Reflections on PR productivity

jellybean1233  http://bit.ly/nzXw81

The Broadgate Mainland survey is a useful contributor in the development of improved productivity for the PR sector.

We need to do something fast to reduce the effects of a perceived professional diversity trap brought about as a consequence of the present structure and practices in PR.

The survey makes us very aware of the key role that a good old fashioned web site plays in Financial (and a lot of other) public/media relations.

In addition, it offers insights into the role of social media as part of the communications mix that influences journalists and journalism.

ABC data:
A blow to an already struggling industry
The Spectator http://bit.ly/pWC84N

Because press agentry is such a big part of current PR practice, and because of the attrition of print media (see left), it is important that research into the interface between PR people and the press is better understood and that the interplay between PR and Journalistic actors is made much more productive.

Source: Paid Content http://bit.ly/aMGo7e

The PR industry which is so dependant on media relations for its living has to acknowledge that it needs a thriving media sector to survive until it has adapted to the new environment. 

The new environment is one where there are fewer editorial pages, fewer journalists per editorial page and where Radio, TV and digital (including social media) are even more important.

It is now urgent that we develop, across the industry, some response to the implosion of the traditional media.

There are a number of other indicators in the Broadgate Mainland survey  that show us where we might begin to look to make the PR industry much more effective and build a defence for the sector.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the PR industry is not the first to have a productivity issue and that we can learn from their experience.

In the case of media relations, the best productivity driver is going to be a combination of quality management, cost reduction and satisfying the media that will eventually emerge from the ashes of the present industry.

It is not the place of this blog to do all the research and to make recommendations to the industry and show it teaches best practice. 

I can point out that PR is not alone, there is precedent and how research can inform the industry to help it become better at its job.

In a post in May, I showed the anatomy of a news story (the killing of Osama Bin Laden). It was evident from the findings that there is an interplay between a range of media for all good stories. It is not one medium or another it is all media that really counts.

In the meantime, who would not recognise a journalistic motivator when given this gem from Broadgate Mainland: "The number of hits a story receives has become the most popular measure of journalist success, followed by how an article is shared online." What this is telling us is that the media and the PR industry both have to take a multi-media view of media relations.

From this, the PR industry can begin to assemble the information it needs to be more productive against a backdrop of a declining, but still critical, media relations practice.

Online readership analysis – is bigger better?
 Show me numbers
http://bit.ly/nZfF2K

Here is an example:If journalists are motivated by the web effects of their stories, is the PR industry obsessed with getting stories published that achieve above the average  number of online page views for their stories in the publication's website?

First we need the data (not hard - see graph) and then know what these data mean for practice.

It is by examining these research findings and others that we can begin to find out what high quality looks like.

For some it is the creativity of the original idea established in the strategy. For others, it may be the quality of writing and for another it may be way a story is pitched to the busy journalist.

But for the journalist what is gold plated?

Well, if the survey is to be believed, a happy editor and publisher is a good start and that means good clean original copy that can be used in the publication, blog and Twitter with a minimum of fuss and with every chance that it will go viral the instant 'enter' is clicked.

For enhanced productivity, we can see that more research is needed and then recommendations can be made, best practice can be developed and practitioners and students can be inspired.

Having a sense of what we need to deliver by way of quality, can we gain some idea of what we seek by way of cost reduction?

Productivity tools may be helpful http://bit.ly/nSrBTS

The practitioner should now be informed about how to manage time and resource to achieve out-takes.

Hit rate, that is, the number of relevant citations matching the campaign objectives (citations in selected magazines, web sites, social media etc should all count today), is a way of measuring out-take. Too many citation or too few citations in selected media are inefficient. This means that setting realistic out-take objectives is important (and because 'all publicity is good publicity' remains a top priority for a lot of clients, now is the time to check them for blood stained knuckles).

Time/cost ratio of output to out-take is what the industry needs to understand and work on. Another way of looking at press relations is the the reach and frequency of citations in selected media per input hour/cost.

What the table (above) is really saying, and it is only one of many productivity tools that can be used, is that there is another way of distributing press releases that has an inherent  and minimum10% productivity advantage. In an industry that grew 13% last year and which is outperforming the market profitability should be brilliant. But its not. Essentially, the industry is living on borrowed time and the long hours of a measly paid workforce.

When looking at services, in house practitioners and agencies should look at their functionality AND productivity gain. Today week Precise launched its new combined monitoring and media contact service.

Here is a case of an integrated service that could offer productivity advantages. But it is a service a million miles from the industry that persists in wanting dusty old paper press clippings as evidence of effectiveness.

Now my cry goes up... who in the PR industry is going to take productivity seriously and take it to the CIPR, PRCA, the universities and other major agencies of the profession?

The industry needs press relations but it also needs to mitigate press relations damage to its productivity.

The case for internet mediated PR to avoid the professional diversity trap

Having identified from the PRCA/PRW survey that the PR industry needs to face up to a big productivity gap and a professional diversity trap, It is time to see what can realistically be done.

In this post, I will look at the development of internet based PR services as being an area for industry investors and why it should be an area worth a close look by the PRCA and CIPR (which are both doing quite a lot of work at the agency end of digital PR practice) and academia (which is floundering).

For every £1 the UK PR industry contributes, the rest of the economy contributes £177. If we look at these data more closely, this is an overly comfortable position and will deteriorate.

As the economy returns to 2008 levels PR's contribution, unless productivity grows fast) will drop to a ratio of about £1:£227 over perhaps five years (depending on how fast the UK can make up the massive hole the last recession made in national wealth creation). This means that the PR industry needs to act now or shrink back in the pecking order of significant sectors and, at the same time, witness the professional diversity trap becoming worse.

For an industry worth £7.5 billion we can see the contribution of the PR sector in a global context from this graph.

The PR industry in the UK has some things going for it which will stand it in good stead if it grasps the nettle.






First of all, this is a country that is used to making its way as an entrepôt economy and by providing services.






So, it may be sensible to look at some of the growth areas and see how they might give the PR industry the lift it needs.


Internet mediated PR is an area of growth that might prove valuable. Getting ahead of the curve so that we can expert expertise would be good for PR productivity.



Among the top economies, the UK does not have a large number of internet users but this may mean that other countries may be valuable expert markets.






This would only be true if the UK could call on a sound base of users and expertise.

And in this case the UK is among the top three countries for Internet use per head of population.





In addition, the UK population is ahead of the curve in the fast accelerating next generation of communication. UK people are more addicted to their mobiles than any other country bar Russia.






Of course, the markets relevant to this sector of PR will need good upload and download speeds and so a measure of this capability is important.





What this UN data is telling us is that the UK is a good place for the PR industry to develop advanced Internet Mediated Public Relations practice and services and an excellent centre for the development services for other, and especially emerging markets.



In PR we are acutely aware of the human condition and so the UN Human Development Report is relevant to help identify markets where stimulation of human development is significant.




With closer analysis of the data, the UN HDI report may also give the PR industry some clue as to where the most relevant markets may be for enhanced online PR services.

There is work to be done to develop the opportunities for the PR sector.

Clearly, these data skim the surface but as part of a contribution towards improving PR productivity to mitigate the professional diversity trap facing the PR industry, I thought it might help PR industry thinking.


Sources: United Nations accessed via Google Public Data Explorer http://bit.ly/pOqBcO

PR productivity sucks

It depends how you look at the numbers 

PR Week (15 July 2011) editor Danny Rogers bangs to PR drum hard this week making journalistic claims about the PR industry. He suggests to politicians that his survey, undertaken with the PRCA is proof of the massive and ever-growing value of PR to the British economy. Well, such claims make some people in the industry wince.


He is, after all a journalist and so might be forgiven for a bit of spin but the reality is that the PR is a pretty poor performer among the top flight sectors. Output per employee is dull.

The survey estimates that there are 61,600 people employed in public relations in the UK and that the industry has a turnover of £7.5 billion. This is an estimate combined with an ambiguous statement which could be interpreted as showing turnover per employee of £121,753 per annum.

The sector, like many others, is growing too but compared to most UK sectors, the PR industry has a very small upstream economic footprint. (press clipping and rudimentary intelligence, catering services and normal office overheads). Downstream economic impact is also limited.  Press relations is an example.

Compared to the top performing sectors, PR is not a great act. Here are some examples:

The UK music industry employs more than 120,000 people and has a turnover of £3.9bn per annum showing a £355,000 annual contribution per employee.

A similar sized industry, the Space Sector is also interesting. In the 2010 a sector study showed the industry with growth rates of 10.2% in the last two years turnover of £7.5 billion. With employment of nearly 25,000, economic contribution per employee £300,000.

UK Internet economy is worth £100 billion a year and Internet companies employ an estimated 250,000 staff showing £400,000 contribution per employee.

PR, it seems has a productivity problem. It needs to up its productivity by a factor of 2.5/3 to be considered top flight.

Perhaps this is the real value of the PR Week report. It has shown that, though growing (and not as fast as most of the top performers) it is not getting the best return per employee among the better exemplars.

For most practitioner (84% of practitioners have some form of general media relations responsibility and 77% write articles and newsletters), it is worth comparing journalist and  with PR salaries. Journalists are paid:

Journalism Salary Range Magazine £11,170 - £34,459 Publishing £12,471 - £38,233 Newspapers £11,407 - £35,489 Internet and New Media £13,150 - £40,724

PR people are paid a comparable level of between 28,384 and £36, 500 average annual salary (up to Media Manager/Account Manager level). It would seem from these data that PR practice is comparable with the work of a journalist but PR work extends to 46.5 hours per week.

This would suggest that to compete with the high flying sectors of the economy, PR has to find an alternative to writing as its core activity.

What we now need from the research is some idea of where the high productivity gains can be achieved.

In addition we need some form of breakdown of the low value activities so that we can cut the cost of production of just simply cut out the activity.

Can PR use ROI as a form of measurement? Its harder than you think

This week three academics have presented challenges to the PR academic community.

Professor Tom Watson at Bournemouth, Richard Bailey at Leeds Metropolitan University and my co author Philip Young at Sunderland have all made interesting contributions to PR thinking ahead of the the CIPR’s new Research and Development Unit (R&DU)  meeting next week.

Before entering into the debate on Grunigian theory presented by Richard and Philip, I wanted to respond to Tom's point.

Tom makes a point: "I still have doubts as to whether ROI, other than in a strictly financial format, can be re-purposed into a more general expression of value creation or contribution to organisational efficiency.  Business managers understand what ROI is, so why would they accept a mixed-concept PR ROI."

It is important. As AMEC boldly goes for some form of measurement of PR providing a return on investment. There seems to be a belief that ROI is a simple idea.

It would seem there is a belief that ROI is a financial measure. Of course it is not. ROI is a profoundly Public Relations measure.

Lets have a look at what ROI is. It is defined in accounting terms as:

(Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment) divided by (Cost of Investment)

Can we pause for a moment and explore what 'Investment' means. Investment requires that an organisation has cash flow, capital reserves or some other asset that can be deployed as an investment.

Organisations comprise three principle assets: capital, proprietary process and/or service and  relationships. The acquisition of capital, and development of process or service; 'vision, mission and corporate objectives' (Kaplan 2001) are a function of relationships.

It follows that to invest in anything, an organisation needs relationships of a nature that can be invested.

So lets re-draw what ROI means:

(Gain from Relationships minus Cost of Relationships) divided by (Cost of Relationships).

ROI is profoundly about relationships. In an industry called 'Public Relations', this could be of interest. In a sector called 'marketing communications' it will be pivotal because Marcoms depends on 'public relation' to optimise relationships to create capital and cash flow to pay for this, a special area of relationship management, namely marketing. In principle the same applies to the trade of 'Corporate Affairs' and other trades associated with 'Public Relations' in practice.

Which takes us back to Richard and Philip and the Grunigian excellence model coming from systems theory. We can, if we desire stay with the systems theory view because already have a grounded reserach into the nature of relationships in the work of Bruno Amaral (2009).

This, Amaral, hypothesis is that relationships  are formed at the nexus of values and using latenet semantic analysis was able to show that where there is a nexus of semantic values there is very strong evidence that they are central to the formation of convergent relationships.This empirical research supports conclusions as to the impact of public relations as relationship management offered, by  Ledingham and Bruning (2002).

Convergent values relationships have some resonance with the Grunigian position of Publics forming round issues but in the Amaral study, it was less issues as values that were key which is a broader construct.

What we have done is to extend and develop the ideas of Grunig and Ledingham and Bruning to identify an empirically based idea of what public relations can be which accommodates both theoretical perspectives.

Can we now re-draw ROI yet again.

(Gain from Nexus of Values minus Cost of Nexus of Values) divided by (Cost of Nexus of Values).

Of course, I have only taken one view as to the nature of relationships namely the empirical research of Bruno Amaral. There will be others drawn from Psychology to the Evolutionary Sciences.

What I hope to have shown is that the theoretical concepts of Public Relations have moved on and that we can, should we wish, pursue ROI but that it will require more than an AMEC Commission to come to any meaningful conclusion unless there is a great deal more by way of, notably academic, research.

And the there is the problem of getting such ideas into the heads of the PR industry's clients. But that is another story.









RS Kaplan  Nonprofit management and Leadership, 2001 - Wiley Online Library

Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, 1992  IABC Research Foundation Edited by James E. Grunig

Relationship management in public relations: dimensions of an organization-public relationship (1992) John A. Ledingham and Stephen D. Bruning Public Relations Review Volume 24, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 55-65

Thinkers, practitioners and academia - lend me a minute

I can do no better than reproduce Heather Yaxley's post word for word from  PR CONVERSATIONS

There’s no such thing as online or digital PR anymore…

That seems to be the message from Philip Young who, with David Phillips, is editing a special edition of the online journal, PRism on the topic: Beyond Online Public Relations (to be published early in 2012).

Philip claims that “Today ALL PR is Online PR” and is interested in papers that support or challenge the view that it is no longer meaningful to discuss ‘online PR’ (abstracts of up to 500 words to be emailed to philip.young(at)sunderland.ac.uk by July 3). The journal will feature imaginative academic papers that expand understanding of the impact of internet on PR theory and practice.

The underlying premise is that we need “a fundamental reassessment of what it means to practice the discipline of PR” as regardless of whether public relations is third party endorsement, reputation management or relationship management, it is necessarily online.

Others may feel that the focus on digital PR has gone too far, or reflects simply another communications channel.  What about the two-thirds of the world’s population who are excluded for reasons of access or ability from the online world?  Or the increasing trend towards commercialisation of cyberspace and its impact on notions that social media facilitates a dialogic form of relationship building PR?  Let alone the consequences of increasingly living life – and managing reputations – in a virtual world?  What does that do to trust, the social sphere and a sense of reality and perspective through which people traditionally view news, public and private information?

From my interest in career perspectives of public relations, I wonder whether practitioners are equipped to forge new paths in an online dominated world?  Will we be reduced to call centre operators typing out tweets and other attempts to “engage” with online communities?  How can we have a point of difference when every digital native can employ digital PR skills?  And will organizations recruit, train and develop PR practitioners of the future into strategic management roles if their entire focus in the online terrain?

Lots to ponder and I’m sure this relates to many practical case studies from those working in PR, as well as dissertations being undertaken by students and academic research initiatives.  The edition is looking for papers which:

• Discuss the implications for organisational reputation and relationships through the lens of rich online content; internet enabled interactive communication and radical reach;  transparency and radical transparency; and institutional porosity and public exposure
• Extend thinking about  the shape of public relations practice in 2020 and beyond, paying particular attention to the concept and PR practices affecting  the dominant coalition mediated by the semantic web;  values derived relationship paradigm and the “Internet of Things”
• Provide case studies that show how imaginative understandings of social media can add a new dimension to understandings of relationship management
• Articulate evolved forms of existing theory, including the Grunigian Excellence paradigm
• Offer a roadmap for integrating what was briefly considered to be “online PR” into academic study
• Examine the contribution of the growing number of social media gurus to practical and theoretical understandings of the discipline
• Examine the significance of the 2010 Stockholm Accords to practice that is not mediated by internet protocols.

The resulting edition aims to “mark a coming of age of an evolved articulation of a discipline that can play a significant role in organisational activity”.  Agree or disagree?  Answers in no more than 500 words as an initial abstract as above…

... and here is a start... what can we do with these:

How can academia serve the emerging PR paradigm?

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

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

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

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

The value of the internet across Europe

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

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

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

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

The nature of social interactions

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

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

Humans are genetically programmed to be social.

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

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

What of the remaining 70%?

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

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

The value of social activity online

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it that we have evolved to share information.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public relations and internet activity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the new realm of online public relations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What part does public relations play

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

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

More newspaper articles were read on line than in print. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution is never linear – some indicative examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

The value of knowing value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media and the Challenges to Academia

First of all, a little context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ordinary life is changing very fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 The Connected Kingdom – How the Internet is Transforming the UK Economy (2010) Boston Consulting Group http://www.connectedkingdom.co.uk/downloads/bcg-the-connected-kingdom-oct-10.pdf accessed Feb 2011.

UCL 2011 UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis accessed Feb 2011

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

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

BP, issues management and 150 million adverse internet citations

Shares are holding up well after BP and its partners were accused of a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the oil spill that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast over the summer, the White House oil spill commission said on Wednesday.

What is coming out in the aftermath goes much wider than the loss of life, an unprecedented environment disaster, threat of being taken over and the loss of some top executives.

Over and again, we hear criticism of poor communication. BP might expect some criticism in PR Week but is now in the spotlight as a poor communicator in the Wall St Journal, Financial Times, and BBC and has been associated with poor communication over 30,000 times online in a week.

The Monthly report will be un-nerving with critical coverage in news sites (5,000 articles this month), blogs (50,000 posts), Twitter (11,000 times), Facebook (14,000 times) - yes they have all be there. This mountain of criticism is now online and will not go away any year soon. long after the beaches are pristine again, the online aftermath will be there.

I am not going to criticise whoever was the manager in-charge of PR at BP (it could or perhaps should be among these people). I am going to offer a view of the two million online citations that have been generated in this last terrible year for  the company.

Crisis management is about preparation and the PR industry does have some very good tools to help in this regard. Planning and managing for crisis is hard work but not hugely complicated (compared to other areas of PR management). BP did not have much of a crisis communication plan in place according to the US commission report.

Recovering from a crisis is much harder and often one crisis sparks another (death - oil spill - share price fall - top executives desert - takeover threat - pressure on other operations - cost of being in the spotlight - legal costs/management disruption). The level of added distraction for the Board, cost and range of threats is now significant and for some organisations such pressures can be crippling.

What is to be done?

Well, after the PR crisis management plan has been put in place and the complete review of how BP and its industry moves towards improving transparency (oh no! not another TV series about the oilmen)  and next shuffle of the Board, there will have to be a change of structure (retail separate from exploration and production for example) name and identity.

Why change of name and identity? Basically BP has to find a way to escape from the mountain of adverse online content that will follow it round like a bad smell for years.

The question is what is the timing for all this.

For good financial reasons, who will get stuck in for the sake of future PR

It is the time of predictions and finding out how good we were last year. Most predictions are not much more than fun but there is good reason for more serious analysis of trends that lead to effective insights.

It is these insights, when they are accurate,  that provide the basis for confidence and investment in the future of organisations, and economic sectors.

I am not shy about forward predictions and the brickbats that come when I get it wrong. Equally, I get very frustrated by peers whose view of the future is too short term, narrow or based on ill considered facts.

Being critical of the PR industry's lack of performance over the last 15 years is not based on 20:20 hindsight but on a combination of professional institutions, academic and industry failure to appreciate predictions made, for example, 15 years ago and empirical often self/shoe-string funded research (like this) which demonstrate modern capabilities that can allow the PR industry to fulfil predictable potential. 

The key here is in knowing how good we are at predicting the potential. I had a go at looking ahead 20 years in 1995 and here is my, verbatim, contribution:

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

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

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

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

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

(David Phillips CIPR symposium in 1995)

A decade ago, some contributors dealt with what seem to be modern issues such as crisis management mediated by social media. Here is Alison Clark's 2001 contribution:

Corporate reputation managers need to put new systems in place to permit timely and appropriate response to the increased level of comment on significant issues that the Internet enables. Collecting the commentary is a preliminary step only. Most of public commentary is on the World Wide Web or in usenet. The originator?s choice of medium is revealing of their objectives and motivations. The management response may be pre-emptive or consequential, but essentially it is limited to six options, which may be supported by protocols prepared for timely response. 

Perhaps the time has come to do more research and backfill some of the old prediction with new research to show the provenance and reasons for the industry to invest in its own future.

I shall start at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011 with some new thoughts. It will be interesting to see which practitioners, consultants and universities can look beyond 'online' to identify whether Public Relations is adapting, evolving or failing.

The real question here is to seek evidence of  contributions by practitioners, consultants and universities. 

Is it Dell, Robert Phillips, or a university leading the charge? Will they provide insights to guide this under performing industry.