Can PR use ROI as a form of measurement? Its harder than you think

This week three academics have presented challenges to the PR academic community.

Professor Tom Watson at Bournemouth, Richard Bailey at Leeds Metropolitan University and my co author Philip Young at Sunderland have all made interesting contributions to PR thinking ahead of the the CIPR’s new Research and Development Unit (R&DU)  meeting next week.

Before entering into the debate on Grunigian theory presented by Richard and Philip, I wanted to respond to Tom's point.

Tom makes a point: "I still have doubts as to whether ROI, other than in a strictly financial format, can be re-purposed into a more general expression of value creation or contribution to organisational efficiency.  Business managers understand what ROI is, so why would they accept a mixed-concept PR ROI."

It is important. As AMEC boldly goes for some form of measurement of PR providing a return on investment. There seems to be a belief that ROI is a simple idea.

It would seem there is a belief that ROI is a financial measure. Of course it is not. ROI is a profoundly Public Relations measure.

Lets have a look at what ROI is. It is defined in accounting terms as:

(Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment) divided by (Cost of Investment)

Can we pause for a moment and explore what 'Investment' means. Investment requires that an organisation has cash flow, capital reserves or some other asset that can be deployed as an investment.

Organisations comprise three principle assets: capital, proprietary process and/or service and  relationships. The acquisition of capital, and development of process or service; 'vision, mission and corporate objectives' (Kaplan 2001) are a function of relationships.

It follows that to invest in anything, an organisation needs relationships of a nature that can be invested.

So lets re-draw what ROI means:

(Gain from Relationships minus Cost of Relationships) divided by (Cost of Relationships).

ROI is profoundly about relationships. In an industry called 'Public Relations', this could be of interest. In a sector called 'marketing communications' it will be pivotal because Marcoms depends on 'public relation' to optimise relationships to create capital and cash flow to pay for this, a special area of relationship management, namely marketing. In principle the same applies to the trade of 'Corporate Affairs' and other trades associated with 'Public Relations' in practice.

Which takes us back to Richard and Philip and the Grunigian excellence model coming from systems theory. We can, if we desire stay with the systems theory view because already have a grounded reserach into the nature of relationships in the work of Bruno Amaral (2009).

This, Amaral, hypothesis is that relationships  are formed at the nexus of values and using latenet semantic analysis was able to show that where there is a nexus of semantic values there is very strong evidence that they are central to the formation of convergent relationships.This empirical research supports conclusions as to the impact of public relations as relationship management offered, by  Ledingham and Bruning (2002).

Convergent values relationships have some resonance with the Grunigian position of Publics forming round issues but in the Amaral study, it was less issues as values that were key which is a broader construct.

What we have done is to extend and develop the ideas of Grunig and Ledingham and Bruning to identify an empirically based idea of what public relations can be which accommodates both theoretical perspectives.

Can we now re-draw ROI yet again.

(Gain from Nexus of Values minus Cost of Nexus of Values) divided by (Cost of Nexus of Values).

Of course, I have only taken one view as to the nature of relationships namely the empirical research of Bruno Amaral. There will be others drawn from Psychology to the Evolutionary Sciences.

What I hope to have shown is that the theoretical concepts of Public Relations have moved on and that we can, should we wish, pursue ROI but that it will require more than an AMEC Commission to come to any meaningful conclusion unless there is a great deal more by way of, notably academic, research.

And the there is the problem of getting such ideas into the heads of the PR industry's clients. But that is another story.









RS Kaplan  Nonprofit management and Leadership, 2001 - Wiley Online Library

Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, 1992  IABC Research Foundation Edited by James E. Grunig

Relationship management in public relations: dimensions of an organization-public relationship (1992) John A. Ledingham and Stephen D. Bruning Public Relations Review Volume 24, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 55-65

The search for hidden meanings

Throughout written history, people have engaged in finding the hidden meaning in writing.

Fascination at the hieroglyphs on the walls ancient Egyptian temples and burial sites extends back well before  4 PM on November 26, 1922 when Howard Carter’s search for hidden meanings resulted in the discovery of the 3300 year old and untouched tomb of 19 years old king Tutankhamun .

Today, we are even more fascinated with exploring our written (and spoken) language.

And it all comes down to what is known as Part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging or POST).

Most of us have done it at school by identifying words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Back when the Beatles were at their peak, America and its allies were embroiled in the Vietnam war, Dr Christiaan Barnard carried out the world's first human heart transplant and The Six Day War was fought in the Middle East, NASA launched an unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft and Britons got their first colour television programmes . But in that same year the one development that affects more people today and will do in the future is the work of Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis.  They published their classic work Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), which provided basic analysis about words in texts on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus.

Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis did more complicated analysis than getting computers to find nouns and verbs but the principle is the same. It is a process largely based on relationships with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. 

Once performed by hand, POS tagging is now done in the context of the son of the Brown Corpus, computational linguistics. It uses algorithms which associate discrete terms, as well as hidden parts of speech, in accordance with a set of descriptive tags or forms of description or, more recently, that are created as they are found ‘on the fly’.

The reason that Kucera and  Francis work is so important is that we have built a whole new form of society on this idea.

Clever scientists have used this idea of extracting hidden meaning to develop a new form of internet.

One of these ideas came from three academics Scott Deerwester, Susan  Dumais, George Furnas, Thomas Landauer and Richard Harshman (1990). They outlined how to analyse relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. Called Latent semantic Analysis (LSA), the idea assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur close together in text.  

This idea is used by all manner of analysis programmes and helps find those hidden meanings.

In their paper they says “...Thus while LSA’s potential knowledge is surely imperfect, we believe it can offer a close enough approximation to people’s knowledge to underwrite theories and tests of theories of cognition.”  Since 1990, academics have come a long way and accuracy is getting ever closer to social reality. 

Today, the use of semantics makes the Google and Bing web search algorithms more accurate, helps newspaper journalists find the most authoritative sources for information and informs the top companies about events and their drivers to optimise financial, marketing and communication decisions.

Remember Kristen Urbahn’s story I blogged about three weeks ago? It has lots of hidden meanings. Using Extractive.com’s special search engine Kristen can find out about the relationships between different parts of the story (using automated Part of Speech tagging).

The results show the nature of some of the significant words:

├PERSON (46) │├SCREEN ACTOR (4) ││└ Kathy Griffin (4) │ ├ she ││ └ her  │├US CABINET MEMBER (1) ││└ Donald Rumsfeld │├US PRESIDENT (3) ││└ Obama (3) ││ ├ Obama ││ ├ Obama ││ └ his  │├ Brian Williams │├ Dan Pfeiffer │├ Jill Jackson (2) │ ├ Jill Jackson │├ Keith (6) │ ├ Keith Urbahn │ ├ He │ │├ Kristen Urbahn (13) │ ├ Kristen Urbahn │ │ ├ her │ ├ Kristen Urbahn │  │ └ Kristen  │├ Maggie Fox │├ Osama Bin Laden (6) │ ├ Osama Bin Laden │ └ Bin Laden  │├ Osama Bin Ladin (5) │ ├ Osama Bin Ladin │ ├ He │ ├ Osama │ └ he  │└ Sohaib Athar

├LOCATION (14) │├GPE (13) ││├COUNTRY (5) │││├ Afghanistan │││├ Pakistan (2) │││ ├ Pakistan  │││└ US (2) ││├CITY (4) │││├ Abbottabad │││├ Denver │││├ Guardian │││└ San Francisco ││└US STATE (4) ││ ├ Kansas ││ ├ South Carolina ││ └ Washington (2) ││  ├ Washington ││  └ Washington  │└ Wiltshire ├ORGANIZATION (21) │├COMMERCIAL ORG (16) ││├MEDIA ORG (7) │││├BROADCAST NETWORK (5) ││││└TV NETWORK (5) ││││ ├ BBC ││││ ├ CBS ││││ ├ CNN (2) ││││ └ NBC │││├ New York Times │││└ Washington Times ││├ Defence ││├ Google ││├ Social Media Group ││└ Twitter (5) ││ ├ Twitter  │├NON GOVERNMENT ORG (2) ││├ Al Qaeda ││└ Republican Leaders Office │└UNIVERSITY (3) │ ├ Preston University │ ├ University of Kentucky │ └ Yale ├CONTACT INFO (1) │└URL (1) │ └HTTP (1) │  └http://goo.gl/qHnFH

├OTHER (18) │├FACILITY (4) ││└BUILDING (4) ││ └ White House (4) ││  ├ White House Communication Director ││  ├ White House  │├LINKED OTHER (11) ││├ Capitol Hill ││├ Christian ││├ Creative Commons ││├ Dachshunds ││├ Internet ││├ Internet ││├ Mobile ││├ POTUS ││├ President Obama ││├ Royal Wedding ││└ The New York Times │└SOFTWARE (3) │ └ Facebook (3) │  ├ Facebook  ├DATE-TIME (16) │├DATE GENERAL (8) ││├DATE (2) │││├ Aug. 18, 2009 │││└ May 1 2011 ││├DAY OF MONTH (1) │││└ 1 May ││├MONTH NAME (1) │││└ May ││├RELATIVE DATE (2) │││├ months ago │││└ the evening ││└YEAR (2) ││ ├ 2006 ││ └ 2011

│└TIME (8) │ ├ 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time │ ├ 10:40 p.m. │ ├ 10:53 │ ├ 11 p.m. │ ├ 11:35 │ ├ 4pm EST │ ├ 9:45 p.m. │ └ from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m. └NUMERIC (20)  ├MEASUREMENT (4)  │└DURATION (4)  │ ├ Five years  │ ├ days  │ ├ former  │ └ the hours  ├NUMBER (11)  │├ 2.0  │├ 3,000  │├ 5,000  │├ 7.24  │├ millions  │├ more than 185  │├ one  │├ one  │├ six  │├ three  │└ two  └ORDINAL (5)   ├ Third   ├ first   ├ first   ├ second   └ third

Here, then, are the key elements that can be extracted from the blog post.

Two people from the 18^th and 19^th centuries now star in this story.

Thomas Bayes (1702–1761) was the son of London Presbyterian minister with a clever mathematical brain. He came up with what can be described as a way to look at these hidden parts of text and other content and find out the extent to which a particular inference is not true. For example Twitter is a big part of the Kristen Urbahn story but it is by no means the focus of the events in Pakistan.  It was just an (important) means by which information was shared across the globe. Thomas’ clever mathematics is the means by which it is possible for computers to make decisions about the probability that information can be relied on and, in that case, the role of Twitter in news distribution.

With enough information and generous computing power, of which modern man has plenty, Bayesian probability offers something like a partial belief, rather than a frequency. This allows the application of probability to all sorts of propositions rather than just ones that come with a known structure. "Bayesian" has been used in this sense since about 1950. Advancements in computing technology have allowed scientists from many disciplines to pair traditional Bayesian statistics with other techniques to greatly increase the use of Bayes theorem in science. Now, computers can both learn from experience and are beginning to be good at prediction.

Twitter was important for the Urbahn story and so, the software might tell us, Twitter will be significant for other stories in the future.

It is such techniques that modern managers need to hand if only to be able to discover emerging trends in communication and or news and events.

Fifty years after Thomas death, George Boole  (1815 – 1864) came into this world to give us all a great way of discovering information.  George (who was married to an equally mathematically brilliant wife Mary and who was the nice of the man who gave Mount Everest its name), gave us Boolean algebra (1854). Today most people know it because it is useful when searching for information using search engines. The Boolean operations AND, OR, and NOT help narrow down searches to get more closely to the facts we seek (Kristen AND Urbahn OR Forcht).

But, the use of AND, OR, and NOT in mathematics and computing has other applications and when combined with Bayesian probability (and other similar math) which means that computers can be used to make accurate, predictive and related inferences and learn, for themselves, from the results.

In practice, we find useful tools to give us insights into events.

For example http://twitris.knoesis.org/  (created at Kno.e.sis at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Wright State University) provides us with an ontology, related Tweets, links to highly relevant web pages, a chart of Tweet rates and much more.

In practice, a manager can keep a close eye on mentions of a company, brand or product and the reputation drivers behind the Twitter stream.

No one is pretending that business managers need to understand all the technologies. There is a need, however, to know that using such advances is now becoming central to modern management and communication.

Bibliography

Kucera, H. and Francis, W.N. (1967) Computational Analysis of Present-day American English Journal: Neuroimage - NEUROIMAGE

Scott Deerwester, Susan T. Dumais, George W. Furnas, Thomas K. Landauer, Richard Harshman (1990). "Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 41 (6): 391–407

 Boole, George (2003) [1854]. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-089-9.

Gruber, Thomas R. (June 1993). "A translation approach to portable ontology Specifications". Knowledge Acquisition5 (2): 199–220.


Further Reading:
Introduction to LSA http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf
Semantic Inference in the Human-Machine Communication http://www.springerlink.com/content/ju71rcn9pq0wcmy3/
Continuous Semantics to Analyze Real-Time Data http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Continuous_Semantics_to_Analyze_Real_Time_Data
Web semantics and ontology By Johanna Wenny Rahayu http://books.google.com/books?id=K7yFJVu8NDYC


Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more sources come through Gnip's API, normalized and enriched with metadata. http://gnip.com/

Hieroglyph picture: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/Egypt+(complex)+(69-80)+2 

Thinkers, practitioners and academia - lend me a minute

I can do no better than reproduce Heather Yaxley's post word for word from  PR CONVERSATIONS

There’s no such thing as online or digital PR anymore…

That seems to be the message from Philip Young who, with David Phillips, is editing a special edition of the online journal, PRism on the topic: Beyond Online Public Relations (to be published early in 2012).

Philip claims that “Today ALL PR is Online PR” and is interested in papers that support or challenge the view that it is no longer meaningful to discuss ‘online PR’ (abstracts of up to 500 words to be emailed to philip.young(at)sunderland.ac.uk by July 3). The journal will feature imaginative academic papers that expand understanding of the impact of internet on PR theory and practice.

The underlying premise is that we need “a fundamental reassessment of what it means to practice the discipline of PR” as regardless of whether public relations is third party endorsement, reputation management or relationship management, it is necessarily online.

Others may feel that the focus on digital PR has gone too far, or reflects simply another communications channel.  What about the two-thirds of the world’s population who are excluded for reasons of access or ability from the online world?  Or the increasing trend towards commercialisation of cyberspace and its impact on notions that social media facilitates a dialogic form of relationship building PR?  Let alone the consequences of increasingly living life – and managing reputations – in a virtual world?  What does that do to trust, the social sphere and a sense of reality and perspective through which people traditionally view news, public and private information?

From my interest in career perspectives of public relations, I wonder whether practitioners are equipped to forge new paths in an online dominated world?  Will we be reduced to call centre operators typing out tweets and other attempts to “engage” with online communities?  How can we have a point of difference when every digital native can employ digital PR skills?  And will organizations recruit, train and develop PR practitioners of the future into strategic management roles if their entire focus in the online terrain?

Lots to ponder and I’m sure this relates to many practical case studies from those working in PR, as well as dissertations being undertaken by students and academic research initiatives.  The edition is looking for papers which:

• Discuss the implications for organisational reputation and relationships through the lens of rich online content; internet enabled interactive communication and radical reach;  transparency and radical transparency; and institutional porosity and public exposure
• Extend thinking about  the shape of public relations practice in 2020 and beyond, paying particular attention to the concept and PR practices affecting  the dominant coalition mediated by the semantic web;  values derived relationship paradigm and the “Internet of Things”
• Provide case studies that show how imaginative understandings of social media can add a new dimension to understandings of relationship management
• Articulate evolved forms of existing theory, including the Grunigian Excellence paradigm
• Offer a roadmap for integrating what was briefly considered to be “online PR” into academic study
• Examine the contribution of the growing number of social media gurus to practical and theoretical understandings of the discipline
• Examine the significance of the 2010 Stockholm Accords to practice that is not mediated by internet protocols.

The resulting edition aims to “mark a coming of age of an evolved articulation of a discipline that can play a significant role in organisational activity”.  Agree or disagree?  Answers in no more than 500 words as an initial abstract as above…

... and here is a start... what can we do with these:

The anatomy of news

It was late on May Day 2011 when Kristen Urbahn’s life changed.  At precisely 7.24 in the evening, her husband changed the way the whole world understood that news was no longer the purview of the ‘news media’.  Of course for the Tweeting wife (@KLF0131) with a husband at work and a big house move on her mind, the emerging seismic global realisation may not have been big on her list of top events. After all, she and her husband had been in public life long enough for her to know that momentous events often come from the White House and her interest in the two Dachshunds, evident in her Facebook profile,  probably were a higher priority .

A graduate of University of Kentucky in 2006 Kristen Urbahn  (nee Forcht), a one time staff assistant at the Republican Leaders Office in Washington and treasurer of the Christian Law Society, moved into Capitol Hill North on Aug. 18, 2009. It was time for a move when Yale graduate Keith was catapulted into global headlines.  The imminent announcement of Osama Bin Ladin’s death came from Keith, a one time navy intelligence officer and Chief of Staff for former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted “I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.” 

He was not the first reporter. Shortly after 4pm EST on 1 May Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was live-tweeting a series of helicopter flypasts and explosions and was unwittingly covering the US forces raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Meanwhile somewhere in the vicinity @m0hcin was reporting too.

The news was out.

According to Brian Williams, the “NBC Nightly News” anchor, some journalists received a three-word e-mail that simply read, “Get to work.”

The Horn picks up the story: “At 9:45 p.m., Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communication Director, tweeted “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time,” a message that was shared with White House press corps. The president had not spoken by that time but news outlets like CNN, New York Times, and CBS among others confirmed Osama’s death by 10:40 p.m."

Maggie Fox the founder and CEO of Social Media Group provided a time line of events:

10:25 – Twitter is on fire, with a tweet from a CBS news Producer (Jill Jackson) with fewer than 4500 Twitter followers) confirming a leak that Bin Laden is dead retweeted over 1000 times
10:50 – The White House invites Facebook users to discuss the pending announcement (where the Presidential address is also scheduled to be broadcast)
10:53 – print media demonstrates where it can’t compete so well, with a journalist for a major national magazine noting that this announcement was going to “profoundly screw up” their Royal Wedding edition.
11:15 – Osama Bin Laden’s death confirmed by the White House

At 11:35 p.m, President Obama addressed the nation to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an operation carried out by US Navy SEAL's.

For Kristen Urbahn, thoughts of house moves and the dogs vanished.

Obama’s announcement was more of a confirmation to millions of Twitter and Facebook users around the world who were informed about the Al Qaeda leader’s death through social media platforms.

A soldier in Afghanistan learned about the death of Osama bin Laden on Facebook, reported the Washington Times. A TV producer in South Carolina got a tip from comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter. A blues musician in Denver received an email alert from The New York Times. And a Kansas woman found out as she absently scrolled through the Internet on her smartphone while walking her dog.

A Guardian article revealed that the spike was so large that some news sites were struggling to cope, and seeing their response times slowed so that they took six times longer to respond, or even crashed under the load. Mobile sites were particularly vulnerable as people logged in from smartphones wherever they were to read the news.

Twitter announced that “from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second.” The number surpassed 5,000 at 11 p.m. and remained that way past the president’s remarks with details reported CNN.

At geo-location service Foursquare, more than 185 people in San Francisco had "checked in" to a "Post-Osama bin Laden World" using their smartphones.

Although Keith Urbahn says "My source was a connected network TV news producer. Stories about 'the death of MSM' because of my "first" tweet are greatly exaggerated," He is in the spotlight.  The confirming Tweet from Jill Jackson created the storm.

It was Twitter that fired off the media coverage and required fast work from the traditional media to catch up to compete and feed the social media frenzy. The mix of media interaction and aggregation  is also fascinating with the BBC using Google Maps to show the site of Bin Laden’s hideaway. This is complete change in media dynamics as we understood it only months ago.

The reach of this story is astonishing and reflects so much of what we understand about how social media in particular takes information from organizations and spreads it round the world. No one could doubt that the media, and ordinary people, fed the frenzy fast. Some information passed on and was fresh, some was a bit old (in internet time) before it was shared. The timeliness of response and reaction is a study in how fast information is now shared.

We know that organizations are porous and that information leaks out of organization, including the White House. Keith Urbahn and Jill Jackson  not only knew, they made the intelligence public really fast and to a fast growing audience.

What makes this story so fascination is the extent to which we can explore the lives of the actors.  Such is the transparency provided by the internet, we even know the names of Kristen Urbahn’s dogs and a very human story is told.

The abundance of information and necessary curation needed to bring the strands together is part of the process of understanding what is useful  and helpful but what  happened in the hours and days after the event are equally fascinating. The nature of internet agency has changed people’s lives.  

Keith and Kristen Urbahn have become inextricably linked to the events in Pakistan and Washington.  Coffee shop owner, Sohaib Athar a graduate of Preston University, has been plucked from obscurity and will forever be associated with the events of May 1 2011. "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it," he tweeted after connecting president Obama's announcement to what was taking place in his neighbourhood.

While this story is one of our times, the nature of Reach,  Timelessness,  Transparency,  Porosity,   Aggregation,  Abundance,  Curation and Internet agency are by no means a mystery.  

Five years before Kristen went to university, in a shed/come office in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge,  the notion of these drivers formed into the book Online Public Relations which is now a best seller with a third edition already on its way.

Public Relations - can it be a science in its own right?

Among its many duties, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the association of individual practitioners in the UK, are responsibilities to be involved in research.

Indeed, under its Charter it is mandated to do so.

The objects for which the Institute is incorporated shall be:
to promote the study, research and development of the practice of public
relations and publish or otherwise make available the useful results of
such study and research;

The Institute has established a Research and Development Unit to create a hub for industry and academic research.

The CIPR Research and Development Unit Working Party includes among its members Dr Sandra Oliver (Emeritus Professor), Dr Jon White (Visiting Professor), Dr Reginald Watts (Business Consultant) and Jay O'Connor (CIPR Immediate Past President).

The CIPR website page of research resources provides an insight into the extent to which, so far, its research outcomes are promoted by the CIPR and the extent to which the Institute promotes or makes available studies and commissions research on behalf of its members.

Then there is a mass of  information about Measurement and evaluation including the Measurement & Evaluation Fellowship Award in the UK (more information here); the Measurement and Evaluations toolkit and the social media version; the Valid Metrics guidelines and a page offering links to resources for measuring different sectors of PR accompanied by case studies relevant to the sector.

The Local Public Services Group is to provide members with inspiration, know-how and reassurance to actively participate in public relations activities, by exposing them to the experiences and good practice of key practitioners in the field. This group signposts third party case studies and research and papers.

There does not seem to be a reference to the Alan Rawel Academic Conference at any time in the future.

It will be interesting to see what transpires from the deliberations of Dr Sandra Oliver, Dr Jon White, Dr Reginald Watts and Jay O'Connor but I have some concerns.

Jay O'Connor suggests that the committee will 'bring together what is a significant body of knowledge about PR practice' and Reginald Watts, Chair of the Unit, says: "Together with those practitioners, consultancies and research organisations that are active in PR research, there are many practitioners and researchers with PhDs in subjects directly related to communications. My hope is that we can mobilise such members, along with others, to shape future practice and to help us to understand the changing communications environment. This is an exciting and timely undertaking by the CIPR. We are committed to bridging the gap between professional and academic research in a way that will be both creative and highly relevant to practice."

There is some need for the PR profession to acquire the confidence in its own right to work on blue sky research.

Many pure play public relations areas of interest have huge economic social and political significance and deserve the kind of attention to research that medicine has in the minds of research funders.

Some example include:

The wider nature of communication like ubiquitous internet as well as new forms of human/machine communicative interaction (like, for example, body/avata languages using the Kinect type of technologies) become the norm in human and human/machine relationships.

The extent to which we understand the drivers of relationships and the extent to which relationships affect matters such as reputation and recognition of entities (e.g. brands, companies, other institutions and machines) are poorly understood. To-date, our understanding is based on research that accepts that relationships exist now how and why they form (social sciences), are evolutionary (Psychology/evolutionary sciences) or are robotic and are not truly helpful in the reality of organisational relationship management.

In my line of interest, the significance of semantics, personal data (and the relationship between control of institutions in some form of digital democracy to control the emerging internet executive/s) are becoming significant for the profession. People offer a cloud of data about themselves and yet there is no means by which a form of vox populi democracy can challenge the owners of such data (governments, utilities and service vendors).

Value based relationship issues, where everything from corporate objectives to website meta tags affect the capability of organisations to operate without creating inherent dissonance with organisational constituents is poorly understood.

The nature of diversity and ethics in relationships are also major areas of emerging concern where we depend on education and social grooming to release value from human interest and development and yet are amazed at the capability of the dispossessed to invent and provide.

Then, again, there are the issues associated with the nature of trust in relationships. If the worlds banking system, and the government of huge swaths of the global population break down for want of of trust, surely the PR industry should be at the heart of research into trust.

Of course there is a case for having practice based research and there is a case for using and even adopting the better cases of research from other sciences but there is also a case for a public relations science in its own right.

I just hope that the Institute should consider such an ambition and be bold in its considerations.

In defence of Aves

Having been involved with PR evaluation for over 20 years, I have been watching a number of recent debates about the use of statistical analytics with a lot of interest. 

Last week PR Week , the Public Relations industry trade publication, put a number of perspectives together about the use of Advertising Value Equivelents (AVE’s), http://goo.gl/oBEk. There is heated debate on the subject. 

Tom Eldridge put an argument together entitled “ Why Klout and Peerindex fail to measure your online reputation” last January http://goo.gl/oKrOo.

Newly financed http://www.ubervu.com has, like many others, automated sentiment analysis as part of its service.

The evidence of these debates goes on and on.

What they all have in common is that they use algorithms in an attempt to bring insights into an ocean of data.

In PR, Marketing and advertising the use of algorithms is commonplace and always has been.

In psephology, the study of election results, as well as in sample surveys and  focus groups, the face value figures are not commonly helpful and need interpretation. In their development, a system of managing these extrapolations quickly turns into an algorithm used for used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning.

There are some key elements to be considered when using algorithms for gaining insights.

The first is the quality and range of data used.

In almost all research there are a lot of variable to be considered.

For example, in many evaluation methodologies used in PR and advertising media selection, a test of readership for a specific article is expressed in a range of ways including newspaper readership, circulation, position of page and position on page and a whole range of other data points.

The extent to which any of these measures can be attributed to the actual readership of any specific news story is often not clear.

A measure of value of an advertisement can be attributed to the cost the market will bear and thus an advertisement of a specific size, page and position will provide evidence of the value of that real estate in a publication. Such space, were it to be editorial and as appealing to the reader could be considered to have a comparable value.  An Advertising Value Equivalent is on its way. Because editorial has the imprimatur of being editorial it is regarded with more authority by the reader and therefore, some say, has an even greater value. For some it is twice as much and for others five times as much and more.

Here we see evidence of the second key element in using algorithms.

The data used and the methodology adopted need to be common, commonly understood, and transparent for anyone to judge the veracity of the results provided.

In an article, ‘The problem with automated sentiment analysis’, Freshnetworks show how deeply one needs to look into such algorithms http://goo.gl/tjCyI and demonstrate clearly that the devil is in the detail. It notes that humans can be about 80% accurate in sentiment analysis of media corpora and that machines can compete but not in the fine detail. Thus the computers provide an excellent overview already.

That there are criticisms and that there are issues is beyond doubt but progressively, the ability of computers to take the strain and reduce no small proportion of cost.

I suggest, before dismissing automation as useless, there is a case for looking for current benefits in the knowledge that very soon developers will have the computing ability to resolve the issues.

AVE’s may be dismissed in 2011 but will they, or an alternative come back to bite the critics in a year of two?

I believe they will.