For good financial reasons, who will get stuck in for the sake of future PR

It is the time of predictions and finding out how good we were last year. Most predictions are not much more than fun but there is good reason for more serious analysis of trends that lead to effective insights.

It is these insights, when they are accurate,  that provide the basis for confidence and investment in the future of organisations, and economic sectors.

I am not shy about forward predictions and the brickbats that come when I get it wrong. Equally, I get very frustrated by peers whose view of the future is too short term, narrow or based on ill considered facts.

Being critical of the PR industry's lack of performance over the last 15 years is not based on 20:20 hindsight but on a combination of professional institutions, academic and industry failure to appreciate predictions made, for example, 15 years ago and empirical often self/shoe-string funded research (like this) which demonstrate modern capabilities that can allow the PR industry to fulfil predictable potential. 

The key here is in knowing how good we are at predicting the potential. I had a go at looking ahead 20 years in 1995 and here is my, verbatim, contribution:

‘The new media will enfranchise the individual with more one-to-one, one to many and many to many communication which will be easy by personal ‘phones, E-mail and video conferencing.

'Person-to-person-to-machine and database communication will be more important, electronically managed and more global. Increasingly this broth threatens brands and corporate reputation and needs professionalism to immunise (our organisations) or doctor the effects of the brew.

‘In its most perfect form, reputation management sustains relationships with publics in a state of equilibrium during both evolution and in crisis. This enhances corporate goodwill (a tradable asset).

‘The big change is that many-to-many global communication brings with it loss of ‘ownership’ of language, culture and knowledge and that there is a breakdown in intellectual property rights, copyright and much plagiarism. This is already a major problem.

‘News now travels further and faster and is mixed with history, fantasy and technology. Reputation in crisis is even more vulnerable. At a growing rate, the new media uses reputation as ‘merchandise’, stripped from the foundations which created it, then traded for pieces of silver - and at a discount’. ...

(David Phillips CIPR symposium in 1995)

A decade ago, some contributors dealt with what seem to be modern issues such as crisis management mediated by social media. Here is Alison Clark's 2001 contribution:

Corporate reputation managers need to put new systems in place to permit timely and appropriate response to the increased level of comment on significant issues that the Internet enables. Collecting the commentary is a preliminary step only. Most of public commentary is on the World Wide Web or in usenet. The originator?s choice of medium is revealing of their objectives and motivations. The management response may be pre-emptive or consequential, but essentially it is limited to six options, which may be supported by protocols prepared for timely response. 

Perhaps the time has come to do more research and backfill some of the old prediction with new research to show the provenance and reasons for the industry to invest in its own future.

I shall start at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011 with some new thoughts. It will be interesting to see which practitioners, consultants and universities can look beyond 'online' to identify whether Public Relations is adapting, evolving or failing.

The real question here is to seek evidence of  contributions by practitioners, consultants and universities. 

Is it Dell, Robert Phillips, or a university leading the charge? Will they provide insights to guide this under performing industry.

Four strategies for social media campaigning

Setting online objectives is as traditional as beef and Yorkshire pudding. Online, objective setting remains the starting point of all activity. It is good management practice and objective setting is as basic as being specific, measurable, achievable, resourced and time bound.

But we seldom see what the next step is before approaching the tactics we need to deploy.

Strategies are important and we don't very often see examples.

I thought I might share some that I have found useful in some of the approaches to client social media management.

In future posts, I will add to this list but this is a start and if you have strategies you would like to add, that will be good too.

It is not reasonable to imagine that a generic post such as this one will cover all exigencies. Each organisation is different but to give a flavour of the strategies that might well be put in place by an organisation, a number are outlines below. Some are useful for meeting most objectives others fill basic needs of good corporate governance while yet others are drawn from experience and have more specific application.

Communication planning, says Anne Gregory in her book ‘should include both systematic and creative elements. Both are essential to information interactive communication work’.

With such a wide range of communications channels the selection of media has a lot to do with the reception of an organisation's stance. Ensuring that the relevant messages chime with the most suitable media is important.

The ‘internet has made interpersonal and mass communication instantaneous’ and care needs to be taken when engaging the organisation's values with stakeholders'. Once interactions are public in the online landscape it will is impossible to retrieve or erase them completely.

For this reason, it is important to have a number of strategies in place to arm the organisation with capabilities and a range of options to meet ambitions and contingencies.


Media Selection Strategy

It is really easy to elect to use some social media because it’s fashionable and cool. Twitter and Facebook come to mind.

Some media are more appropriate to achieve objectives than others. Consideration of audience use and application is essential. For example a podcast has some appeal for the visually impaired while the use of a photo sharing service would need to be used with care.

Part of a media strategy will need to include reviewing the wide ranging landscape of communications platforms and channels. Some will be well known, others less so and many useful new channels emerge from time to time.

In considering media, it is worth looking further and at how the selection of media can interact one with another. For example, many Facebook pages include a Twitter feed. It’s not compulsory but adds interest.

In addition, consideration of time and resource are important. Facebook and Twitter require a lot of attention.

Setting up a presence and proselytising values requires constant attention. For the most part, social media presence will require a minimum of an hour per day for each channel and in some cases, much longer.

In essence, using one of these channels, once created, will require content and, in time, people will respond to it. They in turn often need a response as part of an online ‘conversation’.

Once channels have been decided upon as a strategic decision, the tactics can be thrashed uot and will be informed by a number of other strategic approaches.


The key elements of a media strategy are:

• Knowledge of the audience
• A review of the range of relevant and practical platforms (PC’s, laptops, mobile phones, slates etc)
• Interest in the many channels such as Blogs, Facebook, Wiki’s Twitter and many other services.
• Media interactivity
• Time and resource needed to maintain the channel/s
• Capability to maintain a ‘conversation’

Timed and timely programme strategies

Used correctly, social media programmes are a great way of bringing awareness and attention to initiatives, events or projects.

Unlike traditional media communication, the advent of social media has changed the nature of timing communication.

Once, an organisation might issue a press release or press briefing which in due course would be published.

Once read, the resulting article would be discarded with the paper or magazine. Today, that same story would probably be published online, might attract online comments and or may be references in a blog, social network or microblog immediately or at any time in the future. The life of a story is now potentially much extended. Stories from long ago can quite suddenly reappear. The internet ‘time shifts’ content. Not just content from a newspaper but all online content.

In addition, as most social media programmes use more than one channel for communication, the timing for issuing content or responding to content may have to be co-ordinated such that all audiences see it at the same time or, depending on the campaign, at different times.

The key thing is that the activity has a timeline and is planned to meet the key objectives. The strategy should outline the timescales and activities to achieve the level of interaction to meet the objectives.

Then there is the opportunity to develop a story over time. The plan may be to develop a story over time and to engage a community progressively as the story develops. There is no reason why, using social media, an organisation might not involve its constituencies in the development of an initiative, story line or announcement. The online community will then be involved and will act as ambassadors right from inception.

Timing strategies have two other dimensions.

One is time of year and seasonality. Most organisations have a time of year when they are at their most effective. In addition, there are times when competition is at a peak. For example during October and November the BBC charity event ‘Children in Need’ provides both focus and overwhelming competition for a host of charities involved in child based charities. In the chill of a British winter, there are good reasons to promote holidays selling family holidays in the early Autumn is not a great idea.

• Timing strategies have to be created to deliver objectives on time.
• Timing will take account of the range of modern multimedia communication.
• Timing can be aimed at a single time/event or can be an evolving number of activities with goal posts.
• Time of year and competitive activity will affect strategy and has to be considered.

Internal communication strategy

Even with small teams the need for effective, timely and transparent communication is important. As the internet forces organisations to interact with an undoubted and existing online presence, internal audiences can and are affected. It is better that any online communication is both available and well under stood by employees and other stakeholders.

The strategy covering internet usage in the organisation should cover the explicit policy for employees and volunteers which should carry the full weight of the dominant coalition.

Most people are more productive when they can access the internet. As a rule, people access the internet using work computers, home computers and mobile phones. The device in the pocket or purse has now removed the ability for organisations to build communication walls round internet access at work and so the implications have to be managed.

This means that there is a need for employment to know about and policies to cater for the new online environment.

At the same time this also affects the management and other internal stakeholders.  This would suggest that a strategic decision on whether internet access policies and expected behaviours should be made internally or publically online.

Such policy statements about attribution, confidentially, respect for the law, notably copyright and much more can be considered as part of online strategy.

In brief, internal strategies need to consider organisations’ access policies, what access and behavioural policies shall be made available internally and externally and how people can be expected to represent the organisation and behave online in the interest of the organisation.

The Importance of Auditing, Monitoring Measurement and Evaluation strategies

Monitoring online presence is important. Much of what is written about or represented in images and videos online is provided by third parties.

As part of setting objectives there will be a need to audit presence and there are a number of ways this can be done. Many such tools are made available here.

In addition, watching how many visitors there are to the charity’s web site, how long they dwell, numbers of pages seen and from where they depart is very useful to identify what activities have prompted people to take an interest in the organisation and what interests them (or puts them off) may help in development of a more effective web site presence. Fortunately the service is free and is provided by Google Analytics.

There are a number of free facilities that will be found to be very effective. Google Alerts .

Online issues and crisis management strategies

Many organisations have a problem with getting involved with a form of communication over which there is little control and which, for some, seems to have so little by way of measurable benefit.

The issues are simple management judgements about resources and effects and the potential for crisis seem to be self evident. Most of the heat in such arguments are based on prejudice, ignorance as to the capability to manage online issues or sheer funk.

Even today, many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management. The PR practitioner can allay such fears and to a huge extent remove risk

Much of internet activity does not follow the usual linear models for management. The sequence of events can be disrupted by the online community. So too can many, if not most, management activities. Online PR is no different to managing any other organisational function.


The solution to mitigating risk is to adopt practices from other disciplines in which “management of the unknown” is common. Some of the greatest benefits to modern living have become possible because we know how to manage where there is uncertainty. Examples of how organisations have developed risk management strategies range for the UK Health and Safety Executive to Stephen Ward's studies at Southampton University.


Risk and opportunity

Organisations can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques well established in other disciplines .

One thing we know is that risk and opportunities changes are dependent on complexity. If a programme is very complicated there is more to go wrong and online PR, with its range of platforms, channels and contexts, is quite complicated. But as we also know the opportunities for considerable incremental success is greater.




Fig 1. The relationships between complexity, criticality size and complexity

In most online interactions there are risks and opportunities. To manage them we need to identify them. This can be done by an individual, a focus group or management team or can be established from research. It’s a great opportunity for a brain storm with someone making notes!

In preparing a strategy for an online programme it is worth looking at where there may be influences that can affect it. In online interactions it is possible to second guess many, if not most, of the potential risks.

It is also possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.

An example might be that confidential information could leak out of the organisation and into the public domain because an employee has a blog or other social media presence. The risk evaluation team can come to a conclusion as to the probability and and impact and in doing so can list risks and the extent to which they are probable and or would have a significant organisational impact.

Having described risks and potential for effects, the organisation's PR evaluation team will asses each element in terms of likelihood of occurrence and impact. It helps put the risk or opportunity into perspective.

This is a technique used by many corporate and public sector organisations. It is the kind of matrix that might be used to assess risk for a PR campaign, school outing and is also used in project management.



Assessing the impact of events which can be estimated before any action is taken (now) and again after mitigating policies are proposed by the team, it will be possible to see if the potential if the risk is lowered (and acceptable) prior to implementation or exposure.

The process for mitigating risk is to create a mitigation (or contingency) plan, process or protocol to reduce either of both risk of likelihood or impact.

For example, to reduce the effect of an employee saying something our of turn in social media, a simple policy statement by the organisation distributed to all employees and a disclaimer by the organisation about personal views and opinions of the organisation's web site will reduce risk and often to an acceptable level.

Once a mitigation plan has been worked out, a new assessment is made of the likelihood or impact to see if the proposed actions for mitigation has had an effect that makes the risk acceptable.



These methodologies can be used in making all manner of decisions including the extent to which the internet should be made available during working hours (knowing that most people have access on their cell phones anyway). This structured approach helps inform such decisions.

Using such a process through each part of the planning process reduces risk to a manageable level and also helps to make precise projections of expected outcomes.

Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.





Of course, for each risk there is an opportunity. By applying the same technique but looking for opportunities and means to optimise such opportunities, the organisation can enhance the effectiveness of any approach to a campaign.

It is all too easy to imagine events in stark black and white answers. This is seldom the only solution and, as a result practitioners can work on contingency planning

There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.



Disaster seldom comes unannounced for most organisations. There tend to be number indicators that presage the public event.

The key is to be able to identify the stages as they present themselves. They are:

Variation

All plans have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning (see above).

Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. Often such occurrences are small. These are 'variations' to the plan.

Good monitoring will give teams notice that remedial action can take place and contingency built into the plan will calmly eliminate the risk and opportunity for escalation into crisis An example might be a contingency sum in a budget and some flexibility in campaign delivery time built into the PR plan.

Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the PR team cannot be sure will occur or when an under known circumstances it will occur.

 To mitigate foreseen uncertainties, the plan will need to include the capability to identify the event and a capability to deploy a pre-planned contingency programme.

An example (and not uncommon event)  might be unscheduled maintenance of a computer that is running the campaign blog. One big issue is website uptime (especially if a campaign is very successful) with issues such as a slowing of response times of the organisation's web site or, disaster of all disasters, the web site being so overwhelmed that it stops responding (in retail, this is the equivalent of the organisation's biggest shop being closed).

When a web site goes down, it is a PR problem. It is not an IT department problem. Risk analysis is critical in identifying and mitigating these events. Practicing for such events has to be included in any plan. Who does what, when and how and if they are not available or facilities are down who else should be included as part of such a plan.

Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B.

The team will be unaware of the event’s possibility or will consider it so unlikely that there is no in-built contingency plan. To be able to manage such events a comprehensive monitoring and alerting process is critical. Allis not lost, it is possible to have contingent plans in place to ensure that the right information (e.g. Information about internal manages and key issues management personnel, lists of journalists, bloggers, Twitter friends etc) is available and accessible (good idea to have it in the cloud so that it can be accessed in even the most dire circumstances) . There is a need to have alternative managers available if key figures are not available and of course many facilities can be put in place from 'dark' web sites to off site facilities to work from.

Unknown unknowns

Sometimes refered to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always caused by spectacular events or issues. They can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events, each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. The best management practice here is attention to detail and constant re-evaluation of the crisis and issues plan and its application.

Managing risk and online crisis is not very difficult. The hard bit is gaining commitment and resources to mitigate risk and plan for issues and crisis management.

There is also this very helpful process developed by Alison Clark for the joint CIPR/PRCA internet commission in 1999. The PR industry has had so many tools to help manage issues and crisis management for such a long time. Well done CIPR and PRCA!




In Brief:

• Many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management.
• The sequence of events of online programmes can be easily disrupted by the online community.
• Plans can allow organisations to grasp opportunities and manage threats with tools that can be deployed at short notice.
• The practitioner can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques.
• Online PR, with its range of platforms channels and contexts, is quite complex. But the opportunities for considerable incremental success are greater.
• Risks can be identified and conform to a number of recognised variables.
• It is possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.
• Development of plans to mitigate risk before implementation will reduce threat.
• Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.
• There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.
• Planning for programme variation, foreseeable uncertainties, unforeseen uncertainty and the unknown is possible and practical.

The strategic decision that can be made will cover the extent to which issues contingency planning will be part of the online activity.

The time and resource that will be devoted to issues and crisis management.
Who will be involved in issues and crisis management and that structured methodologies will be a applied.

Finally the strategy might consider how the organisation will practice contingency planning.

This post is relies extensively on the chapter on risk and issues management in the PR in Practice series of books, Online Public Relations a CIPR practice manual. Practitioners may also find Michael Register's book in the same series very informative.

Now we have another (practical) form of communication

Microsoft launched Kinect this week. It represents a new, practical and already available form of communication. It is part of what I have described as the Experiential Web.

Forget cave paintings, scrolls, books, letters, newspapers, telegraph, radio, phones television, the web and social media. They all require a mechanical interface. Now communication is possible just through movement.

Adopted and used by the PR industry, it can help the industry begin to achieve its full potential in this technology led era and should add a new and additional revenues stream.

I imagine that in two years there will be in excess of £250 million worth of PR fees connected with this single product alone and that it will grow the industry and significantly. I am not so sure that this will be the PR industry as we know it but it will definitely be PR and the first Kinect trained PR students will emerge into the market within a year.

Kinect's capability and application has a role in communicating with almost every organisational constituency.

No overalls, gloves, wands just a person going about daily activities can be involved in this form of communication.

How this is achieved has been talked about a lot already and it requires only a tiny imagination to see applications in almost every form of PR activity.

Mostly, Kinect is aimed at games and rather standard communication like conference calling but that need not deter the PR practitioner.

Just by having a constituent move in front of a sensor, the practitioner can now deliver a message, interact in real or virtual way and can engage directly. With its face recognition Kinect can deliver messages to people  based on no more than a photographic image (offering a whole new dimension for direct interaction with attendees at the corporate AGM, launch, political rally, press conference not to mention the retail outlet, sporting event etc).

To do all this the practitioner may want to partner with games developers like Scott Henson, at Rare who says:

You saw our big bold vision for Kinect when we rolled it out last year and now we’re going to enable that. It’s amazing to me how much we’re going to deliver to consumers at launch but we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do....

Kinect is not a game it is a new form of communication.

In response to Tom Watson

Dear Tom. It is very kind of you to comment in such detail and to explicate the work of Bournemouth University in such detail.

I am concerned that you or anyone can imagine that I could possibly wish to imply that any PR academic or tutor is somehow cheating students and agree that such a view would be offensive. I do know how hard they work, their dedication to students and some of the absurdities they have to put up with.

I recall attempting to up-date a module about internet mediated PR and finding (I was told) that there was neither budget (time) nor sufficient flexibility in the system to make this possible in the year when Twitter burst upon us with all its potential for speed of communication and news gathering. The university in question could not provide any time for research, preparation or course development over and above direct teaching hours.

Of course one still finds this is the case in other courses demanding utilitarian approaches to education.

My original post came from a comment I made on Stephen Waddington's blog in which I expressed amazement "that the CIPR could not even refer to its own publications and the work of Gregory, Theaker, Tench and Yeomans and others".  I might have added Watson & Noble and Malony etc all of whose work is evident (truncated and sanitised) in the document.

I am aware of the time it takes to develop such theory to guide practice which is a million miles away from the 'shoot from the hip' methodologies propounded by oh so many people offering ill considered quick fire answers to real issues.

The CIPR Toolkit borrowed extensively from such research which in now inculcated into much practice and the Toolkit and yet failed to recognise the contribution made by academia.

I have no doubt that teaching budgets are tight. That is exactly my point. This narrow view of PR is in stark contrast to other courses and I am sure you are more aware than I of this short sightedness.

As you may have noted from other posts in this blog, my view is that the PR industry is firing well below its potential for want of vision (and consequentially is  performing at less than a fifth of its true potential). 

I agree that, for a majority of students, the year placement is a very valuable experience and great preparation for industry as well as that crucial final year transition from learning to thinking.

As for the level of research, while applauding the work of BU, and I do within the constraints imposed, you must agree that PR research in the UK is pretty small beer. For an industry sector that had  (in 1995) and has today and will again have in the next evolution of communication,  the potential to contribute as much or more than the financial sector to the UK economy we have to do much better.

Twice in the last 15 years, I have suggested a route for the industry which it has ignored to its cost (at best £100 billion, at worst £50 billion) and we now have a much greater opportunity.

Stirring the industry is hard when its sights are set so low and its opportunity to excel is not rigorously explored   (and I am in admiration for the History of Public Relations initiative which is strategically important and notably so for the UK industry).

Rigorous research into such opportunities are few and far between especially when compared to, say, the financial sector or even (am I allowed to say it), marketing (now in turmoil as a discipline), business studies (which are so good that its pupils saw a search engine more capable of automating car driving ahead of the auto industry) and publishing (which has the exemplar of the Times Group which has more difficulty gaining a market (and revenue) that a 140 character iPhone App).

Having, controversially, opened the debate I trust that it sparks some interest among many more people.

Richard I am grateful for your comment. I think you are right in saying that PR degree courses are under threat (as I well know) because they haven't necessarily reached the size or maturity of other, easier to teach, disciplines.  We now have size (more PR’s than Journalists?) but I agree about maturity, which is my point. PR academia has yet to delve into the potential and yet is not investing in the research. It is seriously cheap for the universities. Can one compare the (relative value and) cost of DNA research to knowing more about the nature of relationships (one of many PR disciplines) in this war torn and often starving world.

Duncan, I am surprised to find your comments relating so closely to the arts of Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire when your practice is promoted for rigorous research. But there is a solution. LMU used to have a skills course which taught the basic skills of PR agency. I hope you had an opportunity to employ them before the course was abandoned. 

Why does the PR industry ignore PR academics?

After a comment I made on his blog, Stephen Waddington, a candidate in the CIPR Council Elections, asked why is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? He notes that this is not the case in places such as Sweden and the US, for example?

Could it be that PR academics are wilting flowers? Is it that they follow rather than lead PR practice? Does this mean limited research that is none contentious? Is it the case that such milk and water teaching  and research reflects mostly recent (and largely American) history and is thus of so little consequence to the industry or are the reasons more profound?

Perhaps we should look inside the universities for its response. This is an era of rapidly changing platforms and channels for communication. Can the universities (and the PR industry) cope with the consequences? The hard science which explores the human brain to aid psychologist identify human drivers would seem to be beyond current teaching and hardly figures in PR courses or research. Computerised part of speech analysis which reveals semantically the values attaching to organisations and brands is becoming very advanced and yet PR academics seem to know so little about it. Access to technologies, that driver of human evolution, is changing the very nature of organisational structures and is better explored by other disciplines despite the obvious significance to PR practice. There are many other such issues facing all communications research. Have such changes pushed real PR beyond the limited wit of academia.

Maybe there is another reason. It is possible that the PR industry has been ripped off by academic administrators? The contribution undergraduate PR degree courses have made to Universities is huge. A real milch cow. Easy money. Cheap to run degree courses. Just under 200 PR students in one university contribute £600,000 from their own pockets every year. This means that diverted government contribution is funding other activities. This university is spending a fortune (£3.2 million) on teaching jobbing trades such as journalism, publishing, radio and TV.  Perhaps we await an academic who dares blow such a whistle?

Could it be that academia is truly frightened by the effort and (by historical standards very, very high) cost of the grants and sponsorship it needs to fund and execute ground breaking research for one of the key disciplines of modern management, namely Public Relations?

There could be a further conspiracy founded on the discipline taught in the universities being so threatening to the other institutions they dare not acknowledge the contribution? The PR trade association that publishes a guide that does not acknowledge its academic underpinning; the consultancy feeling more comfortable to provide safe haven for an ex FT journalist than a trained practitioner and the bank that employs a communications expert (even when provided with the evidence - PDF) is incapable of insisting that a breakdown in relationship and trust would lead to the collapse of the financial sector. These university taught practitioners are jolly dangerous folk!

Why, Stephen asked, is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? 

As part insider and part outsider, I think it is all these things and a few more. But the question still stands and perhaps, as universities re-examine their role, this is time for a proper and properly informed debate.

Why is the UK PR industry only achieving a tenth of its potential?

In the next two weeks the CIPR will elect its next president. Will the next one be able to look over the horizon or will the leadership in the PR industry continue to muddle along missing every opportunity on the way?

Poor leadership, lack of good research and timid practitioners have, and continue to, miss the big industry opportunities and, worse, re-enforce practices that may have a very limited future.

PR has to find some way out of its obsession with media relations. It is a reasonable question to ask if the PR industry is too big for the size of traditional media available. 

In the meantime, the industry turns its back on the really big opportunities.

In 1995, in response to a request to look 20 years ahead I spoke to the CIPR annual conference about the significance of the internet and suggested that the newly emerging World Wide Web offered a new and profitable communication opportunity for PR practice.

Today, the internet industry is worth £100 billion. If it were an industry in its own right, the internet would be nearly as big as the financial services sector, which accounted for 9% of GDP in 2009.

In 1999, I wrote Online Public Relations (first edition) saying that gaming as a form of communication was an important communications channel.  The economic contribution of the UK games sector is significant: in 2008, global revenues generated by UK video games were worth £2.03 billion, and contributed £1 billion to GDP.5 It is worth bearing in mind the economic contribution of the sector as an employer: the industry directly employed 10,000 people (and a further 18,000 indirectly) in 2008

In 2000, the joint CIPR/PRCA internet Commission made it clear that interactive online communication was a big opportunity for the PR industry. Ten years on, the tiny tip of revenue earnings from social media activity, advertising, was worth £2bn in the first half of 2010.

In 2006, I was blogging furiously about the content opportunities offered by mobiles.  This year the new communications platform, tablet and slate technologies, will achieve 20 million units sold while there were 346 million mobiles sold in the third quarter of 2010. These platforms are content hungry with associated App and content industries worth many millions.

There are many more examples of the PR industry failing to grasp the opportunities.

Perhaps the missed opportunity is a fraction of the above but at least half was within our grasp when the notion was first mooted. That is £52 billion and today the PR industry is, perhaps a tenth of that size and with the decline in print media, its threatened.

Why is the PR industry so reluctant to look ahead and learn enough to be part of these phenomenal opportunities for relationship building, content creation and take the centre ground?

Could it be that it is not able to bring together practitioner, consultant, futurologist and skill sets?

These are opportunities, not for the geeks and tech heads.  They touch on practices in politics, corporate affairs, internal communication and in every sector of enterprise.

It is about time that all the institutions including the CIPR, PRCA and the academics decided on a strategy that would inform the industry as to how it can and should thrive and grow over the next ten years.

This is all about money, big money and an industry at least ten times bigger than today.

The Experiential Web

The time has come to look at the 'next big thing' and its a big thing for PR.

Way back in 1999, I noted in the first edition and expanded in the second edition of 'Online Punlic Relations' that PR practitioners needed to watch the evolution of platforms  for communication. Then it was the PC, the laptop, mobile phones and games machines.

Today one would add smart phones, dongles and memory sticks, television sets and the  ever expanding internet of things.

This we all know about and can see evolving before out eyes.

But emerging in the background are the internet based experiences that are comming to the fore.

One example is Augmented Reality, another is location based smart phone apps and yet a third is intelligent smart cards that open doors and provide access to the underground. All useful and all primative.

While Skype may make it easy to make an international video conference call it is a long way off creating a virtaul office of sitting room experience.

As more optimies software and bandwidth comes available, will it be possible to be the person winning the 100 metres at the London Olympics from the comfort of your garden lounger? Will you be able to experience the trension, the agony and the thrill?

Well, we are, step by tiny step moving in that direction.

We already have High Definition 3D augmented reality (without glasses) and we have the ability to take a photograph of our surroundings and translate that into information about the object, street or store.

But what if the street or store was created using semantics intelligently combining our history of interets and the many realities that reflect the image we photograped with similar or related objects, sounds and even smells. Tuning into our physiological, neuropsychological and cognitive mechanisms is already part way there as our smart phones monitor our biorythms.

Now it seems that many of the building blocks are in place.

What are the implications for developing relationships, sharing values creating virtual community interactions and offering richer exoperiences through this new media?

Well,there is no doubt that this is a Public Relations issue. It is about media, it is about relationships, it is about personal and community values and it is about publics/stakeholders/social and user genertaed communities.

I wonder how far the universities with public relations or media academics to deploy on how to write a press release are begining to extend the idea to working with the experiential web?

The first such centre will be at the laeding edge of our profession.

Some research questions

Now is the time of year when students begin to look forward to their next steps in education.

I am fortunate to be able to help some students with an interest in online public relations and at this stage, we are exploring ideas.

Without giving away any of my students work but just exposing some of my thinking to them and a wider audience I seek criticism from real experts.


The first of the conversations I have had is challenging. It is for a work in social media.


We know that there is a lot of practitioner experience available from all over Europe and the United
States in particular.  However, there is much less well grounded academic research available. This is a fast moving environment and traditional academic publishing is, by comparison, slow.

This means that the student has an opportunity to add to the body of knowledge as part of a Masters degree by submitting their own papers.

While, at face value, one may like to look at so called 'social media' as it is used today there are some early decisions one would have to make.

Perhaps it is a good thing to first of all think about what we mean by  'social media'.  Is this truly a media, or is is a defined range of communications channels used by people (after all FTP is not social media but is used a lot). If so which people?

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and bulletin boards, Blogs, wikis, Foursquared, Augmented Reality, video and other sharing channels (like, for example, YouTube, Slideshare and Picasa) are available on many communications platforms such as PC's laptops, smart phones, games machines like Nintendo Wi and Xbox and slates like iPad. Some are good on one channel and not so good on others.

The range of platforms offers us a view as to what sort of people access which channels and under what kind of circumstance. We still need more research in this area.

From this we might understand that people without the relevant platforms or channels might be disenfranchised. But we know that there are intermediaries (who has not seen a child show a grandparent
something 'cool' on a mobile phone). 

Thus I think it is worth exploring what we think we mean by social media. 


We have to define the channels that  exemplify social media and then explore the  platforms on which these are available.

A student will need to find sources  that can inform an understanding of channels that are available, useful and are or can be (or have been) popular.

A student will need to explore the recent academic works from the PR, marketing and communication academic journals.


The extent to which these disciplines are new suggests that it will be useful  to look  at a number of other academic disciplines.

I find that the behavioural sciences and neuro-psychology research is informative and is beginning to
explain people's use of platforms (for example people watch television and use a laptop and a mobile phone concurrently under a number of circumstances) and these activities use a wide range of parts of the
brain that normally would not be active using only one platform/channel.

This involves a lot of searching and research - and playing with lots of digital toys too :)

At an early stage, it is helpful to look at how much content there is available to the public and how much of it is about, for example, a specific brand. Here is some software that gives us a quick overview http://www.trackthisnow.com/.

I would not be at all surprised if, at an early stage, a researcher did not discover that there is a lot of content discussed and shared about almost every thing in many channels and across a lot of platforms.

Experience suggests that most organisations do not and actually probably cannot engage their communities at such a hectic pace across so many platforms and channels. This is an interesting consideration when thinking about the role of both PR and marketing in an age of near ubiquitous interactive communication.

For one student this  may help in a finding as to how relevant Social Media is as a brand communication instrument. In the totality of all the conversations of all the people using a range of channels and platforms, it may be that research will explore any opportunity to be part of such conversations and if, in addition, the brand can be 'inserted' into the conversation. 


My view is that it will quickly becomes noticeable that this is much more difficult than most believe (and challenges much current practice).

A proposal to consider the future is one that has me hooked.

A student might be extremely brave to consider the future and the evolution of Social Media communication past, present and the new trends for the future. 


 It is a fascinating subject. The amazing first burst of Usenet and BB's activity three decades ago was astonishing. It showed that people want to engage with each other online, globally and in a new and dynamic way. 


I know it has taken the communications industries a couple of decades to see how dynamic the whole concept is and there is a long way to go among leaders in industry and commerce (and academia and government).  Equally, I recognise that there is the potential for a radical revolution as potent as any in prospect or history.The Bourbons discovered what happens when eating cake is no longer an alternative to recognising social change in 1792. Such revolution is in prospect for a lot of countries, economies and governments not to mention companies in the next few years.


The extent to which near future developments such as the Semantic Web with automated ontology creation will affect corporate transparency and porosity  is an interesting thought.

The development of virtual realities such as 'walk in' Augmented Reality will change personal relationships, experiential marketing and even replace some travel and meetings and is an exciting prospect. I can bet, and history is on my side, that it will become popular in personal relationship experiences long before commerce really gets its head round the wider applications.

The ability to, at will,  identify clusters of online values (words, pictures, experience values) and their proponents, supporters and interested constituents will transform marketing. But much more important will change the nature of relationship building, commerce and even the nature of value.

Yes, the future is interesting.

There is another tack that has been presented to me. It is the consideration and strategic analysis’s of brand
communications in different social  media platforms. I am sure this will be fascinating for people in PR and Marketing. 


Its drawback is that it will need updating every six months or so and so the challenge is be to find a replicable methodological approach - but, of course, each time results are report, they will create a sensation of interest as long as the methodology is robust.

Being able to'listen' to the totality of conversations of a sample in each channel and across a number of
platforms has its challenges and then to try to identify the extent to which the brand is implicitly or explicitly part of these conversations is not impossible and there will be a lot of people who will find this capability really helpful.

A researcher would have to deploy some heavyweight technologies but they are available.


No one can imagine how excited I am at working with bright enquiring young brains in such an array of new thinking that will soon be available to the public relations practitioner - well, those who are following there new developments.


I am, of course interested in comments and insights from you..... One thing we do know is the power of the network to help answer hard questions.

Stockholm Accords and Sustainability

This is second of a series of lectures notes I am preparing about the Stockholm Accords.

Some months have passed since the World Public Relations Forum discussed and approved the Stockholm Accords. It was the culmination of an intensely participated collaboration process which involved some 1000 leaders of the global public relations community from 42 countries by the PR industry's Global Alliance.

There is a Stockholm Accords digital HUB that you may visit here at: www.stockholmaccords.org. The discussions are worth following and I recommend all practitioners to visit and get engaged.

You can access the Accords here. I have also provided a text version here (for all those people who like to copy 'n paste and not get irritated by the use of PDF)

The Accords offer us a view of sustainability in these words:

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions*.

In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity* to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Public Relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders* contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
· interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate)*;
· creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener)*;
· ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter)*;
· going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).

Reviewing each of these elements in turn, we can extend the debate.

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions is a bold and, I suggest, a late 20th century view. It will hold good for some time to come but the move towards greater competitive transparency, the evolution of the semantic web and ever more effective 'Blazing Netshine' that allows us all to search and expose the minutia of human endeavour will challenge economic, environmental and social dimensions with added elements.

The nature of value is being challenges in many ways.

What is 'free' (i.e. not paid for with today's monetary currencies) is frequently challenged in today's society. Patents and Trademarks, copyright and personal assets are exposed in near ubiquitous interactive communication and yet many things seemingly 'free' are much valued.

The 'Free' search engine Google has immense value for most people well beyond the irritation (and much ignored) advertisements. Its value as part of a new form of memory and access to knowledge is huge and dwarfs the utility of Library of Congress and all the other libraries in the world combined.

The nature of value is changing so fast, one might begin to consider coinage as being of lesser utility this year compared to last.

We are beginning to understand value differently. We are beginning to understand commonly held values as being the element that aids/is the essential ingredient for relationship creation (paper by Bruno Amaral and me) and meta values commonly held between two or more people as an indication of the strength of relationships.

Indeed, we are now seeing such values attached to ideas and artefacts as a description of their value and utility for individuals and communities.

It follows that basing anything on economic needs may have to face up to a new form and understanding of economics that truly are (in a process of becoming) dimensionally different. Here is a simple example of what I mean. What is the value of Google to humanity in this generation? Google valued by markets at $165bn  gets two trillion site hits per year. It is a lot of knowledge transfer and priceless (if sometimes trivial).

This leads one to imagine the environment for the existence of organisations.

In an era of developing ubiquitous access to knowledge, corporate environments will have difficulty being an entity. The nature of transparency, porosity and agency as described by the PRCA/CIPR Internet Commission a decade ago (and revised by Philip Young and myself in Online Public Relations) mean that organisations become less bound by a corporate 'hard shell'. We already see this in organisation where 'contracting out' and the use of agents such as PR consultants to act on behalf of and in the interests of an organisation is commonplace. As each employee gets a Twitter Account, the evolution of this transparent and even porous nature of organisations becomes ever more, and publicly evident. The changing environment militates against the structure of organisations as we know them today and we see this in a range of manifestations where the boundaries between one organisation and another is blurred.

An organisation’s sustainability based on balancing demands in social dimensions is also a significant challenge. The social constructs for much of society is changing.

The emergence of Brazil, India and China as big and developing (and more open) economies, the ability to communicate across borders at will and the dynamic of  social groups formed in the silicon sitting rooms of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are very different social dimensions. Add smart phones and location based micro communities and society looks very different. These are considerations for all who signed up to the Stockholm Accords and have to be thought through by the professional bodies as well as their members.

The professional bodies also have to re-act or be left on the shelf.

The Accords postulate that, in this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Sustainability to be long lasting has to be flexible and enhancing reputation is not limited to economic, ecological and social advantage.

I have already suggested that economical advantage my be difficult to quantify as values take on a different role and are probably better viewed in relationship building terms than monetary value.

Environmental and social advantage may then also be measured in their capability to bring relationship values to the fore. This is not a tautologous argument. Environmental and social values are not the same and current practice needs a lot of new and additional work to achieve 20th century gaols. To be effective in the 21st century, PR has to evolve a triple line that can extend into the much more complicated world of individual, corporate and environment relationships and their value drivers today.


Oddly enough identifying, involving and engaging key stakeholders is very easy. We have not yet developed the technologies sufficiently well but espousing values will quickly build relationship clusters with people holding similar values. In the bast it was a little understood but effective brand empathy matrix. Today, we understand it as a not wholly different, but stakeholder derived values matrix.


As we move towards greater competitive transparency and learn to manage organisational porosity it will become much harder for an organisation to determine what information should be transparently and authentically reported. The stakeholder not only has the whip hand by virtue of a wider view of values porosity will inevitably reveal and the community will punish any organisation that lacks authenticity. Secretive accountants and pharmaceutical companies are going to have to find a values driven accommodation with society to remain as they are.


It is professionalism that develops a capability to go beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow and, in addition more emphasis on todays word among PR teachers.

Why PR needs to take digital more seriously

A fortnight ago I was invited to make a contribution the the CIPR social media series.

I chose to extend some of the comments here which have leant in the direction of placing PR as the key discipline in the societal evolution of the internet.

This is what I said:

Approaching digital

View more presentations from dphillips4363.

Such a view may change the way we teach public relations and even open new opportunities for research.

This may be exciting for some and threatening for many and downright cookie for lots of our colleagues.

If one believes, as I do, that PR is about the spread of values, knowledge and the development of relationships round values and knowledge then this thesis works.

It is not without some learning which was hinted at in the last chapter of Philip Young and my book 'Online Public Relations' and has a mirror in other research about communities, communication and the spread of values Steven Pinker hinted at this month for the Economist among many other approaches (which made me ask if Public Relations contribute to less violent society?).

I do think that we are at a watershed. The idea that a lot of PR is about events organisation and press relations is already almost indefensible. In addition subject areas like CSR, Corporate Affairs and other like subjects as far too flimsy without a better, deeper sense of what is happening in today's manifestation of human evolution.

Extrapolating Pinker's view that wider community interaction takes the violence from the savage might it not be that community interaction offers us a new form civilisation as well?

If that is so, the discipline that is equipped, not as an arm of marketing but as the high priesthood of devolved cultural development sounds pretty attractive and my thesis is that we currently have such an opportunity.

Semantic progress

Yesterday Philip Sheldrake gave a talk to the Chartered Institute of Public Relation Social Media gathering (anyone can come - it costs £10 and is at 5pm every Thursday) on the semantic web. It was excellent and you can access it here.

Among the things he showed us was the work of Philipp Heim (University of Stuttgart), Steffen Lohmann (Carlos III University of Madrid), Timo Stegemann (University of Duisburg-Essen).
They have taken existing structured data to allow you to go and find relationships between two entities (I chose to find the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron on this page).

The work they have done is important and uses existing structured data sets.

At Klea Global my colleague Girish has been working towards a way of creating structured data sets using Natural Language Programming including LSI to build (RDF) structures on the fly from content derived from newspapers, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc.

He already has gone quite a long way and you can see an example of how it is possible to create this process with some very new and pretty smart tools. One of which is available for you to try here.

OK, so what is this for, and why is it relevant to Public Relations.

I guess the secret is in the second part of the name of our profession: relations.

Using these capabilities, we can find out all manner of relationships between two entities (subject - object). When, using the Semantic Web, these relationships make sense, all this data will be ever more powerful.

To get some idea of how much data, here is another 'toy' you can play with from Klea Global labs (and yes, I have started to put it all in one place at last): Track This Now. Using this free 'search and scope presence' software, you will see that an amazing amount of information is accumulating about your company, client, university etc.

Knowing how much there is, and knowing that most of what is said online about organisation does not come from the company or traditional media is only half the battle. There is so much accumulating out there that we are overwhelmed.

If only we could find out what the relationships were between all those tweets and press articles, we would have some chance of influencing them, building up huge SEO for clients and lots of other marvellous things. Worry not... salvation is at hand.

These are very early days for these developments to bear fruit for the PR industry but next year they will be quite astonishing. We already know how to do it and in less than a year will be doing it.

This is so exciting for our industry and my only regret is that we don't have a single university in the UK with a capability to do this sort of research.