The Nature of Public Relations - Semiotic

Today there are millions of people building new platforms and channels for communication. Many are awful, some are a duplication of some, now passed over, idea. Others gain a brief following and fade away. A few, a very few, survive for some time. Email and SMS are examples of durable channels while MySpace and Facebook are examples of interim social media that survived and gained considerable presence. But internet properties last only as long as they reflect the needs and satisfy the desires of their constituency. It is cruelly darwinian and is, as a result, a fast changing reflection of human drivers.

The things we see online and the ones that prosper online have elbowed their way into our consciousness and if they are useful and satisfy needs can survive. Most do not. Only the very fittest can make it.

An influential tradition in media research is referred to as 'use and gratifications'. This approach focuses on why people use particular media rather than on content. In contrast to the concern of the 'media effects' tradition with 'what media do to people' (which assumes a homogeneous mass audience and a 'hypodermic' view of media), use and gratification can be seen as part of a broader trend amongst media researchers which is more concerned with 'what people do with media', allowing for a variety of responses and interpretations. Some commentators have argued that gratifications could also be seen as effects: e.g. thrillers are likely to generate very similar responses amongst most viewers. And who could say that they never watch more TV than they had intended to? Watching TV helps to shape audience needs and expectations.

Use and Gratification theory is old but in the 40 years since the most recent manifestation was explicated, social media has brought it to the fore again. It presents the use of media in terms of the gratification of social or psychological needs of the individual (Blumler & Katz 1974). The mass media compete with other sources of gratification, but gratifications can be obtained from a medium's content (e.g. watching a specific programme), from familiarity with a genre within the medium (e.g. watching soap operas), from general exposure to the medium (e.g. watching TV), and from the social context in which it is used (e.g. watching TV with the family).

Theorists argue that people's needs influence how they use and respond to a medium. Zillmann (cited by McQuail 1987: 236) showed the influence of mood on media choice: boredom encourages the choice of exciting content and stress encourages a choice of relaxing content. The same TV programme may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs are associated with individual personalities, stages of maturation, backgrounds and social roles. Developmental factors seem to be related to some motives for purposeful viewing: e.g. Judith van Evra argues that young children may be particularly likely to watch TV in search of information and hence more susceptible to influence (Evra 1990: 177, 179). Translating these ideas into online and in particular social media is very attractive and with the research we have already (Amaral 2009) using semantics, has a lot of close similarities.

The internet is being created in the image of human interest, needs and desires. Tinkering with this driving force is dangerous. Some politicians believe they can, others in management try and governments fervently wish they could. But, as the Arab Spring showed, switching off the internet is far too difficult when living with the consequences.

This evolutionary development of the internet has made it very robust.

So many people have tried to prevent this evolution in the past that it has considerable and hugely complex defensive capabilities.

The UN agency was updating its International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in December 2012, but some member states feared it would lead to centralised control of the internet by the UN.

A wide range of organisations and academics raised even deeper concerns about the plans to seek to establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder internet governance entities, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

For many the WCIT threatened the "free and open internet". It caused a furore, largely because no one really knew what the outcome would be. It had the potential outcome ranging from tinkering at the edges to the potential global disruption of communication as we know it.

The ability to move from mere digital interaction to analog and physical interaction using the internet as a semi intelligent platform or channel is now adding a lot to the way we live.

It is offering a lot to the practice of PR and a wider range of semiotic markers that can be used in the practice of public relations.

The mobile phone app that controls a camera using bluetooth or wifi connectivity is an adjunct to a visual PR tactic that can be applied at any product launch by an intern. Furthermore, a photograph taken in this way can be uploaded automatically to a photo sharing site or other cloud based facility without a human hand in sight. Such is the digital real time press pack and the idea is not new.

The Google Driverless Car is a significant step further and between these two extremes lies a wide range of PR PR tactics.

We are already aware that semiotic PR is being practiced. Almost by accident, it has crept up on the profession. It is now commonplace for a Public Relations programme to be multi media.

The PR industry has strayed into the semiotic web as a discipline for affective relationship intervention. As a result, it faces the new realities of the complexity of semiotics (as opposed to media -including social media - based PR) and the precept of PR using the perspective of constituents and their affective technologies.

Google offers a semantic capability. It shows us how semantics has entered into the relationships we have in the media and between ourselves. Semantics can add values atsuch as the type of media, date and even country. These added elements are semiotic and can be technically as well as user created.

We also know that this information is passed along between one person and another and often shared with a wider community.

The drivers for building, creating and optimising the efficacy of online communities has been the subject of considerable research.

A very detailed study by Matthew Rowe, Miriam Fernandez, Sofia Angeletou, and Harith Alani showed that, in online communities, users interact with one another around a shared topic or interest and exhibit behaviour that can be used to label them with their roles in the community. By deriving the role composition of a community - i.e. the percentage distribution of different roles - the composition can be associated with signifiers of health, such as activity, and used to identify what worked for the community and what did not.

For public relations, this means that practitioners can become more effective when they use such signifiers.

This is becoming the norm for much social interaction. It is network communication. Citations, such as tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn and G+ content, blog post or web pages even emails and SMS messages, carry a lot of information much of this is part of the structure of content and media and is called meta data.

As citations are exposed on line they are automatically available through a lot of protocols and so enter the network. Networks have intersections where a citation becomes available to be found by search engines, lists and channels like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and many many more.

We find that at each intersection of the network values are shared. Each citation carries with it a lot of information. These data are significant and contribute value. They are values. Some of these values are about the media. Is it Twitter, a newspaper, Facebook or a blog? This kind of information is passed on by the software in use. It could also be that some of the content comes in the form of other tags such as Facebook 'Likes' or Google +'s.

Research shows that a) users' motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Such fndings are relevant for 1) the development of tag-based user interfaces (even in public fora such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+) 2) the analysis of tag semantics and 3) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems.

These are the additional semiotic elements in addition to the semantic concepts inherent in the text.

Of course, all web pages (and each Tweet and Instagram picture is a web page) has meta data.

Historically, as Aaron Bradley at Search Engine Land reports, meaning has been given to pieces of text on the Internet by use of the ‘meta’ tag, short for ‘metadata’. Metadata is a word that can be defined as contextual information about a piece of content, such as an individual page on a website.

An older example of metadata would be a library’s card catalogue – at least if you can remember back to the delightfully primitive days before computerized databases were installed in libraries. Each card in those drawers represents a book that exists within the library, and has the name of the book, the author, the subject, and the Dewey decimal system subject category number.

The card for a book is not the book itself, but it describes the book in a way that it can be found – the information on the card gave the book a meaning that could be understood by the ‘process’ or ‘mechanism’ of finding a book using the card catalogue.

The meaning conveyed by the card catalogue, that allows one to find a book in a library, is only an identifier for a book – that description is not necessarily included in the contents of the book itself.

In a similar manner, meta tags have been used to give a webpage a meaning that could be ‘understood’ and acted upon by a process or mechanism depending on the nature of that meaning.

The words or their meaning in the meta data do not affect or appear in the content that they describe – they merely describe the content just enough to help them be handled by a process that, like the library card catalogue, most often involves finding that content.

Meta tags were originally used in the form of HTML elements with attributes like ‘keywords’, ‘description’, and ‘author’.

The words used in those tags were not part of the human-visible content on the webpage they described, but they did assist search engine crawlers in describing them just enough to figure out whether or not they had anything to do with a user’s search query. In some cases, they still do.

Over the years, innovations have come about and progress has been made in finding ways to describe content in a better and more detailed manner. From ‘alt’ attributes describing what is depicted in a particular image, to XML, RDF, microformats, Dublin Core metadata, and HTML5, these descriptions of content are becoming more and more detailed, and consequently more and more useful to browsers and the technical community.

In 2012 Google announced e-commerce meta tags from the GoodRelations project have been integrated into schema.org. This vastly increases the number of schema.org classes and properties available for e-commerce websites. It is worth keeping an eye on such developments for  the opportunities it offers for PR. In this instance fashion PR will find that campaigns using the GoodRelations project  syntax will get to target constituents more and in a richer format.

Each of these elements describe the citation and help in its distribution. To get some idea of how these elements can be used metadata search engines are useful. An example of how metadata can affect search results is shown using http://harvester.kit.edu. It provides some examples of different findings using different tags ( a list of meta search engines is available from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Metasearch_engines).

As each citation passes through the network there is a form of ‘negotiation’ that takes place as to whether the citation is accepted by a potential recipient or not. A blog post will not be accepted by Twitter but a short sentence and URL might be. The technology looks at the signs to identify whether the citation will be accepted.

In addition, there is a human element. Has the person set up their online presence to accept the citation (for example have they signed up for a social media channel of not)? Is this the right time of day for the person to be receptive to messages (perhaps the citation was published in a different time zone)? Are these the messages that the person wants to see or have they set up barriers to stop the content getting through.

The next part of the process is whether the citation prompt the recipient to do something? Doing something will, of course, also affect the message. It will add a tag, a semiotic marker, showing that the software or person has shared the content including the semantic and semiotic content.

Sometimes the person will edit or add to the content adding or taking away values associated with the message. The nature of networked communication is that as it passes through the network it is changed.

This is one of the big changes in Public Relations. Practitioners are now moving from linear, informational,  communications to networked communication. The nature of online public relations is that any control that a practitioner may have had in other times have now evaporated. The internet is the arbeter.

As we will see, network communication can be very powerful, even viral in nature.

Although few communication theorist would still accept it, the informational approach has  been a most influential model of communication. It reflects a common sense (if misleading) understanding of what communication is.

Shannon and Weaver's original model consisted of five elements:

1. An information source, which produces a message (Keith Urbahn)
2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals (Twitter)
3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission (the Internet)
4. A receiver, which 'decodes' (reconstructs) the message from the signal (Twitter, email, Tweetdeck etc)
5. A destination, where the message arrives (laptop, smartphone etc)

A sixth element, noise is a dysfunctional factor: any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static' on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent.

Lasswell's verbal version of this model: 'Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect ?' was reflected in subsequent research in human communication which was closely allied to behaviouristic approaches.

In the networked model, which is closer to conversations held in a community or group, a  richer transaction takes place. The internet offers extra semiotic content that can be equated to body language in face to face communication.

In the networked communications model, meaning can be passed on without much by way of change other than it is associated with a technology or a person adding the endorsement inferred by passing the values to a third party or many third parties in a group or network.

Alternatively, the meaning may be changed by adding or taking away semantic or semiotic values or tags (an activity that can be done by human or technical agents) .

The circumstance of the author may change the way a social media is used and is seen in how people used Twitter after the Great East Japan Earthquake. First, we gathered tweets immediately after the earthquake and analyzed various factors, including locations. The results revealed two findings: (1) people in the disaster area tend to directly communicate with each other (reply-based tweet). On the other hand,(2) people in the other area prefer spread the information from the disaster area by using Re-tweet.

The combination of network communication and semantics is shown to outperform other forms of communication and information distribution in many cases.

We know, from the research of Bruno Amaral, that when people have common values, they tend to cluster together online. Such clustering is found as common aims and values of organisations and in movements on and off line. Other research in different media contribute to this thinking including Twitter where we find semantic tags are influential. The nature of semantic cues in facebook also support this hypothesis. The use of tags or signifieres is is a common practice and adds to the values associated with the content. There is a significant effect from the post /content type and category on likes and comments  as well as on interaction duration. The posting day has an (limited) effect too.

As values are added without degradation of values extant (existing semiotic tokens) a viral phenomenon occurs.

 

Perhaps one can reflect on the two models with the contributions of Daniel Chandler who writes:

“As Reddy (Reddy M 1979) notes, if this view of language were correct, learning would be effortless and accurate. The problem with this view of language is that learning is seen as passive, with the learner simply 'taking in' information (Bowers 1988: 42). I prefer to suggest that there is no information in language, in books or in any medium per se. If language and books do 'contain' something, this is only words rather than information. Information and meaning arises only in the process of listeners, readers or viewers actively making sense of what they hear or see. Meaning is not 'extracted', but constructed.

............
References

• Blumler J. G. & E. Katz (1974): The Uses of Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
• McQuail, Denis (1987): Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn.). London: Sage
• Evra, Judith van (1990): Television and Child Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
• Brandt, P. Aa., Meaning and the machine: Toward a semiotics of interaction. In: P. Bøgh Andersen, B. Holmqvist & J. F. Jensen, eds., The Computer as Medium (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 128 - 140. 
• Chandler D 2011 http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html accessed July 2011)
• UNDERSTANDING WHY USERS TAG: A SURVEY OF TAGGING MOTIVATION LITERATURE AND RESULTS FROM AN EMPIRICAL STUDY. Markus Strohmaier, Christian Körner, Roman Kern Journal of web Semntics Vol 17 (2012)  http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/article/view/318
• http://searchengineland.com/e-commerce-seo-using-schema-org-just-got-a-lot-more-granular-139236 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2141571
• http://www.fastcompany.com/1367870/report-nine-scientifically-proven-ways-get-retweeted-twitter
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167923612001996
• The virtual geographies of social networks: a comparative analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn Zizi Papacharissi New Media & Society, February/March 2009; vol. 11, 1-2: pp. 199-220. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/1-2/199.short
• Baresch,B. Knight, L. Harp, D. Yaschur, C. (2011) Friends Who Choose Your News: An analysis of content links on Facebook. presentation at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, Texas,
• April 2011.
• http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3880702
• http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-24704-0_21?LI=true

What is in a 'LinkedIn' brand

The news that LinkedIn is opening its doors to 14 year olds is odd.

Techcrunch has made fun of it, but I wonder if that applies to us all?

Over the last few years, I have found this service useful. It has the advantage of allowing users to be selective and to manage contacts easily.

The thought of hoards of teens wanting to build networks with a business community is daunting but the critical issue is whether such a facility devalues the LinkedIn brand.

I think it does and the Techcrunch imagery shows why.

For sure, LinkedIn will now need to have the equivalent of Google Circles to allow those of us who use the service to coral our stakeholders - or perhaps we will just have to migrate to G+

Meantime, as the BBC is suggesting, there are other issues that will make life tough for the web service. It is one thing curating a web site and communications network for adults and mostly business people but, as Ask.fm has found out, it is another dimention of management again to curate for the whole population.

Some of us are working on automated curation for such services but we are some way off a perfected capability.

The value of a 'Like'

The apple tree outside my office
in full bloom and depending on
collaboration to prosper

In setting out the PR strategy for an organisation, the practitioner will want to be sure that the dominant coalition is fully cognisant of the commercial value of community and internal as well as external interactivity. Internal and external social networks make money and make organisations more efficient.

Recent research by McKinsey showed that levels of collaboration predict commercial success and outcomes.

The evidence came, not from business, but the US intelligence services.

The research team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.

Then they identified what they thought was a comprehensive list of factors that drive a unit’s effectiveness—only to discover, that the most important factor wasn’t on their list.

The critical factor wasn’t having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn’t having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.

Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues. These contributions helped analysts question their own assumptions, fill gaps in their knowledge, gain access to novel perspectives, and recognize patterns in seemingly disconnected threads of information. The converse was true. Low interaction gave low yields.  Just knowing the amount of help-giving that occurred allowed the Harvard researchers to predict the effectiveness rank of nearly every unit accurately.

Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.
Across these diverse contexts, organizations benefit when employees freely contribute their knowledge and skills to others[i].

In attempting to find what was so efficacious in social media, a huge number of people have analysed massive amounts of data to discover what the value of a Facebook Like, a re-Tweet  or re pinned Pinterest photo was worth. What is staring us in the face is that it is the interaction that is the value not the action.

When people invest extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their online community, they presage a higher value constellation than communities that are shy and retiring. It would seem that in such active communities that there is a greater propensity to be part of the winning social group.

One of the greatest wealth creators through history is the internet. It was, and is, hugely collaborative.

In his book The future of Internet Jonathan Zittrain  makes these points:

“The design of the Internet reflected not only the financial constraints of its creators, but also their motives. They had little concern for controlling the network or its users’ behaviour(page 33)

“The network’s design was publicly available and freely shared from the earliest moments of its development.” (page. 28)[ii]

Being social and sharing, seems to be a great way to stimulate wealth creation and by taking such ideas to the dominant coalition, the practitioner underpins proposals that include the use of organisational collaboration across constituencies (internal and external), embracing Big Data and the Internet of Things (which spook most managers), adoption of social media and dynamic communication in the big bag of PR tactics that will be used from time to time.

Taking the organisation along such a path offers greater long term rewards for all.

---

[i] Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture. McKinsey Quarterly April 2013 http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/givers_take_all_the_hidden_dimension_of_corporate_culture May 2013

[ii] Johnathan L. Zittrain 2008 The Future of Internet USA: Caravan Books, 2008 (e-book downloadable from jz.com) http://adam-hazdra.webz.cz/download/zittrain_future.pdf

People cluster round values - is this 'Publics'?

I used the MIT analysis engine on one of my email accounts to test the Lisbon Theory in the medium of email.

Such fun!

As you can see there are six distinct clusters of people who contact me and who I contact.

In addition, we can see that they are also connected to each other (by including each other in CC and BCC mail services and because I do the same.

Here we see the Lisbon Theory at work in a real live and replicable process that anyone can use.

The result for every example is one that shows networks being formed as part of the process of relationship building through the exchange of values.

This shows how we can use Big Data for effective relationship (and yes - yawn - reputation) building.

It is a further validation of the work of Bruno Amaral published at Bled in 2009 and the conceptual process published in 2006.

I guess, Philip Young and I will have to find space for this in the next edition of Online Public Relations 

It is not that such thinking is new. There are other examples which could benefit from some PR academic rigour, should PR academia want to take an interest in network relationships.

The BBC discovers Transparency, Porosity and Agency

Gordon Corera has a article on cyber attacks on BBC and a programme  tonight. He will show a small part of the effects of Transparency, Pourosity and Agency, the long held mantra of good online PR strategists.

For 15 years the PR industry has known about these core elements for modern management. He has just discovered them (but not for tonight's programme). 

For the benefits of top journalists these are the five key elements:

1. Organisations have to become more transparent to compete.
2. Organisation are more porous and leak more information as the internet matures.
3. The internet acts and an agent and, as both a facilitator for humans to do stuff and as technologies in its own right can change information and understanding of information.
4. The internet delivers rich and progressively richer content.
5. The internet has huge reach and is gaining more reach all the time (not just people but things too).

I have expressed this in three (soon to be four) books; as part of the (published) PR industry Internet Commission 1999/2001 With Prof Anne Gregory  Mark Adams etc; in dozens of lectures and academic papers.

And, now, Shock Horror, the BBC has found out and, Shock Horror in spades, at GCHQ! Worse than that, Gordon Corera has a distinguished career and has dealt with security since 2004.

I welcome the fact that the BBC is raising some of the issues that organisations face now that the internet has such reach. It is a pity that it has taken senior journalists in the business such a long time to find out what has been evident to the leading internet thinkers for the last decade-and-a-half and it has to be regretted that he is being so dramatic about it.

The fact is that the principles laid down by the Public Relations industry 15 years ago, were and are profound. Most senior practitioners who keep up to date will already have informed senior management of the threats as well as the opportunities.

Those that have not can catch up quite quickly by reading Online Public Relations. In the next edition due next year, Philip Young and I describe in some detail what happens next and suggest that, strategically, it is by no means all about Social Media.

Evident from what we learn from the BBC and from Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT and president of the CBI that "These threats are real, they're sophisticated, they do financial and reputational damage."  This is not an issue PR can lay aside. 

Of course, research is suggesting that there is a generation of public relations managers who have a problem. A big problem!

In PR, we knew that in the last century. The key is what has been done about it.

Reflecting on the evolution of Public Relations

A deer in the garden
helps one reflect on the
important things in life.

The Public Relation profession encompasses many spheres of activity. 

For the most part they have in common elements associated with relationships between organizations and people. PR is a discipline encompassing semiotics applied to attitudinal and behavioral changes. 

In internet applications it has to extend beyond semiosis because the practitioner can use a range of platforms and channels as well as the internet of Things and Big Data to make internet technologies do things.

There is now a big element of PR surrounding the concept of who or what is initiating and delivering content and activity in a communications web.  A word spoken or a sentence written by a practitioner can have the effect of making a machine start on the other side of the world without any other human intervention.

Knowing how this can be achieved is part of the range of practices that the profession has to consider for its members.

In this regards, Public Relations becomes more like medical practice with specialists supporting general practice or facilities supporting specialists.

Where once there could be elements of specialization which did not much need to heed the overarching  principles of the profession, the progress of the internet is changing that. In addition, the strategies and tactics of all the elements, and the nature of modern communication (for example its fast changing nature) now require an evolved profession.

Thus, in addition to the other overarching requirements of this profession (for example ethics, informed multi-culturalism, multi-ethnic  competencies  etc), there is a need to have a broad knowledge of internet influences and the probability of knowledge in specialist areas (such as social media, search,  SEO etc.) to be professionally competent in 2013.

This was not the case at the turn of the century. Today it is essential and indicates the fast changing nature of practice.

This means that Public Relations practitioners have to be flexible in their approach and the capabilities needed to be effective. 

Defining Public Relations

It is amazing what clarity your mind has when walking through woodland above the Vale of Pewsey, where this photograph was taken.

Business and Marketing have rolls that are well described by Peter Drucker. He wrote: "Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only these two – basis functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs”. “ Marketing,” he says “ is the distinguishing, unique function of the business. A business is set apart from all other human organisations by the fact that it markets a product or service...”[i]

This neatly places public relations as a cost. It is an essential cost of doing business and an essential cost that we learned from the evolution of the semantic web. Of course, public relations extends to many other areas of life beyond business and yet its role remains constant.

With our new knowledge about semantic concepts and their synergy as values, (and here we use values in way described by Phillips^[ii] (2006) Amaral and Phillips^[iii] (2009) where values of the individual, group, organisation or representation of an intelectual property are percived in terms of a grouping of values into tokens that are specific and  are recognisable by people) the Public Relations practitioner can now use semantics to identify an approximation to organisational and constituent values.  

Public Relations is the care taker of corporate, product, brand and organisational tokens being the nexus of values recognisable by constituents. The relationship between the dominant coalition and all other constituents is wholly dependent on public relations as the guardian of organisational values, interpretation of tokens and their role in building, sustaining and maintaining (in the culture of many PR practitioners ‘managing reputation’) relationships.

This capability extends beyond business to every form of organisation and social construct.

Because Public Relations has the concern for internal and external constituencies, it is public relations, and only public relations, that has this essential role as an organisational discipline.

Without public relations, we are discovering from research we can conduct using the internet, there can be no organisations without public relations.

Extract from ‘Towards Relationship Management’ JCM 2006

”For example, you recognise a rose as a plant, and flower and also recognise it as a social token associated with romance etc. The rose is the token, its description and associations are values.

“We know that people associate different values with tokens. A rose grower may have a completely different set of values for a rose compared to a love-lorn student.

“Where two people recognise tokens and also have the same or similar values for the token, they are attracted to each other and, as for people so too for organisations and people and organisations.”

http://leverwealth.blogspot.co.uk/2006/06/thought-on-values-and-relationships.html

---

[i] Druker, P. 1999 Management pp 57 Routledge.

[ii] David Phillips, (2006) "Relationships are the core value for organisations: A practitioner perspective", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 11 Iss: 1, pp.34 - 42

[iii] Amaral, B and Phillips, D. 2009 A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of  relationship building in blogs http://www.bledcom.com/_files/169/A-proof-of-concept-for-automated-discourse-analysis-in-support-of-identification-of-relationship-building-in-blogs.pdf accessed May 2013.

Time to Make the Universities Honest

I have been noticing courses being advertised by universities claiming to offer 'Public Relations' when it is obvious that they can offer nothing of the sort.

For example:

Marketing, Advertising and Communications
This programme is designed to equip you for a career as a marketing communications specialist in a creative agency or client firm. You’ll gain an indepth understanding of how marketing communications influence society and individuals, developing your talents in areas such as persuasive advertising, e-marketing and public relations.

This description was taken from a four years Honours degree and with the best will in the world, the ability to learn about Marketing, Advertising, Communication, Creativity, Agency Practices, Persuasion, e-marketing (whatever that encompases) and Public Relations is just impossible. It is too much to learn in the time available.

For example, where in this syllabus is the student to learn about the cultural, political, economic and social relevance of reputation? Is this going to include a study of the literature of cultures in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society; psyphology, representation of the people and government including local, regional, national and supra national representative politics; macro and micro economics including the corporate finance and investor relations and the nature of society and social interaction? When it comes to e-commerce, which part of the 20% of retailing will the student learn as it grows to be 34% by the time they graduate?

While I personally disagree with this as of any real substance, the Darren Lilleker mantra that political campaigning now comprises informing, mobilizing  harvesting data and interacting would not figure in the majority of courses advertised.  After all, what is the worth of PR as part of the most expensive national election ever?

That part of the Marketing course will also have to be integrated with theory and PR skills education together with a similar amount of work for the other subjects. many of them are part of PR anyway, for example the psychology of persuasion from George and Alfred Tack to social cognitive and affective neuroscience is pretty heavy too.

Of course “Business has only two functions: Marketing and Innovation”  according to Peter Drucker. He had no concept of business Public Relations but a lot of so called public relations is marketed as being part of marketing. Remind me again, how much did BP pay in compensation for the Gulf oil spill? Or, perhaps, how long will the Jimmy Saville slime take to wash off the BBC?

Would marketing courses automatically introduce this paper in a lecture on Corporate Social Responsibility. It says 'Bankers beware - the human brain is unforgiving'. How then, one would ask a student, should the in-house practitioner advise her Board? ).

Of course, these so called graduate courses are full of University Bull Shit.

Not just one University - many of them.

They are designed to deceive vulnerable teenagers. They are not going to teach much about PR.

After all, would you want to employ such a graduate after she has got past her sell by date as Cheap Tweet Labour? What would she know of the world that an ordinary English graduate would not?

Then there is the question as to what a Chartered organisation purporting to represent the practice of Public Relations do about bringing these universities to a realisation of their misrepresentation?

Crowdsourcing a PhD to make it effective for PR

Crowdsourcing is a description of how people cluster round an idea or subject and contribute to its development or encourage others to make a contribution.

Wiki’s are an example of crowdsourceing. Much software is developed as open-source software which can be used by anyone but is developed by enthusiasts for no pay.

InWikipedia, it is described thus: according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Crowdsourcng is by no means new. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing.   In the early 19th century, volunteer readers were assigned books and copied passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips and thus began to index all words in the English. The authors received over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years. It would seem there is a rich seem of potential help in such volunteer communities both on and off line.

Listening to the people who use an organisations' products and services can be invaluable. The responses can produce information that would otherwise be hard to find, and it can also open up topics that the organisation itself might never have considered. 

Taking this a stage further, it is possible, and not uncommon, that the individual responses themselves feed off each other to create new perspectives and insights.

Sometimes crowdsourcing can be instigated by the organisation itself, simply asking a question or soliciting views, but just as importantly, the sentiment can coalesce without direct organisational input, or can be created by an agency with different objectives perhaps even an opponent.

In 2009, Jan Marco Leimeister and fellow researchers published a paper in Journal of Management Information Systems showing that ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing and open innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies. Such collaboration is part of relationship management and thus part of the discipline of Public Relations.

Understanding the crowdsourcing phenomenon from a PR perspective would be a valuable contribution to the practice of PR.

The Cloud - Home of the PR gods

god of thunder by ~zzjimzz

Social Media is a manifestation of Cloud computing.

We have used the Cloud for a long time. At its core is the idea that if you can communicate to and from a device, the computing processes and the memory can be done on a computer located anywhere.

Today there are many services which offer facilities described variously as:

” Web Services that offer a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.

”One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business.”

Most of us are familiar with some manifestations of Cloud computing.

Email services online including Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail are Cloud based services. Pinterest  and  Photobucket, Flickr and many other services are ways of keeping photographs in the Cloud. YouTube,  Keepvid,  Metacafe and dozens more meet needs to store video online.

Keeping documents in the Cloud is common and so the story continues.

 But there are other dimensions. As we have seen, you can use software online.

Without a programme installed on your computer you can write letters, email, essays, even books online.  You can create presentations and complete spreadsheets (with cells that do calculations), create software programmes and have the whole process done online. All you need is a reasonably fast internet connection and a browser such as Chrome, Internet Explorer or Netscape..

Compared to running such services on company computers, such Cloud services are very low cost and, often, more reliable.

As more of what we do is done using laptops, tablets, smart phones and games machines that are connected to the internet, the logic for a company to keep much more expensive and much less secure computing systems in-house is becoming difficult to justify. In fact, one might ask, do we need such complicated and expensive interfaces with the internet any more? The answer is, of course, no.

  

Now for the leap from technicality to Public Relations.

You can create relationships online too?

After all, what is Facebook? It is a relationship acquisition and management capability in the Cloud.

Yes, although Cloud computing is huge, a large part of it is commonplace activity we know as social media.

It is the ’complete’ package. Words, pictures, moveis, emotions, group encounters and one to one tete-a-tete are at the fingertips of mobile phone and tablet user as well as games machines, laptops and PC devotee.

If the Cloud is capable of facilitating relationships, then it becomes a public relations medium. It requires attention and study and has to be followed closely and beyond the present fashion of social media to where the Cloud offers a wider range of facilities often faster, frequently cheaper and most certainly on computers located at a place that is a mystery to most users.

Relationship data can be access on many different types of machine from anywhere where there is internet connection.  The significance of which is that the medium does affect how information is received.

An intimate conversation is cool on a phone and un-nerving on an 80 in. screen.

PR in the Cloud is already well established and gaining ground.  There are many organisations working to help client’s have a more effective Facebook presence, or Twitter profile and the Google+ PR practices are a sizable business in their own right.

It has to be remembered that Cloud computing it is not the-same-but-on-line.

Simply building in levels of security and accesses, making sure that content is device agnostic and backing up the online content are all issues that need to be dealt with.

Once those concerns are dealt with, the practitioner is free to do so much more than in the days of rigid systems.

The constraints of word processing software, the ability to assemble multimedia briefing content including word documents, presentations, video, pictures and diagrams with voice and apps is a gift for any communicator.

Such capabilities, that can be deployed for a Chief Executive, Board, blogger, journalist or conference in a few minutes is a boon.

The ability to create such content, and for it to be so device agnostic that it can be seen on everything from a phone to a cinema screen, is a dream.

Being able to use, edit, share editing and processing with a wide or narrow community,  re-use information and present it in a variety of ways is a huge saving and the content can be generated by a wide range of people almost anywhere in the world.

Cloud computing driving a car may seem far fetched but will progressively come to be norm.

In PR there is also a need to consider hybrid Cloud computing. For example 3D printing.

3D printing is disrupting the design, prototyping and manufacturing processes in a wide range of industries, according to Gartner, Inc.

”Enterprises should start experimenting with 3D printing technology to improve traditional product design and prototyping, with the potential to create new product lines and markets. 3D printing will also become available to consumers via kiosks or print-shop-style services, creating new opportunities for retailers and other businesses.”

One of the first controversial products was a working gun. The gun was made (that is, manufactured) on a 3D printer that cost $8,000 (£5,140) from the online auction site eBay.

It was assembled from separate printed components made from ABS plastic - only the firing pin was made from metal. The design is downloaded and available to anyone and caused a furore when it was announced in the USA in 2013.

Being able to communicate with 3D artefacts is not as novel as one might image. After all what are public statues but a three dimensional exchange of ideas.  Being able to send instructions to make such icons over the internet is just an extesion of communication that is thousands of years old.

Some cloud computing which is familiar also has reputational issues attached. Examples are e-commerce and e-retailing and forms of payment. Values services such as online banking are other examples. The idea that a shop can be online is pretty old hat now. But pause for a moment, a shop – online? If a shop can be online, the 'shop assistant', that person so much part of the relationship between the customer and retailer,  is also 'online'. Sometimes the experience is not very much in the mold of the personal relationship in the high street but its there nonetheless. Now, using such ideas,  the creative PR person might put much more into the Cloud.

The capability to have demand driven movies and television pulling content from many sources at will and to meet your personal needs and interests is almost there. What, then will the BBC do in the future? Perhaps curation is an alternative to programme commissioning and editing.

But there is a rub. From time to time, people will exploit these capabilities to the disadvantage of the organisation; the internet and cloud computers, although very reliable, do have moments when they do not work, downtime contingency planning is important too.

Monitoring, evaluating and managing such interactions are needed now. Today, every organisation has relationships questioned in Twitter interactions. Cloud PR has already started and it goes further than social media relations.

The Semantic Web and PR

Semantic Web Explained

Perhaps there is no better way of describing the Semantic Web that to use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) explanations (http://www.w3.org/wiki/SemanticWebCerealBox)

Here's an explanation of the SemanticWeb by way of analogy:

Let's say you're going to the grocery store. At the grocery store, you get a box of cereal, right? So, you go to the self-checkout, and shout to the computer, "I am buying a box of cereal!"

Of course, in this day and age, the computer doesn't understand you. It just says, "Please slide the item across the reader..."

So you find the bar code on the cereal. You slide it past the laser reader. Suddenly- bingo. The computer knows what the item is, how much it costs, how many you've bought so far, etc., etc., etc.,. Computers don't yet know how to just "look" at the item, and know what it is.

So we make it easier for the computer: We tell the computer in a language easy for it to understand. Every item in the store has been given a number. That number has been correlated with other information in a database. The number has been encoded into a bar code, because the laser can read the bar code.

And the whole thing results in a computer that can reason over a box of cereal that you're holding in your hand.

Resulting in faster and more accurate check-out.

Back to the Web

So, what's that have to do with the web?

The SemanticWeb is like bar codes for the web.

Say you visit your friend's web page. You can read all this information on the web page, look at picture, etc., etc.,. But your computer doesn't understand a thing about it.

If your friend wrote, "Hey friends! Call me up! My number is 555-1212," your computer just sees it long stream of text. Sort of like: If you write a letter to your friend about cats, your computer still doesn't understand a thing about cats.

But now, let's put your friend's page on the Semantic Web. Following the cereal analogy- let's make a little bar code tag, and connect it to your friend's web page. Now, when you see that web page, you can look for the attached bar code tag. In SemanticWeb terms, the bar code tag is written in RDF. When your computer finds the RDF, it can read out all the information.

Suddenly your computer knows your friend's name, what his phone number is, who his friends are, etc., etc., etc.,. Maybe this all appears in your address book. Or maybe you discover friends with similar interests.

The SemanticWeb will completely revolutionize the way that we use computers.

At an ever faster pace, the semantic web is beginning to influence how the internet interacts with us.

A tablet automatically tells you the weather at your location. When you change location, guess what? The weather report is automatically updated to the new location. You train arrival times are also automatically updated. The internet ’knows’ what you are doing and can make decisions for you (for example to look up the right information for your current location).

In public relations it goes much further. It is why the Lisbon Theory is so important. The Lisbon Theory provides a ‘bar code tag’ that allows computers to understand what is being said and its relative significance. The element of the ‘bar code’ are:

"From the values perspective (v) of an entity (n) to what extent (e) is this object (o) significant (s)”.

If each of these elements are used to tag semantic concepts using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), very significant developments are available to the profession.

One of the joys of using LSA is that it identifies highly linked concepts which, PR academic Bruno Amaral showed, have close alignment to the values people hold. LSA is an approach to computerised content analysis. In this it helps us manage relationships in an age of BigData.

With this information, the computer can get to know what the content is about in public relations terms.

In addition, these technologies can learn from human beings how they assess content from these five elements and learn to emulate the human reaction to such content.

This means that, for example a human can teach a computer to evaluate a corpus of media citations (press clips if you are still of the old school).  This will mean that it comes much easier to follow those Tweets ’in bad taste’ as they happen or identify good and bad content in blog posts and Facebook exchanges.

Before this book is too old to count, it will also mean that a computer could respond online in near real time too!

At the time of writing, research in this area is ongoing but gives us a view of what the potential of the semantic web brings to public relations.

PR's Internet of Things

From http://popupcity.net

 The media takes on so many guises once the Cloud is deployed. It might be content and interaction using an app. It may be a hologram on a Railway concourse and it could even be a message delivered via a pair of glasses.

Predictable pathways of information are changing. The physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what’s called the Internet of Things, the sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects—from roadways to pacemakers—are linked through wired and wireless networks, more often than not using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.

If you look at almost anyone’s mobile today, it doubles up as a gateway to services from train times to weather forecasts. The screen full of apps is a manifestation of a physical thing that was once a mobile phone and is now a gateway to services and a provider of information to the Cloud. Your phone knows where you are and can pinpoint it on a map in a form of two way communication which you know little about and probably care less.

Today, there is no reason why many things cannot be connected to their wider environment. However, it is not automatic.

As Kishore Swaminathan  Accenture's chief scientist reminds us “Even among the RFID ( Radio-frequency identification ) based applications (which can be replaced by any number of identification technologies, such as magnetic strips and biometrics), there is very little in common besides the RFID tags themselves.

“In other words, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept, not a single technology you’d buy off the shelf.”

As a consequence, it tends to be a bit of a surprise when it enables something.

Often it seem commonplace. We already have TVs and set-top boxes that can be controlled remotely using a smartphone. Other household gadgets, such as baby monitors and hi-tech alarm systems, also benefit from similar connectivity to phones and other wireless electronic devices.  The BBC’s R&D team reveals, is has a proof-of-concept intended to demonstrate the UniversalControl system, a way of getting internet-connected devices to perform specific functions in time with TV shows on-screen.

The question one could ask is whether the PR practitioner will create content that is only enabled for specific physical media, days and times and only in the presence of a person or thing.

Newspapers are already there. ’InteractiveNewsprint’ is a research project led by the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) and funded by the Digital Economy (DE) Programme. A newspaper that has interactive content, recordings and other interactive content delivered off the page is interesting. A brochure, book, poster and many other applications can be envisaged.They are developing an entirely new platform for community news and information by connecting paper to the internet to create what is believed to be the world’s first internet-enabled newspaper. By touching various parts of the page, readers can activate content ranging from audio reports, web polls or advertising – all contained within the paper itself.

The use of digitally connected Google Glasses, was proposed in 2013 to help an organisation recruit a an employee for a remote location. The candidates had the opportunity to sit at home and link-up with a person thousands of miles away and go on a tour, experiencing the views and listening to their guides as they went on a remote walking tour of the location.

  

The Internet of things is now here for PR to work with its 20th century partner, the print media!

Meantime, there are already predictions that more than 9 million Google Glass-like devices expected to ship by 2016 (IMS Inc. research in 2013)

The anatomy of the internet

In watching the internet outage in Syria, I came across the CloudFlare video showing traffic routes. It is a dynamic view of the internet in a war zone.

You can see where the traffic is important and when it is being disrupted.

It should be noted that even with a government blackout, there still remain ways for the internet to be used.

There are a number of issues to be addressed in this area and in an age when Cloud computing and social media is becoming commercially significant, there will need to be some work done in this area. It is both a reputation and a relationship issue. Here is the Wired view.

You may also like to know that you can see outage of Google services from a transparency service they run here.

Mind bending Public Relations

You are what you search.

Perhaps this is the simplest way of  describing recent findings into the the short and long term effects of the internet on humans.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"  was the headline to an article by Nicholas G. Carr, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and which sparked off a  debate championed by sections of the press expressing views that the internet was dumbing mankind down to the point of imbecilic infancy.

But now we have facts. Peter S. Eriksson^, Ekaterina Perfilieva, Thomas Björk-Eriksson, Ann-Marie Alborn, Claes Nordborg, Daniel A. Peterson and Fred H. Gage demonstrated that cell genesis occurs in human brains and that the human brain retains the potential for self-renewal throughout life. That the brain can and does change is not news said neuroscientist  Michael Merzenich in a recent TED talk.  “Everything you do changes your brain,” says Daphne Bavelier, associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “When reading was invented, it also made huge changes to the kind of thinking we do and carried changes to the visual system.” Gary Small and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles used fMRI to study observed brain activation of subjects interacting with a simulated search engine.  Small and his colleagues asked Google rookies to go home and train by searching the internet for an hour a day for five days. When the test subjects came back and were rescanned, the researchers found that the net-naive had already increased activation in the frontal areas where they had previously lagged behind the net-savvy.

Use of the internet, it seems, changes our brains.

Have we evidence in our own experience? We have all done it... can't remember a fact - Google it! The big 'know-it-all' in the pub is no longer the bore in the corner, its the person who can type faster on their mobile. 

It can be extrapolated that the way we use the internet has a cultural effect on us.

It is now worth considering whether some people have a Facebook culture or a Google Plus culture. Is there a World of Warcraft culture? What is the difference in cultures (opinions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours) between nations able to use Google Search and not being able to use it. Are such cultures hard wired into how we think and behave or do they have a different, brain changed, view of the world.

The evidence is beginning to mount that is already the case.

This has far reaching implications for public relations. In the sphere of consumer PR there may be a case for considering different platforms, channels and approaches as between different digital cultures. In Public Affairs it may mean that divergence in ideologies is so extreme as to presage international rifts and even, in extremis, culturally divisive understanding as dangerous as Nazism, Soviet Communism or worse.

That there are effects and that they are different as between different users of differing technologies is not in question. The extent to which this is an issue for day to day PR and our understanding of relationships is a matter for future research.

The CIPR Presidential Election Debate

Is this the CIPR's view of the internet? 

Perhaps the nature of the change wrought by the internet requires deeper consideration by the CIPR.

There are two points, I would make following the debate on LinkedIn.

I am uncomfortable with the expression 'social media' because it hides the wider issue of Cloud computing. Cloud computing, I was reliably informed by a marketing academic, is not much more than moving what you have in the corporate network to AWS. He was abashed when I suggested that Cloud computing has allowed a new form of relationship to evolve and suggested Facebook as an example. 'Social Media' in many respects is a subset of Cloud computing.

But it is more. As more apps deliver more via a mobile phone, tablet, Google glasses, motor car etc. the nature of relationships change. It was only when I found it helpful that my tablet automatically showed the weather forecast in Cheltenham (a place to teach) as opposed to Swindon (home and office), that I fully realised the power of mobile. The information changed my behaviour (and relationship with students) as the snow forecast a couple of months ago became serious and class was dismissed early. But, it took an

Cloud computing - Wikipedia

example of neuroplasticity to prompt me to, 'quite naturally' check my tablet. The Cloud is doing much more than just host Social Media, there are direct subliminal and actual behavioural issues. These evolving developments are more significant to PR practice because they demand a practitioner who can contribute the sense of the evolving nature of relationships as they affect organisations. In my example the tablet changed the way the university worked as a result of my unilateral action. We have to  think such changes through.

The other area of change is the one remarked on by Ardi Kolah today. He made the point "It’s a big mistake to make assumptions that people like ‘John’ will think, act and behave in a certain way. That’s crap marketing, isn’t it? So why do we have a blank spot when it comes to the over-55s??"

This is part of a change we see and an effect of the open and 'democratic' web envisioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee.

Once, it was common to think in terms of a vertically structured society (god at the top, peasant at the bottom - to borrow from the Greatful Dead) or organisationally defined segments. The socio-economic, demographic, consumer segmented person was always a compromise. It served its purpose for marketers and 'opinion formers' for a very long time. Today such techniques are less valuable.

The internet (mostly the Web) now allows anyone to opt into many forms of relationships. We now have segments that can only be describes as being of the value perspectives of a person as from time to time they are relevant. This, Lisbon Theory, idea of segmentation is very different and it is of the internet. It is only practical when we have a capability to identify people's values and we have studies to help us use the Semantic Web to do these things.

The Grateful Dead

Here is how it works: from the perspective of the values of Stephen Waddington/Dr Jon White, to what extent is a debate like this one valuable/important/relevant? What we see is a way of assessing this debate from the perspective of a Public of one (yes, the Grunigian excellence theory fits in this instance).

Once again, this calls for a practitioner with the knowledge and skills to be able to identify values systems that are affective for organisations to guide policy and activity.

This is a problem for me when very experienced and highly qualified members of the profession who I respect see only social media and only communication (indeed requiring craft skill, though necessary, at best).

This means that there is more to this debate. It goes to the heart of what the CIPR has to do now. We do need a strategy and we do need to know when we achieve our strategic aims. This means that the CIPR has to progress from courses in Facebook Likes to encouraging much deeper research to aid practice beyond the craft because the internet is changing our social, economic, political and cultural norms quite quickly. Indeed, many would say that governmental censorship round the world will create different forms of neuroplasticity with its implications for culture trade and even peace.

Neuroplasticity

What the CIPR has to do will be in some depth and it will be uncomfortable; will be much more than Communication', 'Reputation'  '+Management' and much more about how PR represents the effects of the internet on social, economic, political and cultural norms in the development and evolution of organisational relationships.

The Public Relations Future (tomorrow) is Very Very Different

In an average month,  BAE Systems will be included in 600 web pages, it is the subject of many references. In Linkedin there are more than ten new references every day. In addition, it will be the subject of comment described in any number of other ways or in its significant share of organisations like Airbus and Armor Holdings.

In any day 20 Tweets is a very quiet Friday in April.. But these numbers can quadruple (Twitter much more) over the mention of a board director and when contracts or financial results are made the volumes are huge.

For a producer of consumer products or services whose customer leave a trail of digital crumbs even as they find or pass a third party retailer the reality is even more daunting.

Far too much to be read by human eyes in real time.
 
In managing the present many organisations need to work hard. Managing the present in an historical context which is accumulating online content at an accelerating pace is significantly harder.

The reality is that most people do not know there is so much data around but the PR practitioner does need to know. All this stuff provides a digital feast for computers all round the world. More and more it is these computers that are setting the reputational and relationship agendas.

As I mentioned yesterday it is now possible to use Google analytics for analysis of offline stuff as well. The information environment is setting the agenda for so much that affects people and the institutions that affect them.

This is about the teen swooning on line but also the influences affecting the North Korean leadership as it turns the US military and economy to a new relationship with the world. It is also big stuff.

This then is the reality of the Public Relations environment emerging today.

Over the next few days I aim to work on some answers .and any contribution will be very welcome.


Are we aware?
Are we ready?