Its going to be hard for the NLA to make its tax stick

As always Stephen Waddington is on the ball with industry news.

He is writing about the NLA seeking to charge people who make a living out of collating media coverage online by selling their researches to customers.

I commented on his post that I thought that this might be a bit difficult for the publishers.

Now that we have the semantic web red in tooth and claw, it is very hard to disguise who contributes to the outputs of journalists.

All the sentient conversation leading up to a stunning original take on any subject by a journalist can be found.

This means we see the extent of original content and the extent of information, ideas and concepts that originate from elsewhere.

Sure, one wants to see original or creative content recognised and getting its just reward. But the heavy size 11's of the NLA is not the way to go.

There are many, many ways to generate value from original or new, newsworthy content. The present models we are being offered are full of holes.

This is an example I sent to Stephen: I went to this page in The Times http://bit.ly/4vMupX Analysed it to get the semantic concepts http://bit.ly/5xx7Y1 Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publication wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times http://bit.ly/7Lb6Fn I asked in Stephen's blog:

Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?

When The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagiarises from them as well as suing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?

Of course, we are using software that is not optimised for this purpose but does show what is possible. I even suggested that there could be people out there who might take affairs in their own hands. I wondered who will write the application that automatically identified the url's of same/similar content on a Google sidewiki to let everyone see where the media stories really come from? Such an application, I contend, will mean that everyone will see, this or that press story really came from a press release/blog/wiki etc...

I guess that the really brave, creative and future publishing successes will be the aggregator (and I declare an interest). But to see a publication like the Telegraph assembling news in real time and considered content from the greatest writers, creative thinkers and others regardless of time constraints being much more successful that firewalled plagiarists.

The value may well then not come from content but from the delivery channel. But that is another story.

The anatomy of a crisis

You are invited to watch a PR crisis being played out in front of you.

The University of East Anglia is in the eye of a storm about emails that cast doubt on the accepted wisdom of human involvement in climate change.

I am conducting a series of monthly reviews across the whole of the web showing how this crisis is affecting the reputation of the University - and you can come and watch too.

This crisis also affects science, climate change scientists, governments and politics across the world and there are issues now emerging that affect the nature of science and politics and climate change and global warming.

This is quite transparent research. You too can watch it and can have access to the data.


The first data available is a view of the major semantic drivers evident from internet citations.

You can see the semantic drivers affecting the University of East Anglia here http://bit.ly/8SdZwf

The effect in comment on climate change and global warming is shown in the results here http://bit.ly/5PeNrs

In both cases you can use the slider to go back a year which helps you see how the issues change. At the end of each month the 'Wall' will be updated but every day you can see the new citations that will be added for analysis and presentation in the following month.

In addition, every week, I will present on my blog leverwealth.blogspot.com an analysis of the number of citations identified each day and the citation broken down into news sites, blogs, discussion lists etc.

I will be saving all the citations for both these projects and will make available to universities the list of citations, the most covered national audiences, type of web site (news, blog, discussion list etc), numbers of citations per day etc.

This will mean that, for the first time ever (and as the newspaper paywalls go up) possibly the last time forever, we will have a comprehensive view of the anatomy of a crisis online for research today and in the future.

Below you will find a list of significant climate change bloggers, a Google map showing how far the story has spread and other facilities that a reputation manager might use at a time like this.

Finding the online opinion formers for the University of East Anglia

Alongside the print, radio and TV media, the 150 blogs talking about Climate Change this month with significant audience reach per country may be worth watching.

I think that I would want to add these blogs into the ones to read before I built the list for interaction (using Blog finder http://bit.ly/8WtT5R).


Eating Clean Works , http://eatingcleanworks.com, United States
Wake up America , http://wwwwakeupamericans-spree.blogspot.com/, United States
The Betrayal , http://www.oilforimmigration.org/facts/, United States
The Plain Truth , http://www.plaintruth.com/the_plain_truth/, United States
The Punekar , http://punekar.in/site/, India
Black Bear Blog , http://mainehuntingtoday.com/bbb/, United States
Liberally Lean From The Land Of Dairy Queen , http://skattershooting.blogspot.com/, United States
India Startups Business News , http://indian-startup-news.startups.in/,
India TechCrunch , http://www.techcrunch.in/, India
RAC Motoring Forum , http://www.rac.co.uk/forum/index.php, United Kingdom
Fanhouse Main , http://www.fanhouse.com/, United States
RealClearPolitics - Articles , http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/11/2009s_top_gra..., United States
ABC Live-Online News,Breaking News,World News , http://abclive.in/, India
XDTalk Forums - Your XD/XD(m) Information Source! , http://www.xdtalk.com/forums/, United States
YID With LID , http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/, United States
Political Animal , http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/, United States
Nice Deb , http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/, United States
TigerHawk , http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/, United States
Loan Modification Forum - LoanSafe.org , http://www.loansafe.org/forum/, United States
C-Questor Carbon Markets and Climate Change... , http://cquestor.blogspot.com/,
American Conservative News Politics and Opinion... , http://www.thelandofthefree.net/index.php, United States
Voices.IdahoStatesman.com blogs , http://voices.idahostatesman.com/blog, United States
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias , http://newsbusters.org/, United States
Mangan's , http://mangans.blogspot.com/, United States

PWCToday , http://www.pwctoday.com/, United States walls of the city , http://www.wallsofthecity.net/, United States
Nation and World , http://www.twincities.com/national/, United States
Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association... , http://forum.pafoa.org/, United States
Marathon Pundit , http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/, United States
fmaidment's Diary , http://www.redstate.com/fmaidment/, United States d
eweyfromdetroit's Diary , http://www.redstate.com/deweyfromdetroit/, United States
The Wire , http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-wire/, United States
Riehl World View , http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/, United States
Crooks and Liars , http://crooksandliars.com/, United States
Worth Reading , http://blogs.rep-am.com/worth_reading/, United States
Iain Dale's Diary , http://iaindale.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
ecopolitology , http://ecopolitology.org/, United States
Probe International - Rethinking foreign... , http://www.probeinternational.org/node/6633, Canada
Media Matters for America - Limbaugh Wire , http://mediamatters.org/, United States
catallaxyfiles , http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/, Australia
DBKP - Death By 1000 Papercuts - DBKP , http://deathby1000papercuts.com/, United States
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Local News , http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_wsu_new_college..., United States
Power Line , http://www.powerlineblog.com/, United States
Brutally Honest , http://www.brutallyhonest.org/brutally_honest/, United States
Orange Punch , http://orangepunch.freedomblogging.com/, United States
ARRA News Service , http://arkansasgopwing.blogspot.com/, United States
The Beacon , http://www.independent.org/blog/, United States
SciGuy , http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/, United States
StudentMidwife.NET , http://www.studentmidwife.net/, United Kingdom
Political Punch , http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/, United States
Bible Prophecy In The News , http://www.prophecynewsheadlines.com/, United States
Griper Blade , http://griperblade.blogspot.com/, United States
Reason Magazine Full Feed , http://reason.com/, United States
Hit and Run , http://reason.com/blog, United States
ExFn.com Daily Fresh News , http://www.exfn.com/, Turkey
Tim Oren’s Due Diligence , http://due-diligence.typepad.com/blog/, United States
Video on The Huffington Post , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/video/, United States
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raw_feed_index.rdf, United States
The Blog , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/, United States
Europe on The Huffington Post , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/europe, United States
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/, United States
thetorydiary , http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/, United Kingdom
Crosswalk.com - News , http://www.crosswalk.com/news/, United States
Right Wing News , http://rightwingnews.com/, United States
John Lott’s Website , http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/, United States
It's Happening Forums , http://wincoast.com/forum/, United States
The Archdruid Report , http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/, United States
From so simple a beginning... , http://www.desipundit.com/ashutosh/, India
Great News Network , http://www.greatnewsnetwork.org/, Pakistan
Lancaster Unity , http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
Liberal Democrat Voice , http://www.libdemvoice.org/, United Kingdom
Consequence of Sound , http://consequenceofsound.net/, United States
HolyCoast.com , http://holycoast.blogspot.com/, United States
Midwest Voices - , http://voices.kansascity.com/, United States
Midwest Voices - , http://voices.kansascity.com/node, United States
Newsweek Blogs , http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/default.aspx, United States
Politics , http://www.covenantnews.com/politics/, United States
skippy the bush kangaroo , http://xnerg.blogspot.com/, United States
WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society , http://newsociety.com/blogs/index.php, United States
Wizbang , http://wizbangblog.com/, United States
Science Codex - Science news, science articles,... , http://www.sciencecodex.com/, United States
The Daily of the University of Washington... , http://dailyuw.com/, United States
Climate Skeptic , http://www.climate-skeptic.com/, United States
OrthodoxNet.com Blog , http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/, United States
On Target Blog - Accuracy In Media , http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/direct-your-tweet-outrage-..., United States
Change.org's Stop Global Warming Blog , http://globalwarming.change.org/, United States
The Rule of Reason , http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/, United States
Climate Progress , http://climateprogress.org/, United States
AmSpecBlog , http://spectator.org/blog, United States
MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory , http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/02/14/sensational-video-on..., United States
Get Energy Smart! NOW! , http://getenergysmartnow.com/, United States
Kiwiblog , http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/, New Zealand
Burning our money , http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
StreetHop.com , http://www.streethop.com/forum/, United States
ForestTalk , http://foresttalk.com/index.php, Canada
Knowledge Problem , http://knowledgeproblem.com/, United States
Birmingham Weekly , http://www.bhamweekly.com/, United States
The Michigan Daily , http://www.michigandaily.com/node/49181/talk, United States
WSJ.com: Environmental Capital , http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/, United States
Gawker , http://www.gawker.com/, United States
CanadaFreePress.Com , http://canadafreepress.com/, United States
Public Servant Daily - Latest News from... , http://www.publicservice.co.uk/archive_news.asp, United Kingdom
The Last Ditch , http://lastditch.typepad.com/lastditch/, United Kingdom
Atlas Shrugs , http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/, United States
Blog entries from Aratus , http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=Ara..., South Africa
The Real News Network , http://therealnews.com/idirectep.php?e=57, United States
The Dread Pundit Bluto , http://dreadpundit.blogspot.com/, United States
Science Guardian/Global Health Review/Paradigm... , http://www.scienceguardian.com/blog/, Canada
Friends of Dave , http://friendsofdave.org/,
Chandler's Watch , http://www.chandlerswatch.com/, United States
Asymmetric , http://www.nelsonguirado.com/index.php, United States
All MNN Content , http://www.mnn.com/, United States
Stereo Net Australia , http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/, Australia
British Democracy Forum , http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/, United Kingdom
Lonestartimes.com , http://lonestartimes.com/, United States
Climate Today , http://rankexploits.com/news/, United States
Right Soup , http://rightsoup.com/, United States
Democracy Now! , http://www.democracynow.org/, United States
Israpundit , http://www.israpundit.com/2008/, United States
Amateur Economist , http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/, United States
Switchboard, from NRDC Dan Lashof's Blog , http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dlashof/, United States
GupShup Forums , http://www.paklinks.com/gs/, Pakistan
EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty , http://econlog.econlib.org/, United States
Pete’sPlace , http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/, India
KnowledgeOman.com , http://knowledgeoman.com/forums/, Oman
Flopping Aces , http://www.floppingaces.net/, United States
Signs of the Times , http://www.sott.net/, United States
Bishop Hill , http://bishophill.squarespace.com/, United States
Moonbattery , http://www.moonbattery.com/, United States
Next Big Future , http://nextbigfuture.com/, United States
Trackpads Community , http://www.trackpads.com/forum/,
University of Salford - News , http://www.salford.ac.uk/news/, United Kingdom
antimisandry.com , http://antimisandry.com/, United States
Letters , http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/contemp..., Australia
Andrew Bolt , http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php, Australia
Care2 News Network , http://www.care2.com/news/, United States
The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG , http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/, United States
Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog , http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/antitrustprof_blog/, United States
ScienceBlogs Select , http://scienceblogs.com/, United States
Investing to Wealth , http://blog.macroaxis.com/, United States
Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office > News , http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/news/, United Kingdom
TechNewsWorld , http://www.technewsworld.com/, United States
The Oil Drum - Discussions about Energy... , http://www.theoildrum.com/frontpage, United States
Theodore's World , http://theodoresworld.net/, United States RealClimate , http://www.realclimate.org/, United States
Current Green Blog , http://blogs.current.com/green/, United States
Politics articles at Blogcritics , http://blogcritics.org/politics/, United States
Irish Blogs , http://www.irishblogs.ie/, Ireland
Technology, Science, Entertainment, and... , http://www.tgdaily.com/, United States


Its nice to know if you are managing a PR crisis that this sort of capability is readily available.

Who and how is reporting on the University of East Anglia

A really quick way of finding the most authoritative sources talking about a subject is to use a semantic site search.

For The University of East Anglia, it may be helpful to know which are the most authoritative sources

I have not yet got the widget to work but this link will take you to the site.

Media interest in the University of East Anglia

The University of East Anglia has appointed distinguished Scottish civil servant and former principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, Sir Muir Russell, to head an independent review into the email allegations concerning the scepticism of the human effects on climate change.

For the university, this storm has created a global buzz about the University.

It might not want it, but here is how far the story is news




You too can make media maps like this here.

Fun huh!

The Practitioners' Rough Deal

An excellent post by Stephen Waddington, prompted me to to resond to some of the comments it evoked.

The original post is here and I have extended the arguments below.

The initial comments was:

The challenge of identifying the authority of a blog was raised yesterday at econsultancy’s Online PR roundtable.

Technorati recently changed its blog authority ranking to reflect the real time potency of a blog rather than influence over time. Consequently only very high profile blogs are being rated.

The number of inbound links combined with Google PageRank was proposed as a solution at yesterday’s roundtable.

And then there are a lot of differnet methodologies.

My response was:

Typical of the PR industry, come up with black art reaction and ignore the research - soooo professional. The research work presented by Bruno Amaral this July (bledcom.com) is based on blog discourse. It shows the proof of concept in analysis of (blog) discourse for the creation and development of relationships (oh, and for those who want to know buying and selling is part of a relationship for lots of people as well). What, it seems, this debate might be about is the extent to which there are common tokens identified and expressed with mutual understanding as to the values that are attributed to them by actors which will ensure relationships are created, re-enforced and extended. One way of doing this is to use semantic analysis to identify commonly held and agreed values (which is what Bruno did). This may provide the same answer as a mash up of inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations, number of readers/subscribers, words published per day, number of comments etc. The one thing we do know is that one approach is definitely built of sound science and three years of solid, peer reviewed, research and the other may not be. If one was betting the survival growth and profitability of your company on the methods used, there might be a reason for choosing one methodology over another.

My principle beef is that there is a lot of good research about that the PR industry ignores. A lot of research is conducted in the universities, is converted to dry academic papers and some long and boring books that a few undergraduates and even smaller proportion of PR Masters students have to read.

The chance for a practitioner to get at this stuff is zip.

Its not as though organisations like the Chartered Institute of Public Relations or the PRCA help much - if at all. In the case of the CIPR one struggles to find the courses and conferences that are leavened with expert academic research because the institutions do not list the people and qualifications of the teachers and trainers. Of course, knowing which PR celebrities, old codgers and underemployed practitioners are engaged by the CIPR would be interesting but the web site is a bit shy about revealing this.

On the other hand, there are the academic institutions. These places, where PR academics count how fairies on pin heads communicate and undertake senility surveys of ten past it practitioners. They are stunningly secret.

Sometimes they invite the world into their cloisters and sometimes they are seen at conferences wearing their habits.

I was a bit surprised to discover that universities with PR degrees are staggered that the PR industry needs social media expertise from students emerging into the sunshine of modern practice. This reeks of academia polishing the ivory towers.

PR academics NEVER criticise practice or practitioners. As the financial industry went into melt down not a single PR academic suggested even meekly, that banks like other institutions needed to manage relationships if they were going to lend to each other (and customers?). Not much good at grasping the hour these PR academics.

Here they are without an argument to put about really great measures of successful PR such as ... well we all know how much Advertising Value Equivalents are used.

I really do want to see the survey of top 1000 company CEO's who use the measure, rely on it, base the future of their companies and careers on such a profound measure of ...... ummmmm.....

I know of a university with a PR course that has a PR office that uses Ave's. Where is the PR equivelent of:

Three more scientists have resigned from the UK drug advisory body after the home secretary sacked of its chief advisor, Professor David Nutt, for disagreeing with government policy on marijuana.

So am I really surprised about the comments of Stephen's blog. No.

Am I amazed at the PR institutions and academics lack of spirit in pouring scorn on iffy methodologies. No.

But I believe that practitioners deserve more.

A New Monitoring Tool - Real Time

Greg Cohn is the Director Strategy & Business Development at Yahoo! Today, he is making a big thing about Real Time Web and I am delighted.

The reason I am thrilled is that a company I am associated with, Klea Global, has launched a Real Time Monitoring service called NextMention. The basic service is free... as you would expect and a raft of commercial services are due out soon.

What is does is simple. It monitors everything. News, Blogs, Twitter, social networks, web sites, Google's Sidewiki and lots more and if your organisation or issue is mentioned it alerts you. The alert can be by instant messenger or email and for paid for services by SMS, Skype and lots of other communications channels and platforms.

For PR, monitoring clients 360 degrees of internet content is a big deal. You will be surprised at how much there is.

CIPR has a £700k hole

PR Week reveals today that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a financial problem of £700,000.


Its hard to believe. In the name of transparency the Institute had no media statement on its website at time of writing. Its CIPR in the news page made no mention either.

But, we are told by PRW that:

The executive board met last week and agreed a programme of immediate cost savings, along with a three-year strategy that focuses on the needs of the CIPR membership and the profession.

‘Our cash flow position remains positive, and we are committed to turn round the finances in the next year,' said CIPR President Kevin Taylor.

‘We believe our new base at Russell Square, with its improved training, conference and office facilities, will help in that turnaround. Services to our members will remain our priority.'

This is no time for long term members like me to rock the boat but we can make constructive criticisms that may help the Institute develop a three year strategy that is more in keeping with the needs of the public relations profession than has been evident in recent years.

Ethics, modern communication education, dramatically enhanced and modern management theory are desperately needed as bedrock career skills.

But, above all, there is a need for a complete overhaul of PR education and research.

These are changing times.

The Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for non geeks the Real Time Web has become fashionable. It's fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance, a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November noting that

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

Code named Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service that will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media.

Very few services are real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services. Topsy (http://topsy.com) is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month. Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/) offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results.

Meantime, People like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the Real Time Web..

Modern Day PR Monitoring and Evaluation

Practitioners have monitored the environment affecting their clients forever. It’s what we do. Today we have more to monitor and we have to do it faster.

Most know how much of a challenge monitoring this is. Most have their ‘Google Alerts’, their blog and Twitter monitors and the daily updates from Linkedin groups. These are augmented with online media (web based publications) and media online (print publications with online content) and subscriptions to all manner of news services to supplement the daily John Humphreys pre-breakfast fest, newspaper, magazine, radio, TV and press clips.

The internet stream of consciousness seems endlessly oppressive because the practitioner needs to follow all the conversations while the users only follow one or two. It is, all too often, unmanageable and is, mostly, not very comprehensive.

Even with Tweetdeck and Feedreader going full blast, professional communication and relationship advisors are blithely ignorant of all but a fraction of web pages that mention their clients. Does, for example, PR Week see all of the citations that are published about it online at the rate of one every 90 seconds 24/7?

The truth is that after the news, blog, twitter, social networks and discussion list citations, the string of website references, comment in new channels and machine generated content is mostly factors larger. The client’s online web cloud grows every day. It is a competitive asset and creates a footprint for all to follow and affects the algorithms of search engines that make organisations searchable and famous. Klea Labs which is a new interest of mine has interesting capabilities such as its Web to IM service which provides real time monitoring of 'everything'.

For most organisations, more than half of online content appearing each day online is not monitored, measured or evaluated. In addition in an era of Real Time web, Twitter, is the nearest most organisations get to following the movers and shakers of internet reputation in real time.

Too much Too much, I can hear a whole profession cry. Yes, we do have to bring order to all this stuff and this is where there can be a happy marriage between PR and technology. All the content can be sorted into the different generics such that your Facebook content is not confused with your tweets.

Even when some practitioners get this information, is it enough in a digital age?

Far from it. In fact such a view of client publics would probably be misleading. The impression would be, as Colin Farrington once described it “ill-informed, rambling descriptions of the tedious details of life or half-baked comments on political, sporting or professional issues. They read like a mixture of the ramblings of the eponymous Pub Landlord and the first draft of a second rate newspaper column.”

But this is to take and overview of all the conversations of all the Pub Landlords and all columnists. Out of context they do seem banal. But once you are immersed in the community where these comments are made, they make sense and are about real people and the issues in their lives.

This means that monitoring is only part of the story. The content we read needs to be evaluated and evaluated in context.

As long ago as 2007, Read Write Web was discussing the importance of semantics to Google. It is semantics that allows us to make sense of content in context. For ten years I have been involved in semantic developments which provided the technology behind the relationship management research presented at the Bledcom PR conference this year. In PR, semantic analysis is a boon. It provides ways in which computers can mimic human needs. It is not able to completely second guess human understanding but it takes a lot of the hard work out of gaining actionable insights.

We have now come a long way from monitoring online content using tools like Google Alerts and RSS feeds to monitoring all web content in near real time then evaluating for actionable insights in context.

In 1995 it was quite hard to speak to a public relations audience to get understanding that the internet was going to change PR practice. Not many in the industry waited with bated breath for the findings of the CIPR/PRCA internet Commission in 2000. Few practitioners believed the world wide web was more than a fad. Only a minority agreed these developments would change our profession forever. Fourteen years and three online PR books later it still remains challenging.

Asking readers of PRWeek to move to a point where you can begin to believe that technologies will mediate in PR practice is a big ask but that is where I believe we are going.

Handling online issues - PRW keeps running scared

Next week PRW will publish the results of a poll of digital PR people's response to its question: • How would you have advised Neal’s Yard to act when it was faced with a barrage of negative blogger comment on the Guardian’s You Ask They Answer section?

The Neal’s Yard issue highlights how important it is for the PR professional institutions to have modern and relevant training in place for members. After all, it’s their members who should have advised the client in this case and the methods for management have been published by these institutions for years.

‘Managing Your Reputation in Cyberspace’ was quite specific about what practitioners needed to consider to both prevent and manage issues arise like the one facing Neal’s Yard. It was published in 1998. Of recent years PRW has returned to the issue of online risk management and is a complete pussy cat about it. It is time that someone broke ranks and pointed fingers. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR COMPANIES TO GET CAUGHT OUT ON LINE. EXCEPT, OF COURSE PRW IS NOT CALLING CIPR & PRCA AND THE TEACHING UNIVERSITIES TO ACCOUNT for not teaching this subject.

There is every reason that shareholders should sack CEO's that get caught out because they can't employ responsible and capable PR managers who will prevent the company being wrecked by bad mouthing online. Perhaps this is also a subject PRW could return to but it is not really a campaigning publication is it.


Ten years ago, the joint CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission, even explained the motives and methodologies that affect reputation online and Alison Clark even provided a neat diagram which I published in both editions of the CIPR in practice book ‘Online Public Relations’ published by Kogan Page.


If, in ten years, the PR industry magazine is not in a position to point the finger at the CEO of Neal's Yard, it is pretty pathetic.

The public relations sector that knows about these things is not going to be surprised or fazed by these kinds of event.

So, we will not be amazed to see the calm, considered, detailed, factual and comprehensive explication of the products and services offered by the company which be available on their site and an exemplar to all. We will not be taken aback by engagement of online ambassadors or an increase in online activity. Most companies that are well advised get their defense in first.

I admire the way Tesco deals with potential issues. Its corporate site deals with criticism before the event openly and online. It is very hard to criticize a company when the online community tells why a criticism is invalid.

The Next Big Thing Online

PRWeek is going to run a digital supplement next week. They will ask a number of experts what the next big thing will be.
This is my view:

PR is part of the Next Big Internet Thing and evolution characterised as the internet extending beyond the PC and laptop and emerging in eBooks, web enabled cell phones, touch-screen panels at bus stops, RDIF powered interactive messaging and computer games consoles.

The other part of this revolution are the communications channels optimised for social interaction. These are the online place of the brand recommender, critic and conversationalist. Where once stood Usenet, Instant messaging, Blogs, Facebook and Twitter, now stand the newer Real Time and information Augmented Reality channels representing forty years of online communication evolution.

There are some simple rules about what is the next big thing online. It will extent the physiology of humanity. Just as busses allow people to go faster than their legs will carry them; Google enhances the human memory, Facebook makes it easy to be better social animals and Twitter offers faster communication with communities beyond being a Town Crier, each successful development offers a human enhancing capability.

There is a whole chapter about this in the Phillips/Young book. But I guess PRW has not read it yet.

Values have value

I was interested today to see the world's 100 most valuable brands are recovering more quickly from the economic downturn than the companies listed on the S&P 500 as a whole.

One of the significant features of brands is that they are surrounded by conversations that add brand values.

For example, the top brand, Google, is talked about from many perspectives and with many values expressed.

I thought that it would be fun to see an example of value concepts from the first ten news reports about Google as presented by its news search engine today.

What we see from the mini reputation wall (below) are a diversity of concepts that form a small part of the value cloud that has accumulate to create the brand we all know as Google.

What is interesting here is that the values I ascribe to Google's brand are not the same as yours and both of us might agree that the newspapers in the test are not representing the view of the brand either of us have.

But then we are probably not desperate to know that "Google has finally admitted that mysterious doodles on their search engine masthead, which showed a UFO and strange crop circles.....", which was the Daily Mail story or "The Beatles really became bigger than Jesus when more people searched for the band than the son of God on Google over the last month...." according to the Daily Telegraph. These two articles add unusual values to the Google brand which both the Mail and the Telegraph think we might like to add to the values we already have.

We see that brands have a wide range of values and that there is an exchange rate between brand values and, for example, products purchased for cash. This means that brand values can be traded for money.

There are a number of differences as between a market and the purchase of a brand values. The most obvious is that the brand does not have to part with its values in exchange for the sale of the product. Indeed, as long as the product is satisfactory, the brands values will have enhanced value.

The big lesson we learn from all this is that brand values are not created by the brand but are created by a diverse community and that successful brands have a lot of values ascribed to them. These values, when shared help to build a common community of interest - the basic elements for social groups to form. Common and shared values form publics.

abuse blog business circles computer content cornfield court crop data docs doodle engine flying game generator god goods google hg intelligence internet invasion japanese lennon machines management market martian mobile news open phone political poor relative report samuel saucer search service source stamper subscriber technology unexplained users video web wells

created at TagCrowd.com

Tactics v Strategy

Sometimes in this hurried world you nearly miss a gem.

Brian Solis blog is worth following and I try to.

I skimmed a post this week and this sentence caught my eye:

Tactics are nothing, Strategy is everything: No talk would be complete without quoting Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before the defeat.”

It's that silly conversation that comes my way all to often:

"The client wants.....

'A viral....

'A Facebook ....

'A blog ....

'In Twitter....

Absolutely NO! NEVER! EVER!

The client must have Strategy.

Thank you Brian and your guest contributor Dr. Mark Drapeau.

Sarah Hartley at the Guardian - how to write for the web

Sarah Hartley, digital editor at the Guardian revealed all to Journalism.co.uk. There are not many suprises here and it all sounds like wrting for most other media.

Her comments on Search Engine Optimisation are valuable:

"SEO is as much about how you present the words as the words themselves. Make sure the reporter hasn't saved important information until the end of the story - tell your reader everything in the first paragraph. Yes, you are 'ruining' the surprise, but that's exactly what you want to do."

As semantics become more critical in serach, this is great advice.

Both Google and Bing are fed up with SEO gaming and are relying more on semantics for presenting content.

Here is what Bing's Mark Johnson has to say about it:

If you want to see the semantic concepts on a web page, you can play with one of Girish's tools by just adding a url to the box here and it will show them

The year of Mobile PR

E-consultancy has an interesting post this week.

It said:

The mobile market is expected to explode in the coming years thanks to the popularity of smartphones. But for the market to really take off, retailers need to get comfortable selling their wares in the space.

I think that there are lessons here for PR too.

The ability to distribute content (words, images, widgets, game etc) using mobile devices is quite critical and this is the year when we will need to get really competent at doing it.

We have perhaps until the New Year to join the early adopters and after that its going to be a common PR activity.

A number of staws in the wind suggest that time is not on our side.

There are other people talking about Mobile.

ReadWriteWeb commented this week too.

It is bullish except for Mobile Commerce, where it follows US data.

One has to remember that, compared to Europe, the US is a relative newcomer to commercial applications for mobile.

Buying Beer in Estonia or paying you cab fare with your mobile is commonplace. Try it in New York!

How Google selects news

Every media student should know how Google gets and selects the news it distributes.

This is not just for the publishers but for PR people. If you want your story to really caatch hold, it need the promotion power of Google News.

This video helps a lot

This Guardian articlee is very useful too.

Why would Google release this information now? Would it be to do with the moves by lots of publishers to charge for online content?

Public Relations - define

For one minute, I would like all those people who do not believe that PR is about relationship management to suspend belief.

For some time I have been thinking about the role of the practitioner in a bank.

It re-defines Public Relations.

I suppose the role of the PR Manager (Public Affairs Chief, Top wogga with some similar title but responsible for PR, CSR, IR, and other acronyms that really mean Public Relations) is now forever changed.

This person really only has one role.

It is to be able to assure the executive, main Board and the regulators (all organisations bend a knee to one or more regulator)that the relationship in any proposed or actual transaction between actors who can affect the long term productivity of the organisation, is robust enough to survive the transaction.

It is really quite simple.

It is probably too rich for CIPR, PRCA and other such organisations.

It will be usurped by Charles Handy and the management guruship.

It is as good for all types of PR from press relations to so called social media relations and sponsorship of the local soccer club.

I just do not know why it has taken me so long to get it!

Productivity comes to marketing

Addressing a meeting of the Public Relations Consultant's Association this morning, Peter Cochrane ducked the question of how the internet changes economics as we know it.

I thought it might be time to re-visit this difficult area of of forward thinking.

Of course, I am not pretending to be able to out-think Yochai Benkler or a host of other experts, authors and thinkers.

I just want to pause for a second to consider productivity.

The concepts of productivity espoused by Hansen & Prescott suggesting that automation is the prefer ed or dominant method for enhanced productivity is misleading. Automation and the deployment of technologies does tend to presage changes in employment and in wealth creation and distribution for a larger majority.

While no one would recommend the slums of London in the time of Dickens, the population was expanding and, horrid though these places were, they had an appeal for the rural population who migrated to them. How hard life must have been in the countryside!

I am not completely in the camp that suggests that mankind is successful because of recent evolution. Evidence suggesting that evolutionary processes in the composition of existing genetic traits may be rather rapid and the time between the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that lasted some 10,000 years is sufficient for significant evolutionary changes. True, changes occurred such as lactose tolerance in Europe and the Near East; genetic immunity to to malaria provided by the sickle cell trait among descendants of agrarian African tribes and so forth but I think that the productivity spark goes back a lot further.

Today's news of evidence that early modern humans living on the coast of the far southern tip of Africa 72,000 years ago employed pyrotechnology – the controlled use of fire – to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process tells us a lot more about our species.

Here we see examples of intellectual capital being deployed in the transformation of stone to tool.

This is manufacturing.

It also is an example of knowledge associated with technology in making mankind more efficient.

We are, as Philip and I made clear in 'Online Public Relations' (Kogan Page) extending the capability of our physiology.

Today we can travel much faster than our legs will carry us and instead of a super memory we have Google and Wikipedia. We have used our intellect to create super-humans in the basically primitive human of 70,000 years ago.

More recently, we have added to these capabilities by offering people opportunities to contribute time, creativity and attention to goods and services.

This may only be the adding of photograph to Facebook or an erudite Blog post or even an SMS vote to Big Brother (if it still exists). It might be the development of new process shared with like minds online but its not passively watching television.

This shift from consumer to producer is big and it has a major significance for economics. A huge jump in the productivity of huge population is happening now.

This productivity is lost to most organisations.

Some gain because the productivity is part of a production process or, in marketing it is brand building and its big.

I shall return to this though in a day or so.

What our web sites say about us

Over the weekend, Brono Amaral have been showing off some of our latest research into network effects for PR management at the Bledcom conference.

It has been fun.

One of the things we have comparing is the difference between word counts about web sites and the semantic (important concepts) in a web site.

To show what I mean the next two extracts are a word count and a concept count of what I have said about research and evaluation on this blog.

This is a word count:

able advertising applications ave blog comments company content conversation david editorial ethics evaluation google identify internet labels links management measure media news number obama online organisation pages people per phillips pm post pr practice public relations relationship research results search semantic significant site social twitter value view web work yahoo

created at TagCrowd.com

and this is the semantic view:

conversations deadlines dimension edited evaluation geography journalists label media morals morphs newsletter opinion page philip platforms posts pr priorities professionals public relations research showing tools version young

created at TagCrowd.com

The difference is huge.

The word count shows words that are common in the discourse while the semantic view is about meaning and the drivers of my posts.

Of course, there is a role for both forms of analysis but by far an away the most informative is the semantic analysis.

In bigger corpora my experience is that word counts become ever less helpful and semantic analysis offers real insights.

At Blecom, Bruno and I showed this form of analysis as a proof of concept for some pretty big networks (in real time too) and the results were very interesting.

Crisis? Prevention is better than cure

A huge amount of time is devoted to managing issues and crisis and their Public Relations impacts. Crisis is a huge waste of time and the costs are astronomic.

Today, the internet is making reputation risk management a much more significant area in need of attention. It is an area of practice that is developing fast.

Managing reputation risk is neither hard nor rocket science (but rocketeers do use risk management techniques). One issue avoided has two immediate benefits. It saves cost and expensive management time and it helps sustain reputation, goodwill and brand equity. Not a bad return for a few hours work.

This is not something to give to a fresher PR executive. It is a job for senior mangers and is at its best when undertaken with a professional external advisor (and I know a few who are good at it).

In past posts, I have covered the management discipline of risk management here and here.
There is a chapter in 'Online Public Relations' about it.

The methodology I have adopted comes straight out of the risk management models use in many other industries.

What I have not done is to provide a copy of a simple spreadsheet that can be used in risk management assessment and am happy to provide it to anyone who asks.

Essentially, a focus group convened to look at risk is invited to come up with thoughts about risks that may befall an organisation in a number of categories (see below). The process evaluates percived risk to help prioretise the deployment of budget and resources.

Each percived risk is assessed for likelihood and impact typically on a scale of 1 to 5. The result is multiplied and provides a risk factor. The higher the factor, the more likely the risk.

The PR team then come up with methods for mitigating the risk and then the focus group re-assess the risk to see how much risks can be mitigated and where the greatest effort (and risk avoidance budget) goes.

Of course who should do what, when and how to mitigate risk is integral to all risk management and it is helpful to have good data to support investment and activity.

Reputation, and importantly online reputation can and should be managed.

The types of risk that might be considered by a practitioner concerned with blogs, Twitter, discussion boards and all that stuff out there and online that is just about to come as a surprise:


Legislative change
local
regional
national
European
Global
law
regulation
Corporate change of direction
Change in requirement
Change in objectives
Change of output, outtake, outcome requirement
Change in publics/stakeholders
Added publics
Removed publics
Publics change
Implementation impact
Technology change
Content not available
New/changed opportunity
Unexpected change in team
Managment team
Technical team
Operations team
Competitor action
Merger/acquisition,
Competitors me-too actions
Management Directive
Budget
Delivery schedule
monitor, measurement, evaluation requirement
other
Corporate re-organisation
At board level
Departmental re-organisation
Merger/acquisition
Problem not anticipated
Reputation/ethical issue
Corporate, brand, personnel crisis
Server down/overload
System attack/bug
Change in available resources
Budget
Vendor availability