The 'love at first sight' embedded chip - a 2020 PR issue

There is a very interesting discussion going on at PR Conversation. I have just added a comment about PR in 2020 and re-present it here.

..... Perhaps we can take a wider look at ethics and social media and some other aspects of the new PR mediated by the Internet of Things.

Seeing, for example, social media from the constituent's perspective one finds some pretty dangerous happenings.

For example in Wired Mat Honan describes an experiment he did by 'liking' everything he say on Facebook. The most worrying aspect of this activity is the impact he had on his followers. They were bombarded with, in effect, his propaganda (and some of it was pretty distasteful http://goo.gl/SdsPlV).

Do we, as practitioners, monitor what our constituents see to identify if they too are targets of propaganda? Do we ensure that our 'marketing' colleagues are not using such tactics? There are some big ethical issues here too.

Meanwhile, www.brightplanet.com and www.torproject.org, two of the Darkweb search engines make password/paywall protected content in the Lightweb visible for all to see - yes, even your academic papers!

It does not stop there, these search engines shine a bright focused spotlight onto a much bigger internet than most would credit. Internet porosity is now a much bigger issue. Is this sort of search and monitoring ethical?

Once again, we might also ask the ethical question of our marketing colleagues and web masters. Information is  'leaking out' faster than we imagine.

And so back to wearable technologies.

By 2020, London will have 5G (http://goo.gl/iBZEUn).

4G offers download speeds that are roughly equivalent to your superfast broadband (around 30-40Mbps) at home. 5G will go well beyond that http://goo.gl/dPsTBx.

You will be able to download a film to your Google Contact Lens in less than a second http://goo.gl/gnfWsc.

Regardless of the technology adopted, it's thought that there will by multiple smaller antennas employed, allowing signals to be emitted in multiple directions and even bounced off off buildings and solid surfaces. New York University, have come up with the idea of utilising millimeter-wave frequencies. The main advantage of using this frequency range is that it's scarcely used by other broadcast technologies http://goo.gl/fiPBNd.

Already there are a range of network technologies that can be deployed that are almost 'invisible' to the onlookers too e.g. http://maidsafe.net. There is no question that such capabilities will evolve to work on the new 5G networks.

Apple is rumoured to be working with Intelligent Energy, a fuel-cell firm that could enable Apple's devices to last "days or even weeks," http://goo.gl/R9BTMz. There are also experiments being run to generate electricity from microwaves. Such technologies remove the need for batteries or other power supply http://goo.gl/t3oz58.

 Not only will it be 20-100 times faster than 4G, it will be a communications technology that can be embedded into almost anything (think light-bulb). It will provide an opportunity for development of a distributed network internet unencumbered by the big ISP's and not needing batteries or other connections to electrical power.

The internet will then be able to reach areas and communities that do not have electricity or a reliable electrical resource.

Embedded and mobile devices. The "Internet of Things" will explode. Such devices are being developed now. Some predictions suggest 50 or more mobile devices per person by 2025 (that is only eleven years away).

Why should this be relevant to PR?

If there is traditional media, social media and a new medium called 'Things' and we have 50 'Thing' media attached to us one way or another, the evolution will be many times more significant than the 4G mobile phone plus the tablet communications device 40% of the population already carry with them wherever they go.

Which of your students will resist the 'love at first sight' embedded chip which tells them that the pheromone count of the the hunk that just walked in the door thinks they are gorgeous? For the proponents of PR as relationship management this chip will be a whole new area of practice and for the PR as a communications discipline will have ever more communications channels/content  to worry about.

So can we imagine such developments in 10-15 years?  Did we envisage Twitter and YouTube as part of the PR discipline in 2004 or 1999?

Perhaps PR needs to begin work on what to do now and not leave it too late.

I am certain that we should be working on development of University courses with such developments in mind.

Old stuff and Bebo

I keep lists of URL's that I can go back to. 
Some of these lists are over a decade old and are fun to look at.
This one is fun:

When researching my post last week on mobile social networking, I canvassed several industry bigwigs to get their views on how well the likes of MySpace and Bebo would translate to mobile. 

Bebo! what's that?

Here are some more that might amuse:

http://www.techdigest.tv/2006/10/when_researchin.html
http://www.out-law.com/page-7371
http://www.webhostdir.com/news/articles/shownews.asp?id=17694
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/sport/2006/10/10/stfede10.xml
http://www.thisisbradford.co.uk/display.var.961625.0.students_see_how_resourceful_they_are.php

The Social Economy

Benkler, von Hippel, Weber, and many others showed us that the Internet has liberated many economies. One economy is the traditional “commercial economy,” an economy regulated by the quid pro quo: I’ll do this (work, write, sing, etc.) in exchange for money (which is a recognised intangible symbol with an international reputation). Another economy is (the names are many) the (a) amateur economy, (b) sharing economy, (c) social production economy, (d) noncommercial economy, or (e) p2p economy. Even the Bitcoin economy. This alternative economies (however you name them, I’m just going to call them the “second economy”) is the economy of Wikipedia, most open source development, the work of amateur astronomers, etc. It has a different, more complicated logic to it than the commercial economy. If you tried to translate all interactions in this second economy into the frame of the commercial economy, you’d kill it.

Having now seen the extraordinary value of this second economy, I think most would agree we need to think lots about how best to encourage it — what techniques are needed to call it into life, how is it sustained, what makes it flourish. I don’t think anyone knows exactly how to do it well. Those living in real second economy communities (such as Wikipedia) have a good intuition about it.

But a second and also extremely difficult problem is how, or whether, the economies can be linked. Is there a way to cross over from the commercial to second economy? Is there a way to manage a hybrid economy — one that tries to manage this link.

Social Media now has a cousin called Social Economy.

Um ..... where did I put that page.

I have been revisiting some sites, blogs and posts this week that I need to keep close to me.

This is meets my eye as I look round my study:

Every student in PR, marketing and economics should have read The Long Tail.
I keep talking about Transparency Porosity and Agency and need to be able to reference this page a lot. Peter Drucker saw what was coming and web 2.0 years before it arrived and is mega relevant today.

Applying Communications Models was an important paper in its day. So was Share This Too and then there is Reputation Economics ... I need to re-read them all.

Blazing Netshine has coloured my thinking for such a long time (and has morphed, I now discover) that I had to look at it again - not too rusty and I still like the title and some of the sentences I user e.g. "The digital riptide flows round historic information gatekeepers" and Prof Anne Gregory's comment "public relations practitioners `will also understand that complex feedbacks within and between systems and environment can create resonances that cannot be controlled and which may diminish or even contradict the desired result of communication.'"

The various versions of Online Public Relations have been interesting experiences too.

But here is a big question. Are the papers and books relevant any more?

So much emerges online and a lot of the real beef is available via mobile, should I be reading books at all.

Take Google Plus as an example.

The top gun is Martin Shervington. He could not possibly be relevant in a book. His subject is too fast moving.

So, I am now going to work on how I can keep up my reading on a mobile phone.

Here is how I can start beginning with Drucker.


Its the way ahead.


Notes:
Phillips D, 2000 Blazing Netshine on the value network: Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000, pp. 189±206
Evans, P. and Wurster, W. S. (1999) `Blown to bits', Harvard Business School Press.
Drucker, P. F. (1994) `The age of social transformation', The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 274, No. 5, pp. 53±80.

Rebooting PR - Radical Poroity

In this series of, posts we have already seen how the internet is now making organizations porous.

For a long time people have discussed their employers, friends, acquaintances and    a myriad of other relationships.
I do so, they expose torganizationsons and people to a wide constituency. Information in this way, inadvertently leaks  out.
The work I did on analysis of LinkedIn profiles also shows how people expose their employers to a low deep analysis (see Rebooting PR).

What is happening now is that a lot of data (Big data) available for such analysis. We can automate such proceses and then re-work the findings.

Radical porosity now allows us to identify the common and unique unique skills, capabilities of individual banks in relation to competitors - automatically. We can also use similar capabilities to match LnkedIn profiles with Twitter accounts and get near real time intelligence.

There are many more examples of how apparently innocent activities make oorganizationsmore porous.

Such is the extent of content provided by individuals that if an organization wants to have no presence it creates a hole in the Internet environment which points in the organisation.

From here we learn a lot. There is no hiding place.

We also learn there is a critical need for public relations to manage the effect of constituent's porosity.

Rebooting PR - Internet Agency

The internet can act as an agent.

For example, people can take a message output by an organisation and propagate it with great ease. They are acting as an agent. Re-Tweet, blog post and everything else in between allows this to happen. We have known about this phenomenon for twenty years and it is in the PR literature.

We have known that this form of agency is not limited to people. Technologies do this too. They can monitor websites and alert and broadcast content easily. All the news media monitoring services do this. CyberAlert.com has been offering this automated service for more than a decade and a half.

But now we are moving into an era when internet agency reprocesses information and prompts action; acquires new intelligence and identifies new knowledge and then provokes action in its own right and without human interference. At the same time, such capability offers a new, different, and for some, threatening future.

It would not surprise anyone to find an exchange that would provide data on the relative value of Avious Points, Tesco Clubcard points and Bitcoin. This would be a new form of financial exchange based on new forms of wealth and currency.

What we would see is an internet capability to buy things that stepped round existing currencies. 

What is more important is that it would have crossed national and currency boundaries as well. 

True international currencies with global exchange rate could be a reality. Such ideas go much further than just the crypto currencies. Such an activity can take place without any recourse to existing currencies, governments, cenral banks or regulators. Their success is completely dependent on international trust, goodwill and reputation.

With such benefits they can also also interact with the existing currencies.

It may be worth having a look at: http://www.topcashback.co.uk. The idea already exists. We have already entered into such an economy. The idea of radical agency is with us already.


For traditional PR people this is something of a problem. Interactions with the Wikipedia world is beginning to have some sensible resonance with the profession (and less so for the cowboys). This is a good thing because and automated system of creating corporate presence in Facebook based on the Wikipedia profile is happening now. A lot of companies did not lift a finger and yet find themselves with a Facebook presence in their name. These forms of radical internet agency are becoming ever more sophisticated.

The intermediaries of a bygone day no longer have exclusive rights.

The idea that 'publics' form round issues or that there are groups of people who own a 'stake' in organisation even if they are not shareholders is now of a distant age. The 'organisation' is now a number of value added, if intangible, content assets that it may not have had a hand in creating. If you like, computer generated assets.

Radical internet agency is an interesting area for PR practice. It is part of reputation management and management of intellectual assets that even the organisation may not be aware of.

Rebooting PR - Radical Transparency

Transparency

Once, it was cool to propose that organisations be transparent and that secrecy was commercial and political suicide. It was an idea that caught on. 


Greater transparency led to higher profits for those who had access to the information about the relevant tax rate; transparency in Government, democracy an politics has many advantages and made governance accountable to the electorate. Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or open government. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making.

Bennis points out why and how digital business strategy is an important transformational issue for leadership. He argues that information driven transparency will forever change the way that power it derived by top leaders and that leaders need to embrace this new transparency.

Making information available to help inform, enthrall and educate people who are customers and prospective customers also informs competitors, vendors and employees. They too can see the product and its pricing online.

Until recently agency was easy to understand:

• Had email for fast delivery of information  - That could be circulated easily to anyone.
• Created websites which showed off: products, services, Director’s names, locations and much more - To everyone!
• Then came discussion lists, blogs and Social Media - The constituency read added value content and could interact.

So far so good but now we can see new developments. People tell each other about the products and prices, they rank, rate and review about all these products and services and add intangible values. 

Alongside these people are technologies that help spread the word and aggregate the information. They compare several competitors and seldom miss ones out (despite the claims of the advertisers).

Today there is:

• Competitive pressure to make more information available to develop competitive advantage
• Competitors see the nature of competition and respond to remain competitive (example - supermarket pricing - PwC publish research papers for free and so all competitors have to do it).
• Transparency via multi media including ‘social media’ words, pictures, video. Lots of automation to spread messages etc etc
• Content available across many devices from PC to mobile to digital window displays
• Content provided by many actors - e.g. social media authors as well as many other company ‘faces’.
• The network effect means the information available and provided by the organisation constituency potentially reaches many generations from the first view and crosses from one medium to the next and the next and also jumps platforms (PC, Tablet, Mobile phone, game machine and even down to the fridge). Transparency is now also a matter of multimedia distribution.

Radical transparency requires the PR practitioner to develop content for many media, devices and outputs, to monitor the reach and identify the extent of the added intangible value.


Sophisticated computer algorithms help automatically understand human-generated text. A growing field within NLP is semantic analysis and its application to social media content is just starting to mature beyond labs and classrooms. Semantic analysis is capable of providing valuable insight into the meaning behind social media content.

Its like finding that your content has been located to where you wrote it! This is added value and more of the intangible value being developed online. To understand it we need universities able to teach this as part of a PR curse and the profession to include in continuous development programes.



The rate at which the move to online content is being used is not hard to see (see Unilever below) but being adept at optimising transparency is harder than just being seen in Facebook and the machines now have a strong hand in all of this too.

Unilever is a classic example:

References
Leadership in a Digital World: Embracing Transparency and Adaptive Capacity
Warren Bennis. MIS Quarterly Volume 37, Number 2 — June 2013

Rebooting PR - Part 2

Public Relations is changing and has to change and the theory behind it has to change too.
The change is radical. 

This week  CIPR South West heard from Adam Lewis of Immediate Future, one of the leading figures in the online PR space. Practitioners were very mindful of the significance of 'social media'. 

The BledCom, this week is about "Digital Publics: New Generation, New Media, New Rules" is a festival of internet mediated public relations research from round the world.

To Reboot PR we have to watch our language.

We use expressions like 'social groups', 'stakeholders' and 'Publics' and in order to recognise people and technologies that might slip through the net of terminology, I would like to use a catch-all expression 'constituent'. This will mean I can include constituents that may otherwise be defines in exclusive groups such as voters, employees, customers, prospective customers, audiences and so forth. All of them are constituents of some kind. 

The nomenclature of 'the media' has to change as well. Once it was a descriptor for, mostly, the press. In a time when one's mobile presents you with emails, websites, sms messages (or G+ messages), Facebook comments, essays by or shared through your acquaintances in a variety of digital resources via LinkedIn and  synced appointments via Google Calendar which mirrors your office one. All these media and almost none of them have a print or even broadcast counterpart.

Media to me is the means for distribution. Each has unique attributes as much as the newspapers and magazines of old. Today the prospective reach is, by comparison huge; the content can morph and can explode on the hurricane of Twitter or amble through email.


The tenets of online public relations are focused on transparency, Internet agency, organisational porosity, richness and reach of content. They were laid down in 2001 by the UK PR industry internet commission and have not changed a jot - until now.


To reboot PR we have to recognise the huge influence of the internet. Very little PR is undertaken without it being mediated by the internet.

It is a space where some long held and much loved ideas have to be massively modified.
Before we go further, I would like to morph some of the icons of PR language into a form of words that can work on line.

Today, we have to consider the evolution of such ideas.

These tenets have morphed. Today we have radical transparency, porosity, agency,  richness, reach.

Over the next few weeks, I shall look at each in turn to see how much work we have to do with each in order to Reboot PR.

Rebooting PR - part one

The value of public relations mediated by the capabilities of the internet is huge. But to access this value, the industry has to change.

The extent to which we are beginning to understand the contribution intangible capabilities make in the creation of wealth is growing every day.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO)  put it this way: 

"Whereas, in the not too distant past, the majority of business investment was in people or physical things like premises and machinery, today the majority of business investment is in intangible goods, in ideas and creativity. Making sure that our entrepreneurs, innovators and creators can translate their investment in the creation of intellectual property assets into value is key to the UK’s long term growth prospects. In the last 12 months, the Intellectual Property Office has done much to increase the likelihood that British businesses understand the importance of managing their IP effectively."

The IPO showed that it needed  strong PR to allow the UK to get at the real value of IP.

Inngot and Valuation Consulting Limited reported that:

The role of intellectual property and intangible assets in facilitating business finance” found that knowledge assets were not appreciated in mainstream UK lending and that IP was therefore a missed opportunity with millions of pounds worth of business assets whose value was not being leveraged at all, or only being leveraged inadvertently

It seems that a very large part of the worth of the nation is in dire need of some good PR.

We can begin to see why such strong PR is needed so that, for example we so can use our currency. The Bank of England put it this way:

The words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five [ten/twenty/fifty] pounds" date from long ago when our notes represented deposits of gold. At that time, a member of the public could exchange one of our banknotes for gold to the same value. For example, a £5 note could be exchanged for five gold coins, called sovereigns. But the value of the pound has not been linked to gold for many years, so the meaning of the promise to pay has changed. Exchange into gold is no longer possible and Bank of England notes can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes of the same face value. Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy, the objective of which is price stability.

The value of your pay packet comes down to 'trust'.

It also comes down to reputation:

The Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has said he doesn't see any reason why the Government should inject more cash into the economy, in comments which have given a big boost to the value of the pound.

Is that all? Is the intangible value of what we earn down to the comments of the Governor of the Bank of England?

What about advertising and marketing... they much have a role in this debate.

In advertising Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown struggles but begins to show what is at stake. He writes:

My attempt to explain that advertising could add intangible value to a product experience was met (by friends at a dinner party)  with blank incomprehension at best. Creating intangible value seemed to be equated with duplicity. Advertisers cheated people by creating erroneous beliefs about the quality, efficacy or value of a product. It was unethical. So maybe you can help me come up with a better and more compelling argument?

First, let me state that I am all in favor of developing products that deliver a tangible and positive experience for their users. This is the first step of creating a strong brand. Advertising can serve a useful role simply by informing people of the existence of a product that might serve their needs better. But that does not preclude creating an even better experience through the creation of intangible benefits. Just as placebos can produce a positive response in patients, so too brands can create a more positive experience for their consumers.

What he was saying is that adverting can add value but after the event and is limited in what it can deliver.

But something does add value and a lot of it.

The added value of a brand to an engineered product like a motor car is an example. But there is a lot more going on.

If we go beyond advertising to 'brand' values we see big numbers emerging.

In 2012 Brand Finance published a study on the Monarchy as a ‘brand’ to coincide with the 

Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. They valued the Monarchy from an economic perspective and as a brand with an impact of £44 billion on the UK Economy as well as assessing the emotional, political and constitutional arguments for The Royal Family. 
The Monarchy’s contribution to the UK economy is considerable and  Brand Finance estimated the revenue uplift to the UK economy was £2.4 billion offset by costs of £1.4 billion giving a net uplift of £1 billion to GDP. 

UK businesses also benefit from Royal Warrants and Brand Finance valued the scheme at £4 billion and there is also a significant reputational benefit to individual UK businesses from the Monarchy once they have been granted a Coat of Arms which Brand Finance valued at £400 million. 

The question one may ask is, which management discipline is charged with defending and exploiting and developing the tangible benefits from intangible (reputation, trust, employment, social development, profit, etc) an idea which in itself is as intangible as the Monarchy?  This goes beyond brand management because it needs the ethical and social engagement of a broad constituency.

Investing in this asset has such a high return that we need to know who can deliver the required servicing.


 Perhaps we can see how the intangible converts to money to gain a view of the new intangible economy according to an recent article in the Economist:

FACEBOOK, Amazon, Twitter and a host of other big companies in today’s “data-driven economy” share one thing in common: they make a living from harvesting personal data. Some of this data is freely given, perhaps too freely. More than 1.3 billion people have donated some of their most valuable personal information to Facebook in return for the ability to “like” and “share” cat photos. Amazon knows almost as much about its customers as they do. Twitter knows what you think and when you think it.

The article follows the adventures of Jennifer Lyn Morone  (JLM), who is collecting the growing amount of online data JLM is amassing and which will be visible on her website—although as Ms Morone gains more control over her data she aims to transform this transparency into opacity; only she will collect the data, and only JLM will decide how and where it can be viewed, used, sold, bartered or donated. This may be challenging: some of JLM’s most valuable data, such as financial transactions and health records, are by definition controlled by other organisations (such as banks), although Ms Morone will be able to re-package and resell them (data can be sold many times without losing their value). 

Turning something as intangible as a Facebook 'Like' into money is an interesting idea. Turning the data aura surrounding and individual or a group of individuals into assets seems like alchemy.

The significance of transparency is now coming home to roost. There is a big economy out there where intangibles visible from transparency are becoming very valuable in many directions.

It extends beyond the individual.

I looked at the big data that is LinkedIn. Here I saw how porous organisations have become. This porosity also has value and is also a resource for many disciplines.

It is possible to view about 60% of the UK banking industry employees in LinkedIn. This means we can see how long they have been employed in the industry and how long with a specific bank. We know the skills that they bring to banking and the skills the banking industry needs to run its businesses. In addition we can view if there are more of fewer people being employees and what is the employment employment churn rate between competitors, what are the skill (service) differences as between banking competitors over time. We can plot this over time and much more. This is an organic map of an industry with data not provided by the organisation or the traditional media but by its employees using social media. This is, as the CIPR Internet Commission put it 15 years ago, internet porosity.

This is a picture I created of the skills, and especially, the intangible human resource of 14% of Nationwide Building Society employees:

From this you can see how much of the bank is driven by intangibles and, indeed, the word map is, itself is an intangible asset.

From this one data set, it is possible to monitor and view whole industries and LinkedIn ".... will eventually become an "economic graph" that "maps the global underpinnings of the global economy." Says its CEO Jeff Weiner. 


We are seeing elements in this mix that include trust, reputation, assets of functions, assets encapsulated in features and assets available through the activities people and every time we look at intangible assets, they are bigger than anticipated and depend more on public relations than any other management discipline.

My thesis is that the PR industry now needs to play to its strength.

It has the capability to lever value and to enhance the value of that part of the economy which is bigger than any other - intangibles.

It is mandated to be ethical and to be open about how the client can develop trust and a reputation for trust worthy dealings and it has the power to and place to say to the Marketing Director and the CEO what has to be done to access value.

It is by no means a low cost activity and it has issues and crisis management to add to its activities online.

We even have a map to take us from here.

Evaluation of PR leads to the value of a CEO

Jim Macnamara  has offered an evolved way to evaluate some PR activities. It is very timid.

He can go much further and it can turn from a cost into a high yielding investment.

It seems simple to measure but is much more daunting than most will believe.

Audit

There is a need to maintain an audit of the organisational constituencies and the environment in which they interact.  Without such knowledge it is very hard to identify the nature of the tangible, but much more important, intangible value of corporate activity.

The need to consider intangibles is as relevant as being able to measure the value of a printed £10 bill. This is the ultimate manifestation of trust and reputation and is adopted by every citizen and corporate leader every day. The ten pound note is worth nothing. It is backed by nothing it is the epitome of paper having a value which is disproportionately valued by citizens.

So too the press clip and tweet.

Here then is the basic mind-shift for most corporate managers and especially the AVE led marketer.

There is a need to audit what is evidently in the public domain and to examine its intangible value.

The Barclays Bank Twitter stream shows exactly why the bank is so weak in global terms despite holding so many assets. Trust and the Bank are not great bedfellows at present and neither is reputation. Perhaps this is why it performs so badly and is the target for every regulator and financial ambulance chaser across the world.

Monitor

The next part of this process is monitoring. What is the norm? What is the norm among competitors and what is the norm for organisations with similar constituents. That is simple. Next up is what are the variations. Monitoring variation is a very good way of evaluating an organisation and its competition.

Measure

There is so much to measure and it is here that we can begin to see where the real intangible value lies.

Oddly enough the marketers got some of it right when they tried to use AVE's. 

There is a measurable relationship between good, extensive, independent and timely coverage and the ops and experiences of people using Facebook or Google+ to express their view of the organisation and its products or services.

The extent to which Anthony Jenkins reputation is better than Barclays Bank reputation is noticeable and the same can be said of other Banks and their leaders. They are also different as between Twitter and LinkedIn. There is a form of market, an exchange rate, between reputation quotients. What would it cost the Barclays PR people to buy the Jenkins Twitter reputation and sell it to the Daily Mail? Who might be the auctioneer?

Could it be Google? Could it be that one can use Google's findings to show the relative relationships between various media and their coverage of the client? Who then is going to explore such exchanges?

Value

Across all this media, how does trust and reputation compare between different corporate leaders? Is this an intangible market place that offers a view of the value of CEO's

But wait, we know how much they are paid... there is a cross over between the intangible reputation and the intangible we call money.

So it would seem there is a theoretical way we can evaluate trust and reputation, and the intangible value of public relations which is as robust as the value of the CEO's salary.

Without such a measurement is is very hard to gauge the value of the management team or even a ten pound note.

So, Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC, Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney it may be time to put your PhD's to work to explore the value of PR as tightly as you would an Australian Dollar.

Return On Investment

Return On Investment (ROI) is an accounting valuation method.

In PR we use it a lot. I am not sure we realise what we are talking about.

But it is not very robust.

Because the numerator (Net Income) is an unreliable corporate performance measurement, the outcome of the formula for ROI must also be unreliable to determine success or corporate value.
However the ROI formula still keeps showing up in
many annual reports...

The degree to which Return On Investment (ROI) overstates the
economic value depends on at least 5 factors:
1. length of project life (the longer, the bigger the overstatement)
2. capitalization policy (the smaller the fraction of total investment capitalized in the books, the greater will be the overstatement)
3. The rate at which depreciation is taken on the books (depreciation rates faster than straight-line basis will result in a higher ROI)
4. The lag between investment outlays and the recoupment of these outlays from cash inflows (the greater the time lag, the greater the degree of overstatement)
5. the growth rate of new investment (faster growing companies will have lower Return On Investment )

Formula: 

Net Income / Book Value of Assets = ROI

(Better) alternative:

Net Income+Interest (1-Tax Rate) / Book value of Assets = Return On Investment

You may find more information like this from Steven M. Bragg in his book  Business Ratios and Formulas : A Comprehensive
Guide  and Ciaran Walsh - Key Management Ratios 

Mobile revenues 10% of Newspapers is a threat to... democracy?

The future of traditional PR is now in serious doubt.

If there are no newspapers, journals or magazines and when academic publishing is seriously threatened, there will be little by way of independent media for the media relations model.

We see the scenarios with Tom Foremski when he discusses the effect of mobile on news publishing and Dylan Tweney as he talks about academic publishing.

At worst, the PR industry has to put a range of added skills, capabilities and strategic abilities within the grasp of the practitioner.

This is not as simple as being technically competent in Facebook and Twitter applications. We have seen reports of declines in the use of both. The whole area of defending relationships between clients and their constituencies is now a much bigger business than anyone would have imagined ten years ago. PR is re-defined.

As for publishing, there are other societal issues.

For centuries, we have depended on newspaper publishing to lubricate the role of government and social interaction. We have used newspapers as mainline defence against threat to democracy. Today, this is no longer possible and we do not have any idea of the emerging model other than it is evolving and is not called Facebook.

Formeski's point is well made and needs some further consideration: A solution has to be found on an industry-wide scale in order to halt the media's crumbling business model and to begin to reverse the trend and rebuild its fortunes. Individual media ventures, no matter how well funded, or how much high quality content they produce, will not succeed as self-sustaining businesses unless there is a new media business model available to all.

We don't have it. And it's the biggest failure of our digital age because media informs and educates all citizens and governments, and influences the many complex decisions that have to be made."

Managing risk - a crisis in PR

Some years ago, I commented on FIR how we can manage uncertainty.

Risk Management is a methodology to reduce exposure to risk and is a well known and established discipline in high risk environments. Today, social media has exposed most companies to high risk.

It is time to plan for such occasions

The methods that have been refined over the years can be applied to all forms of activity and where the cost of risk is likely to be significant, prudent companies use it.

Reputation risk is, for most organisations, a crisis. It escalates very fast and for most entities has disproportionate ill-effect on the organisation and people involved.

Most people try to behave honestly and justly and are deeply affected when issues arise or crisis hits. The actual cost to organisation in terms of lost confidence throughout the organisation is immense.

With the writable web, organisation have begun to discover that there is the potential for immense harm to come swiftly.

I have been reviewing my approach in the last few weeks and have come up with some added content:

The nature of risk and crisis

In developing a policy, it has to be noted that social media is very volatile and needs a very responsive capability to manage risk.

The nature of risk and crisis is well documented and often characterised as four steps towards danger:

Variation 

All plans/activities have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning. Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. This is normal day to day management. We all do it. In social media it is manifest in day to day chatter; planned outputs; anticipated message devolvement and community building and supportive commitment. This is part of the daily norm and planned activity that typically has modest variation to the anticipated result.

Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the management team cannot be sure will occur or when. They can be planned for and are part of management.  Like coping with unexpected staff illness – managers cope. Such issues can be identified from past experience and brought into this category with a developed mechanism to reduce impact or turn disadvantage into advantage. An ability to monitor the the organisation, its competitors, working environment and people commenting on them is a method for seeing evolution at an early stage. There are other such issues such as evolving consumer offerings; mobile phone effects; not to mention the implications for, and responses of the organisation and its competition at home and abroad as potential to create issues. It is not unreasonable to use scenario planning to manage foreseen circumstances even to the extent of imaging new forms of product/service management derived from digital evolution, criminality and radical religious and political threat.

Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B. Good management has crisis management planning in place to mitigate effects.  The ability to implement capabilities that mitigate such events have to be developed. For example, a capability to monitor volume and semantic focus of conversations will help identify an issue gaining pace. A capability to do this dynamically with an alarm trip for incidents that seem to be different from the norm is a good start (variance alarms). Having a capability to reach experts, spokespeople and management quickly is another. Scenario planning and ‘war games’ also offers a capability to develop expertise.

Unknown unknowns 

Sometimes referred to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. It is possible to push unk unks further away with good crisis management tools in place. Developing capability  to manage Unknown Unknowns is also part of the work of the PR practitioner. With a trained management team is becomes possible to identify an unknown risk and alert the organisation  and its constituents to the environment. It is, thereby possible to 'plan' for Unk Unk's.

The elements of a plan

The elements of a plan need to be in place at an early stage and include the following:

• Broad and well versed issues and crisis team to develop plans and maintain capability
• Comprehensive and regular audits
• Integration with wider BoE issues and crisis systems
• Comprehensive monitoring and alarm systems
• Development of responses to different (known, projected) forms of issues and crisis.
• Escalation/de-escalation policies/practices/planning. 
• Regular reporting

Steps to be taken

There is a need to create a formal response to issues and crisis. 

This will form a formal plan to progressively identify the nature of issues and crisis across a range of social media (YouTube, Twitter, etc) and eventually covering the majority of such media.

There is some crossover between media and other operations, these need to be explored and planning developed to optimise monitoring, reporting and response.

The extent to which issues can be significantly dangerous and mitigation can be developed needs exploring and formal policy developed and implemented.

The continued evolution of policy and activity needs to be developed to mitigate less helpful public contributions:

There is a strong strategic case for the organisation to develop alternative forms of communication. For example the some organisations are very dependant on the leading reporters in their field and the views of  a small journalistic elite. They have a particular view of events. 

There is a case for developing alternative channels to the wider population using social media. 


Equally, there is a cadre of  writers in academia and the management consultants shaping opinions and strategic application of social media can offer the means to address their audience without dependence on their outputs.

Because we can identify a large part of their audience, it is possible to use social media to go direct to a wide and interested audience and still avoid the traditional opinion formers.

There is much we can do in planning for issues and crisis management

Traits of the Modern PR Professional - Prezly blog

An interesting view



Traits of the Modern PR Professional - Prezly blog

Eight in ten CEO's don't 'Get It'

In a blistering indictment of Public Relations Managers, research firm Forrester found only 21% of CEOs in firms with more than 250 employees have set a clear vision for digital.


This fell further to 17% among CEOs in charge of companies with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees.


Not being able to see, or worse, not being able to convince management that digital and social interaction is critical to corporate mission is a complete failure of in public relations management.


It is not that there has not been enough warning or even consideration of the matter. In 1999, the CIPR held and internet Commission into the significance of the internet to PR practice.


The findings were uncompromising.


Today, with 700 social media management jobs currently being advertised by organisation like Nationwide, Sky, L'Oreal and National Trust in LinkedIn, there seems to be serious demand to capability but it looks like same old same old. They are reporting to marketing managers who, it would seem, are tarred with the same brush.


They too have been caught out and so the blind lead the blind and Boards of Directors blithely lead their companies along the same path.


When it comes to strategic contributions to corporates it seems that PR is, at best, batting a bad third.

Digital PR up 47% or missing the target by half?

The UK has the highest share of total media spending on digital channels worldwide. It is estimated to grow by 47.5% this year. 

Is this reflected in the development of the PR industry?

For example, is the PR industry able to generate 300 Social Media Managers (see my post on the recruitment bubble).  Have the Universities created the courses to feed the need? Are the PR institutions investing in education of members at this sort of rate? Have senior managers in industry and commerce invested in in-house training to develop the necessary skills base and strategic capability?

For example, would one imagine the need extends to: 'how we might expand our digital and social media activity – and which platforms are the most appropriate for us to use.'  It is the CIPR answer to the need. Perhaps, a more strategic approach might be helpful.

Amazingly half of the PR consultants knew a year ago that they had a skills shortage. Now that number has grown by half if they want to compete. A quarter of agencies are not even going to increase marketing budgets for digital services.

To get some idea of the under ambitions of the PR industry, many agencies are expecting to grow their digital revenues to 21-30% this year says the Public Relations Consultants Association.


Is this an industry working hard to flop?

See report: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736#sthash.h7ZC0juH.dpuf

Frantic recruitment bubble for Social Media Managers

I was a little taken aback to be presented with requests to respond to advertisements for the job of social media manager.

I am, as they say, a little older than most!

So I looked up LinkedIn to see how many vacancies there are. It is a vindication of the online PR courses I have been teaching over the last eight years.

Please feel free to select your next job.

Radical Porosity - a vendor example

Today, I received notification about the journey of a small parcel of goods ordered yesterday, in the UK made in the Netherlands and shipped via Germany to my home.

I did not know that the product originated in Holland.

In order to deliver the product, UPS disclosed to me the location of the manufacture and it took me  a few seconds to locate the company using Google.

This is an unintended consequence of USP's transparency system but is evidence of how a vendor can contribute to Radical Internet Porosity.

Is this a PR issue?

Does the manufacturer want such third party systems to affect them? Of course, UPS is very aware of the dangers of intercepts and has ways of limiting exposure (here is the system) but others are no so well organised.

Is such disclose a good thing ?

How do we prepare management understand about the significance of Internet Porosity? Is it inevitable? How can it affect reputation and what can we do to prepare for the big Nobel Award leak which one day will happen?

1Z06694R0411139292

• Updated: 29/01/2014 7:06 Eastern Time

On Vehicle for Delivery Today

 

 

 

 

Scheduled Delivery:

Wednesday, 29/01/2014, By End of Day

Last Location:

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28/01/2014

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Location	Date	Local Time	Activity
Bristol, United Kingdom	29/01/2014	7:25	Out for Delivery
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	28/01/2014	17:45	Origin Scan
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