Some research questions

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

Yes, the future is interesting.

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


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

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

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


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


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

Day 3 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

Day 2 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic representation for Nick Clegg

Semantic representation for David Cameron

Who and how is reporting on the University of East Anglia

A really quick way of finding the most authoritative sources talking about a subject is to use a semantic site search.

For The University of East Anglia, it may be helpful to know which are the most authoritative sources

I have not yet got the widget to work but this link will take you to the site.

The role of emotion in the immersive web

Some time back I began work on the future of the internet. I wanted to have a view of where PR would fit into the web over the next decade.

I could see how a range of platforms such as PC's, laptops, cell phones, computer games and domestic multiple screen as well as digital wall paper could produce new environments that would change the way we use the internet.

It is no longer a great leap of faith to see how different channels for communication can be mashed to provide rich experiences that our big brains so crave.

In addition, it was obvious that these developments would increase the emotional connection between people, avatars and the hybrid person avatar (such as the Wii opponent represented as an tennis partner on a screen).

One of the elements that makes this kind of immersive web sticky is emotion. Today, browsing through the New Scientist's YouTube site can across Peter Molyneux's video where he shows how this can evolve. Peter is the wizard behind Lionhead Studios (worth a visit just for the graphics) and explains the concept very well.

Emotional Internet is on its way!

The Words Don't Stack Up

I now have a capability to search the semantic concepts that describe organisations across the internet. Using http://www.netreputation.co.uk/values, you can join in the fun too.

What it does is to collect the texts in Google news articles, blog posts, website pages, and Google natural search.

Using Latent Semantic Inference, it finds the most to least concepts evident in each corpus.

The theory is that an organisation with a good internet strategy should provide a list of concepts that are similar between these four sources  and offer a coherent view of the organisation, its products and services and their merit in a balance grouping of value concepts.

One might at least expect the web site and natural search (with good search engine optimisation) to have common concepts and that these should at least offer a coherent range of concepts (keywords) that describe the values of the organisation.

Here is the good news.  If you want to describe your organisation get the blog returns... they tend to be really good.  They reflect what even the fussiest marketing man would want to hear. Then try news coverage. Most companies would like that. Mostly, it’s great coverage pointing to a coherent structure of values.

 

From there forward it goes downhill. The website will be pretty, the navigation flawless and the words – completely at sea. Lacking coherence, the offer of the day ahead of company values and one can only feel for the poor visitor trying to make sense of the content in the site.

Well that is pretty bad. Worse is to come. The top ten citations from natural search confirm only that Search Engine Optimisation is, to most people responsible for it, a place of loathed melancholy, where brooding darkness spreads its jealous wings.

The capability of companies to build a coherent internet strategy is the biggest issue facing PR practice today.

The easy bit, where the practitioner has control like the website, is a mess. The part of the internet which can be influenced using SEO is incoherent and yet where there is less control in press coverage and precious little control, in blogs, life seems flawlessly wonderful.

Finding nice bloggers - finding nasty bloggers

In recent weeks, development in using Bayesian inference on Latent Semantic Analysis of blogs has been keeping me up at nights.

From a simple engine developed by my friend Girish, I have been thinking about how one can use this information as a predictive tool and it has some promise.

Let me go back a bit.

Here is a simple application to find out the sentiment of bloggers between two competing entities. You can try it out. Try comparing 'clinton' with 'obama' and see who is getting the most positive and most negative blog posts.

You will also see that the programme also measures the extent of objectivity in the content analysed.

Because of the way we have set this application up if the comment about the candidates is neither positive or negative it produces a nul return (because of the nature of the experiment).

This experiment has moved on quite a lot and soon I hope to have a more advanced example you can try out here.

The experiment we are working on is to use the concepts identified in the blogs to monitor what subjects are growing and which are retreating and the sentiment attached to them.

The next phase is to predict where such concepts are going within a level of confidence that is acceptable.

Now comes the theoretical leap of faith. When a new concept emerges, it will be disruptive and may well provide an insight what future news will be.

Now that really will add a new dimension to PR practice.

Relationships the missing link in Clay's book

At last after some long train journeys I have finish Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky.

He brings to the modern time the work of a number of American researchers and weaves some great case studies in a very engaging way.

The one element he needs is the dynamic behind why 'if you publish it people will come'. Of course this is not true but is a truism and it all comes down to the basis of relationships and notably relationships online.

Relationships form when the values of one entity (or person) finds another entity (or person) with values in common.

We go to the places where we know there will be like minded people. We talk to people with similar interests, we seek contexts where the values are akin to our own when we are in the 'mood'. We migrate to the blogs that interests us and then pass along the best to people who follow our blog.

On page 217, Clay explains the nature of 'networks of dense clusters', with a nice explanatory diagram which is a social media take on social networks.

There is some interesting work from the Haas Business School Alumni Networks' blog Group Scope which is not theoretical but is similar and from real life mapping and which shows the diversity of organisations (click here to see interactive version of the graphic) that form around a range of relatively narrow values and through a range of online channels for communication.

It is the basis upon which the Relationship Value Model ( a very European model) is predicated.


Group Scope have been investigating ‘hot company’ networks based on the idea that key people and investors can help point the way to new companies. They point out that the goal of a ‘derivative network’ is to take a network of interest (aka values systems) and ‘invert’ it to see another view of its affiliations. In each of the ensuing three derivative maps, they expose new sets of people and companies that are not in the group of ‘hot companies,’ but are related to that group through these derivative networks because they have common value systems interests.

In other words, the common themes of 'hot companies' (aka 'hot company values systems') are of interest to a wide, interlinked, network.

Its the values that encourage people in networks to find and then distribute the values in networks of dense clusters.

Here is a Touchgraph image of this blog and we can see the networked relationships:

It is closely interlinked with a relatively few (but germane) other blogs and sites.


















BoingBoing.net, for all its reach is not as heavily networked. It is like a newspaper, a broadcast medium. It is the point well made in Clay's book.

What PR can take out of this is that the 'top blogs', the ones with a big readership and consequently relatively little interactivity, are really just publishers of stuff like any other mass media. If the content from these 'broadcast bloggers' is picked up by the network of dense clusters, great. But if not, try an advert in The Times.

On the other hand, further down the power curve, people who are interactive will pass on the news adding value (commentary, personal recommendation, insights and other values) on the way.

Thus PR is about relationships in this milieu where values are added to the values public relations explicates for its clients. In the networked community, values have a dense relevance among people who have a close relationship with them. These communities are very affective. They are the real key to reputation, for when content in the communities migrates to other (including, but not exclusively broadcast) media, the effect is significant because of the added values contributed by the networked communities.

And, values come before communication. So PR is not just about communication.

Let me explain. Suppose two actors (people) have common interests in similar values but there is no communication between them. In such a case there is no possibility of a relationship forming. However, in a network of dense clusters, there will be a third party who can act as the bridge between the two original actors and will show the values one to the other either overtly or, more often, through other values that are common to all three.

It explains the phenomenon of why RSS is so powerful in bringing relevant people and information to us so quickly. It explains how some activities truly 'go viral' online and it also shows that effective values systems, including corporate values systems have a wider and diverse online 'community' of direct, related and indirect interest. To miss quote an ex US president 'its the values stupid' .

In recent weeks, I have been exploring values and value systems for clients. Of course, driven by the idea that 'key messages', a 20th century marketing idea for brand exposure in mass media, most client have such messages in the meta data on their web sites (although some are far from well optimised). But often these 'keywords' are at odds with the actual content that people seek or read. Even worse, the value systems offered in texts and images on web sites miss the mark which shows up in the demographic data now available from services like Google Trends and MSN labs.

So far, every time we have shown these results to clients, there is an element of shock and a demand for re-evaluation of corporate and brand value systems as well as web design. The former falls directly into the lap of the PR practitioner who now can clearly see where the disconnect (dissonance) between the 'user generated social (sometimes market) segment' and the organisation lays.

Here we begin to see how whole organisations can be changed by the 'messages' (aka values) and how the online community is having a direct influence not only on brand positioning but corporate positioning, not to mention direction, as well.

There are more than a few organisations that are beginning to see that corporate values are critical to long term survival.

The book is worth reading and with just the one further, relationship values, step, would be seminal.

Thank you Clay.

Job hunting to be bigger online

On-Line Recruitment is suggesting that over the next 5 years (to 2011), the e-recruitment market will grow significantly both in scale and importance.

Indeed, some are predicting that recruitment will be close to travel – the most successful sector in terms of the online business model. A new Market Assessment report, E-Recruitment, from market intelligence providers Key Note, forecasts that by 2011 nearly 2.1 million jobs will be on offer via online recruitment websites, with a monthly average of 32.5 million unique visitors to these sites.

Something in me suggests that this is not the way it is going to be.

The idea of six degrees of separation, allied to the Long Tail may mean there are other options when it comes to recruiting - or finding a job.

PR = Phone Relations

Richard Bailey is a great observer. He has put telephony in the frame as a communication channel ahead of the Internet. Right.
And he notes The Economist article which shows how the Internet is a platform for the Internet.

Good one Richard.

Pay-for-play PR is bad - always

Gary Bivings has a comment about 'pay for play'.

... it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products. There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend. There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts. Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads. (Yes, this is a real problem.)

If you have to pay for it, you are not doing it right. You will be found out, your client/organisation's reputation will suffer and the blogger in on the deal will be ignored by the 'real' people in the conversation.

Instant publication of press releases - anybody?

David Meerman has an interesting post about Yesterday in the 'press release' distribution business.

He sums up with some advice that I add below.

For the nonse, this is OK but I just wonder what the business model is for the future.

Yesterday, talking to Peter Wilson, we pondered on how easy it would be for a distribution agency/publishing house to render 'press releases' ready for page and ready for print by using XPRL. Of course it is dead easy, would cut out a load of journalist's time and, from reliable sources, would be an instant pass straight through the system.

The whole business is designed to make it easy.

David's points are as follows:


The important things to consider before you send a release through any service are:
1. What reach does the service have into the ways that buyers search for news such as Google News, Yahoo News, vertical portals and online news sites?
2. What reach does the service have into the media that you want to target?
3. What value added social media tools such as tagging via Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us does the service provide?

Compare the various services and the pricing levels and choose accordingly. "We've always sent releases through XYZ wire" is not a good reason to continue to use that service.

Tag - a word to play with

Ian Delaney has an introduction to social tagging. I mentioned tagging on For Immediate Release on Tuesday and this is a less culinary approach.

Tags and tagging are a big part of social media. Instead of sorting items into folders, you describe them with a series of words. The words you use, the ‘tags’, are up to you. Some people refer to this as ‘folksonomy’ in the sense that tags are home-grown and created by users, as opposed to putting things into folders in a tree structure decided by other people, ‘taxonomy’.ote>

This can be useful for lots of reasons and Ian shows some of them.

The changing nature of organisations

An article by Wyatt Kash, in GCN cought my attention.

Despite his use of 'web 2.0' it is interesting because of some of the comments he has brought together.

For example:

"If the Web 2.0 is in its infancy, then Enterprise 2.0 is a total newborn," and "

"...the days when the technologists could impose technology standards, inflicting structure on, and inside an organization" as they have over the past 10 years may be waning."


"...the outcome doesn't have to be chaos. It can be more like an ant colony."

PR transparency

Perhaps what we are seeing at last is the enforced transparency that comes from the semantic web.

This was a conclusion we came to in 1999 at the CIPR Internet Commission. (It would be soooo useful if the papers were published by the CIPR - its site needs an archive capability. Perhaps we should introduce them to Google which is said to be building a global archive) .

Andrew Lark has a post on the subject of trasnparency and 'green policies and notes: What is going on here is interesting. Recognizing the very tangible commercial advantage of messaging green, companies like Sun, GE and Dell are moving beyond messaging as hyperbole and into making the message very real. The stand to gain from the mantra of "live the message and prosper".

Beyond the New Media Release

What must we do to our media releases to serve the publishing industry.

First of all we need to be able to offer formats that are helpful. Just as a paper press release is unhelpful to a journalist these days, so too is a format that forgets the media need to use SMS.

There is another consideration which is described byAdrian Holovaty who gives a good idea of what 'repurpose' means and says: "I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

This is important for public relations on a number of counts.

Would we have to provide the wider and broader content? Does this mean that the New Media Release is inevitable? Yes it does in order that we can offer the formats that are realistic for todays' media.

But we have to go further.

For example, suggests Adrian "say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

This goes some way beyond a New Media Release because it uses will use the NMR tags to mix and match news stories.

This is how XPRL and NewsML will be helpful to the media and to readers who want to go beyond the news story to offer more facts.

IPTC G2 Family of Standards (which is the new NewsML) will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.

The PR industry has to work on this to stay with it.

Yadee Yardy Ya - the PR phone-round - and celeb journalist

Yes, I know, it should not happen. There are all the reasons why a PR company should not blast out a hundred copies of a release and then follow each one up with a phone call...

'Hi my name is Samantha from Best in the World PR, we sent you a press release about The Greatest Company on Earth and I wanted to see if you would be using it ...... I will email you a another copy now .... let me get back to you about that .....'

It does happen... But will it be relevant in the new era as the newspapers move from 1665 to 2006.

Lets first consider the New Media Release first.

• Its technical
• You loose control because technology can pick up the content and mash it.
• It might not be interpreted by a journalist
• It could find its way into blogs.
• Why adopt a process that is going to put people out of a job and reduce billable hours?

Lets stay where we are.

OK.

But, over the last few years, the number of journalists both staff and freelance has been dropping like a stone. They are very busy, they get a zillion emails and even printed press releases, there are a host of phone calls and they are expected to output story after story like a sausage machine.

Having time to garner the stories the editor needs, checking back on facts and sources and writing is one thing, using, even trusting, feeds arriving from some on-line aggregator is suspect, time consuming and a pain. But... hang on, there is some merit in being able to get past the marketing speak to the story and having lots of available background to give journalistic depth and their own spin. Perhaps for the Journalist there is some advantage.

Disrupting their day is hard and tiresome for both parties when its human. When it is computer driven, it has all the attributes of a punch bag.

There has to be a better way.

Yes there is but, at face value, neither party is going to like it much.

The machines can do a lot more. There is a computer programme that can combine past editorial, current press releases, blogs and wikis and create mashed up content that is founded in historic reportage and current PR outputs leavened with academic research and papers and flavoured with social (blogs etc) content. The amount of content such programmes can review and include into relatively short articles is stunning. The resulting texts are very readable, germane and comprehensive. Unlike present content, the computer can be limited in the amount of content it will use from a single writer, title, publisher or genre of information. Yes, its plagiarism but of significantly lesser degree than current reporting and much less circular and worrying than the current model exposed by shown by Chris Patern earlier this year.

The output might need editing ( I have seen it and, yes, it needs editing into good grammar), but that is a heap better that all the work involved in researching and writing most stories.

I can envisage a day when news outlets deploy such programmes (very soon too).

What then happens to the PR agency and the journalist?

The PR agency is OK. It has to find more copy, more angles, deeper background briefing and content (sounds, pictures, video and even avatars in some cases), and interference in social media leavened with facilitating face to face (Oh! all right - Skype to Skype) conversations with key opinion formers. Its role gets bigger even if the skill sets change.

The Publisher get a big bonus. They have access to much more content, a wider range of content and can fill the new on-line pipeline 24 hours a day using automation. They never run out of news. It is current and cheap.

In addition journalists are relieved of the mundane. They can have more rewarding jobs in part because they do not have to be a sausage machine and in part they have access to the mashup of historic and current comment from which to take a new different and interesting perspectives.

If one takes the topic of the day in the UK, the 'orderly transition of the Leadership of the Labour Party', the new and news content was available electronically. It came as historic media and on-line news and comment and new blog posts and press releases. That kind of content can be automated. The added value was in private briefing and commentary, which once published, goes into the common pool of news.

One can see the difference between automated 'news' and journalist input.

The key here is that the real and actual voice of the journalist is present at his/her outlet and is 'mashed' for all other outlets.

What I see coming from these developments is celebrity journalism. Hugely valuable, hard working, very well connected and expert journalists.

There is an element of win win here.

And for us, the news consumer?

We can 'pull' the information we need, when we need it and then can indulge in that relationship that the media always brought to its readers, as Guy Consterdine put it, reading a favourite magazine is like talking with a friend. We can get the popular 'mash up' news and as a treat a personality journalist take on it.

Of course, these organisations that still want to hide behind firewalls will be fine. Just marginalised.

In the 17^th through 19^th Centuries all of the papers practiced an "advocacy" journalism, it is genre that can adapt and perhaps be more honest than the "objective journalism" of the 20^th Century.


How brave the publishers can be is evident from the Daily Telegraph which is investing heavily in its on-line future but who will be next and who will really adopt the semantic web as the backbone of media.



Picture: The Telegraph Hub published by the Press Gazette today: "The Daily Telegraph is promising to revolutionise the production process of its journalism with what it believes will be the UK’s first truly integrated multi-media newsroom at its new offices at London Victoria."

A Semantic Opportunity for Sir Martin Sorrell

There is a lot of drive behind the Social Media Club and its flagship 'New Media Release' which has its own wiki, blog and podcast.

I am an enthusiast. It is not that I see this capability levering advantage for the Public Relations industry as it tries to cope with so many media channels (see here for both a list and a podcast). It is of no consequence to me (the fee has not been paid) if no PR people use all or any of these channels. What is important is that someone (loads of people) will. I just hope it is PR professionals.

For a decade I thought that it was the PR industry that could benefit from initiatives like these. Well, lets examine the reality.

When Sir Martin Sorrell puts on a best face on for the annual financial results party on Friday he could reflect on how much of his empire is now leaching away from around the foundations of his monolith.

His company will use XBRL to announce its results (Quote: “Getting the right information to the right people at the right time—faster, more accurately, and with greater efficiency—is vital in today’s business world. Which is why investors and analysts alike favour XBRL” says PriceWaterhouseCoopers. This company has invested heavily in XBRL so it could communicate with its client's stakeholders efficiently.

Sir Martin's statement will use the equivalent of paper because he and his companies can't see the advantages of supporting XPRL to deliver words to investors and analysts despite his empire's claim to be “A World Leader in Communication” (WPP ).

The people running traditional companies do not move rapidly enough. It is impossible to change a company rapidly enough in this era of technological change (quoth Sir Martin) and over four years, the Sorrel companies have briskly demonstrated this as the semantic web marched in a completely different direction.

Because all of this is about the semantic web. It is manifest in the New Media Release initiative.

It seemed obvious to a number of us in 2001 that there would be a need for a Public Relations to be involved in the semantic web. It is all about communication. To us this meant there was a need for an industry XML schema.

There were four reasons for this.

• The World Wide Web Consortium was backing it.

• Closer to home, Reuters had a standard which they released to the news publishing industry which because NewsML. It seemed to us that if we were going to communicate with the media using NewsML, there was a need to join the club.

• The financial sector was developing a schema (XBRL)for posting financial results in a structured way to the major stock markets. It was providing the numbers but not the statements and text related content. For financial PR it was important to be able to use XML in this environment.

• It became clear that, as the emerging semantic web took hold, every communicator would need capabilities to lever the value of XML in all their software.

We formed a group called XPRL.org, involving the CIPR and PRCA in the UK and a number of people in the UK and USA.

Timing was awful. It was 2001. The dot com bubble burst, there was recession and the PR industry struggled for every buck.

Furthermore, this was a time when in PR even the web was new and attempting to move thinking among people like clip companies, press release distribution companies and PR agencies was very difficult. It was still a time of paper and, tentatively, email.

The PR evaluation companies really did get it. Mostly because they could see how good XML would be for creating mine-able data.

Using volunteers we created the site, I wrote the Vision statement, and a group created the first schema.

We had a number of meetings with a range of organisations (agencies, clip companies, press release distributors, government departments etc.) asking them to adopt the standard.

The concept was taken to the Global Alliance, the worldwide organisation for all the national Public Relations Associations. It was, and remains, supportive.

However, the vendors and practitioners in PR, just could not understand or see the value of XML in their businesses.

What happened then was that, as companies realised that XML was useful, they started to build it into new software. It soon became obvious that the CEO and CIO across the PR industry have little in common and mostly have no way of discussing the niceties of communications technologies.

Time after time I would visit companies to hear that they were using XML in development; had not heard of XPRL and, in any case, preferred proprietary XML schema thinking that it gave them some kind of competitive advantage.

Time after time, I saw programmers building 'look up' tables so that the proprietary schema could 'talk to' other schemas most often not just in the same group of companies but on the same computer!.

We now have a circumstance where even in the same group of companies for example where there are a number of big PR firms under the same ownership they do not have common data management standards and have mix'n match XML knitting in their computers.

I also know of two PR big service providers who have two or more schemas running in parallel inside the same company. One is for proprietary computing and one is for interface with other, external schemas.

The IT costs run to five if not six figures.

Part of the problem is that most companies feel that what they do is unique. Is what a big PR company does each day so novel or can anyone do it?

There is almost nothing unique in PR.

(a quick diversion here, I founded Media Measurement, we had a complete software capability to replicate all the evaluation outputs of all of our competitors in the late '90's. We chose not to because our approach was, to our mind, better. For most in the PR industry, the same applies).

What these organisations have not yet managed to understand is that by co-operating they can up their individual game to levels they would not believe.

Meantime, other industries were not so reticent. They brought their XML schemas together, they shared their technologies and they created huge advantages that allowed them to prosper.

There are a number of reasons why the PR industry needs to take XPRL seriously now.

First :

Much (probably all) of the services delivered to in-house and agencies are now delivered using XML as the basis for managing data. While this is delivered as a one off service this is of no consequence. But the minute the organisation wants to make two services work together, they are at (an expensive) disadvantage.
Where services are delivered using the Internet, it can ONLY be optimised using XML. For example, if you have a Google News RSS feed to bring you breaking news about a client, industry or other news, you are using XML and need to be able to integrate using other XML enabled software. This is also true of press lists, clippings, events calendars and without exception, all social media. It is only the PR industry that is out of step.

None adoption of an industry schema is costing the industry a lot of money AND it is losing competitive advantage because the more advanced competitors are using XML standards. A small number may be edging towards involvement but the announcements are thin on the ground.

Second:

To be able to provide services to clients (intranets, extranets, web based, social media based, news release, SMS etc) the industry now has to use XML. Other computers just don't use any other common standard. At present, the industry is relying on a human interaction (such as a journalist transposing words in an email to his article). This is no longer an option for many publishers, the time cost is too high. They have to change the rules to survive.

This means that the PR industry needs to adopt an XML standard to be able to deliver its offering.

The delivery of financial results in XML format is now important even if only to get the timing right and yet the XML standard is presently optimised for numbers and not text. XBRL (the business schema was forced

Third

Most of the emerging practices such as posting photos to web sites, including video and podcasts in blogs, and monitoring the Internet with RSS is dependant on the application of XML.

In fact, to receive press clips from most of the major clipping companies is XML enabled.

Not being able to optimise XML means that PR practice is hamstrung. It cannot compete with people and practices that can use XML.

These three reasons:

Reception and integration of information from suppliers; distribution of information and an ability to optimise interaction with digital media are the three reasons why the PR industry globally needs XPRL. It needs a group of people and the companies involved in providing vendor and client side services to come together to provide both a Public Relations Schema and XML services and advice to the industry.

In a time when the media is becoming the audience, the industry and each of its competitors will be stronger if they collaborate. Beggar thy neighbour is not a policy, it is a suicide note and one hopes that recent events are not an attempt at rushing the pearly gates.

This of all industries should know pro bono publicam. Which is what XPRL is really about.

Of course, there is one other reason why the semantic web and XML is important. For the unwary, it leaches out value from the foundations of the big companies unless they can, to quote Sir Martin again, find better poodles.

Go Join XPRL. This is the person to talk to.

A Semantic Opportunity for Sir Martin Sorrell

There is a lot of drive behind the Social Media Club and its flagship 'New Media Release' which has its own wiki, blog and podcast.

Go Join XPRL. This is the person to talk to.

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