Measuring Reputation - a day in the life of Starbucks

In a post in Google+ I have made a point that the internet (not just social media) shows how, in an age of wider transparency and at a time when mining Big Data is getting easier, corporate governance is coming under closer scrutiny.

Here, I show measurable effects on reputation, SEO, social media budgets and financial PR.

Today, Starbucks is in the news for its tax avoidance policies which have collected opprobrium in social media the press and, today, from a Parliamentarians.

Sky reported it thus:

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee criticised the companies for the "unconvincing and, in some cases, evasive" evidence they gave on why their corporation tax payments are so low.

Starbucks told the committee it had made a loss for 14 of the 15 years it has operated in the UK, a claim the committee said it found "difficult to believe".

In my G+ post, I noted

The new rules of corporate governance have arrived.The ability of the public and politicians to both look closely at organisations (both have transparency tools at their disposal) means that ethical judgements are made by both groups to question corporate governance......

This is an example of Big Data analysis (search numbers) in action. We shall see much more of this as the norm going forward.

The tiny bump in Google search today is interesting. It shows search for the Starbucks tax issue of the order of 5%.

When interest in a subject is this big, it has an impact elsewhere on the organisation too.

Starbucks has a big internet presence in the UK, much more than most organisations. In search terms it sits between Pepsi and Waitrose. The work done in SEO and social media is a significant marketing investment which is being blown off course by this issue.

Indeed, semantically (using Google's Keyword Tool) , Starbucks is now associated with these semantic concepts: "tax, avoidance and green".

This semantic association affects search results.

In addition these impacts feed into Big Data analysis among a number of financial trading houses.

This means that these is now a lot of work that needs to be done on the NY stock exchange.

What we see here is the fallout from a corporate governance issues.

Here then is the dilemma. Ethically, the company has to satisfy the demands of shareholders. At the same time it is under pressure to compromise with constituents online, in the press and among parliamentarians.

Is this a case of the ethical imperative being the long term interest of the shareholder? This may mean, the company does not need such agressive tax avoidance policies and can thus protect reputation.  If so, where lies automated trading and a long history of tax management.

Do organisation now have to look at optimal management to ballance the many interests of so many well informed constituencies?

The Lisbon Theory ... more

There is an urgent need for a strategic analysis of what is really needed across all the PR disciplines. The threat is significant and most practitioner are blithely unaware they are under fire as the PR institutions play the fiddle.

Now we can describe the nature of public relations  it gets much easier to do a wide range of things like predict the future of PR.

The great value of the Lisbon Theory is that it can be evaluated in so many ways. We can identify perspectives, they are a set of values. We can find values evident in people's use of the internet through the application of search data and semantics.

We can identify relationships by seeking out common values between people and discover that people with common values create groups, form relationships and motivate each other. Better than that we can quickly and easily find the proof we need to show how precise our research is.

The struggle to be able to evaluate PR is now part of its Lisbon Theory description and it is not hard.

PR Practitioners

• Observe  events from the value perspective of many constituencies, organisations and cultures
• Undertake activity that compliment the value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Identify future, present or past extent of effects of activity on value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Measure objectives or objects from value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures
• This is how they establish change or variance in the significance of values.

With this capability, it is going to be interesting to look at the future of PR. It is quite disturbing.

In particular and using the Lisbon Theory, I will consider three areas of practice:

• Media relations
• Corporate affairs
• Public affairs

Media relations

From the perspective (v) of marketing directors (n) to what extent (e) is a 50% cut in newspaper readership (o) significant (s)?

The chart in the middle is the one to watch. It shows consumption of the raw material of newspapers, newsprint.

The trend is down.

It is easy to imagine this is because of the internet but this is not exclusively the case. Advertising drift and other factors have also contributed.

In the meantime we note that the internet is a distraction because people use the internet when they consume other media output and they use internet platforms to access content, and in particular, news.

The internet, has become pervasive in the news business. Online news has escaped the PC and Laptop and is now read on tablets and mobiles. It is now common to watch iPlayer and similar channels to follow TV output and there are now a number of new 'TV' competitors emerging. Google+ is begining to look more like news TV than many expected and YouTube channels are becoming ever more popular (the BBC has half a million viewers). The White House Channel is a 'TV news station' in  its own right. We can expect many more such News Channels. TV is strong but...

Newspapers have some really good radio stations and there are many ways that online radio is bundled. Not threatened yet but soon we will see TV and radio dependant on third party internet delivered content.

When we come to print, the story is not so good.

British newspaper circulations are among the worst performers in Europe, according to industry analyst and consultant Jim Chisholm.

They have plunged by 20% over the last five years, compared with a European average of 12%. During the past five years UK nationals declined by 16% against a European norm of 13%, while regionals declined by 29% against a norm of 12%.

It is important to note from this Guardian analysis that there are MORE THAN  50% of readers coming from the internet. Newspapers and magazines now depend on the interest for more than half of their readership.

In France, but Brazil was way ahead, there is a move to prevent Google from indexing news sites and or preventing Google adding content on its Google News service unless the search Giant pays. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of the traffic on French news sites comes from Google’s links (much less than in the UK). There are murmurings of a European wide ban.

In the UK that would just about halve the number of people seeing the news in newspapers and magazines.

What has to be the PR media relations response?

• Traditional content is also published online. It is therefor importnat to offer content for the online editions.

• The traditional media is fighting a rear-guard action. This means PR needs new ways to get to value partners.

• There are alternatives to the old model in every case – the tipping point is getting very close (TV, Radio, Print).

• If linking to newspaper content by Google is prohibited, the media relations part of the PR industry will need a new model very fast because the reach of print alone is far too small for the investment needed to get coverage. PR needs to prepare for some quite alarming scenarios. At present much of the industry is predicated on a very sickly one trick pony.

• It is possible for the PR industry to create its own hybrid media concoction but one suspects there will be other entities in this space soon as well.

• The bottom line – the traditional media relations model is broken and we need a new one.

The future of media relations is pretty poor. Without online initiatives (and that means much more than just Facebook and Twitter), there will be severe financial pressure on the agencies. It could be less then a year if the French prevail but a continuing 20% attrition as in the last ten years, straight line decline will kill off media relations as we know it by 2030.

Corporate Affairs

From the perspective (v) of Board Directors (n) to what extent (e) are corporate values (o) recognised assets (s)?

For a very long time, the corporate affairs practitioners were pretty sure that this 'internet thing' would not affects their realm of cosy one on one relationships.

As it turns out there is a lot going on that affects corporate affairs.

Of course we start with the watchers of corporate activities. Almost anyone can take a view of almost any company based on its online presence.

It is the nature of internet transparency, and porosity, which makes almost all corporate activity accessible to the networked digital community. In addition, such opacity is served by third parties from Corporate Watch to Safe Call. There are videos and stories a plenty.

As more online monitoring migrates to semantic driven indexing, organisations become more vulnerable because it is easy to look for content relating to obscure subjects in semantic relationship with an organisation. 

Much of this affects corporate brand.

An analysis of 50,000 US consumers has found that when positive brand equity and positive corporate reputation were combined the effects are even more positive than the individual power of each. It seems that there is a multiplier effect as the nexus of corporate and brand values complement each other. 

After the Sandy storm, even Apple is giving to the Big Apple. The tech giant is giving generously to New York City. It helps deliver corporate brand values to consumers who are able, in a networked society, to  cross-over from consumer to corporate values and identify with or reject them. The same was found, if not expressed in such terms by the Cambridge Forum 2012 Reputation in and Age of Protest.  No more has to be said about BBC Newsnight amateurism,  the relevance and cross-over between corporate deeds and miss-deeds, corporate brand and consumer brand values is evident to the networked world and people react .

The simple truth is that Corporate Affairs now has a role explicating the organisation's values where the network carries its values across what once would have been stakeholders or publics but which now are networked people with common semantic interests in the organisation which are also reflected in their personal values.

What does PR have to do?

• PR has to understated how to discover and  manage the  value of corporate reputation and brand values.
• It has to be able to make the case to the dominant coalition and invest in both protection as well as promotion.
• Progressively, the PR industry has to learn to manage issues and crisis. Practitioners have to read the chapter in Online Public Relations and then implement it.
• Monitoring has to be much more aggressive and competent.

Public Affairs

From the perspective (v) of politicians (n) to what extent (e) are ill briefed lobbyists (o) of interest (s)?

The public affairs part of the PR industry is now facing its biggest change since 1945.

Ordinary citizens are now as well briefed as Ministers of State, the nature of internet transparency and porosity has blown the whistle on relationships between organisations and politicians that are too cosy and there is no shortage of material for briefing and counter briefing politicians and their staff.

Internet aided briefing is now commonly available. News of battles in far off places is instantly at the disposal of Hilary Clinton and Clinton Hilary. Street by street flooding reports, electricity supply and emergency food stations are available to the world in the middle of a hurricane. Where public tenders are available and even deeply hidden is now there for you to see now. You can even watch the rockets landing in real time in the Middle East by satellite and from your own home. For politician, the role of social media in their future career is patently obvious.

To imagine that a lobbyist can attempt to change the view of a politician without a profound capability to seek out the latest and best online knowledge is not realistic. For the political campaigner to under-rate social media, is suicide.

From every perspective, Public Relations has to embrace the internet.

It is not just 'Social Media' but everything that the internet has to offer.

Its professional bodies have some training available. Few universities contribute and all the time the future of the old forms of PR practice get close to the precipice of irrelevance. 

There is an urgent need for a strategic analysis of what is really needed across all the PR disciplines. The threat is significant and most practitioner are blithely unaware they are under fire as the PR institutions play the fiddle.

From the perspective (v) of PR practitioners (n) to what extent (e)are the professional associations (o) protecting their interests (s)?

Well, this is it:

Online Trends and the Lisbon Theory

This post is about the Lisbon Theory.


It provides the basis for next generation public relations.

It is a form of PR predicated on the perspective of a person or (online) community perspective.
Its basic building block, values, are evident in the semantic web at all its intersections and it forms the basis for all public relations subject to digitally networked communication.

This is the background to it and its application.


For a very long time, I have been struggling with a concept of PR that would bring PR theory into line with what I know of the internet. For publications about online PR such as Share This Too there is a need for a theoretical framework to hold so much apparently new practice together. It needs a coherent structure because it seems to challenge everything that PR stood for in the 20th century.

In three books, I too have challenged the orthodoxy of academia and PR teaching. Some has stuck (Transparency, Porosity, Agency, Richness and Reach is now commonly taught) but much has not.

About three weeks ago I had one of those moments when a lot of thinking came together.

It goes back to some work I did on tokens and values in which we identify people and organisation as the nexus of values; the work of Bruno Amaral who showed that people cluster round commonly held values (an empirical study); Thoughts about wealth being based on relationships; my contribution to the Global Alliance Melbourne Mandate to help define organisational character and much more.

In each case, I have been looking at the values that people subscribe to at a moment in time. For the most part, we are looking at values that are established from the perspective of the individual.

In an era of mass-media dilution, communication has a higher and growing dependency on network communication as a mechanism to introduce individuals to the story of the hour. It is this development that is the evolving and critical element that PR theory has to address most urgently. We need to see why and how values (some of them being no more than a hyperlink) spread in networks and how this is different to mass media 'communication'.

Mass media messages go in one direction. Network media is all over the place. We need to be able to track where the messages are coming from and going to.

From this need for perspectives drawn from individuals we can sum up the new form of PR practice more precisely.

PR Practitioners

• Observe  events from the value perspective of many constituencies, organisations and cultures
• Undertake activity that compliment the value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Identify future, present or past extent of effects of activity on value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Measure objectives or objects from value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures
• This is how they establish change or variance in the significance of values.

We could reduce this to an explanation as simple as:

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

  In application, one might evaluate PR activities thus

• From the perspective of the citizen, to what extent is democracy valuable?
• From the perspective of the organisation, to what extent is the threat of new competition significant to its future?
• From the perspective of the marketing director, to what extent is public relations a contributor to sales?

In fact, we can use this concept to evaluate almost everything in PR and, and, more boldly, management.

Now, I guess, its time to test the theory and especially look for that secret ingredient the values of the constituency.

We need a method for identifying the perspective of constituents. Fortunately one is ready to hand. It is the application of semantics as practiced by Google. 

Perspective are a nexus of values. To find the nexus of values, it is possible to use a practice that will also reveal a lot more that is useful to PR practitioners. 

Perhaps its time to do a simple thing. The sort of thing any practitioner might need to do.

Identify the platforms and channels one might seek for a client who makes designer handbags! 

Well, someone does.









Yes, people will look for images of handbags.

Pinterest (and this is where it is possible to get basic 'reach' data from Alexa) and Google Images are both going to be key media.

Both have a presence before more readers than one might expect from a double page spread in a popular magazine. In addition, they provide a service for the consumer at the time most relevant to the consumer interest. Against this competition, the press is not going to do well unless, of course, it gets its content and its pictures online and circulating.

In fact, a quick scan of the media landscape shows that there is a huge readership seeking more information and interaction concerning designer handbags.



Not much in traditional media but we can easily see one Facebook commentator has a following of 36,000.

Perhaps that is the place to go to share our enthusiasm for designer handbags.

But what we really need to do is to find out where there is an on-line 'Community Perspective'

We can do this by looking for the values people associate with 'Handbags'.

People tell us what values are important to them by using such words when they search using Google, Bing or Yahoo and in the pages they look at online where we can extract the semantic concepts most evident on the page.

One way of doing this is to use the latent semantic indexing which forms the core of Google's Adwords.

Here are the results of an experiment I did  last week:

I went to Google Adwords and searched for the term 'designer handbag'.

Associated with the word 'handbag' Google found just what we were looking for. The keyword concept values most important to UK citizens in November 2012.



At the time I did this experiment a number of handbag retailers came up as concept words and, of course the word  handbag. I eliminated them and was left with the following words:

"organiser, hooks, designer, black, patent, charms and navy".

One would not expect any such words to be much help in finding designer handbag web sites. What in the world would 'navy, add to the search.

Well, it is what some people associate with handbags. In fact, if you were to try the experiment now sometime after the initial experiment, you will find that Google will take you to handbag sites as if it was reading your mind (gradually this ability will decay as people favour other values associated with handbags). The key words evident in the search terms used by people take them to the semantic construct which means 'handbag'. We have tapped into the values that people associate with handbags.


Using this idea, we can use it to do what a lot of people in PR find really hard to do.
We can make online lists of the web sites that are most relevant to the interests of our key constituents.

We can explore top social media sites such as Wordpress, Blogger, Twitter and even Facebook to find key opinion formers and enthusiasts.

(Try using the search syntax organiser hooks designer black patent charms navy site:facebook.com and you will get to the media you really want to get to - you can dilute it a but by adding 'handbag' in your search)



What is evident is that the technologies we are deploying (based on semantics) provides us with this new type of constituency segment:  ‘community perspective’ segment. 

It is sensitive to the values of the people who are engaging at the time and it is sensitive to the values in on-line and offline conversations of the minute.

Not publics, not stakeholders, not socio-economic and cultural demographics but people with a community perspective expressed in some words they have in common.

This constituency does not have to be very engaged but does have similar values:

• The big issue is often remote from the values common between the individual and audience

• There is no segmentation in messaging ‘everyone can see everything’

• 'Publics' of one, and in this instant only, is now common.

• A 'public' of millions is meaningless. It is no longer an realistic PR, advertising, or marketing promotion option.

Now for another experiment.

The practitioner needs to be able to find the semantic concepts in corporate content. The tools are available and more keep coming.

In this experiment, I parsed the content of a Stuart Bruce posting on his blog to see what proper noun semantic concepts emerged. The post was about Share This Too. Semantically, four people figured strongly.

The result was and entity map for this web page

(as an aside and for Philip Sheldrake and similar enthusiasts for semantic data analysis, this form of semantic analysis - which I built last year and is available here - gives you RDF triples)



Delving into what people contribute online (and because there is so much of it, it is called Big Data) means we can get very helpful insights into the intentions of constituents. Indeed, this is what GCHQ does and so too can PR practitioners.

From the foregoing, it is possible to claim that a theory based on perspectives in Public Relations are key.

As we will see in my next post, the days described by Will McInnes in  Culture Shock  and brought to us by Stephen Waddington,  are not just being pushed aside, the very nature of PR under severe threat.

For the big consultancies it is not business as usual but with 'digital attached'. It is now possible to discover what is really motivating people even when your organisation is tiny and in a very niche market. The most humble PR agency can now compete with the biggest and brashest.

Practitioners now have keys that take them to the big time. It is driven by social media and understood with semantics and most people call that 'Google'.

All those years of work proving the validity of opinion research are being swept to one side.

For example, one can ask communities questions as part of research into values and views.



Online polling has been a great success and now can claim to be among the best available. Google Surveys, came out top during the US Presidential election.

What is really significant here is that the average practitioner has mass polling available at a cost that would have been the preserve of the big research organisations only two years ago.

Now we need to look at the other part of the communication story.

The Platforms.

Mass media thinking and theories are now challenged. The range of media is considerable. Content is distributed by databases and algorithms aided in a big way by people recommending content to friends, family and colleagues. This means that the 'network effect', the multi path route to your Twitter account, Facebook or G+ page and into the email inbox now reigns over the printing press and even the TV station.

Mass-media theory now has to content with this growing dependency on network communication.

Throwing away newspapers as a channel is not (yet) sensible but it is important to examine the new platforms.

For a number of years the internet has been trying to escape from the PD and laptop. It's done it!



From Newspapers to running shoes, data is being used to create messages which is distributed on and offline with nothing in between.

Games consoles, TV sets used to play YouTube videos and touch screens that we all take to bed and call 'phones'!



Dresses that display Tweets and glasses that provide virtual reality not so novel any-more. In fact Monmouthpedia is just a PR application of the Internet of Things.

In the next post we will look at what the future really looks like but here and now I have shown that the old models and old theories of PR practice are under pressure.

I posit that all the historical theoretical concepts that affect PR have been shaken if not stirred in the last few yeas.

A new theory is emerging based on the idea that the perspectives of people evident in their values. These are evident in what they are interested in and look for and are made available to the practitioner by application of Big Data semantic applications.

Historic segmentation theories such as Grunig and Hunt's publics, Freedman's stakeholders and the marketing approach of social and economic demographic segmentation models need to be re-cast to accommodate the new reality.


This new theory based round the 'perspectives of people' has been through a mincer of thinking and research  at Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon including academics running the Online PR Masters,  Nuno da Silva Jorge and Bruno Amaral and a host of enthusiastic Masters students. We called it the Lisbon Theory. 
It  is very new and had to be developed because so much of the 20th century theorising was showing signs of stress.


Most notably, we now have considerable evidence of people commenting about organisations and brands with little of no reference to the organisation or brand (often no experience at all). They are part of an eco system of brand values that are not much influenced by organisations but are (often if only by sheer numbers) influential. 

Organisations, in many instances have lost control of the brand. It is owned by what can be regarded as the community perspective.

The Lisbon Theory also gives us a really clear view into how PR will have to develop in the coming months.





References
David Phillips, (2006) "Towards relationship management: Public relations at the core of organisational development", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 10 Iss: 2, pp.211 - 226
Amaral, B. (2009) "A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs." Bledcom http://www.bledcom.com/about_bledcom/research/2009.

Dis-intermediating Public Relations

We are distracted by the tactical approach to the internet that goes under the catch-all heading Social Media.

Tiny dots of information such as a tweet or blog post may affect the sentiment expressed about an organisation and the ripple effect on volume or price of a shareholding transaction may be slight but significant. Garnered by algorithmically-driven high-frequency trading (HFT) and aggregated,  they have a big effect and generate high returns for the institutions that use them. Over eighty percent of market volume is traded in microseconds this way. Your Tweet is important.

This effect has huge implications for public relations as practised.

Although all the causes of the 2010 Flash Crash have not been identified conclusively, HFT was identified as the primary contributor. Such algorithms carry very real economic, not to mention social, risks. For the corporate affairs manager and financial PR practitioner, the financial world is changed. It was once dominated by gossip, speculation, research and strategically-timed trades – by people, for people

This unprecedented socio-economic Flash Crash episode, as Executive Director of the Bank of England Andrew Haldane observed at the time, exposed the precarious frontiers of algorithmically- and digitally-driven financial ‘innovation’: “Trading in securities generated trading insecurities,” he remarked, adding that “the impatient world was found, under stress, to be an uncertain and fragile one.”

If we then step back and look at the digitally driven news coming from countries under stress (but already much more effectively that during the Arab spring) we see it too is having a profound effect. No serious government is dependant on gossipy political advisers to put the East Coast hurricane, US election, Iranian bomb and Syrian shoot outs into a perspective to secure the present and future of the nation. There are computer algorithms to help. No one can gainsay how good the Google crisis map is http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy-nyc .  But look what it has done. It has created an environment to provide real time news, link to real time reporting (including cameras where no sensible journalist would tread). Furthermore it has been done in such a way that anyone can feed or add content. The Red Cross was in early and has a significant presence on the map.

For the PR man the ability to re-act is paramount (do I see the dog rescue charities in there yet? Can I use the map to find a purveyor of generator sets?).

We already have a similar Google map of Syria and Iran? This can be extended to oil fields in Nigeria; new land owners in Africa? Or lots of other politically, commercially or personal issues. A lot of the content can and will be provided using automated functions. Its a far cry from gossipy political or corporate advisers offering research 24 hours later. This is real and real time.

But this is small beer. I will announce a new semantic engine for PR academic PR's in the next few months. It will allow students to create semantic website clusters to show where relationships exist between organisations and people. The software can update every hour if needed.

Now we will have ordinary PR students able to automatically monitor relationships as they evolve! It is a PR applications that has only ever been taught in two universities worldwide. It will also take more than gossipy political or corporate advisers and publicists to affect the direction of relationship travel (if you would like to join in and play, let me know).

Once again we see those pesky algorithms at play.

But lets get in even deeper.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has exposed its hand in reporting automated, deep natural-language understanding as a solution for more efficiently processing of text information. When processed at its most basic level without ingrained cultural filters, language it offers the key to understanding connections in text that might not be readily apparent to humans. DARPA created the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program to harness the power of language. Sophisticated artificial intelligence of this nature has the potential to enable analysts to efficiently investigate a huge corpus and discover implicitly expressed, actionable information contained therein. If you read the slide show it is evident that the same approach is just as good for organisations as much as governments.

What then is the role of the gossipy political or corporate adviser and publicist?

What is more this is not at internet speed, it is much faster than that. This year BGI demonstrated data transfer at nearly 10 gigabits per second between US and China in which data transferred in 30 seconds is compared to the public internet which took over a day.

PR is now as much under threat as the high street. This is not about the Social Media tactic, important though that may be. This is about using the internet to deliver strategies but faster than the speed of thought.

The Absence of Social Media Case Studies

This week in the CIPR 'Friday Roundup' Andrew Bruce Smith bewails the the lack of good case studies and the significant use of anecdote in the realm of Social Media PR.

 Of course the top end of practice across Europe and leading academics in the field do have access to such knowledge.

He can be forgiven for not noticing The Digital Communication Awards run by the Quadriga University Berlin because it did not happen in London, but it is the sort of activity that our institutions are wont to let slip through their fingers.

This is a European wide event and is rigourous in its selection and judging of the best campaigns/programmes  across the continent.

All the DCA awards are selected by panels of leading experts, practitioners and academics (no less than 11 professors sit on the Juries).

All the contributions include both written details and vivas and the winning entries include a very wide range of communications techniques (this year I particularly liked the Red Cross First Aid app which now has a million downloads).

It is not that British best practice is not well represented. As well as the Red Cross, the BBC took home awards this year which deserves recognition from all communicators and notably, the contributors to best practice thinking in the CIPR.

A short history of online retailing

In the 1970’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) gave corporate life to the internet.

In 1979, long before the advent of the World Wide Web (1990), Margaret Thatcher’s IT advisor, Michael Aldrich, invented online shopping by connecting a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line. E-Commerce had arrived and Thompsons Holidays B2B (1981) and Tesco B2C (1984) gave the internet new avenues of commercial power.

 Fast forward three decades to the year of the London Olympics and the proportion of online retail sales excluding automotive fuel is 8.5 per cent; Deloitte highlighted how the boundaries between physical and virtual space are becoming blurred with four in ten shops predicted to close in five years (Deloitte 2012); collection of Amazon parcells from The Co-operative stores is a reality with Waitrose to follow the same model.

In the UK, independent traders selling through online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon were turning over £10bn or close to £1 for every £70 spent online. Then there are the 4% of UK customers who bought stuff through Facebook according to a TNS survey.

Meanwhile there are predictions that one in four (25%) people will regularly use interactive TV to shop by the end of 2014.

These are new types of retailing business and management across British retailing has to be very aware of the power of the internet.

 Thank you Michael Aldrich.


 Thanks for the image go to http://entrance-exam.net/

Where would you keep your Blekko search engine

This on has the same list as the Google engine below.

/topukpapers search

Where would you keep your UK newspaper search engine

Well, here, of course, This is just the nationals:

A sign of how aggregation is moving. I built this today.

Health Service News from Wales

The history of PR, anti feminism and Aristotle

Some 1300BC there was a lot of very public correspondence between the rulers of Gaza and Egypt.

It looks to a modern eye very much like lobbying.  These are real (Handcock translated) words held in a number of museums and brought to us by the Internet Archive. They come as part of a big and ancient resource known as the Amarna letters.

I can imagine a number of PR colleagues, and not a few diplomats, paraphrasing this text even today:

Let the king know that all lands have leagued 

in hostility against me j let the king therefore care for 

his land. Behold, the territory of Gazri, the territory of 

Ashkelon, and the city of La[chish], have given them oil, 

food, and all their necessaries. Let the king therefore 

care for the troops ! Let him send troops against the 

people who have committed a crime against the king, my 

lord ! If in this year there are troops here, then will the 

land and the local ruler[s] remain to the king, my lord ; 

but if there are no troops here, then there will remain no 

lands and no local rulers to the king. 

Behold this land of Jerusalem neither my father nor 

my mother gave it to me ; the mighty hand of the king 

gave it to me. Behold, this deed is the deed of Milkilu, 

and the deed of the sons of Labaya, who have given the 

land of the king to the Habirii. Behold, king, my lord, 

I am innocent as regards the Kashi.

My question is: How old is the practice of public relations in thousands of years before  Edward Bernays? Many believe was the first public relations person and probably because he was a man and the Duchess of Devonshire (1757 – 1806) was a woman.

The Bournemouth historical initiative refuses to look at the (evidence of ancient) practice and is very focused on the words 'Public Relations'.

The nature of relationships in public and with publics is as old as the hills.

The history of public relations is very much tied up in this anti feminist and 20th century thinking  (think of examples such as 'Torches of Liberty' and 'September Morn' as opposed to the longer view.

After all it was Aristotle who wrote that it is:-

... not merely unnecessary for a king to be a philosopher, but even a disadvantage. Rather a king should take the advice of true philosophers. Then he would fill his reign with good deeds, not with good words.

(in On Kingship)

I hope that someone is preparing to go to Bournemouth with a paper that looks past a form of practice that used women to a form of practice that is more about philosophy and, thus, relationships.

Using vertical search engines and search for research

I have been experimenting with vertical search engines as a means of using online opinion for opinion research.

Using Blekko I have been looking at share of voice of PR institution among the 81 leading UK PR bloggers.

The organisations I looked at were CIPR, PRCA and AMEC.

I looked for the number of citations (blog posts) mentioning these three organisations.

The results are:

But of course, this is only part of the story.

Less than half of these PR bloggers have mentioned any of these three organisations in the last five years.

It would seem to indicate that there is a need for an outreach programme by these organisations if they  want to take advantage of the major opinion formers and brand promotion facilities online.

But we can also look to see how many times the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is publicly visible in Facebook which is about 35,800 and in Linkedin about 70,900 compared to the Public Relations Consultants Association - about 296 but in Linkedin its just 1,990.

Of course the CIPR competition is the Chartered Institute of Marketing  with mentions in Facebook of 15,700 and Linkedin about 255,000.

It is not hard to imagine what the institutions would do if such results were noted for newspapers and magazines. I am not sure why online is so different.

Of course, many companies are much, much worse in their use of online brand development and opinion leadership but the institutions do need come up to the mark if they are going to be part of the action.

Communications Data Bill

I do realise that it is hard to change the mind of the Home Secretary.

Somehow, there has to be a way of making it clear to her that the Internet is not like a news channel and tinkering at the edges will only bring her more grief than the problems it solves, is economically damaging and panders to vested interests. The draft Communications Data Bill is bad law for a number of reasons.

Her proposals can be avoided by real criminals. Her proposals will present opportunities for drip drip drip criticism of the security services. There will be a regular occurrence of high profile mistakes as innocent people are caught in this complex concept. Most of these issues will haunt the The Secretary of State and will bring government into disrepute for little good outcome. It is bad law.

These latest proposal are weak and cannot be effectively implemented to achieve the stated goal.

Most significantly her proposals are economically damaging.

She probably does not realise that the internet is contributing nearly as much as the financial services sector to the UK economy. The A T Kearney report is a recent example in a long line that reveal such data.

Important points are: 

• Total U.K. Internet traffic is expected to increase by an average of 37 percent every year between 2010 and 2015.  
• The U.K. Internet ecosystem is worth £82 billion a year.  
• Every £1 spent on Internet connectivity—mobile and fixed broadband networks—currently supports £5 in wider revenue for the U.K. ecosystem. 
• Of the total £82 billion U.K. Internet economy, £37 billion is in the Internet value chain and £45 billion in the e-commerce it supports. 
• The value chain is 2.6 percent of the country's GDP, while e-commerce is a further 3.1 percent a total of 5.7% of the British economy and unlike most others is growing at a double digit rate.,

Double digit growth is very important for the economy which elsewhere continues in recession and especially a part of the economy that is this big.

The Home Secretary is presenting proposals that will be a burden for this sector.

Of course, there is every reason why some sectors would want to be able to invite the security services to identify people using the internet to, for example, download protected intellectual property such as music, films and newspaper stories protected by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (i.e. nearly every national newspaper whose news story URL's are protected as well as the story content - and should not be used by MP's either!). Some of the pressures, advice and lobby affecting the Home Office will be from such vested interest.

There are many issues involved here and most notably the democratic, social, cultural and economic advantage of development of IP for the economy. This is not a matter for the Home Office but it is being brought into this debate through the proposed legislation.

The Home Secretary is, I am sure aware of such pressures and the prospect of related vested interests and their third party supporters.

I am sure that the emotive headlines grabbing  story about protecting young people and the the vulnerable will, no doubt be headlines in newspapers who count among the vested interests and that they pose yet another threat at a time when the Media is desperate to 'get its own back'. I have no doubt that the Home Secretary is capable of weighing such influences in the national interest and can examine more effective means to protect society.

How the internet permeates all things PR

Mark Page, a partner at the management consultants A T Kearney, said: "Total U.K. Internet traffic is expected to increase by an average of 37 percent every year between 2010 and 2015."

Against a backdrop of shrinking economies, this sounded pretty impressive.

He also said: "Traffic on mobile networks is growing 84 percent year over year and is expected to account for 11 percent of total traffic by 2015."

Impressed?

This would indicate that a lot of people and organisations use the internet a lot. Indeed, according to Page, the U.K. Internet ecosystem was worth £82 billion a year in 2012, with mobile connections accounting for 16 percent. If this is true, a very large part of the economy is dependent on the internet.

Every £1 spent on Internet connectivity—mobile and fixed broadband networks—currently supports £5 in wider revenue for the U.K. economy. The value chain is 2.6 percent of the country's GDP, while e-commerce is a further 3.1 percent. In addition, the United Kingdom has a much stronger business-to-consumer e-commerce sector than other countries. The numbers escalate so fast that you would need to look them up to be current on the fist day this book was printed.

In the year of the Olympiad, the internet value chain was 2.6 percent of the UK's GDP, while e-commerce was a further 3.1 percent. 

To put this into some kind of perspective travel and tourism, communication and financial services' contribution to GDP in the UK was about £100 billion in 2011, or 6.7% each. This compares 2.3% for automotive manufacturing, 1.9% for mining and 4.1% for chemicals.

The internet is one of the big hitters in the UK economy and is growing fast.

Ericsson's second Traffic and Market Report predicts data traffic – as opposed to voice calls – will grow 15 times over by 2017, by which time 85% of humanity will live within range of a mobile broadband signal and there will be more mobile devices than people.

This means that the internet part of the economy will outpace tourism and banking any day now.

For real digital specialists, total U.K. internet traffic is forecast to grow from a monthly volume of 621 petabytes (PB) in 2010 (equivalent to roughly 41 million music albums downloaded each day) to 3,000 PB in 2015.

AT Kearney note that U.K. Internet value chain makes up a significantly larger proportion of GDP than the global norm, while the value added by e-commerce also constitutes a larger share of GDP, especially for business-to-consumer (B2C) activity.

The data also suggests that the UK is good at creating content and poor at providing services.

In the midst of all of this is Public Relations. A career almost completely mediated by what is happening online. 

A major shift happened in 2009 when, for the first time, people globally were using their mobile devices more for data transfer than they were for voice communication. Chetan Sharma Consulting showed that the mobile had become the most personal  internet enabled computer.

In personal terms the internet is having considerable impact.


In 2011, 19 million households (77%)  in Great Britain had an Internet connection.  There were still 5.7 million households without an Internet connection. Half of those without a household Internet connection said they didn't have one because they “don’t need the Internet”.

Broadband has now almost entirely replaced dial-up Internet in the UK, with 93 per cent of households using broadband. (Office of National Statistics 2012 http://www.ons.gov.uk). Half the population uses Facebook and the UK represents over 10% of all internet users in Europe (http://www.internetworldstats.com)

Internet sales values  in March 2012 increased by 15.2 per cent compared with March 2011 and are estimated to account for 8.5 per cent of all retail sales values excluding automotive fuel.

PR activity online is now charged with helping organisation reach out to get a bigger slice of the growing environment.

Childnet International report that the internet and mobile technology are increasingly important to the educational and social lives of children, and are becoming a part of children’s identity. As one young person said to Childnet at one of its recent focus group meetings, “Take away my mobile phone and you take away a part of me!”

The internet is also changing how people's brains work. Sparrow et al (2011) report on findings showing that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. In other words 'don't remember it, Google it!'

The power of audiovisual expression in video games took a dramatic leap forward with the arrival of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Gamers are being treated to gaming experiences with unprecedented realism and power (Square Enics web site http://www.square-enix.com/na/careers/getech/) . Video game visuals already equal or surpass the quality of those in feature films, requiring even more advanced game development pipelines.
For PR practice, this means that there is a need for a profession to adapt and adopt practices that are not as old fashioned as Facebook, even Pinterest but of a semantic web challenged by Googles Knowledge Graph.

Some people find the incusion of the internet into the daily lives of such a high proportion of the population dangerous.

Nicholas Carr (Carr 2012) sums it up like this "People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, updates and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are often less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time." 

Practitioners need to be aware of such research too.











....

Page, M 2012 The Internet Economy in the United Kingdom http://www.atkearney.com/index.php/Publications/the-internet-economy-in-the-united-kingdom.html accessed May 2012

Global Mobile Data Market Update 2009, Chetan Sharma Consulting. Available online: http://chetansharma.com/globalmarketupdate2009.htm (accessed on 6 May 2012).

Components of the UK internet value chain.  http://www.atkearney.com/images/global/articles/FG-The-Internet-Economy-in-the-United-Kingdom-8.png  accessed June 2012
Ericsson Traffic and Market Report June 2012 http://www.ericsson.com/traffic-market-report accessed June 2012

Childnet International Intenet Addiction http://www.childnet-int.org/downloads/factsheet_addiction.pdf accessed May 2012.

Betsy Sparrow, B. Liu, J. Wegner, D. M. 2011 Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips Science August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 776-778

(Carr, N, 2012 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains W. W. Norton & Company)