McKinsey finds the value of Public Relations

In a paper that is, to some, mundane, there are some interesting comments in the latest McKinsey paper published today.

The paper “When social issues become strategic - Executives ignore sociopolitical debates at their own peril” shows why the role of Public Relations is the core management discipline.

Written by Sheila M. J. Bonini, Lenny T. Mendonca, and Jeremy M. Oppenheim, the most significant part is this sentence:

“Increasingly, a company's sources of long-term value (for example, its brand, talent, and relationships) are affected by a rising tide of expectations among stakeholders about the social role of business.”

Can I extract from this that the Relationship Value Model has entered into the McKensey lexicon? Of course it has. It is inevitable and is the basis of my paper “Towards relationship management: Public relations at the core of organisational development”.

Personally, I would put relationships first because without relationships it is impossible to create a brand or secure talent. Relationships are at the heart of wealth creation. There is no other asset as valueable.

The other out-takes are familiar to anyone who has seen the influence of Social Media at close quarters.

The corporate social contract (now) 'embraces not just direct stakeholders (such as consumers, employees, regulators, and shareholders) but also, and increasingly, a broader set of stakeholders (such as the communities where companies operate, the media, academics, and the nonprofit sector).'

To my mind, this why the Clarity Concept is so important. It is also why stakeholder relationship management and mapping is so important.

The report notes that 'More challenging are the "frontier" issues that have not yet entered the formal or semiformal contracts but could, over time, become social expectations—something that business might not even realize. Take obesity. It had always been widely believed that the responsibility for avoiding it lay with individuals, who choose what they eat, not with the companies that make or sell fattening products. But the blame is shifting, much as the debate around tobacco shifted the responsibility from individuals to an industry perceived to be aggressively marketing addictive products.'

What is so important here is that it puts values are at the heart of relationships?

The report continues: Two forces are colliding: an emerging set of sociopolitical megatrends that are upending the lives of people, communities, and societies, as well as ever-more-powerful stakeholders wielding wide influence.

The case they cite three reasons for adopting a wholeheartedly strategic approach to the sociopolitical agenda.

First, these forces can alter an industry's landscape in fundamental ways.

Second, the immediate financial and longer-term reputational impact of social issues that backfire can be enormous.

Finally, new product or market strategies can emerge from changing social and political forces.

The conclusion is pretty predictable:

Sociopolitical trends will increasingly affect the strategic freedom of companies, which just can't ignore the rising tide of expectations resulting from these trends and the power and influence of the stakeholders who mobilize around them. For stakeholders, companies are, in many ways, already agents of social change and must become much more deliberate in understanding the way they affect society. Businesses that follow the approach we outline and proactively understand and engage with social issues will benefit most. They will be better able to shape the social contract and to identify ways of creating value from the opportunities and risks arising from sociopolitical issues.

All this sounds to me like basic Public Relations which suggests that Public Relations is a core management function.

Picture: Asger Jorn In the beginning was the image 1965

Public Relations is a core management function.

Changing values

The significance of values in the Relationship Value Model can be approached in many ways.
One is to examine the values that consumers bring together in online environments. From Joel Cere I see another example showing how the can be seen at work.

The Long Tail explained in video

What this attempts to show is that people in relationships identify common values. The more such values chime between the parties involved, the more potent is the relationship. Organisations are the nexus of relationships and the more values in common, the more powerful the organisation.

PRBusiness a missed opportunity

PR Business has fired its Editorial Team. It looks like curtains for the competitor to PRWeek in the UK.

Its web site still proclaims “The company publishes a lively and analytical weekly magazine, PR Business, and offers an associated website designed as a practical tool for all those working in PR.”

According to its correspondent Antony Mayfield, the former editor of PR Business, Eirwen Oxley Green, along with the rest of the editorial team at PR Business have been made redundant following the magazine's decision to go monthly. The conference it was sponsoring London PR Business Week, co sponsored by The International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) now looks a bit thin.

Geoff Lace, the publisher, has been around the industry for a long time. He set up in PR Week in 1984 when he was Marketing's executive editor and it was bought by Haymarket in 1988 .

He has missed an opportunity for want of New Media (or old fashioned Web 1.0) experience and understanding. By example, we still find the PRBusiness web site up and running with no mention of these recent changes.

This is not the only Online issue. Ex-Editor Eirwen Oxley-Green said that she “agreed with everyone's comments about the website: there were all sorts of grand discussions and promises made at the start, then everything stalled. I repeatedly asked our publisher to sort it out, to no avail.”

This is ironic after Geoff's comments that: “Emerging markets will offer the greatest and most exciting opportunities for PR operators over the next few years." Of all the emerging markets for PR, Social Media is the most significant for all practitioners. Lets take Estonia as an example. It is wired. It is the home of Skpe and would find PR 1.0 out of date.

To follow this idea through....

The combination of a publication built round a wiki ( without the troubles of the Ragan communications site) with a number of blogs, podcasts, vlogs plus contributions through YouTube video, with del.icio.us bookmarks Flickr, photo records and presence in a virtual community like Second Life was ready and waiting and a number of us would have been happy to help. We would have ensured that all stories and comments were tagged and had RSS feeds. The print version would have been all the richer. With the combined authority of its contributors and constituency, subject specific syndication of its content would have been sought after and transported across the world – this is an era of global communication after all.

Such an approach would have given PR Business, its journalists and contributors huge Google Juice (global online presence) and advertising opportunities and would have made the paper version a sought after commentary on the interactive contributions of staff, contributors and practitioners.

The opportunity to be associated with New Media would have been an outstanding USP. There would have been wonderful initiatives for example being a platform for exploring new communications opportunities such as the application of cellular text, voice and video; Virtual conferencing; the NewMediaRelease (http://groups.google.com/group/newmediarelease ); XPRL, and many other areas of necessary PR development. It would have been quite exciting.

That is not to say such a publications would eschew traditional practice. Far from it. It had the opportunity to expose such practice in its proper setting as part of the broad acres of communication and media relations beyond print, radio and television. It had the opportunity to explore the on-line effects of offline practice and the converse effects as well.

PRW, having gone behind its firewall and withdrawn its distribution to CIPR members (and then re-instated after pressure from PRBusiness – but selectively as I have not yet received my copy yet) has shown that its reality remains command, control, niche and elite, a platform for advertisers to scream at each other (behind firewalls and subscription only distribution, of course). It will take a long time for it to gain trust and reputation for transparency or participation among the 'got it' practitioners.

One day, a publisher will come along and I hope in the PR sector, with enough vision to provide a vehicle with vision.

Geoff?

PRbusiness
PR Week
social media

Has the Ragan Communications Wiki been hacked?

I have been looking at Ragan's new Wiki.

It came as a surprise to find that its 'Community Portal' is loaded with 'adult' content.

According to the site, this wiki is: 'Launched in conjunction with our 10th Annual Strategic Public Relations Conference, PR Rehab is a place for the PR community to have a frank conversation about what ails PR'.

This site says 'there are many wonderful things happening in the world of public relations. But there are also areas that need work, a bit of rehabilitation. And we’d like your help in defining those areas and, together, trying to fix them.'

Yup!

Nice idea but the crisis communication post will need a bit of an update.

PR Rehab
Ragan communications
public relations

Virtual environments for communication - is this a PR function?

One of the core disciplines in public relations practice is an ability to communicate.

This means that a number of capabilities are really requires. The spoken word, the written word and an knowledge of visual communication is essential.

In an era when SMS is more important than television and instant messaging has deeper reach that newspapers, this means that effective communication skills have to branch out into mobile and Internet communication.

I have discussed the range of communications channels before but have not dealt with forms of communication that can be described as virtual environments in any great depth and want to put this right in this post.

Betchtel, the UK Government's Department of Transport, Microsoft, BP, Royal Bank of Scotland, the auctions house Christies and my grand-nephew are companies that have one form of communication in common. They all use virtual environments for communication and yet none use Second Life. I noted last week, there are more forms of virtual environments than Second Life. They are in commercial use and many companies depend on them.

A very quick Google search shows how project management environments now are modeled against time, costs and available resources and 'What-If Modeling'” These facilities too are virtual environments.

Through tasks, documents, issues, calendars, threaded discussions, news postings, polls and dynamic applications, a wide range of interactive tools are commonly made available in workplace communities.

My 10 year old great-nephew was here today. He and his school use Digital Brain. It is a closed virtual environment and class environment. They can link to other schools. Within this environment they have capabilities for doing most otheirer school work on-line and have can maintain their school relationships with discussion, IM, email video conferencing etc. He has his own photos online, a biographical note and types like a demon. This made me think about some other similar educations communities such as WebCT and Blackboard.

Let us not forget the other close cousin. From Joel Cere we learn 'More than 100 million people worldwide log on every month to play interactive computer games (source: NYT, December 2005)'. Here again we see virtual communities at work. Some interesting stats are here.

In other words, virtual communities not dissimilar to Second Life, are already in daily use in business education and leisure.

Most, if not all of them, are audience specific but they are very powerful and used throughout Industry and commerce.

These capabilities are interactive communications channels. Most enterprises that use such facilities have a significant investment tied up in these channels for communication.

The question one asks is: among its range of capabilities and practices, are public relations practitioners communication experts? If they are, should they have an understanding of the range of virtual communities that may exist in their organisations and should they have a capability to be involved?

Furthermore, for practitioners in-house one can ask who are these communications channels are available to, are they enterprise specific or do they involve external constituents (consultants, vendors, contractors) are they open to porosity and Internet Agency in a Public Relations context and can they be used for other stakeholders and constituents. Additionally, it is clear that an assessment of transparency issues is needed.

Picture: Franz Fischnaller

virtual environments for communication

One in 15 UK newspaper readers has a blog?

This news, which comes to me via Neville Hobson, about the extent of blogging in the UK deserves meme status in the UK public relations industry.

I quote the Guardian:

'One in four British internet users keeps a blog and more than half of that number share their online musings with the public, according to a report released today.

The research suggests that, with 27 million internet users across the UK, the country now holds nearly 7 million bloggers - equivalent to nearly one in nine of the population.'

This is exciting news. It confirms a valuable channel for communication has become mainstream for the Public Relations Industry.

The article notes Tim Worstall, whose blog at timworstall.typepad.com attracts around 3,000 clicks a day, questioned whether the number of active bloggers was really as high as the report suggested.

"A good 70% of blogs are things where there's one or two posts and then the writer loses interest," he said.

What is key here is not that the blogs have only three posts but that more people are involved in Social Media.

The most heavily read print media in the UK is the local newspaper. According to the Newspaper Society:

83.6% of all British adults (40 million people) read a regional newspaper, compared with 69.6% who read a national newspaper. Regional press has a high solus readership; 33.3% of those who read a regional newspaper do not read a national daily.

Allowing for the age issue (some bloggers are not adult) it would not be unreasonable to imagine that ten percent of local Newspaper readers have experience of social media to the extent that they have participated.

If the numbers are to be believed, of national newspaper readers the ratio is nearly 1:15.

With careful monitoring and evaluation, a PR campaign can identify its target constituents very closely and can achieve considerable participation and awareness with this new media - does this mean we get higher ROI?

To get an even more rounded view of Social Media, it is worth looking at the Times report about Kenneth Lay, the disgraced Enron chief who died suddenly this month. Wikipedia is so fast that it also tends to be sloppy, partial and inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. however, argue that the death of Lay shows the resilience of the system. True, there were initial inaccuracies, but these were edited out over time. The system worked precisely as intended. It is the kind of capability that allows Public Relations practitioners to get a group of people to contribute to building a good brief for their campaigns.

To get the skills to be part of this revolution talk to Ralph Tench. He has a plan.

Picture: Cox and Fortum

Commercial application of New Media

The ability to create virtual environments as Auction House Christies is doing or to offer real time video footage and the UK Highways Agency is attempting gives us a peek into the future of communication.

Lets go beyond RSS, SEO, blogging and wiki's and Second Life and look at some other initiatives.

These give us insights into what we can achieve for clients. These are examples of public relations tools that are both available now and are being used commercially.

It does not require creative genius to imagine adaptation of these examples into everyday PR practice.

The Annual Report, product launch, celebrity event, product application story and many more public relations techniques can all use these kinds of communications tools.

In the UK, if you want to find out more about new media courses for practitioners, try Dr Ralph Tench at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is working on how you can discover more.

Picture: From Christies demo of an online auction

Get it deficiency

There are some organisations which are almost getting it and others where new forms of communication are regarded with ambivalence.

Whereas the Chief Constable of North Wales Police has a blog (well really a newsletter), that is a diary area on his site without an RSS feed or the means for comment (but does include the W3C Accessibility rules) , others see this medium as being “first jottings and half thought through” but uses the medium to make a point.

What we see in both these stories is that there is a 'Get it deficiency'. Social Media is just that, it is the means by which people choose to engage in conversations. It is not a megaphone (North Wales Police) or an optional engagement with stakeholders (CIPR).

What we are seeing in both these cases is an absence of corporate strategic thinking.

We are now beyond the experimental stage. Social Media is now a core part of communication. What we now need is professionals who can look across all the social media and apply the most relevant channels to achieve convergence between organisations and their communities.

Words - Wars

Christopher Allen, Founder, Alacrity Ventures examines one of the issues we face with social media. In particular he examines the nature of text in online communications and how it can escalate into torrid flames. He says

“Since text is lacking tonal and visual context, we have a tendency to over-interpret any emotional content that does exist (link to paper). In fact, we may have no better than a random chance of correctly interpreting the emotional tone of ironic vs sincere text in a message (link to Epley/Kruger paper).

“In addition, we tend to respond to someone's emotional state by expressions of similar intensity (this phenomenon is known as Emotional Contagion). And the higher the level of intensity of our emotions, the less our ability to be empathetic (link to paper).

“These tendencies lead into a vicious feedback cycle.

• One person starts with a very trivial or subtle emotional context, say irony.

• This is interpreted at a higher level of emotions, such as sarcasm.

• A reply is made at a similar level of emotion, for example being sarcastic.

• This, in turn, is interpreted at an even higher level of emotion, maybe a mild insult.

• In turn this is replied to at a similarly intense level.

• A flame is born!”

When one translates this into the 'Relationship Value Model' and subsequent thought on the subject, it becomes clear that the the values inherent in relationships are extensive and there is a limitation using just text. A picture being worth a thousand words adds more values to a person or organisation and other values help explicate the token. Were that pictures (including icons like smileys) could resolve the multi layered values that we need to say something.

I could get quite upset at the idea that a brand or company should be reduced to a single word because for a single word to work so many other values have to be in place. It is the role of Public Relations to offer the context by which brand values can be apreciated and this is a tall order. It is not achieved in a moment and it has to relate to context.

What we are seeing is a big divide between traditional brand management and a culture of community building. The brand manager wants a simple word or phrase to sum up the world and everything - 'Go _ _ _ Ogle' - but it is the conversations, and interactions that translates the word into what we can appreciate, the values we associated with Google.

One understands flaming. It is the ultimate in relationship failure and is how wars begin.
No more anger... just cold reason. No poetry? How dull.

Just because the medium has many communications deficencies ( and we have to do all we can to add the extra values to make the message clear) does not mean that social media has to exclude passion.

What this really tels us is that we have to be careful and empathetic. But we knew that already and can listen to this part of the lecture now.

Picture: Empathy (Oil on Canvass)

A Thief is a Thief

There is an inevitability about Neville Hobson's actions to prevent his work being plagiarised. Internet Agency is still largely a human activity. Of course, most people in the PR profession (those who belong to the Association like PRSA, CIPR and the majority of other such organisations worldwide) are forbidden from using such practices.

Regardless of the fact that anyone would want to be thought to have such a little brain that they need to copy others work the there is a question of reputation and trust to be considered. Who is going to trust someone who blatantly and in public steals. A thief is a thief whether its Neville's IP or an Enron excecutive

Picture: Kenneth Lay

God is Disintermediating

The cartoon comes from B L Ochman's blog. He says: “The cartoon from the gapingvoid widget that you're looking at is a sea change in online marketing and advertising.”

I juxtapose it with my comment Marketing RIP and what do we get?

I still hold out hope for branding and (some) advertising. The rest is disintermediated.

Does this mean God is disintermediating?

PR Newswire is auctioning off some national news releases...

The old model is no longer what it seemed.

I am grateful to Adventures in Business for alerting me to this news. This is another case of disintermediation. PR Newswire has disconnected the relationship between the product and its price. Through eBay, It has invited people to look at the value of its service instead.

The consequence of its action is that the 'Marketing' inside PR Newsire is now dependant on relationships and not the value chain.

The extension of this idea is that PR consultancies will offer ideas and programmes to clients who can bid a price for the work in advance.

Equally, one can imagine a news agency bidding to distribute stories generated by PR departments which would mean that news stories would really have to be newsy but would also mean that there would be advanced notice of a story that everyone will be waiting for.

Auctioning off your service may have been and interesting idea as a promotion but now the genie is out of the bottle. News release distribution costs are no longer what they seem - they are negotiable.

Picture: Fire is Feminine

Press Release - You are on the wane

Starting in August, Logitech will include a link within its Webcam software that will enable people to record video directly to the Internet, according to sources close to the deal.

One of my favourite web sites is run by The Royal Marsden Hospital. It is an online cartoon for children facing Chemotherapy. Then there is the peek into the future and Epic. Not many in PR have taken virtual communities very far and few will have seen how good they are.

For professor Edward Castronova in his Business Week interview, games are quite real. There are other academics even better known like Howard Reingold, with such ideas.

But I have some more prosaic examples.

Imagine creating an auction house online. There is a fantasy for you. Could you imagine bringing together hundreds of academics into a modern Library of Alexandria with whole nations visiting this temple every day. What about a classroom only inches across? Were these ideas born out of a PR communicators brain?

There have been some attempts by PR people such a putting an email address in a news story.

Already there are a host of environments waiting for an imaginative PR person to use.

But, Convergent applications have a long way to go. There have been some attempts such a putting an email address in a news story. So why not a 100 contractors in Second Life on television as part of an integrated Olympic PR programme?

Who has yet to put podcasts on Internet kiosks at the railway station. Have passers by been invited to blog in Oxford Street about their brand experience with comments projected onto an electronic billboard above Eros? Nice thought.

Highly targeted, engaged publics are at the heart of what I am saying. A massive population of people who want to spread your messages for 'free'.

As soon as we break the bonds of the last 40 years, there is so much that can be done. Imagine asking the question, instead of a press release what will engage our publics?

A cold winter has set in and the press release wanes.

Picture: Luxorian

Spam – Yes Minister

Interesting snippet from Silicon.com. The UK Government is to revise anti-spam law. Why bother. Email has all but been killed off by spam anyway. They have been blind to its abuse for so long. It now has a finite life because we can't spend time junking these messages, looking for false positives and pratting around with a form of communication that, in its heyday, was just great.

RIP email, at least the Government likes you enough to care.

Picture: Thomas Thü Hürlimann

This is straight forward promotion.

I don't know about you but some web pages seem to go on forever and some news articles seem to be very long too (there are even long blog posts!). So Girish and I created a web page summariser. Simple really. You can have it too from here.

Did you ever want a quick email each day about client news or just a subject you want to follow in the press. So do I. Well, we invented one of those. It's a sort of press clipping service and, at present, its free. You can get this service from here. You get a daily email of summaries of news stories and you get a service that allows you to smarten up the automated output and post them by email to friends and colleagues.

Would you like a blog version? We are thinking about it. The idea is that you have a small programme that lets you add RSS feeds, categorise the content by keyword into subjects and get any of the following: an email each day, a web page you can check or an xml out put so you can put the summarised blog comments on a your web page (with links – think of the Google Juice you get for that) or on password protected pages. Its a sort of daily blog newspaper.

If you want to trial it, let me know and when we have built it you could be one of the first to try it out.

Dear Lionel....

Astroturfing is a legitimate gamble for all sorts of organisations. It is a process designed to create a populist movement by using a contrived appearance of of popular support.

Throughout history it has been one of the methods for creating political momentum and it has a history of disaster.

What happens is that when the population finds that it has been mislead, duped or drawn into something they later regret, they are very angry.

Joseph Goebbels used astroturfing (in a 20^the Century form) to create the impression of widespread support for the Nazi party in Germany with considerable success.

I guess that companies and organisations (even political candidates) and campaigners don't really like to be associated with the Nazis when they use this silly, and potentially dangerous approach at persuasion. Bet your life, I will make the comparison.

I hope that Richard Bailey's points are taken to heart by the CIPR. In fact one would expect a comment from the Chairman of the Ethics Committee to make a clear statement sometime in the future.

It may be that the CIPR's Chief Officer is dismissive of social media but the President whose travelogue is of the genre might wish to assist the President Elect representations to the Hansard Society project looking at the role of lobbying organisations in the British political system to have Atroturfing on the agenda.

As for the rest of us, there is a simple rule. Do PR and if you are a member of any of the professional association in the UK, expect to be chucked out on you ear if you use Astroturfing because a lot of us are watching, for the sake of the profession.

Just for fun

This has nothing to do with PR.

We have a litter of puppies and they are learning new tricks all the time.
This little one is looking forward to the next World Cup.

Enjoy

To Plan or How to Plan

There is a dichotomy in management which we face in planning and management of Internet mediated Public Relations.

In planning and management of Internet mediated Public Relations (99% of all practice in Internet mediated in some form) we need to understand these problems in order that a well formed Corporate PR strategy can be developed.

From the ideas such as Drucker's 'Management by Objectives' to CIPR definition of Public Relations as the “ planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics” there is an assumption that planning as a core management discipline will be SMART, that is, Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, and Time-Specific. We start at the beginning and work through to the conclusion, evaluate our effort and file away as 'finished'.

On the other hand there is a view of “radical transparency” which is a management method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly. All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision making process itself, and all final decisions, are made publicly and remain publicly archived.

"“The case for corporate transparency is compelling. With perfect corporate transparency, everyone within a company has access to relevant information. Management accurately represents the drivers of the business. Annual budgeting is replaced with a system of continuous planning supported by a collaborative process. Every manager knows exactly how his or her decisions affect other aspects of the company. There is visibility into how external changes impact internal matters. And the organization is able to predict precisely how the market will respond to various activities."”

Corporate Transparency makes organisations efficient. It means that information that can be trusted and available to people who need it when they need it in an environment where they can act on it will be more efficient that one where gate keepers restrict access.

Corporate Transparency and Internet Transparency are different.

The Internet facilitates transparency, it is one of its great features. We use it a lot. Organisations are transparent online in many ways.

In every sector, public, private, not for profit, organisations make their supply chain available to vendors to take advantage of enhanced production scheduling and just in time deliveries. The employment of the best practitioners in the world in design and development may mean using an expert half way round the world requiring open and transparent interaction. To produce goods and services we use contractors and expose our needs and aspirations to them on line. Then there is process information, interaction with eGovernement Internet enabled regulators and public utilities, There are recruitment and employment policies, markets, product distribution, pricing, and customer care all to be made clear, all using multiple channels for communication and in a mashup of digital data, plain conversations and all manner of other digital techniques in-between.

Much of this information is open and in the public domain, some is password protected or encrypted.

In addition policies are made public, it saves having to deal with every enquire with paper, post and people.

Internet Transparency also means our competitors, and a vast array of stakeholders can find out a great deal. In some cases, being open means that critics have ready answers and in social media, criticism is often answered by ordinary people who point to corporate content that makes policies and practice clear. In addition, all information is (almost) eventually available to everyone online.

This means that Internet transparency has the power to be disruptive.

Internet transparency interrupts the plan.

This changes the nature of Public Relations planning.

It means that monitoring and evaluation have to be a continuous part of all activities at every stage of the plan and the plan itself needs to be constructed to allow for change as an organic part of the process.

There has to be a response mechanism in the PR plan than will allow fundamental change even to the extent of changing the aims of the organisation.

The extent to which this is evident can be seen by example. BP, stopped being a company that provided oil based fuel and became a company that is about finding, producing and marketing the natural energy resources on which the modern world depends. It embraced competing technologies and diversified into renewables. It tells its shareholder that returns will not be maximised but optimised to 'underpin growth by a focus on performance, particularly on returns, investing at a rate appropriate for long term growth'.

Rick Wagoner CEO of General Motors does not head up an auto maker which ' remains committed to leading not only from a business standpoint, but economically, socially and environmentally as well'.

These are titanic shifts for major corporations in less than a decade.

The shift did not come because of government pressures but because their operations could be juxtaposed with economic, environmental, social and political counterpoint on a global scale and affecting all their key stakeholder groups.

Internet disruption is gaining pace. Evidence of how it changes organisations ranges from the IMF to retailing.

In the relationship management model (and by that I do not mean relationship management as interpreted by Steve Mackey at Deakin University, Australia. My interpretation is more fundamental) there is a dynamic in which there is constant shifting appreciationiation of values mutually held between the organisation (a nexus of relationships) and its constituency.

It makes planning and management very dynamic.

Picture: Gilera Nexus 500

Colin Farrinton's comment

I thought that, because of the diminutive storm in the tiny teacup about Colin Farrinton's comment in Profile Extra (that most of us read online), I should reproduce his comments today here. He said:

“As always writing personally, I was amazed by some of the comments received on my ‘Profile’ piece – although they do show the power of ‘hard copy’!

Blogging is simply a form of vanity publishing. No wonder most content is instantly forgettable. And does that which survive really have a beneficial impact on society, on political discourse, giving a voice to those who genuinely can’t be heard as some proponents claim? Bearing in mind the use made by French middle-class students to protect their subsidies and the anti-John Kerry campaigns last year this seems very idealistic and blinkered to me.

Even the commercial impacts seem to be overstated - I’ve seen the same cases quoted over and over again.

That is not to say of course that public relations people shouldn’t be aware and be trained on the impact of blogging. And it’s a great medium in the right hands for grabbing attention as Tony is doing. But it’s time to take a realistic view (and keep a sense of proportion) on the power of this communication medium.”

Thank you Colin. Insightful as always.

I thought that one might have a closer look. Just for fun!

Source

Point by point analysis (just click the links):

Some comments from The Economist view of blogs and corporate reputation

Some vanity publishing at The Times

Instantly forgetable content.

Social benefits

Political discourse has many sides.

One Marines view

John Kerry's got Blog Juice at last

The commercial case for a web site (where would you invest?)

A realistic view?

Picture: Colin Farrington

Concepts: impact / Blogging / Colin / Extra / Farrinton's

Colin Farrington
Chartered Institute of Public Relations

Emily, the Digital Native

Emily is a “digital native”, one who has never known a world without instant communication. Her mother, Christine is a “digital immigrant”, still coming to terms with a culture ruled by the ring of a mobile and e-mails, reports The Times. Though 55-year-old Christine happily shops online and e-mails friends, at heart she’s still in the old world. “Children today are multitasking left, right and centre — downloading tracks, uploading photos, sending e-mails. It’s nonstop,” she says. “They find sitting down and reading, even watching TV, too slow and boring. I can’t imagine many kids indulging in one particular hobby, such as birdwatching, like they used to.”

As The Times points out, last month, Lord Saatchi, virtually declared the death of traditional advertising — because digital technology is changing the way people absorb information. The digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it has received growing up, he claims (The reason TV advertising is unsuccessful with digital natives is because they are in what he refers to as a state of 'constant partial attention'). This has implications for PR practice. How we present information online and off-line to attract attention in a multi-tasking world is a big deal.

The media reports parents still fear that children who spend hours using computers will end up 'nerdy zombies with the attention span of a gnat'. There is, apparently, a view that 'cyberspace is full of junk and computer games are packed with mindless violence'. I suggest such writers go to their local school to find out the truth. Nintendo requires endless concentration.

To evangelists of the digital age such as Marc Prensky, picked out for the Times article presumably because he says on his web site that he is an “internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning” (sounds like Marketing speak to me) an American consultant and author, modern interactive computer games are “deep, complex experiences” that challenge the intellect far more than, say, passively watching Big Brother. Socialising through chat rooms and online forums, he argues, both requires its own etiquette and overcomes old prejudices: it doesn’t matter nearly so much what you look like. But in 'Alone Together' the extent of some social interactions in online games is questioned and there are limits as to how far you can extend the argument. The author Steven Johnson pursues the argument in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You that online interaction has educational benefits. Far from popular culture dumbing down, he says, much of it has become more challenging; he points to the intricate, multi-layered plots of modern TV series such as The Sopranos or 24, compared with the linear plots of programmes 30 years ago.

Does this mean that the Public Relations practitioner who having once gained the interest (not the same as attention) of constituents can find reward in the complex? My view is yes because it enhances the opportunities for common values to be sought and found.

“A few people have demonstrated that computer games can improve some aspects of attention, such as the ability to quickly count objects at the periphery of your vision,” says computational neuroscientist Dr Anders Sandberg, who is researching cognitive enhancement at Oxford. “Is this a different way of thinking? Well, a little bit. Being instantly able to itemise objects is probably a useful skill in this world. Some evidence suggests people are becoming more visual than verbal.”

For more research into human/computer interactions, there is a Special Interest Group that is worth following.

The sheer mass of visual, auditory and verbal information is forcing digital natives to make choices that those who grew up with only books and television did not. At one time, there was a view that this would be the limiting factor for the Internet but two things have changed in the last five years. The first is that people have learned to multi-task and we have learned to make snap decisions. Implications for the practitioner are that the key information has to be present on the landing page. This does not, as Lord Saatchi proclaims, mean that attention is only archived by reducing everything to a single word. People can do much more that absorb a single word in a millisecond. But it does mean that Dr Reginald Watts is right to follow semiotics as an important future activity for PR practitioners.

“Younger people sift more and filter more,” says Helen Petrie, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of York. “We have more information to deal with, and we pay less attention to particular bits of information, so it may appear attention spans are shorter.” She also notes that the brevity of text messaging is spreading to e-mails and other communication, rewriting English with simpler spelling in the process. Though this may appear rude to traditionalists, it’s merely sensible to digital natives. “But I don’t think attention spans are diminishing per se,” Petrie says. “If we find something that is engaging, then our attention span is just as long as it has always been. I bet you during the England-Sweden World Cup game people’s attention span wasn’t any shorter than it might have been before.” We can take from this that if Public Relations activity engages constituents, they will pay attention.

The question, then, is how do digital natives learn to discriminate, and what determines the things that interest them? Parents who hope skills and boundaries are instilled at school may be fighting a losing battle. According to Prensky, the reason why some children today do not pay attention in school is that they find traditional teaching methods dull compared with their digital experiences. Instead, parameters are increasingly set by “wiki-thinking”, peer groups exchanging ideas through digital networks. Just as the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has been built from the collective knowledge of thousands of contributors, so digital natives draw on the experience and advice of online communities to shape their interests and boundaries. A telling symptom is blogging. Where once schoolchildren and students confided only in their diaries, now they write blogs or entries on Bebo or MySpace.com — where anyone can see and comment on them. While I have some doubts about the collective wisdom of the collective commons. It is a dangerous place to be. There is merit in having a digital footprint and response to the 'Digital Footprint'.

“My parents are as au fait with the internet as I am.” says Nathan Midgley of the TheFishCanSing research consultancy, “but what they are not used to doing is upgrading. “People of my generation are much more used to the turnover of gadgetry. Other generations are left out of the loop in the way it is speeding up.”

Will this lead to greater intelligence? Some might argue that is already happening. In what known as the Flynn Effect, underlying IQ scores have been rising for years.

For PR practice this may mean that we have to adjust our thinking, relationship management and even our understanding of brand values every decade or so because the population is getting really clever.

Picture: Geek art

Concepts: digital / people / attention /

A Week in Cyberspace.

The 2005 tsunami appeal prompted the biggest outpouring of public generosity ever witnessed in the UK. Niall Cook, "More than ever before people want to engage with the world around them and charities now have the technology available to make those connections." From the Guardian.

The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office is out of touch with the reality ( The Register) of the net

Prescott and blogs from the Guardian. “If John Prescott really barely knew what a blog was it seems odd he put his name to a "Prescott Express" battlebus blog during the 2005 general election.

So, he was a blogger during the election, and now isn't sure what a blog is and he is about to be put in charge of the nation while tony Blair holidays in Italy.

Lily Allen, daughter of comedian Keith Allen, has topped the UK singles chart with her summery hit, Smile, says I like Music. Shakira, who also scored her first UK number one single last week with Hips Don't Lie was knocked off the top spot by Lily, after Lily's song entered the chart last week at number 13, but on download sales only. This week 21 year old Lily who's internet fan base has helped spread the word about her talent, celebrated news that her glorious little song reaching number one on stage at T in the Park. It's an exciting time for Lily as her debut alubm, Alright, Still follows shortly on July 17th. For one with such tiny feet her digital footprint is leaving a golden trail in the sand

Roy Greenslade in the Guardian is trying to show why newspapers are doomed.

“I'm simply trying to show my colleagues in print - especially those who revel in regarding themelves as inky dinosaurs - that they cannot hope to compete with the speed and efficiency of the net in communicating facts AND opinions. The idea that newspapers will survive because they're better at providing comment and analysis is nonsense. Nor do we need papers to set the agenda.”

Whither Press Releases

I think that all PR practitioners should follow the discussion about the future of press releases.

It would not surprise me the hear some practitioners wonder what I am talking about.

But the press release has changes a lot in the last five years. It has morphed from the typewriter and duplicator to the PC and email. It is now a web post and PDF. In less than ten years the change has been significant and it will continue to morph and change.

There is a considerable issue here. Let us suppose a press release is issued to a web site. It will be picked up by a search engine in due course. If it is sent to an online distribution service, it will be picked up by some people and search engines faster. Its circulation will be immediate and by the time the presses role it will be long in the tooth.

So, what is the purpose of a press release?

A press release has a role where the content is/can be reproduced in a different channel for communication. This is not a futuristic point, it happens now and to most press releases. The range of channels available is very wide. Online right now I show 14 channels and these in addition to press radio and television.

In some instances the route for press release content is from release to newspaper/journal via an editor/journalist. But it could also be from press release to PRNewswire to Google and via RSS feed to intranet or MySpace.

There is a second role. It is to tempt the receiver to find out more. The receiver can, if the release is online anywhere, call the PR person. This normally is a call from a journalists to the PR person.

Part of this conversation will be to look for alternative or additional information. Some of this information will be online.

But there is another enquirer. This is the search engine and search bot. They look for more information to add to the story. For example a hyperlink to the company web site, company name or a brief description of the company. Goole routinely shows the range of publication that cover the story about the company.

What happens if the enquiry is not from a journalist? It could be from a blogger ot podcaster or anyone else for that matter. If, the answer from the PR department is to deal only with traditional press, where does the citizen go?

Added content created for the media on Wiki's or iJot can offer considerable depth of information and this can be enriched with video or voice in vid/vodcast and podcast comment. In fact the production of a press release may now need vast collateral support to make it available and useful to the people and technologies that will receive it.

Typically a journalists will call for story confirmation and to eke out some unique added angle of spin for the story.

Distributing a press release with backgrounders is common practice (although using wiki's or podcasts is not so common yet). Thus the purpose of the press release is to feed services that can use the content in a range of technologies. Traditionally for a printing press. But now the medium can be as diverse as one-to-one Instant Messaging; one-to-many Google News or many-to-one RSS.

The key to a successful press release will be its inherent capability to offer content and construction for purpose. The target might be a journalist an also it may be for a search engine or an SMS alert technology. This is why the future of the nature of the press release is an important discussion.

I work in the UK and the actualitie is the noticeable relationship based round a telephone and 100 word emails with the press release being a statement of record rather than a news announcement. The un-noticed PR engagement is online. Most practitioners in the UK see some of this activity, most do nothing to affect it and of those that do, the range of channels they seek to affect is very limited.

There is nothing wrong in this. We are in a state of transition. The technologies are taking over much of the human side of Press Release production, distribution, reponce and publication. Is PR for cyborgs?

But I can see a day (quite soon) when computers take the content of a press `release and mix and match similar and associated comment to form stories and editors only make final adjustments (Web 2.0 mashup software). Then the whole deal will change.

In the meantime it is worth following the press release debate.

Picture: Darkwold's Design Cyborg

Podcasting PM

The Internet is sooooo slow at creating new communications channels. Its official according to Tony Blair.

The UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair suggested that "In 100 years time another Prime Minister may be using even better technology to get across what newspapers do which is inform people about events and launch some fantastic campaigns that make a real difference to people's lives."

The PM has recorded a podcast for his local paper The Northern Echo in what is believed to be a first for a Prime Minister for the paper serving his constituency of Sedgefield. It was recorded to mark the launch of the paper's new podcasting site. You can listen to his broadcast here.

Perhaps, in less than 100 years Tory leader, David Cameron will hold a political rally in Second Life which will be an even better technology in only a few weeks.

As another Labour Prime Minster, Harold Wilson, put it 'A week in politics is a long time”.

Picture: BBC

Counting the online readers of B2B media

How important is monitoring Internet versions of online publications? How important is the Internet to B2B PR practitioners?

Well, and it is a sign of the times, business-to-business publications are to have combined print and digital edition circulation ABCs figures in the next auditing period.

The ABC Council reached the decision after consultation with the ABC Business Press Specialist Committee and follows the move in June 2004 where publishers could include digital editions on separate certificates from their print figure.

What this means is that stories submitted to B2B publications need to be Search Engine Optimised, online monitoring is essential, levering value from on-line coverage is the next step to provide that muti-touch, multi media experience.

Perhaps there is more about this to help practitioners deal with it here? Or maybe not!

Picture: IAB

A new manifesto

It may now be time to look at the direction of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. I declare an interest. I am a Fellow.

What do these things have in common: Ships, Metalled Roads, Canals, Newspapers, Railways, Cars, Lorries, Aeroplanes, Radio, Telephone and Television? All are forms of communication and all brought great wealth. Without them, modern man is poor and deprived.

If I add a new range of channels that makes the foregoing more productive and that have a direct impact on a majority of citizens and an indirect impact on all citizens. It would be an economic colossus. It is the Internet.

Not just web sites, email, SMS, Instant Messenger, blogs, podcasts, wikis and MUDS ( Second Life to most) but all the enabling capabilities, and strategic significance. It is many channels for communication and the infrastructure as well. It is core to PR practice as this podcast explians.

The big issues are then about Richness (e.g.Net Neutrality), Reach (e.g. the absence of Internet access for the disadvantaged), Speed (e.g. affecting practitioners because the half life of news decreasing all the time), Transparency (e.g. which is affecting corporate trust – try the podcast here), Porosity (as an issue affecting internal communication), Agency (e.g. because it affects the value of corporate assets ).

Richness, Reach, Speed, Transparency, Porosity and Agency are the five core issues for the CIPR in an Internet mediated era.

Big issues all, for an Institute involved in communication, and perhaps more significant than a travelogue.

These are not just the issues for the President or his successor, they go to the heart of decision making and the professional advice given to those who make decisions that affect the organisation and both the wider PR industry and associated professions.

There is a desperate need for an authoritative voice for all the relationship management sectors.

But such is a strategic decison.

In the meantime...

There is a new CIPR Market Report is an expensive (£840) document (ever heard of transparency - I guess a lot of this stuff will be availble online for free soon if it has any real value). It talks of Blogging and Podcasting... I wonder if it looks beyond the tools to the strategies relevant for inclusion of social media in Public Relations - including relationship management - (the high value-add stuff) or are we still in the agentry business?

What about the economic contribution of PR. The range of practice and skills of members is different to the survey now used by the Institute and was by no means inclusive (for example, it missed out big chunks of events management). It under-values the PR industry by factors. Pretty profound research huh! Time to get a grip on who this institution represents and what they contribute.

The nature of the job is changing. It has to change because the PR value chain is changing. There is a need to re-focus the direction of the industry.

New discoveries are affecting how we understand communication and relationships. It is important for the professional industry to monitor developments that affect practice and keep members up to date.

The budgets for online work are growing and are demanding. They require response to aid members. The skill base needs to be more widely exploited.

There is a need for a new Manifesto for the Institute to meet the demands of a new era.

PS... If you really want to know how importnat Net Neutrality is have alook here!

What is Colin Farrington on about

Simon Collister expresses some of the frustrations that certainly this Fellow of the Institute has felt for some time with the CIPR 's present understanding of cyberspace.

I offered to to run member courses and discover that I am not on the list of trainers. The sum total of CIPR Social Media contributions is the freshly squeezed twenty minute talks.

I offered to update the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (Which I chaired in 1999/2000) work. Not needed.

Before the CIPR presidents blog was launched I commented in person and on-line on the need for a strategy.

When launched I made some comments about how one might imagine the footwork behind the scenes.

Last week, I suggested ways that such an institution might approach new media.

The answer to Simon's post is that there are people involved in the CIPR who have to understand that, as with the Web (which I invited members to address at the IPR Annual Conference in 1995) , the Chartered Institute members are about to miss a major opportunity. The rest of the PR industry is less reticent.

For CIPR I suspect:

Suddenly, the president started a blog.The proverbial golf course conversation had persuaded him that this was a spiffing idea.It went against all the tenets of Public Relations. It did not serve the aims of the organisation other than to offer ..........

Colin, Anne, It is time to talk to some people who do 'get it' People like Anne Gregory, Mark Adams, Alison Clark, Roy Lipski and Simon Collister.

In Place of Ads

Here are alternatives to advertsing as we know it.

Blogs are known for their ability to enhance the range of values attributed to brands.

This added richness offers more values out there to attract more people with convergent values.

People in the right frame of mind, context and emotional state.

The values can come from the richness of concepts that permeate texts. These might be tags created by humans or that could be generated by software.

I have a tag generating machine (see picture)

Today Peter Robinson included the emotional element.

'Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to sell you something," says Peter Robinson, of Cambridge University in the Herald today.

"Imagine a future where websites and mobile phones could read our mind and react to our moods."
It sounds like Orwellian fiction but this week, Robinson, a professor of computer technology, unveiled a prototype for just such a "mind-reading" machine. The first emotionally aware computer is on trial at the Royal Society Festival of Science in London.

Two Tier Internet

The Manchester Evening News has started to get interested as well.

It reports:

PROPOSALS in America to create a two-tier internet with higher charges for a faster service could spread to Britain.

The US company AT&T is lobbying politicians to allow fast and slow services for traffic, including email. If the move is accepted, British internet service providers such as BT may follow.

All data moving around the net is treated equally and moves at the same speed, whether it is a personal blog or the website of a multinational.

But with the quantity of traffic soaring, there are fears the network could become clogged. US service providers want to be able to charge customers to give their data priority.

Mobile Power

The number of internet users in Japan accessing the web from mobile phones exceeded those using it from PCs in 2005, according to a government report published today.

At the end of the year there were 69.2 million people using the internet from mobile devices, compared to 66 million conventional PC users, the Ministry of Information and Communications' annual Information and Communications in Japan white paper said. Of these two user groups, 48.6 million use both a mobile device and a conventional PC, it said, giving Japan a total internet population of 85.3 million users. That's equivalent to two in every three people in the country.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Wifi, CSR and Net Neutrality

The Royal Bank of Scotland is experimenting with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for wifi based credit and debit card verification. An aerial in the card sends the data to a RFID reader at the retail store and payment is then credited to the store.

The cynic in me would believe the credit transfer from bank to retailer might take days not milliseconds - this is, after all, a bank.

This contactless debit card will replace cash for low-value payments with the hopes of moving Scotland to a "cashless society". What a great wizz.

As this will be a great way for the bank to make money I would hope that the RBS Corporate Social Responsibility contribution will be to make wifi free in all participating stores and locations as well.

Or they can go one further to offer city-wide wifi and spread the capability to the disadvantaged location and their often struggling local, often small, shop keepers.

Imagine the brand benefits of being the vendor of free, high capacity broadband to everyone in Glasgow's Gorbals or London's East End.

The French have a different view on Information and Communications Technologies than most. New legislation passed last week could force Apple to make its iPod music player and iTunes Music Store compatible with those from rivals such as Microsoft and Sony. An earlier version of the legislation drew fierce criticism from Apple as "state-sponsored piracy" because it would have required companies to share details of their digital rights management technologies.

The law as passed still demands interoperability except where permission is held by Apple from the rights holders such as musicians and record labels.

This is state imposed disinternmediation of Intellectual Property. Not the first but certainly significant.

It should make AT&T, BT and the other big pipe companies think hard. If the same principle were to apply to net neutrality, they will have a big problem preventing content flowing through their networks without sharing the capacity with everyone..... Such as a Bank wifi networks for example....

Picture: Ken Bushe A Glasgow Street Scene