Monitoring and evaluating Blogs.

Lisa Poulson (pictured) has an interesting take on how hard it is to monitor and evaluate blogs. Her issue: “The thing is, if a company wants to penetrate a market or build relationships in the blogosphere the single most important thing is listening. But how? “

Lets start with her issue about monitoring. There are the usual suspects and PR blog monitoring specialists like CyberAlert and a specialist capability is not hard to build (Springboard software in Bangalore can build you one for about $1500 in about a week). So acquiring the basic data is not hard.

The real problem comes when trying to make sense out of the mountain of irrelevant to find the nugget of relevance.

This is a bit harder but not much. Both the CIA and the British hush hush place at Chelmsford (not to mention the UK Prime Minister's office) have been using a semantic computer process to do this work.

The application of Latent Semantic Analysis, which I mentioned in this blog a week ago can be applied in a number of ways and has very 'human characteristics'. This is very attractive for a lot of people who like playing with these things (like me).

The application of LSA is well established and, in my case is used as an agnostic process to identify concepts in texts (blog posts in this case). The resultant hierarchy of concepts are then processed to identify those concepts most closely associated with the client interest (the semantic bit) which identifies concepts of greatest relevance. I then just recall the concepts in their context (KWIC) which identifies the key issues in a sentence, the blog and by relevance. Its worth a go Lisa and if you want to be able to practice in the area of relationship management then we all need these kinds of tools.

PR subsumes Royal College of Arms

I thought I would follow up Blake Barbera's comment about the article on Domains of PR Practice.

An ancient domain of public relations practice is that of heraldry. In Britain, their recognition in 1420 came when the Royal heralds had a common seal and acted in some ways like a corporation. In 1484 they were granted a charter of incorporation by Richard III to become the College of Arms.

In the Middle ages, heralds represented the dominant coalition, providing a medieval service equivalent in many respects to the public relations practitioner of today. These days, under the The Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, the College organises extremely ancient and splendid ceremonies (parties have always been big in PR practice). In June each year at Windsor Castle is held the procession and service of the Sovereign and Knights Companion of the Order of the Garter. The State Opening of Parliament, usually in November, is an even more magnificent ceremony.

Even with its new Royal Charter (not to mention need for a new headquarters office) the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is not believed to have an eye for a merger with the College of Arms which, although a branch of the Royal household, is self-supporting and is located in an historic building (re-built after the Great Fire of London in 1670).

Despite Public relations' long pedigree (an example of practitioners is recorded by the Roman historian Florus who, in the time of Augustus reports “Thus even Scythians and Sarmatians sent envoys to seek the friendship of Rome. Nay, the Seres came likewise, and the Indians who dwelt beneath the vertical sun.”) the practice of public relations is still thought to have originated as a practice of an American psychologist Edward Bernays who practised in the 1920's or even earlier, Ivy Lee (who formed Parker and Lee in 1904).

Thus it is that when we think about public relations in the Relationship Value Model, we cast our net very wide indeed (and no doubt Colin Farrington with an envious reputations for growing the CIPR membership might even run a ruler over The College).

PR legitimacy grounded in sociology

“Society is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interactions” (Georg Simmel in Fundamental Problems of Sociology sourced from Cardiff University and written by Angus Bancroft and Sioned Rogers). The reason for using this quotation is that, as I noted in my original paper, 'Any new concept that affects attitudes, behaviours and social structure needs to be held up to social theory.'

Now, I understand that a lot of PR people would not want to spend a lot of time worrying about a member of sociology's 'big four' (the others being Marx, Weber and Durkheim). But if this profession is to find its legitimacy, all those pretenders who seek to explain what we do and how we do it and those who will be teaching a new cohort of undergraduates next month, need to be able to place PR into its socialogical context.

It's like teaching accountancy and not knowing about John Maynard Keynes. It's possible but lightweight and probably not worth the serious student's money.

Lets face it, every course in public relations needs to be taught by a person who can defend the legitimacy of PR. There is not a context that is more demanding for a profession that aims to change society and social relationships nor of greater significance than sociology.

The Relationship Value Model, as a form of public relations practice (and my explanation of the theory is not sufficiently well formed for a full blown examination and debate) does not shirk the issue.

As far as I am aware, there is no grounded theory of PR that has been exposed to investigation in sociology. Yet there is an army of practitioners who would say that the profession is about 'managing relationships' or is 'relation management'.

The inference that the profession should 'manage' relationships is a statement that this is a practice that would change society. Not only do I believe that we do, I recognise that we can be much more effective and powerful in this regard. I go as far as to suggest that it is public relations, and only public relations, that allows humans to change value and create wealth.

To achieve its optimum potential, PR cannot act in a vacuum, we have to be able to defend our work at every level which means that the question is not esoteric, it is fundamental to legitimate practice.

So back to Simmel. Simmel believed that society consists of an intricate web of multiple relations between individuals who are in constant interaction with one another. This is very close to the Relationship Value Model. So, can we see a sociological convergence between Simmel and the Model. His view espoused that the larger superindividual structures--the state, the clan, the family, the city, or the trade union--are only crystallizations of this interaction, even though they may attain autonomy and permanency and confront the individual as if they were alien powers. The major field of study for the student of society is, therefore, sociation, that is, the particular patterns and forms in which men associate and interact with one another.

It is here where the Model and Simmel appear to converge, and for this reason: in the Model the structure of organisation, being dependent on groups that closely interact with other groups each with, by varying degree, common tokens and values in common networks form social groups that we can recognise as nations or companies.

Simmel did not have the technologies we can call on to prove such relationships with an investigation of what he called "interactions among the atoms of society" but we do.

In addition, we have a live and living mode that we can use to aid our understanding. The Internet and Blogshere offers us insights into where people see value both in what they do and in what they say.

Perhaps here is where public relations can enter into its legitimacy as a profession that is grounded in social theory as well as many other disciplines.

A romantic moment and great public relations

This post takes up some of the comments that have been made so far in the journey I am taking to present an even stronger case for using the Relationship Value Model.

Starting with how the brain works I am going on a journey that will, I hope make sense of how and why, at its best, public relations works. It will cover many academic disciplines from neurophysiology to economics and will end up showing how public relations is a management practice that creates wealth – and always has done.

Neurologists and psychologists will hate me for the analogy I am about to make. Its a simplistic view of the brain and how it works.

In our brains we have Neuronal cells and they have special projections of neurons (called dendrites) that receive and send information, (encoded as patterns of electrical and chemical activity, within the brain). They receive and send signals from many other cells and then integrate these signals over time and pass this information on.

The network used for this communication (the axon) is like the strands of a spider's web. This network allows this information be communicated to many other neurons, thus beginning this process all over again in a new neuronal cell. Its a poor analogy for a wonderful and complex organ, but we might imagine the brain as a massive spiders web with Neuronal cells at each intersection of the web.

The point of contact between dendrites and axons (the cell and the web strands) is highly specialized and is known as a synapse.

Synapses are of great interest to neurobiologists since it is at this point that information can be modulated before it is passed on to the next cell. Synaptic modulation is thought to be the basis for several complex properties of the brain such as learning and memory.

(OK, its all a bit technical. I am doing my best - the romantic moment is on its way - promise)

Continuing with the analogy, the Neuronal cells can work on information that comes across the web. Sometimes, for the synapses, the web strands have different characteristics for the neuron (thicker, stronger, faster) and so they tell the cell to do something. It might be commands such as: 'please process this information with other information' or 'please process this information by paying special attention to some information from another strand in the web first – Oh... and can you do that really fast please'.

Imagine that this web stretched across the whole of the European continent. It would be massive, and it is, and it is, all scrunched up into our heads.

Some parts of this web have special skill sets. The bit of the web that could, for example come from Poland and might represent the prefrontal cortex the part of the brain scrunched up in our heads but controlling planning, working memory, organization, and mood modulation (This area of the brain is not mature until about 18 years of age ). Other parts of the brain do other things very well too but the whole works with all the other web strands and cells.

If you then imagine a stimulus arriving at the brain from sences, for example example a smell, taste, sound, sight or touch. The brain gets a signal from the nervous system and it rushes it to the web in the brain. Some synapses say to some cells 'this is something you should know about – process please.' And the cell does its processing and says 'yup this is definitely a like a smell' and the message is passed through the web where other cells confirm its a smell and after a lot of work, the cells all agree, this is the scent of a rose.

Wow! Suddenly a whole load of other synapses recognise this, get all physical about it and tug harder on the web and make the strands bigger, faster and stronger to tell the other cells that this is important information and they say: 'my Neuronal cell can tell you more'.

After a while, the brain finds from past stimuli that this not just a smell but is the scent and romantic emotion associated with roses and a loved partner. This is lots of cells from all over the brain working together. Some of them my even issue commands to the nervous system to do something – a kiss maybe.

Romantic notions, like all emotional responses are held by cells that have seriously strong web strands and chunky synapses and are very happy to jerk all the other cells around until they almost don't know what they are doing – you know the feeling?

Public relations is a practice that introduces stimuli to work with what people know and have stored in their brains. So by just passing the rose under the closed eyes of a loved one, all the sensations remind her of you.

A romantic moment and great public relations.

People's brains are wired to be receptive to good public relations.

Well, it's the first part of understanding how, in the Relationship Value Model, PR works.

Off topic thanks

This blog has been going for a very short time and yet so many people have made very kindly comments. My objective here is to explore the developments of a paper I presented to the CIPR Alan Rawel academic conference early in 2005 in which looked at the idea of relationships, organisation and relationship management as a public relations discipline.

This means that I will not usually comment on issues and information that drifts too far from the subject.

This is an exception because so many people have been so kind and helpful.

Some to their posts are here and I thank you all.

Doc Searl (one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto)

Tom Murphy

Bruce Marshall

Constantin Basturea

Elizabeth Albrycht

This week, I plan to look at some of the stuff behind 'the Model', ask impertinent questions about the teachers of PR both to practitioners and in universities and will become a little more controversial.

Evaluating Relationships

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations has taken an interest in PR Evaluation for a long time and its latest policy document and makes the point that measurement and evaluation are problematic in all areas of management. The CIPR document includes evaluation contribution to management, leadership and organisational performance (to business or organisational success, to better decision-making enabling the organisation to capitalise on opportunities or to avoid mistakes, and to the creation of value) and as a practice with a contribution to make to social and economic development.

It recommends the European Case Clearing House ,case collection accessible through www.caseplace.org maintained by the Aspen Institute in the US, and the resources available at the Institute for PR. The latter being a notable source for all prtactitioners.

The critical research methodologies proposed by CIPR are about creation of value and focus on financial value or measures of activity outcomes which, as we all know, are but a metaphors for real values and thus only partially helpful in the field of relationship management. When considering the principle value of organisations, which are the intangible assets and values (not my conclusin but that of Baruch Lev at the Stern School), we have to move beyond financial measures and look at a wide range of values. Here the CIPR does not offer a great deal of help nor do the references it suggests (even IfPR but it does get closer).

This means that there is a need for wider and deeper search into the literature to help the practitioner identify relevant measures. It is not a case of counting clips but much much more. In providing a proof for the Relationship Value Model, some methodologies have become available but a wider range of tried and tested methodologies are needed.

The Emotional Tug for Affective PR

In developing the Relationship Value Model, I used research into journalists' reporting of actors to identify key concepts in their articles using LSA. Some of these concepts were explicit and so are, according to the theory, 'tokens'. The explicit notions were nouns and verbs. But there were other concepts that were adjectives and adverbs. It occurred to me to look at these again to see if they were really expressions, identified by the journalists, of emotional values.

In most of research by psychologists, there tends to be a lot of post cognition rationalisation but research by Heath and Nairn claim that affective copy, that is copy with an emotional tug, is much more effective. This idea has been around for some time and is an extension of the 'Emotional Selling Proposition'. Some leaders in Brand thinking like Martin Linstrom and Wendy Gordon not to mention many interesting psychologists like Elizabeth Kensinger (pictured above) can rationalise this approach through neuropsycological reserach and a wide view of brand promotion (remembering that, brand promotion is absolutely dependant on relationships).

Given that advertising is very limited in the range of touchpoints it can deploy, and that is is inappropriate for much communication. This is a baton that should be taken up by PR practitioners. Master this idea and we master relationship management, wealth creation and, as a by-product, improve all the processes for every domian of PR practice.

A study of Elizabeth's work is rewarding and is a very significant finding for the practice of public relations as applied using the Relationship Value Model.

I have some way to go, but there is evidence that this is so.

As we know, emotional values have a much stronger effect than other forms of information. Perhaps, in planning our communication, we need to pay close attention to these emotional elements. Watch this space.

Why spend so much time worrying about relationships?

The initial thought is quite easy and seems to make a lot of sense.

It does need a bit more thought because many people and especially Stephen Brunning. John Ledingham have mapped out what we need to consider in developing the theme. There are a number of ways one can come to this subject and in my case it was via the company I set up in the field of PR evaluation.

The early research into some drivers of relationships identified specific themeswhich was published in the early 1990's. that interested people pointed towards some specifics that interested people but which did not show that the relationship extended much beyond the media. Other studies, however did offer important evidence on the effectiveness of editorial on behaviour

Since then many people have looked at relationships management such as T. Dean Thomlison and he looks at relationships with care. His work and his overview of the work of other researchers shows how the model of relationship management would work.

Then came the breakthrough showing that people hold tokens and values that can be identified and which can test the theory.

But this is just mechanics. In following through the model, we find that it is relationships that are the core drivers of organisations; it is relationships that change value and it is relationships that drive all the other forms of organisational management.

This has major implications for economic development, management of societies (and is thus important for government) and how we can view our society from pre-historic times to now.

We do discover that there is a process for managing relationships to change values which can be interpreted as being the nature and role of public relations management. Pretty important I think.

(pictured – Stonehenge, evidence of relationships to create tangible and intangible assets 4000 years ago and very close the where I live)

Porosity and Jean Charles de Menezes

Documents obtained by ITV News are alleged to reveal contradictions in evidence after the killing of an innocent Brazilian during the height of the bomb murders and subsequent attempts at additional bombings in London. According to ITV, a catalogue of police failures led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes (pictured left) who was innocently caught up in the police response.

The significant part of this story is that, to quote the UK Prime Minister,"the rules of the game are changing”.

The rules that I refer to go back much further and go deeper than his present worries over treason and sedition.

These rules are the rules of transparency, porosity and agency first identified six years ago by the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the Public Relations Consultant's Association. Their joint Internet Commission reportextensive literature on what needs to be done. pointed out that organisations would have to become or would be forced to be more transparent and, as a consequence it is appropriate to respond to the new rules of the game. There is

What the media calls leaks and I call porosity (because some of these events are not leaked, they are just made available in the public domain for anyone to pick up) have to change the way management (and this means PR management as well) operates and has changed the need for transparency and less spin.

Perhaps the Jo More lesson has not been learned. Internal actions are wide open for exposure and email leaks are well documented.

There are many other forms of Internet transparency and there are strategies that need to be implemented in an e-PR savy organisation.

The key issue here is that the rules of the game have changed and there is a need for a different form of governance and competent strategies.

The nature of organisation is different in an information rich age. In addition, this era is now mediated by many networks and we need to understand what the implications are.

PR is 'becoming a management function'

This claim was made by Professor James E Grunig (pictured).

No doubt most people in PR would be horrified to imagine that their work is a process. Each likes to imagine that they have an approach and creativity that is unique and more profoundly effective than any other in the field.

On the other hand most like the idea that PR is identified as a unique capability in the corporate management mix.

We can't have it both ways.

Professor James Grunig noticed thechange in the speech he gave in 2001. He said:

“I have observed public relations practice around the world as a scholarly researcher for over 35 years. In general, I believe five trends are occurring. First, public relations is becoming a profession with a scholarly body of knowledge. Second, public relations is becoming a management function rather than only a technical communication function. Third, public relations practitioners are becoming strategic counselors who are less preoccupied with publicity in the mass media than their predecessors. Fourth, public relations has moved from a profession practiced only by white males to a profession with a female majority and with practitioners of many racial and ethnic backgrounds. Finally, I believe that almost all public relations practice today is global rather than confined to the borders of only one company.”

Take accounting, human recourse management, production engineering or purchasing. Each of those disciplines is a discrete form of management and each has its own processes to aid the management of organisations. Some, like accounting and the law have huge institutional and legal frameworks the proscribe their activities. But all of these 'professions' are, in their own right, creative and specialist. In addition, most managers use some of the skill sets of these varied management practices in their daily life. Budget planning and management in the marketing department uses, among other skills: accounting, human resource management and purchasing management. Thus the skills of the Accountant are shared among other managers as is HR and purchasing.

PR is but another management discipline. Its process can be codified. It is one that, until now and despite the work of Grunig, has not been explicated.

One reason may be because there are so many forms of public relations and the big problem was identifying the underlying practice and common elements of the 40 or so recognisable forms of PR (domains of practice). In addition it has an extensive and broad value chain of practitioner/vendors all working in the same field.

Is it that PR is about reputation, communication or perhaps representing the outside world inside the organisation? Perhaps PR is the part of the company that is the ethics arbiter or provides the capability to foresee danger and 'surprises?

All of these things are true to a greater or lesser degree for some areas of practice and not others. A party planner may be horrified to believe that her work might be about advising the organisation on ethics. Each domain of practice has different priorities and forms of activity. This is true of other professions. Book keepers are not the same as auditors or cashiers – these are different skills in accounting. As for accounting so too for PR.

So what is it that underlies the practice of PR?

It is my thesis that the primary reason for organisations to use PR is to create, sustain, change and nurture relationships in the optimum interests of the organisation and thereby change its value.

In managing relationships we use a very wide range of skills and capabilities. We might use press relations, the web, parties, briefing events and so forth but all are aimed at management of relationships.

The management discipline “Managing Relationships”, like accounting is a distributed form of management. It is applied to greater or lesser effect by managers and employees, aided, supported and managed by the relationship management expert/s in the company.

But it is far too important to be added to the duties of a marketing director or chief executive. It is far too important not to be managed with good metrics, measures, quality controls and strategy as well and operational planning and execution.

It is the primary corporate process for creating wealth. It is a subject worth returning to.

Social Frames and Neuropsychology

There seems to be an inexplicable reason for PR to work when brand promotion and advertising does not. The shift to below the line is palpable. But there is new research that helps us understand what lies behind the success of effective PR.

The search takes one to the powerful work of Giep Franzen and Margot Bouwman (pictured) and their book Mental World of Brands (2002 WARC) and their interesting on-line interview with John Griffiths. I found this from following the thinking of Wendy Gordon in her chapter in Brand new brand thinking - edited by Merry Baskin and Mark Earls (Kogan Page, London 2002).

In less than 15 Year, there has been a sea change in in our understanding of how we think, feel and respond. Work from the research of people like Richard Kaplan and Robert Heath. Give us insights that have never been available until now.

Scanning technology and cognitive brain research experiments have enabled us to understand how the brain works as never before (very well described by Lucinda M. Wilson & Hadley Wilson Horch). And this understanding throws light onto how the accumulation of knowledge and emotional experiences combine to create effects at certain times and in certain situations.

These 'Social Frames' are those moments sought by PR practitioners which deliver the results that the client is looking for. Knowledge, of the client, it seems, is gained from and is moderated by a very wide range of experiences that are built up over time. In a process called synaptic modulation we gain knowledge through the five senses and build up a matrix into which a range of other influences can have an effect.

This knowledge and associated emotional triggers form the basis by which we deliver the client expectation.

The single 'brand' or 'three core messages' are just not enough on their own to have an effect. Indeed at that level, there is a lot of evidence to believe that such approaches are just blocked out.

Set in the wider context of relevant information of 'my newspaper' or 'my magazine' there is an emotional tug, which Guy Consterdine identified as a 'friend dropping in' which provides the powerful influence of editorial over advertising.

This principle applies to the many other domains of public relations practice well beyond the field of media relations.

The basic principle is relevant to all forms of PR. It is in the use and application of the relevant attention and memory process that are all important to the practitioner.

We know quite a lot about what works from a significant body of work in the field of education and much of this may well apply in the field of public relations.

It is quite reasonable to conclude that a broad based, rounded and durable approach to public relations is by far the most effective.

From research in the class room it would be reasonable to extrapolate a Neuropsychological PR approach to develop an even more effective public relations practice. We can reasonably suppose that using a broad range of domains of PR practice the most powerful campaigns would include activities that are most compatible with attention and memory such as:

• Designing collateral, activities and events where publics' ask critical questions and then develop their own approach to find the answers, such as communicating with third parties and opinion formers.

• Using experiences and activities that involve publics' understanding of various perspectives, points of view or a range of corporate/brand drivers, objectives and benefits.

• Using a wide range of approaches to impart information through a wider range of cognitive senses (sight -written word, pictures, video, sound – talking, recordings, music, smell, that moment when you smell newsprint, touch the feel of paper, hands-on product experience, the weight of the briefing, and taste – who said the 'PR lunch' was dead!) to link memory to specific understanding of the client and its products.

• Implementing strategies that encourage the publics to reflect on and reiterate what they learn about the organisation/brand to consolidate learning.

• Posing visual and word problems or puzzles to challenge thinking so that publics learn that there are many ways to understand the client. This type of thinking strengthens the neural connections and gives publics' more confidence in their ability to understand their relationship and experience in the client context.

• Involving publics in real-life experiences related to the client/brand and its objectives especially where there is an emotional element which is very powerful – emotional triggers are by far the most powerful and durable.

• Using peer collaboration or cooperative learning helps broaden a public's understanding of issues and promotes group empathy.

• Developing an integrated approach that encourages publics to face issues and concerns and weave them into the corporate or product competitive mission, sector or thematic.

There is a lot more research that is needed in this area and brand managers are well into these developments. Perhaps we can encourage PR researchers to look more closely at how these fabulous new development in Neuropsychology can aid the practice of PR.

Adding 'Relationship' assets to Intangible Value Reporting

In my post intellectual capital and intangible asset management. I linked to my 1993 paper which proposed relationships should be included among an organisations' intangible assets. The reason for this need is very well described in Accounting in the same year. The paper presented a case for balanced scorecard reporting, a concept first proposed by Kaplan and Norton in the 1990's.

Among most people who research into intangibles, the notion of relationships being at the core of organisational wealth and wealth creation is a complete novelty.

Part of the problem is that few people accept that most accounting is based on metaphors. Money, that familiar metaphor for wealth, is commonly used. Of course money is a token, its wealth is in the values we associate with it.

This means, that for a company, for example, to report on its wealth, it has to explicate what it means by the accounting metaphors it uses. The 'balance sheet' a metaphoric list of of asset tokens disguises what the directors and auditors mean when they describe some of the assets of a company. The list of assets is often difficult to interpret and is seldom complete.

What is less difficult is to examine are the relationships that are at play within the organisation and the tokens that are used to create, sustain and use for levering added wealth in the form of better relationships to optimise the exchange of tokens.

Some approaches to valuing relationships.

LSA

On the basis that 'if you can't measure it, you can't manage it' one of the most important aspects of accounting (not to mention management) is in measurement and evaluation of relationships.

The earliest approach that was used to prove the Relationship Value Model was the applications of LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis). It is based on the work of Deerwester, Dumais, Landauer, . Furnas, and Harshman and allows one to look at a a text corpus to identify 'concept words'. These concepts can be interpreted as tokens and can be given values (I subjectively used Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or values can be identified from a deeper use of LSA analysis.

This approach identifies the nature of the tokens and where they are common and material between parties identified in the corpus (texts).

There is some work that needs to be done in developing this approach but it works well.

Clarity

With Jon White I worked on a methodology which allowed organisations to identify relative significance of corporate relationships (called Clarity). It was developed long before the Relationship Value Model saw the light of day. However, it does offer an embryonic approach for identifying both actors and tokens using visualisation and focus groups. This approach has the advantage that it examines both 'internal' and 'external' relationships. I have been considering a development of this concept to offer a visualisation process for the identification of actors, tokens and perceived values. It would be a methodology available to identify both the extent and strength of relationships both for auditing purposes and for relationship management.

Social Frames

A further approach for identifying the nature of relationships and which would have helped Mie Augier and Morten Thanning Vendelù in their paper 'Networks, cognition and management of tacit knowledge' is the application of Social Frames.

Using the Social Frames approach we primary require is to be able to observe tokens held by actors.

In addition we need to be able to identify changes in value and that means we need to observe at different times in order to draw comparisons.

The process allows the researcher to ask what ellements exist and which prompt change among actors across four dimensions: Time plus Knowledge, Interactivity, and Environment. The methodology is described on this web page.

It would seem, even with a concept as young as the relationship Value model, that there are already a number of approaches that may be available for measuring and evaluating relationships.

There is a lot more research to be done in this area and, no doubt, there are some keen to help.

See: S. C. Deerwester, S. T. Dumais, T. K. Landauer, G. W. Furnas, and R. A. Harshman. Indexing by latent semantic analysis. in the Journal of the American Society of Information Science 41(6):391--407, 1990

See: M Augier and M Thanning Vendelù Networks, cognition and management of tacit knowledge Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 3 . Number 4 . 1999 . 252±261

PR practice and The Relationship Value Model

The Relationship Value Model is beginning to attract some interest by enquiring minds.

A couple of comments have been made by Frazer Likely, (left) one of those people who has considerable understanding of public relations in its widest sense. His comments were interesting and showed that I have not made the concept of the Relationship Value Model clear in respect to its relevance to one-to-one communication.

One-to-One Relationships

This area of relationship building is very significant.

Personal relationships are in a sense a 'social group'. Social groups can be just two people. Such relationships have specific material tokens (tokens, signs and symbols are explained very well by semioticians) that are unique to these two actors. The classic example is a marriage. The actors in a marriage have material tokens that are special and unique to the partners.

One then finds that such close knit 'social groups' extend into other groups such as family, local community and so forth.

In management terms, one-to-one relationships can only be created and sustained when there are those special material tokens between the actors. A false friend is one who does not hold material tokens dear and special.

In the empirical research, this multiple inter-linked process became quite clear. One of the interesting patterns of groups is seen in politics where politicians have many tokens that are material and form a social group one might call 'politicians'. One finds that there are, among these people, members of social groups one might call 'political parties'. In this grouping, their material tokens (tokens held by actors with common values within a network) are common to the principles of the political party. In such groups one can find additional groups that lean towards factions, policies, constituencies and so forth. Such groupings become quite clear using latent semantic analysis of media coverage for each of the political actors.

Stakeholder and interest groups

A further point raised examines the Model in relations to stakeholders and interest groups, particularly the Freeman view of stakeholders . My view is that the Stakeholder movement is based on an incomplete theoretical construct. Stakeholders, who have a 'stake' in an organisation are a groups of people who hold material tokens in common and among which are material tokens associated with the organisation. The extent of such token convergence will often determine whether an interest group (such as an NGO or pressure group) has the status of the Freemanish 'stakeholder'. My current position on stakeholders
suggests that the boundaries given to stakeholder groups is far too rigid and cannot support the mixture of interests of social groups who have an interest or 'stake' in an organisation.

A 'shareholder' (a type of actor), for example, will hold different material tokens to a 'shareholder-employee' (another form of actor). In turn, a 'shareholder-employee-local community member' will have three sets of material tokens and is not to be confused with the other types of share-owning actors.

Of Reputation building

Earlier this year I did some work on what people in the PR business call their work.

It describes how there are 'domains' of public relations practice all of which aim to change relationships between organisations and their publics.

To my mind each, in its way, is a vital element in the process of creating networks that secure the values of the organisation such that it may prosper.

The networks, often with many channels for communication, are not hierarchical nor semantic but tend to be interlinked.

One very important domains of practice is the area of reputation management and Alan Kelly who has a very interesting approach to competitive reputation advantage prompted me to note some aspects of this practice against the Relationship Value Model.

We are aware that multi-touch communication is much more effective than sheer noise (a description for much advertising) in order that the simple physiological/psychological process of getting the synaptic modifications and the message remembered.

This is why PR tends to be much more effective than advertising. At its best PR is multi network and multi channel.

In a competitive environment, the need is for reputation to be constructed in a wider society and not just in in the minds of the client or its narrow value chain. If the latter, then a competitor message/brand will have the opportunity to be more effective if it uses a broader multi-touch approach.

(see: Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston. Pitman Books)

Intellectual Capital and Intangible Asset Management.

When Patricia Hewitt MP was the British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, she called for corporations to have "successful relationships with a wide range of other stakeholders" because they "are important assets, crucial to stable, long-term performance and shareholder value.”

A new book by all the leading thinkers in the field Perspectives on Intellectual Capital: Multidisciplinary Insights Into Management, Measurement, and Reporting edited by Bernard Marr has contributors among the heaviest heavyweights in the field of intellectual capital management and intangible asset management. Contributors include: Guthrie, Mie Augier, David Teece, Göran Roos, Baruch Lev, Leandro Cañibano, Sudi Sudarsanam, Guhlam Sorwar, Jan Mouritsen, Per Nikolaj Bukh, Lisa Fernstöm, Ulf Johansson, Joe Peppard, Martin Cloutier, Richard Gold, Patrick Sullivan, Antonio Lerro, Giovanni Schiuma and Daniela Carlucci, Ahmed Bounfour and Leif Edvinsson, J.-C. Spender.

It is a splendid tour de force but the authors have still not come to terms with the idea that relationships are a valuable, if intangible asset. In a paper to the Bledcom conference in 2003 I argued that relationships should be included among the intangible assets that accrue to organisations. The nature and importance of relationships is missing from the book and I guess that is why The Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield has not been able to nail the big problems associated with measuring intangibles, managing intellectual property and understanding the nature of wealth creation. In my paper 'Towards Relationship Management'

I give an example of how relationship management turns intellectual capital into wealth.

Subsequent work on the Relationship Value Model looks at how one can identify organisations and their tangible and intangible assets in terms of their value both in trading terms and on the balance sheet. This applies to all organisations including governments, voluntary, NGO and, of course, commercial.

Big corporations and economies flourish which is a good thing but they also falter and decline which is not so good. At the same time we find that corporations and the financial markets are valued on the basis, crudely, of physical assets (which are by their nature no more than a metaphor for wealth) and 'goodwill' which are basically assets you can't kick.

The conclusions one might draw is that Patricia Hewitt was, probably by accident, close to putting her finger on the key issue in creating wealth.

Hewitt, P (2004) Foreword to the Draft Regulations on the Operating and Financial Review and Directors’ Report Department of Trade and Industry.

A $100 barrel solution

Reuters reported Oil at $64 a barrel this week which led me to think how the Relationship Value Model would be applied by governments contemplating oil shortage and production problems pushing prices towards $100.

In the first instance, landscaping the broad range of knowledge, opinion and projections by many groups is mandatory. This would need to be across many networks using an array of channels for communication.

Obviously there are the traditional news channels of the nature used in the early empirical research into the Model. There is the academic media which is slow to publish but peer reviewed and there are analyst reports, oil company reports and projections plus the work of the financial institutions.

The commentary among NGO's and unmediated commentary from sources such as Blogs, Usenet, Listserve as well as focus groups and the like may also be of help. The methodologies used will probably be automated content analysis because of its speed and consistency (I would lean towards semantic analysis where I have had considerable success in the past - see below for reference).

Using this approach, we will be able to identify the most significant concepts that are relevant to each communication channel.

Each such concept will be associated with kindred concepts and in combination one would be able to identify similarities and differences between each of the channels and the people who are presenting such views.

In addition, where concepts are presented as an explicit description (e.g. 'oil' or “global warming') we might consider such expressions as tokens and where there are concepts emerging that are semantically associated with such tokens that are implicit or metaphoric (e.g. 'shortage', 'disaster' etc.) we would have identifies values associated with such tokens.

In identifying where there are the same values and associated tokens in any channel, we can assume convergence is occurring (and the actors who have the most affinity) and, in addition, we would be able to identify where there is actual or latent convergence. In both cases, we would have identified the constituents related to the emerging topics and their concerns.

The advantage of this form of landscaping is that it would also provide a view of the 'language' of the people expressing concerns and interest which offers the communicator a lingua franca which would be attractive to and understood by these groupings.

From such information, policy making and the means by which policy can be explicated to the pubic can be made.

(Latent Semantic Analysis is developed from the work presented by S. C. Deerwester, S. T. Dumais, T. K. Landauer, G. W. Furnas, and R. A. Harshman. Indexing by latent semantic analysis. in the Journal of the American Society of Information Science 41(6):391--407, 1990

Falling foul of brand valuation

Earlier this month The Financial Reporting Review Panel published its first report on the results of its pro-active approach to company accounts for review. The report covers the fifteen-month period to 31 March 2005.

Not surprisingly it had problems with reporting on intangibles. John Flynn (left), Vice Chairman of CIM is making interesting comments about brands and thier values and the advent of the Relationship Value Model will give them, and some major corporations some additional ideas for the future.

This is quite important. Some Brands are said to be worth a lot of money. Tesco is said to be worth £4.8 billion as a brand.

Goodwill and intangible assets

The accounts of a number of companies failed to satisfy the disclosure requirements of FRS 10 ‘Goodwill and intangible assets’ which contains a rebuttable presumption that the useful economic life of purchased goodwill or an intangible asset is limited to a period of 20 years or less.

The standard requires the grounds for rebutting the presumption to be disclosed. In a number of enquiries, which included FTSE 100 companies, the Panel found that no such disclosures were provided. The reasons for the failure to include a reasoned explanation for the policy varied from case to case, but included the proposition that the durability of the assets, particularly brands, was well known and understood without further comment and that a number of industry leaders adopted a similar approach to the detailed reporting requirements.

If we start off with Brands we find that most brand valuation and most of the literature is misplaced because it does not factor in the value of relationships. If the organisation does not foster relationships between its brands and consumers, the brand must suffer. And, if this is not enough, the requirement to report on stakeholder relations (and a stakeholder in this context is any 'user' of the annual report) is also up for a major revision.

One recalls that it was not the author who suggested that relationships have value. It was the then Secretary of State, Patricia Hewitt MP and I did report on her assertion at the time.

There are a number of disenting views about brand valuation. John Flynne, Vice Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) says that ‘Brands come second: Brains not Brands are an organisation’s marketing asset

And, one might add, this is only true if the brains have relationships with other brains. The relationship Value Model would seem to be needed to make his latest hypotisis work.

Tinting the rose

In following through the writings of Bathes I spent some time with Wikipedia on Bathes.

The comment that caught my eye is this:

“In His 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," Barthes made a strong, polemical argument against the centrality of the figure of the author in literary study. (Michel Foucaults later article What is an Author? responded to Barthess polemic with an analysis of the social and literary "author-function.") In His 1971 essay "From Work to Text", Barthes takes this idea further, arguing that while a work (such as a book or a film) contains meanings that are unproblematically traceable back to the author (and therefore closed), a text (the same book or film) is actually something that remains open. The resulting concept of intertextuality implies that meaning is brought to a cultural object by its audience and does not intrinsically reside in the object. Barthes' book S/Z is often called the masterpiece of structuralist literary criticism. In S/Z, Barthes dissects the story "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac at length, proceeding sentence by sentence, assigning each word and sentence to one or several "codes" and levels of meaning within the story. Barthes' cultural criticism, published in volumes including Mythologies, is one of the key antecedents for later cultural studies, the application of techniques of literary and social criticism to mass culture.”

Tracing through the links, one comes to a conclusion that there is a superficial similarity between the Relationship Value Model and the work of Bathes. The concept that in a work the audience (well... one member of an audience) will take a cultural object and interpret it with the values brought to it by the audience (person) is close to my hypothesis. But is not exactly the same, if one accepts that a cultural object is the same as a 'token' in the Relationship Value Model. My hypothesis makes much of the network and its ability to offer the means by which tokens and their values (the means of interpretation) can be exposed to the parties using the network. It then goes on to suggest that values attaching to the token, when commonly held (say, between and author and an audience), will create impetus for cognitive consistency and thereby a relationship.

There is interesting background stuff about cognitive science here

Two minds and the nature of a rose

There is a considerable cross over between the work of the semioticians and relationship management theoreticians. Having used the rose as a metaphor to describe how we exchange tokens in networks as part of the process of building relationships I discover from Dr Reginald Watts (who offers us a concept “Towards a visual language – are we standing at the graveside of the written word?”) that Roland Barthes used it in a similar way.

The Relationship Value Model posits that the rose, as a token, has values that help us understand what is meant when it is gift (romantic, peace offering etc.) or represents an asset (to a florist a rose represents stock) or is a twig from a dying shrub depending on the Social Frame (network) in which it is presented.

Multiculturalism needs more research

The BBC's Today programme invited comment about what multiculturalism really means from Labour's John Denham. Denham wants more action to tackle the roots of alienation.

This debate extends to what we mean by 'our country', 'our nation' and the values we ascribe to such notions. The argument can go further. One might ask about 'our community', 'our neighbourhood' and so forth. Multiculturalism is a significant area of social research and a debate will rage because of the emerging critics. There is a need for a capability to be able to research into the drivers behind communities.

This really is what the Relationship Value Model is about. It is an approach to understanding social groups through the tokens and values held by people and held in common such that they describe the nature of the country, nation, community or neighbourhood..

The model is quite explicit in showing how it can be applied in the process of discovering what shapes our society by way of social groups, the tokens that are significant to such groups and the values that attach to such tokens and which are held in common by members.

A third of UK workers couldn't care less about their jobs

A third of British workers could not care less whether their company succeeds or fails as long as they get their pay cheque at the end of the month, according to research from IRS.

A widely reported study study of 15,000 UK workers found that while the overwhelming majority – 85 per cent – enjoyed their work, a significant minority feel unengaged and indifferent about their organisation's success.

Nick Tatchell, project director at ISR said: "It is encouraging that Britons enjoy their jobs but disappointing that such a high percentage of employees are indifferent to their organisations' success.

"The worrying thing for UK companies is that this indifference can lead to a reduction in profits," he added.

This would suggest that British companies are not very aware of what it is that constitutes a company. The Relationship Value Model is based on research that showed that employees have tokens in common with other employees which have common values. These are the 'material' tokens that describe the organisation.

The role of managers is to identify these tokens and to create cognitive consistency among employees. Otherwise as Nick Tatchell points out, they will loose money.