Who owns your life

ReadWriteWeb covers a whole range of confidentially issues in its post this evening written by Marshall Kirkpatrick. 

The problems with Google collecting information abaout us, recording our documents search and reading habits and even owning Blogger.com is not as simple as Google being Big Brother.

It goes beyond this. It is a question of who owns what we are. At present it does look rather like Google. 

Google has moer information about more people than most tax authorities and all governement departments put together.

Who will they share this with and for how much.

Is it monet, the freedom of an un-named chinaman or YOU?

Where audience research and PR evaluation is taking us.

Using marketing metrics in the age of the internet is like using napped flints to use in brain surgery.

The concepts of top down, corporate marketing design for market segments, brand values and relationships built on the whim of of a 'marketing director', just does not wash anymore. The ogre of marketing is slain.

I read Jeremiah Owyang's post just after Tom Watson's. The contrast is there for all to see.

In one, Gartner's survey is presented by Jeremiah in these terms:

Gartner has recently published research on the topic of “Generation Virtual” (Generation V) which essentially define as two things: 1) This generation isn’t specified by demographics (age) but instead by technology usage. 2) There are four major behaviors

Gartner suggests that Generation V isn’t a demographic categorization, but instead behavioral:

“Unlike previous generations, Generation Virtual (also known as Generation V) is not defined by age — or gender, social demographic or geography — but is based on demonstrated achievement, accomplishments and an increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights.”

Meantime Tom's reports on the findings of the SNCR

After nearly a decade of social media, a new report from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) has found that although it is clearly changing “the way we think about media and influence … [companies] are still struggling to find effective metrics for deciding who are the influential players” (p.16).

This is a refreshingly honest appraisal of where we are on measuring the effectiveness and impact of all those blogs, podcasts, websites and wikis. The report, New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations, also has a set of eight case studies which illustrate a wide range of measurements and non-measurements of outcomes.

The interesting part of the former report is that is shows that market segmentation:

....... is not defined by age — or gender, social demographic or geography

In other words, this 'demographic' is self selecting. What is more it is not self selecting by some corporatist measure. It is self selecting by measures that are of the moment and of the publics own devising. This latter concept is, I agree, one stage too far for Gartner and miles too far ahead of Jeremiah who sets out to defend the kind of thinking presented by Tom.

You see, Tom reflects on findings that 'show':

- Top criteria for determining the relevance or influence of a blogger or podcaster are quality of content, relevance of content to the company or brand, and search engine rank.

- For evaluating a person’s influence in online communities and social networks, the main measures are participation level, frequency of activity and prominence in the market or community.

- About half the surveyed communicators formally measure their social media activities. Their goals are “to enhance relationships, improve the reputation of their businesses, drive customer awareness of their online activities and solicit customer comments and feedback.”

Perhaps one might ask some questions of the research and Jeremiah's knee jerk response which has such resonance with it.

The first is to ask of the study what was the context and environment, the values of the audiences and the ability for them to interact. Without that basic information life is tough.

Next let's consider the influencer platforms that were considered for the study.

Were they an X-box, PC, cell phone or perhaps something more dynamic fun like a Wii or eBook. And if we know that, what influence did the platform (device) have on the channels for communication available?

Such channels could be a web page, blog, or twitter. Perhaps it was a computer game, in Second Life or email. Maybe it was through instant messaging that the interactions were so potent.


Now, once we have unscrambled these influences can we also look at the content. Was it explicit or inferred. Was it the brand or its semantic equivalent?

Then perhaps, the nature of context and environment, the values of the audiences and the ability for them to interact can be examined. The may be we can find out what were the motivations for the audience to select itself with the help and aid of semantically attached, semi detached or just passing acquaintance with the concepts of the minute.


We are beginning to see that the old measures that were flawed even in their heyday are now almost inconsequential.

If a corporate objective sets out:

“to enhance relationships, improve the reputation of their businesses, drive customer awareness of their online activities and solicit customer comments and feedback.”

It is utterly doomed. This is not the ambition of any but a tiny part of any self selecting group. Their ambition is to be able to judge the values of the semantic notions at a time, place (physical as well as emotional context) and environment of the moment and from there interact as availability for interaction presents itself.

Buying using a Wii is different to buying on a website - but both are possible.

I know these are ideas that are hard to grasp and well beyond the current thinking in research but we have to put behind us the idea of golden bullet answers. They were great in the 20th century but not now.

The Gartner report is of a generation of marketers who love the idea of a segment ("Generation V") and the SNCR report is is of a generation of PR that loves to think in terms of the 'impact' of 'mass media'. Both are no longer enough.

The notion of values at the core of relationships at a time, in a context and with varying forms of interactivity has to be developed if we are to gain more effective understanding of the ability of organisations to prosper in this age.

Kids on Hols - Broadband dies - Alternatives?

For a couple of years now I have come to expect my home network will deliver 100 mbs between my broadband modem, computers in my house and at the end of the garden. Beyond the modem, that is, the (virtual monopoly) BT service, speeds are typically 5 mbs. But this week have died.

There are many vendors for my kind of domestic system. I use my electricity circuits and Devolo's dLan.

This means that the feeble BT wifi system that comes with their modem is not a problem and I can access both cable and wifi irrespective of the thickness of the walls or distance from the hub.

However, with kids on holiday, I have noticed that the network, the other side of the BT hub is struggling.

I typically get 5 mbs from BT but the last week has seen a drop as low as 750 kbs mid morning, late afternoon and when it rains. I guess, this is down to kids at home watching online TV or just surfin'.

So, its time to break the monopoly. The BT cables.

This is where the system I have at my home comes into its own. Use power cables. The country is wired up to electricity and electricity cables can and are being used for data transmission but not for the domestic user.

Broadband Powerline (BPL) is not some fancy dream or over the horizon technology. It is a reality and is simple to implement. It does not require fibre to be installed and it could be implemented as a national minimum 100mbs system very quickly.

A combination of BPL and Wimax could wire up the nation quickly and no doubt would relieve BT of the onerous task of providing consumers with what they want: fast reliable broad broadband at an acceptable cost.

So cheer up BT, salvation is at hand!

IMRG Capgemini - online retailing to top 50% by 2011

Online shopping is poised to take 20p out of every UK consumer pound by the end of the year, a landmark milestone that analysts believe will make the channel a critical business for many high-street retailers.

An IMRG Capgemini E-Retail report notes that online retail sales amounted to £26.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 38 per cent from the same period in the previous year and projected online retail sales would be as high as 50% by 2011.

In B2B because of the growth of online trading, IT workers, now have to be creative, world-aware and business-savvy to succeed. They are now a central part of the wider workforce and drive future development in sectors as diverse as retail, transport, finance and hospitality, reports Retail Bulletin.

Booming e-commerce means sectors not traditionally linked with IT are creating brand new technology-related job roles throughout their businesses and working much more closely with IT workers to help them succeed.

Of course, this also should include the PR sector. But figures are harder to find here.

Next results

The results from retailer Next today suggest that there is a lot more work to be done by the Group to boost its online sales.

The FT reports that Next’s online and catalogue business sales were up 5.6 per cent last quarter with high street sales down 2.4% over the same period.


No one will pretend that online sales can beat the downturn. There will be casualties and for a lot of organisations their online sales still remain only a small fraction of total sales.

So there are things to be done.

The first is to optimise online sales now. This will help with the immediate issues that will plague retailing for a couple of years.

Next is to plan for next year when the online experience and commitment to the brand from the online community has to be of a different order.

And then, as retailing begins to recover, it will have changed for all time because the experience of online shopping will be well established.

The immersive internet will be at hand.

Beating the downturn

"If we – as marketers – follow where our customers go, we will need sooner or later to make the mental shift to consumer generated media."

This is a conclusion made by Eric-Kintz over at his HP blog. Oh... this is just bait for a good ol' fashioned rant.

It is a real problem in PR.

Personal experience and as many reports on the impact of the internet on life, commerce and everything keeps passing the PR community by.

It is no good sticking with the press-releases are our bread and butter mindset. Its just not very effective any more. The Internet has roughly double the influence of the second strongest medium — television — and roughly eight times the influence of traditional print media.

Sure, there is a pile of press clips and exaggerated and meaningless AVE's and so called ROI to demonstrate that PR people can get coverage.

So what. They don't sell product and have a relatively low and declining effect opinion and brand success.

But clients are mesmerised by the glare of online and consultants seek a silver bullet.

I guess there is a simple answer as online spending bucks the recession: focus on developing online capability.

I know this means that the average practitioner will have to listen to FIR, join Linkedin, write a blog and Twitter like mad and, at the same time, learn to use and pay attention to experts using RSS.

But the preferred PR industry option is to advise clients (in house or as a consultant), to do more of the same and go down with them.

I am more convinced than ever, that online PR has a future but frustrated that its taking practitioners so long to wake up. If that was not bad enough, I am also alarmed at how bad...... I mean irresponsible .... PR education is when it comes to online anything.

Last week, I had a conversation with two PR tutors who told me that they had difficulty getting PR first degree students to engage with the internet and internet marketing and PR.

In the last month, I have been talking to PR graduates (at least that's what they hope for) from a number of different UK schools and they just did not have a clue about online communication. Sure, they did have a Facebook presence and many had course groups on it.

Some 'Had to blog'. Wow!

Not one used Twitter, none had made a podcast, they could not find an academic paper using a search engine, only one had heard of 'pay per click' the list goes on......

The present economic slowdown means that these young people NEED online capability to get a job this year and survive the next five years in their chosen profession. Failure to provide it in a fun and engaging way is irresponsible beyond belief. Equipping young people with skills in flint knapping is fine for a minority of archaeologists but not the rest of society!

Is it true that when the going gets tough, academia retreats into its ivory tower?

So we don't have expertise among practitioners, who truly can't square the life of tens millions, their own reality and the need to be professional in communication skills and PR students who have been turned off.

If you are a student with online PR on your CV... send it to me. If you are a practitioner who just wants to find out where you career is going, you are too late!

Online Retail - Its a disaster in the making

Today, a crisis broke out in retailing.

The BBC reported "Wedding present firm Wrapit says it is experiencing financial difficulties and is in talks with banks and advisers to avoid going into administration."

This is really bad news for retailers. Online retail has been the one bright light for retailers according to the latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.

It shows that UK shoppers spent over £26.5 billion online in the first six months of 2008 despite the credit crunch – up 38% on the £19.2 billion recorded for the first half of 2007. Capgemini and IMRG report that for the first half of 2008, 17p in every pound was spent online. This is roughly equivalent to half of all supermarket sales and larger than all retail sales for clothing and footwear.

What the online retailers really don't want is anything to shake confidence in online retailing and especially this demographic sector at this time.

This is a PR issue for all retailers and I am happy to hold a meeting next week at the CIPR in London with practitioners to discuss the issue but in the meantime, this is a matter for fast work across the retail sector at a corporate level.

Tiptoe Towards PR Meassurement

This weekend I anticipate being able to analyse all the pages of designated web sites using semantic analysis. The objective is to be able to identify values systems evident in the text in the form of semantic chunks.

Using this approach one can identify those elements of text (such as sentences) that are, by virtue of containing words (concept words) identified as having enhanced value by virtue of their strength of connectedness among the words in the corpus, of greater significance than others.

There are a number of approaches one can take. For example one can identify the strength of concept words by page or from the combined texts of all the pages.

My requirement is to be able to identify those concepts that are most connected throughout the web site to yield chunks of text ranked from most significant to least significant (and to identify the URL of the pages from which they are derived).

This is one of my approaches to help provide empirical proofs to support the Relationship Value Model .

The model posits that relationships are based on values shared between actors and semantic chunks of text have characteristics akin to values. For all intent and purposes, semantic chunks in web sites are expressions of values. They are not the complete set of because other elements such as design, site uptime, photographs, video and other images are also expressions of organisational (and personal) values.

This new development will take the hard work out of identifying the value systems inherent in a web site and is the first stepping stone towards being able to identify common values between organisations and actors.

I guess that a lot of people will be interested in the values their web site presents to the public (and those of competitors ) but this is only the first step in this journey.

Semantic concepts are valuable in other directions too.

Search engines use semantic analysis of web pages as part of their algorithms to match up search terms to web sites and an example of how this works is provided by Yahoo. Its 'Search Assist' service provides lists of semantic concept words to help people using its search engine.

Thus there is a commercial value in my research at an early stage. It can show people trying to optimise web site content how effectively their content has contributed to accessibility of their site to the public through both common values and search.

The next research aim using semantically derived values is the be able to compare the commonality of values as between different web sites. Thus one can combine the web page corpus of two sites to identify all the concepts for both and the extent to which there are common concepts, unique concepts and the relative significance (lets call it rank for the time being) of different concepts and their associated semantic chunks of text.

So far so good. But can this approach go further? Let us imagine comparing the values of an organisation as expressed through its web site (the place where more important visit most often) and the values expressed in, say, the media or blog posts or in social networks.

In theory, and we will be able to test this in a few weeks, we will be able to identify those values that these media have in common with an organisation and the values that are expressed that are unique to either the media in question or the organisation. This will offer a very powerful view of whether the message is 'getting through'.

The extent to which there is convergence and divergence is, surely, a test of how close the relationship is between the organisation and its stakeholders.

Is this a measure of the effectiveness of public relations as a whole?

It certainly has potential.

20 things you need to know about social media

Providing definitive information about channels for communication, keeping it up to date and extending it as media evolves is as important for communication and good governance as the periodic tables are for good chemistry, engineering and pharmacy.

Suitable investment among the universities using the rigour of academic research into the requirements of communicators practising across the many channels for communication is long overdue and synthesising the range of knowledge needed, from a variety of practice perspectives has implications for social and economic policy well beyond the attention it received at present.

Here is my list of the 20 things we need to know to before using specific channels for communication:

The media

1.Title
what is the generic name e.g. email, wiki's etc)

2.Definition
a description

3.Brief history
wikipedia or another resource)

4.Fast Facts
how would the practitioner explain this channel for communication really quickly

5.Communication platforms
PC, laptop, cell phone, print, TV etc

Interactive elements

6.How do people (the public/s) contribute to this channel
To what extent is this common (past/now/future)

7.How does the public share knowledge of content in this channel using this channel and across other channels?
To what extent is this common (past/now/future)?

8.Risk analysis (nature of the risk, likelihood of occurrence, extent of potential damage, mitigation procedure/s extent of amelioration achievable)


Application

9.What services are available to help the practitioner set up/deploy this channel (software, suppliers and/or contractors; are there expert people that the practitioner could employ on behalf of a client)?


10.How to implement the technology (what are the steps involved?)


Policy and optimisation requirements

11.Internal/external policies (examples of such policies will be needed if the practitioner is going to use this channel)


12.How does the practitioner optimise this channel to help people find/use it (e.g. Search Engine Optimisation)?


Monitoring and evaluation

13.Monitor (what is there out there that can help monitor the effect of work using this channel
e.g. can the practitioner set up and RSS feed or a search engine monitor. Can the practitioner monitor how this channel is affecting its audience and how? Does the practitioner need to use a monitoring company and if so who has the expertise
and how much will it cost?)
14.Metrics: What numbers are available in the public domain? What numbers are available in the private domain? Is this best measured as page views or is it by the number of references it generates in www.digg.com. Or by a combination of measurements? Or are the metrics completely different?


15.Evaluate (How does the practitioner set realistic targets and outcomes; how can the practitioner measure how good she is at using this channel for communication; how can the practitioner evaluate the effectiveness of using this channel for communication as part of a relationship building campaign?)


Buy-in

16.Overcoming objections to implementation (what are the practitioner arguments; how are they supported with real and verifiable evidence; can the practitioner call on quantifiable evidence and case study supported reasoning?)


17.Case studies of good and bad practice. Can the practitioner find case studies and look at the best examples and the worst and then identify the risk mitigation or opportunity optimisation policies when using this channel for communication?


18.Relevance to organisations and practice


Planning and implementation

19.Training (training resources, training examples, etiquette)


20.Timescale for implementation (a Gantt chart to identify processes and time taken to implement)

Is there a relationship between profitability and web presence

I have been looking at relationships between numbers of pages indexed by search engines each year and the financial results of companies.

There are a lots more to do before one can draw conclusions but hear is an example from one company.

The key here is to see the relationship between numbers of pages that include reference to the company and the profit indicators.

Does this mean that having a big online footprint aids profits>

The Online Asset - How Obama won

In the past, I have commented on the relationship between traditional press relations and online content.

The difference between the two is that a press release has a limited long tail value whereas an article online has a long half life and contributes to the digital footprint, Google Juice and visibility of an organisational long tail asses.

The former is best considered in accounts as part of P&L and the latter as a corporate asset on the balance sheet.

The extent of goodwill in the former is less potent than the latter.

Today, with Robin Gurney, I am building a company to help organisations identify this corporate asset in its wider sense.

The argument goes like this:

Lets suppose you are the government minister for a small island in a large archipelago in the middle of the ocean and want to increase its GDP to benefit the people of the island.

You elect to invest in building the digital footprint of the island and work at it until it has an online presence ten times bigger than all the other islands nearby.

Thus when people seek to comment about, visit or invest in the group of islands, your island always comes up first in searches, in information resources and in connectivity. The result will soon see more economic activity.

There is a direct relationship between online presence and economic activity.

In concept, it is an extension of the London School of Economics Reports which showed that a 7 per cent increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1 per cent additional company growth (http://tinyurl.com/aohth).

As for an island, so for any country, company, brand, person or politician.

It is not quite a case of simple counts. There are other factors.

Lets take a very simple look at the US Democratic race and see if we can add to other commentators efforts.

The Google index for Barak Obama is, today 5,3700,000 and Hillary Clinton is 5,4300,000.

If my theory was going to be correct, Clinton should have won the race and, plainly, she did not.

But, if we look closer at the results, we see that Clinton has a couple of decades of commentary that is indexed and Obama only four years worth. He made up a lot of ground very quickly.

Now lets look at blog posts:

Obama blog posts 99,859,318
Clinton blog posts 34,127,553

This is a very different picture. Here we are seeing like for like time scales and the digital footprint shows Obama attracting three times as much comment which, one can argue, helped Obama Google Juice as well as wider visibility. What is more, the digital footprint for Obama had the benefit of a steeper long tail curve (more content was more recent).

Then, again, take photographs. Online Obama has 2,990,000 photos indexed by Google and most of them are less than six years old. On the other hand Clinton only has 2,530,000 photos and hers go back to 1969 (see picture above)!

This is why Robin and I think it is important to have robust methodologies for audition online presence. It affects political and corporate outcomes and the extent of correlation between online presence and success are far too close to be co-incidental.

There are other indicators in the use of evolving channels. Twitter is one. Clinton has 4,019 followers and Obama has 33,069 followers; Obama is following 33,960 people and Hillary is following 0.

Leavering value from online presence is not hugely dependant on other marketing activity unless that serves the online presence in a virtuous circle (as Google, Facebook, eBay and Amazon attest) and so auditing online presence is important to be able to identify the value of an organisation.

In addition, it is a significant element in valuation of organisations and for establishing thier future prospects.

Obviously, there will be much more to follow as our research reveals more information but here are some interesting findings over the last few months.

1. In the UK social media interest in organisations in general changed last autumn. The rate of increase in social media comment accelerated very significantly.

2. The rate of change of inbound links is greater for more successful companies.

3. The long tail effect does have a half life. Content effect decays over time which means that having been online for a long time is not always good in itself.

4. Active sites and active social comment raises the digital footprint faster.

Fun huh!

BAA baggage handling

Someone might tell BAA that it sometimes rains at Gatwick in may which makes customers baggage soggy when thrown on to the back of an open truck.

And anyone can photo their practices and blog about them in near real time!

The statistics that say you must take social media seriously

Image via Wikipedia

I have been working through a range of statistics that show how significant social media is for PR and marketing.

While UK internet users are all saying they want to hear from brands and companies on line, with rare exceptions, marketers and PR people cant quite make the leap of faith to do it.

Perhaps this list of links will suggest to them that it is their inhibitions that are the problem and not whether this space is commercially important.

Perhaps this too, will suggest that online PR is a great career move. Perhaps this will show the Universities they need to be able to teach this stuff.

So here goes (and if you want to add any... help yourself)

• London School of Economics Reports: a 7 per cent increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1 per cent additional company growth.
  http://tinyurl.com/aohth

• Internet usage growth out performs all other economic activity worldwide.
  http://tinyurl.com/6aaxc2

• National statistic office report six in ten Internet users go online dail
  http://tinyurl.com/5sky8a

• IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Online retail sales in the U.K. grew 54% in 2007 over 2006, reaching £46.6 billion from £30.2 billion http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x

• IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. 15% of all British retail sales took place online last year. http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x

• 40,362,842 UK Internet users in Nov/07 http://tinyurl.com/6255h5

• 66.4 % penetration, of the population http://tinyurl.com/6255h5

Growth in social media

• Britain's blogging army is now 4m strong http://tinyurl.com/2uzh2k

• YouTube is now the most popular social networking website in the UK http://tinyurl.com/26h7vo

Social Media affects consumer behaviour

• Social media is affecting audience behaviour. According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006) , social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9

• UK visits to Facebook
  http://tinyurl.com/yt6ax5

Top Brand mentions in social media

http://tinyurl.com/5av73g

• Reasons for people going online

(Source: National Statistics Office)

What people do online

• 5.7 million users were browsing via mobile devices in January of this year. http://tinyurl.com/4xn2z9

Social media affects every stage of the shopping process

• A study by DoubleClick shows that the web is the most influential medium in shaping consumers’ purchasing decisions, with shoppers using it at every stage of the shopping process, from first awareness to final purchase. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9

Should be % of marketing spend

• Internet advertising has again buoyed the UK advertising industry with above-expectation 41.3% year on year growth in the first half of 2007. This takes the sector to a half-year high of £1,334.3 million – compared to £917.2 million just a year ago – lifting online advertising’s market share significantly, to 14.7%. http://tinyurl.com/2xg2kr

• Where is Internet advertising going?

http://tinyurl.com/4czrbx

• Audience engagement in online advertising is 18 per cent more effective than its print equivalent, and people are also 15 per cent more engaged in magazine articles online than in print. So much for print advertising. http://tinyurl.com/4kzf3c

• But is advertising the answer? Nope!

New research into the effectiveness of different advertising mediums has revealed that advertising on social networks has had very little impact on consumers so far. http://tinyurl.com/657yj2

• Since July 2006, Topshop has seen more visitors to its site come from its pages on social networks like MySpace than from search engines. Advertising don't work involvement does http://tinyurl.com/5tgpfm

• Over 90 per cent of marketing departments are planning to launch a social media campaign in 2008 http://tinyurl.com/66pq63

• A survey, conducted by LEWIS PR at PR Week’s New Media Conference, revealed that 75 per cent of attendees are planning to use a blog as a social media asset in 2008 – an increase of 50 per cent on 2007. The number of firms planning to use social networking is tipped to increase from 33 per cent to over 70 per cent. http://tinyurl.com/66pq63

• What Web 2.0 is most effective for US companies http://tinyurl.com/57xrgh
  

Online v’s print media (popularity, growth etc)

• Average Time Spent on Social Nets 3X Longer Than News and Media Sites

http://tinyurl.com/5qxxqf

For any target demographic there are numbers;

What sites are 18 – 35 working women visiting? (not just media)

• In all countries except the UK and the US, more men than women use the internet. In the UK, the split is equal (50/50), while in the US 52% of internet users are women, with 18-34 year-old women being particularly active in both countries (Ofcom).
  

• Women outnumber men for the first time among UK residents going online. Females between 25 and 49 spend more time online than males the same age.” http://tinyurl.com/3lac2o

• 18-34 age group is where women spend more time online than men (57 per cent compared with 43 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/2pms2u

Importance of social media

• Two thirds (66 per cent) of 18-35 year olds in the UK are actively engaged in social networking and almost two in five (38 per cent) are members of two or more online forums or social networking sites. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• Negative comments posted on online forums and social networks put off customers. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• Nearly 1.5 times as many 18-35 year olds would rather accept a friend request from a brand than have banner adverts on a social networking profile page. The best way to get users to accept friend requests was identified as through offering special offers and discounts (60 per cent) http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh

• In a survey in 2006, 1000 women were surveyed revealing some extremely interesting insights:

• 70% are 25-44 y/o. 70% are in long term relationships, 83% are employed over half full time.

• 28% 'couldn't do without it'

• More important that TV, magazines and radio

• Internet is six times more than nearest rival (TV)

• Compared with other media the internet is regarded as the most important, achieving a 37% share. TV followed and only managing 24%. 63% of those surveyed ranked online first or second in terms of importance and 45% considered the internet “very important to me” with 28% of women going as far as to say they couldn’t live without online!

• 67% regard the Internet strong on community. That three times greater than magazines!

• 92% of women identified shopping with their use of the internet, over nine times as much as its nearest rival. Buying fashion online is now as important as booking travel, with 63% of women claiming to do both.

• The convenience of being able to research products and services before purchase online or in the high street is also valued with 75% of females identifying this as important. The internet is enhancing women’s lifestyles. 67% of women considered the internet to be strong on community, with 84% using the internet to keep in touch with friends and family.

• 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%. http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8

• A recent poll by Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nin-tendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%). http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8

• "Video streams at broadcast network TV websites were nearly two times more likely to be viewed by women age 18-34 than men, who accounted for 22% and 12% of streams respectively. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu

• Different types of products are likely to be best advertised on different types of video websites.
  For instance, a female products brand may have better luck effectively reaching its target audience through a network TV website than through YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu

Corporate site important but declining

http://tinyurl.com/4fvadf

How regularly do folk go online

• 88% of women who use the internet aged under 44 use the internet daily.

• Most adults (59 per cent) who had used the Internet in the last 3 months used it every day or almost every day, with the age group 25 to 44 using it the most (63 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/46u4wc

Where are client target audience currently reading about the brand online?

Its easy to see how far the client has got: Only 16 in Blogs, 26 videos, 288 mentions in MySpace, 14 people and 14 groups in Facebook. A profile in Wikipedia and was last updated 17 days ago (five changes). But it does not figure in Twitter. There are 26,400 indexed pages that refer to the client in Google (Budweiser has seven million).

We cab see where the online communities are active. e.g. Social Networks are the most popular social media for this client.... But how active are they in other media?

Who’s doing digital well?

• The web continues to drive sales at PetMed Express. In fiscal 2008, e-commerce generated 65% of sales and accounted for 83% of growth. http://tinyurl.com/437p8
  
  

What are competitors thinking of doing?

• More than three quarters of company respondents say that the importance of online customer engagement to their organisations has increased in the last 12 months.

• The most frequently cited benefits for companies implementing customer engagement initiatives are 'improved customer loyalty' and 'increased revenue'.

• More than half of respondents say their companies are either using or planning to use web-based widgets to engage with their customers more effectively.

• Around two thirds of respondents say the mobile channel will be 'essential' or 'important' for customer engagement in the next three years.

http://tinyurl.com/25e5ay

Here are some examples in the public sector campaigns:

• Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea for an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

• National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components.

• Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get involved too.

• Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities led by GCN.

• Downing Street - it’s use of ePetitions

• Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software.

• Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with government data made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.

• DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK’s web users have accessed government services via DirectGov.

• Ministry of Justice - Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain.

• SS/SIS - a bit of a Is involved in a range of interesting developments.

Do we know or have an idea of how much other brands are spending on digital activity alone?

I hope you enjoy the links.

There are zillions of them and they all point one way.

Seven Strategy Steps for modern communication

I thought it may help to examine how organisations can develop strategies. This is at the beginning of the thinking and in no special order but its a start and I only have seven considerations.

I guess the place most people will start is that place of record. The company or brand web site.

Strategically, for a corporate web site we can imagine it as the place where the most visitors come each day to engage on corporate matters. For an etail site it is the flagship store and the trade site is an invitation into the biggest and busiest warehouse and so forth.

Strategy consideration 1

So our first strategy action point is the examine investment at a level that reflects the opportunity. For example there is significant evidence that corporate web sites are extensively used by financial analysis, investors, prospective employees, NGO's, regulators, vendors and many other stakeholders. Equally, if in general, retail sales on line are 15% of all retail activity, does the etail site offer an opportunity to access this business and will that be incremental business, will it enhance sales at bricks and mortar sites, will the return on investment be recovered at a lower cost to deliver added bottom line profits. All the indication suggest this is the case.

We now have available a lot of information about who, why and how people visit our web sites.

For example, the research is telling us that prospective customers come to a web site for a whole range of reasons through the buying process including, according to the Enquiro study, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase and, one can add, to reconfirm and justify the decision after purchase.


Strategy consideration 2

Our second strategy is to consider each of these instances and have relevant content for each of the visitor's needs. The strategy will set out to resolve the requirements for why people should search for, explore, find information and save it ready for the next visit.

Of course, as part of this process, the strategy will include SEO and will ensure that every page of the web site reflects the relevant company values which will be both obvious to the visitor and to the semantic algorithms used by search engines.

Strategy consideration 3

Our third strategy consideration is one of access.

In an era of user created market, and social segments that change and morph all the time, it is important to maintain an interest in the wider adoption of online media to create access.

Is access only to be through a PC or laptop or will it include games consoles, USB ports, mobile phones, kiosks and the panoply of devices that are available across the market?. How do people keep engaged with the company, product or brand? Is it one device or many and, for the time being, never mind the volume of people or even the number of visits because should the devices engage enough and is interesting for people at different stages in relationship building the pay off will come elsewhere.

For example Twitter. We have some good figures about the number of people who visit its web site But we don't have a clue as to how many people use tools like Twirl, mobile phones and Blackberrys to engage through Twitter. These dispersed metrics are going to be ever more diverse and difficult for the traditional marketing person to manage.

Strategy consideration 4

My fourth strategy focuses on content and content management. Lets take the case of a new product launched in California at 10 am local time. Of course, it missed most of Europe because they are enjoying an aperitif and, by the time the news cycle reaches Stonehenge, the story is so old there is not a journalist on earth who wants to cover it. No, the content strategy has to start at some point and as it goes through the time zones it needs refreshing with new and relevant insights, references to comments about it and to give a reason for bloggers and journalists and Susan and her friends swapping the news in Bebo. At what point in this cycle are employees engaged and those many organisations that work for the company (like consultants, vendors, and commercial partners)?

Strategy consideration 5

This content strategy also has to be able to serve many channels for communication. Can the strategy encompass words for twitter, bloggers, newspapers, feature writers. Does it have capacity for associated pictures, interactive AJAX graphical content, news updates and other mashups or widgets. Is there, strategically, room for video, podcast or an interactive second life avatar that can be controlled with a Nintendo Wii? Does this story warrant its own social media microsite, wiki, poll or user evaluation?

Strategy consideration 6

The sixth strategy are those management imperatives such as rules of engagement for employees and other organisations closely associated with the organisation.

Strategy consideration 7

The seventh strategy consideration encompasses both risk management embedded in the approach and crisis management capability - because we are all professionals.



Of course, there will be other versions. I welcome comments.

Agnostic evaluation of media content

Image via Wikipedia

This weekend, I have been playing with a sentiment engine and thinking about people's perspectives.

This one does not take sides. It is agnostic. It decides if a press story is positive or negative from a neutral perspective.

All you do is past text into a box and it analyses the content as positive or negative and shows the structure of sentences that leads to this conclusion.

You can try it here.

The returns it makes is an academic minefield. It challenges your thinking about truth.

It has a first cousin, that can add perspectives. For example, it can make similar decisions from the perspective of the actors (company, person brand etc) which is why it was invented but the returns with no perspective are very interesting.

Sometimes this programme gets it wrong but not often.

It is able to glean content that is negative but which contributes to the positive side of the article and you can see how it does it.

I have tried news articles, book chapters, reports and even client presentations to see where the sentiment lies.

So where is the beef?

This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.

Try it out and be challenged.

Touch the virtual

I have a new word for everyone Realtuality.....

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, "EVE Online," Habbo, MapleStory and "World of Warcraft" are the next step in "network intermediated" social and economic interactions according to Andrew Burger at Linux insider.

But he missed a significant element. They are now combined with the Nintendo's Wii. Wii adds a physical element.

These developments are easy to dismiss and put into the PR no go area of Games.

As you may know, this has never been my view. Games are a form of communication and online games now allow players to interact with millions of other players round the world.

But the Wii is different. The players can interact, not only in the virtual world but in a mashup between the virtual and real dimensions.

A movement using the Wii from Stonehenge can be transferred to a movement on a screen in San Francisco and in real time and in the existing, simulated or game graphic renderings or virtual world.

David Stone, an MIT research fellow claims the motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science." He offers the Wiimote as a key to building realistic training simulators in Second Life.

Add to the Wii and virtual worlds a huge mass collaborative development effort and you get where I am coming from.

Take Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, who says Sims attracts creative people of all ages and both genders and have a track record of 4.5 million players visiting the Sims site monthly, and 70m downloads of player-created content including user created avatars and environments.

These are pretty big numbers and pretty active communities and they are not alone.

Corporate investment in post 2000 technologiesis already interesting. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million in 2007 and has at least nine more developments in train.

A study by Virtual Worlds Management, a Texas-based research company identified $184.2 million this year pouring into companies that run virtual worlds.

You can bet these will be very different and will need to include Realtuality, with its physical dimension to compete.

Intel add fuel to the flames. It say that the next generation Wii will not need controllers. Camera technology and sensors will mean they are obsolete.

The pent-up capability to create applications, the technical advances and money is now converging. The breakthrough cannot be far off.

Virtual offices, virtual homes, virtual friends and all interacting with real offices, real sports, real homes and real people stretches the imagination and yet is not far off.

Does this mean that the press conference is acted out by real people in virtual worlds or virtual people in real environments. Yes to both.

Does this mean the end of the travelling salesman, yes it does, and is supermarket shopping now a case of really walking but down virtual aisles, yes it does.

But these are pretty ordinary transmogrifications. What happens when we mashup email, twitter, VoiP and that old fashioned place of record, the website and add people being both themselves and their alter egos in dynamic activities in dynamic environments and physically involved too. Now add millions of people doing all this in full-on creative mode.

Well... Facebook is, by comparison, dull. Even the announcement by Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company behind the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, that they seek a partner to license a pole dancing game for the Wii is tame.

Development of new markets, new inventions and new societies already happens all the time in microcosm in these emeging worlds and at a pace that makes following twitter seem sluggish. But as these people bridge the gap to what our generation believes is mainstream, the effect will be astonishing.

Building relationships between organisations and their publics in existing games has a very new dimension and is culturally very different. Second life using a Wii is different again and adding big bucks investment and open tools and open source to both is a daunting prospect.

And what is going to drive this revolution?

I think fun and sex. These environments are novel and fun and they open up whole new opportunities for romantic interaction.

Millions, of people using open tools and open software backed up with significant investment by business angels will begin to deliver products that make the exponential growth of YouTube look sluggish.

The commitment to life in these environments will drag people from television, the cinema and night clubs to the next mashup generation beyond today's Wii and big home screens, games and virtual worlds.


The first shops in these environments will soon become the biggest mall anyone ever walked down.

Today, we think we are cool with our corporate blogs, wiki's podcasts and social media involvement but perhaps we should now begin to think of the next digital generation.

News in the making

The telegraph today. The political editors hard at it

The new telegraph HQ

Today, I was given a tour of the Telegraph new editorial centre. Its 67,000 sq ft of open plan editorial space.

My host was Chris Lloyd Assistant Managing Editor ( my nephew).

He has been with the project from its inception and was both a charming host and brilliant in his outlook for where the internet is taking publishing.

The Telegraph has shown thousands of people, including competitors, from all over the world round this amazing facility.

With its extension of My Telegraph due soon and raft of well known bloggers not to mention the growing capability and range of content at Telegraph TV, the evolution fom print to all media is a revelation.

The BBC and Guardian are both creating new centres now.

The big issue now, is can the PR industry raise its game to support these new capabilities?

The pic is Carl Courtney (Chairman of Publicasity - for whom I work three 50 hour days a week), sitting at the editorial hub in this huge centre.

Measuring the value of PR - the values that make relationships

Over the next few days I will be working on development of tools that allow me to look at corporate and brand values.

You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.

First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.

My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.

This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.

These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.

With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.

Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.

But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).

We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.

The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.

Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.

We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.

The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.



That's the theory.



Now to see if it works.....

The Clip Book

Working part time in an agency gives an insight into how far they have regressed.

In the 1980's and 90's I ran a PR consultancy. We had a sister evaluation company (Media Measurement) which did all out work on clip book production as well as evaluation to meet a range of client needs. In those days we used a lot of trees in PR.

The evaluation team were specialist, had all the software and equipment to deliver product on time and right first time.

Professional PR people and awesome writers were not wasted on clip counting and mounting.

Easy.

Now, a decade later I find that agencies are still using PAPER! The Clipbook carbon footprint in the PR industry is massive.

Because clients want it?

Now, I don't care about the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) demand for huge amounts of money to force organisations to knock over more trees. Its time to face them down.

I am not a person who believes that you can't read off the screen. We all do it.

I don't care about size for size Advertising Equivalents spreads and all that complete AVE rubbish. That was invented to satisfy the 20th century egos of Marketing Directors. In those days they had secretaries who typed letters!

Paper guard books offer so little information compared to digital ones. Today, would professional managers accept cash flow forecasts without drill down?

But what I resent most is the complete an utter waste of intelligent people’s time and on every count. Cost, wasted skill, environment damage, encouragement of lazy, typically innumerate, PR practice are all reasons to move away from paper.

Partnering with a professional evaluation company is the right direction for agencies (and I mean partner – not supplier) and this needs to be a three way, transparent relationship with the client.

In cost saving alone, it makes sense.

Search v Value

In recent weeks I have been working for Publicasity. They are developing their online skills - and the new web site, blog Twitter etc. is due in a few weeks (of course).

But we have been working on audits for a range of clients and companies and one the striking statistics that emerge is search volume.

More than once, we have un-nerved marketing directors with a graph that they recognize as sales graphs.

These search graphs are now beginning to be important. A way of being able to identify the how well companies are doing over the counter and online in terms of sales.

It struck me that there are more applications for these kind of data.

Knowing that search volume tells us about the commercial success of an organisation means that these data could also be useful to investors and others.

This conjoin between actual activity and online activity is another way of expressing the value of online work.

Find top bloggers - pre alpha

Here we are. The client has asked us to begin a blog outreach programme for their new widget. You need to find the top bloggers in the field. Goog and Technorati provide a huge list. Which are the top bloggers. Whose influence in the bloggersphere really counts?

Well, this is a pre alpha experiment and I will welcome comments. You can try it here in an iFrame or go to the web site here which is easier on the eye.

Enjoy!

In preperation for Euroblog 2008

Tomorrow, I will be joining a panel at Euroblog 2008.

I will be in the august company of

• Toni Muzi Falconi,
• Ansgar Zerfass (University of Leipzig, Germany),
• David Weinberger (Fellow at Harvard Berkam Center),
• Frank Ovaitt (President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations)
• Gilles Klein (Le Monde),
• Tim Macmahon (NY University)
• Wolfgang Luenenbuerger, (Head of Social Media, Edelman Europe)

We are tasked with examining:

The changing media environment and how it is affecting business, academia and its implications for the future:

• What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
• How can we measure it?
• What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.

I thought that I would get my thoughts ready before the event.

In the first instance we need to be sure that there is a changing media environment and whether the extent of any such change is significant.

A year ago, I presented evidence of the changing media environment. Based on work at Bournemouth University I showed that at a time when more people were online; when people were spending more time online and when access was increasing because of the uptake of broadband there was a paradox. In 2006, I showed that traffic to search engine sites and retail web sites was not reflecting the extra eyeball or eyeball hours. Worse still, traffic to these sites was in slow decline. Where was all the extra 'traffic' going?

It was going to social media. Blogs, wiki's, social networks, YouTube.

These finding legitimise the the first assumption in our discourse and are a vindication of my repost to the views expressed by Betteke van Ruler, Professor of Communication and Organization at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, in April 2006. Social media is significant and has a huge role to play in communication.




Of course, it would be wrong to blithely make the assumption that there is significant evidence of the generality of business being affected by the changing media environment.

What, then is the evidence that online interactions are affecting business?

Over the last two months, I have undertaken in-depth studies of the digital footprint of five companies. One of the resources used has been Microsoft adCenter Labs . In presenting to a B2C client with over 600 UK retail outlets, I showed this graph of search driven numbers of visitors to their websites.



For the marketing director this was a surprise. This graph was a match for their volume sales! In subsequent analysis for a range of other clients we were able to demonstrate similar correlations.

It would seem that people go online before buying and search extrapolation from these data suggests that they do so in significant numbers, mirroring other research of this nature in areas like B2B purchasing.

In answer to the second premise for our discussion, I contend that companies and the internet are now joined at the hip. Even for company websites that are not e-commerce enabled, the internet is having a significant impact on business performance.

The next issue we need to face before we go further is the extent to which the internet is affecting business.

Once again, we now have evidence of what companies believe they are achieving online.

With some confidence we have evidence of the demographic nature of the website by sex and age profiles:











But when we go and look at who is actually visiting the site we get a different picture:

The age and sex profile is not the same:



What we are seeing is that it is the consumer who is deciding what they want and need from the internet. This is full blown evidence of the phenomenon of 'user' segments. The marketing people (you remember - those folk who held sway in the 20th century) have got it wrong.



There is other evidence that is interesting. If you examine the SEO keywords used by webmasters, they are more often than not at variance with keywords people use to search for products and services (which also demonstrates the poor SEO of most websites). In this case, we are seeing evidence of people online deciding what they believe are brand and corporate values. In the majority of cases (in the five surveys I have done so far) there is significant dissonance between what the company thinks are its brand values and what their website visitors believe.

Progressively, companies are changing their keywords as the attune to the power of SEO. The companies are being changed by the online community.

But is this enough? What about the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication.

In the UK there was a very significant change in the behaviours of the interactive community.

As a generality, and for years, the numbers of blog posts about companies has shown a progressive increase.

But last year (round about November time) there was a sea change.

The rate of growth in the number of posts moved from progressive to exponential. It is not the numbers of posts that is important. It is the rate of change that is so significant.

Once again, in each of our surveys the results showed the same dynamic.

















From the foregoing, It is reasonable to accept the premise of the session at Euroblog. There is a :

changing media environment and how it is affecting business and academia and it does have implications for the future.

These finding also help us with our examination of:

• What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
• How can we measure it?
• What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.

The opportunities are, of course, no longer potential. If companies are being changed because of SEO, the opportunity is being seized. But probably inadvertently and probably at considerable risk to the organisation.

Not that risk cannot be managed it can and so I hope that the discussion on risk is based on good research, practice with good assessment and in a structured way.

This is going to be fun.

You are not the words you write

I chanced upon Daniel Chandler's essay on intertextuality (looking up more reading about value systems) in which he notes

In 1968 Barthes announced 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader', declaring that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination' (Barthes 1977, 148).

Essentially the reader has his/her own context and interprets both the author and the work from a personal and cultural perspective. But the sentence stood out for me because of its immediate parallel with the significance to user generated content.

Here there is no authority except in the author but many interpretations. In a sense, we cannot make clear our written intention nor can we expect common acceptance among readers.

Thus the values we express are not all of our own making but of the readers making.

It was good serendipity.