompted people to take an interest in the organisation and what interests them (or puts them off) may help in development of a more effective web site presence. Fortunately the service is free and is provided by Google Analytics.

There are a number of free facilities that will be found to be very effective. Google Alerts .

In response to Tom Watson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the PR industry ignore PR academics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A first look at the Stockholm Accords

The first in a series of five papers examining the Stockholm Accords 

Introduction

Public Relations was ambushed by marketing in the mid 20^th century. It became the servant of its child and was largely subsumed into something called ‘Marketing Communications’.

In this lecture and associated papers and seminars, I will explore the nature of the profession from a perspective of Public Relations forced back into its roots of persuasion, diplomacy and relationship building by ubiquitous interactive communication.

Drawing on the perspectives of the Stockholm Accords and their ready acceptance by practitioners and academics worldwide, I will examine how the professionals, the associations, managers, consultants, educators, researchers and students in the PR sector have to adapt.

This paper outline the perspective I will take and will be supported by four further papers (including Management, Sustainability, Internal Communication, External Communication) that will be published in advance of the lectures.

Pre-amble

The extra-ordinary experience of one of the biggest companies in the world being ill-prepared for a historically unmatched oil spill disaster from every PR perspective in 2010; the complete breakdown in relationships and trust among bankers two years earlier and the ill-preparedness of the industry as new platforms and channels of communication become commonplace, forms the basis of a new professional construct in which PR has to administer its principles on a sustained basis and to affirm them throughout the profession, as well as to management and other relevant stakeholder groups.

The Stockholm Accords provide the basis by which modern day practice may be examined in what Phillips once call ‘Blazing Netshine’, the internet as ubiquitous, interactive communication.

The Stockholm Accords can be accessed at http://www.wprf2010.se/stockholm-accords/draft-of-the-stockholm-accords/comment-page-1/#comment-171

 Governance

“All Organizations operating under the stakeholder governance model empower their leaders -board members and elected officials- to be directly responsible for deciding and implementing stakeholder relationship policies”, claims the Accord.

In the papers published in 2000 (Phillips, Journal of Communication Management, , 2001) and in the subsequent book (Phillips, Online Public Relations, 2001), I made it clear that I thought that the concept of fixed social or economic groups could not be a long lived construct in a digital age. The reality is that now we can explore the nature of such group, whether beings with a ‘stake’ in an organisation, namely ‘stakeholders’ (Freeman, 1984) or people with an interest in the issues that face organisations, the publics described by Grunig and Hunt (Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T, 1984) and Grunig, et al (Grunig, L. A., Grunig, J. E., & Dozier, D, 2002) . The reality, we discover in a very large data set and published by  Amaral  and Phillips (Amaral, B. and Phillips, D, 2009) is that groups of individuals form and re-group round clusters of ever changing mutually held values. The concept of such groups, it seems is not wrong, but they are much less fixed than the marketing literature would have us believe.

The communicative organization, described in the Accords does indeed require timely information because the groups which interest practitioners change quite rapidly. As Professor Anne Gregory put it at the World Public Relations Forum Stockholm in June 2010, ‘Public Relations is complex’. One might add, fast moving.

We are now also aware that the nature of  groups on line is that they can have and do access a broad and often well informed knowledge base. For this reason, if non other, the modern parctitioners requires knowledge and understanding of economic, social, environmental and legal developments, as well as of its ‘stakeholders’ expectations.

Practice needs the tools, and an ability to be able to use them and have sufficient (and pretty comprehensive knowledge) to asses such influences in near real time.

It is with such skills that the practitioner can promptly identify and deal with the opportunities and risks that can impact the organization’s direction, action and communication.

This then suggests that mastering the actuality of the iPhone and iPad generation and those people whose lives are mediated by the immediacy and ubiquity of the internet is a PR imperative.

The Accords invite the profession to participate in defining organizational values, principles, strategies, policies and processes.

In the last year we have moved a long way. We are gaining considerable insights into the nature, relevance and significance of values. Indeed, one might suggest, based on the presentation provided by Amaral at Euprera (Amaral, 2010) that the nature of values and the capability to identify values extant in an organisation and among the wider community is much less difficult than first thought.

The extent to which such values express the mission and objective of the organisation can now be considered in juxtaposition. It is remarkably easy with such tools to be able to identify dissonance.

With such capability principles, strategies, policies and processes are much more easily managed and implemented.

The reality is that, as the use and application of the internet escapes from the Personal Computer and  becomes ever more evident in mobile phone, games and the ‘Internet of Things’, much of what the practitioner needs is to be found in digital social networking, interaction and mediation.

This does require the practitioner (hopefully the research based academic practitioner), develops, becomes knowledgeable and hones research skills and tools to interpret ‘stakeholders’ and society’s expectations as a basis for decisions.

The practitioner capable of delivering  timely analysis and recommendations for effective governance of  ‘stakeholder’ relationships is thus a reasonably practical ambition and practitioner capability. It does require a very mature, well educated and committed career practitioner. But, as we discover from the BP Oil disaster and the Banking crisis, a long overdue recruitment capability is required among non-exec board members. The simple sense to employ public relations practitioners rather than what can be described as Johnny-come-lately and often ex-journalists to do a proper job may be considered in the best interest of the shareholder and future societal contribution of the firm.

In the interest of professionalism, is it right that we could or should judge the practitioner who allowed a bank to be so wary of its trading partners that it nearly brought the world’s financial structures to an end? Is it, one might ask the responsibility of a public relations person to have some role in the effectiveness of organisational relationships?

The Accords are proscriptive in calling for enhancing transparency, trustworthy behaviour, authentic and verifiable representation, thus, they suggest, sustaining the organization’s “licence to operate”.

There is a need to explore such propositions. The nature of radical transparency is an anathema for most organisations, indeed, for most individuals. However, we are seeing a trade off between transparency, which Philip Young and Phillips (Phillips, D. & Yoing, P, 2009) explore at some length, and the convenience it offers individuals. Does this translate into the future organisation?

Today, the location capability (using triangulation between mobile cell transmitters) of the mobile phone is one form of tracking a phone, there are a number of organisations are involved in ‘blue casting’ using the mobile Bluetooth facility to broadcast messages to people in close proximity and many of us are aware of the GPS facility embedded in mobiles. At the same time we broadcast emails, photos and voice without a care. Much of these data is used by organisations to collect information about the users.

People make themselves and their actions and activities transparently available.

Why?

The pay back is terrific with a host of location specific services that range from directions to a destination to discovery of local products and services. This trade of is much more extensive that this short description and will become even greater in the future as the ‘Internet if Things’ becomes ever more common. What we are seeing is an extension of personal transparency towards radial personal transparency.

The question the profession may like to ask itself is whether organisations might want to or wish to extent transparency further because the trade-off is so beneficial. Indeed, there are ethical issues at every turn and, just to make life more interesting for the practitioner and the Accords, is that the proposition is, and rightly, a sign of professional capability that this should be a matter for the practitioner manager and academic.

The Accords invite practitioners to espouse trustworthy behaviour. Of course, we understand the nature of trust and trustworthiness but how far have the Centre for Public Relations Studies[i] or the The Institute for Media and Communication Research[ii] explored the nature of trust in an internet mediated world through the extension of the thinking of, say, contributors to the Oxford Internet Surveys group such as Dutton et al ?

There are interesting areas for research with Dutton et al ( Dutton, W.H., Guerra, G.A., Zizzo, D.J. and Peltu, M., 2005) offering an interesting starting point with papers on Trust in the internet. A key determinant of social capital is thought to be trust in other people. But we find that internet users are actually more trusting than non-users, implying that they have more social capital.

The fashion for talking about organisations that have an internal listening culture, an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond to events though the experience and using the contributions of its ‘stakeholders’  is an area for further exploration and the subject of a further paper.

In this series of papers I shall be presenting consideration of other Accords including Management, Sustainability, Internal Communication, External Communication and the coordination of these activities.

Dutton, W.H., Guerra, G.A., Zizzo, D.J. and Peltu, M. (2005). The cyber trust tension in e-government: Balancing identity, privacy, security.0:13-23. Information Polity 1 .

Amaral. (2010, February). Concepts of Values for Public Relations. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from Euprera Spring Symposium: http://www.euprera.org/?p=69

Amaral, B. and Phillips, D. (2009, July). A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from Bledcom.com: http://www.bledcom.com/home/knowledge

Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman.

Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing public relation. Orlando, FL: Holt: Rinehart and Winston.

Grunig, L. A., Grunig, J. E., & Dozier, D. (2002). Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations: a Study of Communication Management in Three Countries. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Phillips, D. & Yoing, P. (2009). Online Public Relations 2nd ed. London: Kogan Page.

Phillips, D. (2001). Journal of Communication Management, . Journal of Communication Management Vol. 5 Iss: 2, pp.189 - 206 , pp189-206.

Phillips, D. (2001). Online Public Relations. London: Kogan Page.

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[i] http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/fbl/CPRS.htm

[ii] http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/imcr/

No grammar, can't spell and want to 'do' PR

Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist, is suggesting that the "nappy curriculum" – the statutory rules introduced in 2008 which dictate that toddlers should be introduced to computers as early as 22 months of age – is "subverting the development of children's cognitive skills".

In an article in the Telegraph, Dr Sigman is reported as saying that "Children should be banned from using computers in schools until they are nine-years-old because the early use of technology is destroying their attention spans." Here then, is another insult delivered to the profession.

Perhaps an academic can, in the future, present findings to the professions for the professional to consider rather than some headline grabbing and throw away line.

Is it the use of computers that explains why the generality of students with three or more 'A' level exams cannot spell and have appalling grammar? Why is it that some can construct a 'sentence' without a verb and often a subject?

How is it that PR, journalism and other students enter university without an ability to recognise and write in different styles?

Why is it that a lecturer is not able to return scripts to students without a mark because the quality of grammar makes the work confusing, contradictory and or misleading?

Now that the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority is to be abolished can we have a simple rule for teachers at every level. Stand up to the bureaucrats, confront the parents and give the (paying) student a chance of a sustainable career by refusing shoddy work and if that means using computers or not is down to the professional judgement of the teach.

I am the least of literates, but now see young girls in offices being mentored for their writing after 18 years of schooling. They have been let down badly by the likes of the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority. Now it is the teacher's turn to show how education can be just that.

Picture: Socrates using his socratic method. http://www.skolavefurinn.is/_opid/islenska/bokmenntir/heimspeki/heimspekingar/sokrates/14_sokrates_2/sokrates_eiturdrykkur_4.jpg

Talking of Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for  non geeks the Real Time Web has very recently become fashionable. It fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction and then, of course, we no have real time search available fro Google which shows every new page it indexes almost as it happens.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance. This is a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November  noting that:

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. 

Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by  Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch.

There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. 

Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

A number of services are now being introduces. S typical solution is  Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media. Very few services are really real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves, feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot  to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services.  Topsy (http://topsy.com)  is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content.   So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web.  You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month.  

Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot.  OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/)  offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results. 

Meantime, people like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the 

Real Time Web.

 What does all this mean to practitioners.

The key issues for the PR profession are not as easy. The need to be able to monitor the web real time is hard.

There are a lot of tools for monitoring the Fortunately, Publicasity has partnered with companies that have the necessary technology.

Being able to identify opportunities and dissonance between brands and the brand values held by consumers is the next big challenge.

The Publicasity digital team is already working on this with Lisbon University and Klea Global. Early examples of the Real Time technology research are available and Klea Global is closely associated with developments of the Real Time Reputation Wall.

We are now able to discover the way online communities understand corporate and consumer brands both when the brands are top of mind and in lifestyle situations.

This is a big advantage for Real Time Web interactions where marketers can respond to the changing consumer landscape as they evolve.

This is ground breaking capability that the account teams can bring to meet Real Time Web success.