Bad management is not made good with firewalls

Web 2.0 report that a survey of more than 1,000 office workers found that 42 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 discussed work-related issues on social-networking sites and blogs.

The research, carried out by polling company YouGov for content security specialists Clearswift, revealed more than a quarter of young workers spent three or more hours a week surfing blogs and sites such as MySpace and YouTube during working hours.

Nearly four in ten admitted accessing such sites "several times a day".

This is supposed to say what?

Is it that organisations are, as a result going to become more porous. Well there is no news in that. The CIPR was telling the world about that when Lionel Zetter was in short pants.

Perhaps porosity is a bad thing? Well if Employee relations are that bad, then there is little hope for thr corporate future anyway and that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Perhaps having employees aware of online information is a bad thing... well... what sort of employer is this or perhaps employees are so badly motivated about their job they go off on a YouTube hunt for the banal.

All-in-all, I don't see what all the fuss is about except that bad management is not made good with a firewall.

The teaching of PR

There is conflict between what is happening in an Internet Mediated world and PR Theory:

I would like to explore, and do not have the licence to expound that with 1.1 billion (yes - billion) observers of corporate (and personal) activity, online PR is set against a practice that self evidently undermines scream management, spin marketing, bling PR, conscienceless and conscience driven CSR and privileged lobbies. For every propagandist, there is a counter propagandist: for every view, a countervailing argument. The wisdom of crowds is at once powerful and scrutinised. Where we teach Public Affairs the Internet offers the perpetual revolution (Mao lives - Zittrain proclaims the Cultural Revolution). The influence of the Internet on so many authors we use for teaching is a problem for a module that encourages online searching. Banish the words 'market segment' (unless a segment of one), stakeholder (when everyone can see, change and influence everyone and diversity attacks Freeman's ill founded ideas) and treat 'publics' with care (because a blogger is at the nexus of a relationship cloud that can be tiny or huge and have equality of power and influence in five minutes of global fame). NOLA.com, the web affiliate of New Orleans' Times-Picayune, was awarded the Breaking News Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Katrina. It is a blog and its content was powered by SMS. Can a PR student master (comprehend) SMS mediated blog relations? Even Porter and Grunig have modified their views in the last two years . Then, of course, the very nexus of contracts (Coase, and Easterbrook weep) is dismantled when the reality of Internet agency and porosity etch away at the Intellectual Property of 'the contract' as surely as MP3 downloads and relationships replace conversation (Sonsino) as the driving force so that organisations cease to exist as we know them – proof being three students who, asked to provide a press release as freebie to a friend with a start up web business, have asked for part equity in exchange for an online (social media) PR programme. This is an issue for all PR teaching as we know it. Die press agentry Die! Die! Die!

With so much vested in Marketing, and notably Marketing PR (whatever that is), its disintermediation before our very eyes shows the PR and Marketing Schools suffer from schizophrenia in some style. London is the world leading online advertising capital. The UK is the biggest market for online advertising; Martin Sorrell briefs the City that his empire is not dependant on Advertising and marketing agencies and keeps his share price afloat; Web sites are in slow decline, sex sites are eschewed, social media soars in exponential appeal; relationships conquer all; the brand is an RSS feed; the message is corporate values systems (British corporate value systems are scrutinised by more English speakers in China that in the UK and USA combined). Transparency, agency and porosity is the theoretical core of Web 2.0 and is nearly a decade old and still the marketers believe they have a future and, worse, encourage students to take marketing degrees.

Like many organisations, the CIPR this year ceded its online presence to the UK's PR bloggers. Many of the latter had, individually, more reach and page views that the Institute or the leading trade magazine.

Major companies and brands are in the bottom quartile for online interactive presence despite the best efforts of the likes of Martin Sorrell who are fighting off freely created wiki content for Google ranking despite a massive online budget and not a few millions spent in online advertising.

We are now past the 'does social media change behaviours' we know it does - and more measurably than advertising. We are past page views and need to measure engagement. But these are measures that we still have to learn about and teach.

Online studies undermine 'marketing by numbers' not by the way they are taught or through the content in the modules but by the evidence of the online conversation space. Projection or rejection of brand messages, brand values, semiotics and values is no longer at the disposal of the brand. At best it is available by permission. The power has shifted. Power and influence is now held by a nexus of relationships and all too often they are outside the organisation and the organisation, whether it knows it or not, is changed.

Scream management; Pap marketing; Bling PR

Scream management - Pap marketing - Bling PR is what we are taught.

It will not survive. Karl Fisch offered this:

http://www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/fisch/didyouknow/didyouknow.wmv

I listened to MySpace.

Information and knowledge are disintermediated.

What is success:

Conversation, innovation and listen, conversation, innovation and listen.

Listening offer values. Values are intangible. Values create relationships. Relationships with richness and reach create wealth. Wealth offers money.

New wealth is based on conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach, wealth (and money what ever that is?).
Old wealth is available through conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach (and money what ever that is?).

Pap marketing (with associated scream advertising) and Bling PR (with associated CSR) offer no values. PR and Marketing as we know it have a very short shelf life.

PR ethics - are these the right question?

There is a significant debate on the issues of PR ethics bouncing round the bloggersphere and media. Heather Yaxley has a good conversation going on about it on her blog. Tom Murphy has a take as does Leo Bottary at H&K.

I just don't think it has been thought through. We are constrained by old thinking. We are either looking in or looking out. But there is no inside or outside.

This whole debate and the issues of professional and ethical Public Relations, the survival of trades like marketing and the disintermediating effects of social media are moving corporate practices towards what some might call relationship management. There are no segments or stakeholdera snd few 'publics' in the new world.

Last year I proposed that people recognise tokens because they identify associated values and that when there are convergent values with another person or organisation empathy will create a relationship (Towards Relationship Management... 2006 JCM).

In many ways this goes beyond discourse/rhetorical, propaganda debates because they are comparatively insignificant to the nature of values and relationships.

In exposing the values (indeed, value systems) of organisations, the organisation survives because of its values or not in interactions with its wider constituency.

Is the ethical practice then to expose the values or to change them?

A purist practitioner would expose the values and be damned and would allow the organisation to be damned by its constituencies. It is a form of practice that can stand back from the consequences of foolhardy management.

On the other hand the PR manager (a person who attempts to manage the relationships between an organisation and its constituencies) would attempt to change the organisation.

If the organisation wants to use propaganda (aka marketing) the purist practitioner has an ethical duty to expose the value systems that support that approach in so far as they are values evident inside the organisation. It is an acceptable professional approach and there is no ethical issue in exposing the true nature of the organisation.

In many ways this is part of current practice with the 'bog standard' 'boilerplate' intro paragraph you see as the first par on most press releases. This exposes the organisation as having values that are propaganda (pejorative) based.
The decision to issue such a release, if taken consciously, is ethical because it exposes the value systems of the organisation. The constituent can then live with such value systems or not - Publishing is happy to do so which is fine for the publisher (and might go some way to explain away falling readership).

Dell-Hell was not about a computer it was about values and value systems of an organisation. Wal-Mart dito.

The practitioner who is not making the conscious decision between exposing values or not is, of course, not a professional practitioner and belongs in trades like marketing.

To those who would argue that 'spinning' and 'putting the best face' are unethical practices I would argue that there is now a discursive inevitability that these practices will be exposed by the online conversation in due course.

This inevitability may be a challenge from any quarter. It could be some comment in a blog or it could become the disintermediation of a whole industry.

The assumption that 'it can be hard for the public to evaluate viewpoints and come to a reasoned conclusion' is unreasonable (more marketing speak). Who is 'the public'? Who are we to judge? If we believe such ideas we doubt the very foundation of democracy.

The attraction of values that represent tokens is hugely powerful and more potent than scream marketing can guess at. Did Tesco and Morrisons do enough to allay fears of polluted petrol with its advertising campaign this week? Yes they did. They paid through the nose to pay for the repairs to customer's cars, but, a week after the problem arose, what have they yet to do to assure their constituencies that the values of supermarketing and their constituencies have common resonance. The backlash will not come where the petrol is cheap. People are not daft. It can now come from anywhere and the real damage is that Tesco and Morrisons have no way of knowing where or when it will happen. Reputation in crisis is not knowing where the damage will be manifest.


There is no dichotomy for the ethical practitioner exposing corporate (institutional) values. The values are reflected in the people who can live with such value systems and killing the messenger is not what the PR industry should be doing. Indeed, our inability to be purist or manager is giving rise to a massive 'Citizen Public Relations' (CPR) sector which is replacing much of PR practice.

Our role as business managers has some way to go if we are to be empowered to change the very nature (and values) of organisations.
We are not forgiven and have a reputation in crisis.


Picture: Charnine
Charnine.com features information on surrealist artist Charnine

12 Themes on the 'User Revolution'

Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing research team today published an in-depth, comprehensive research report titled, "The User Revolution.


There are 12 key themes discussed in "The User Revolution" report:
1. Global online advertising revenue to reach $81.1 billion by 2011.
2. Communitainment: Internet has increasingly become a principal medium
for community, communication and entertainment -- three areas that
have collided and are impacting each other's growth -- generating a
new type of activity: communitainment. Communitainment is taking time
away from other, traditional, types of content consumption on the
Internet.
3. Usites -- The increasing popular category of user generated sites,
which we are calling Usites, are driving traffic away from other
destinations and pose a challenge to the advertisers and publishers.
4. The Internet is now a mainstream medium: The web is the leading
medium at work and the second leading medium at home behind
television.
5. Internet usage patterns are changing, favoring Usites,
communitainment sites, search, and away from traditional portals.
6. User Generated Brands. The consumers are taking control of content
consumption and branding.
7. Media Fragmentation: Advertisers increasingly will need to buy more
inventory, from nearly all types of media, especially the Internet,
to have the desired impact.
8. The Golden Search: search has become the new portal.
9. Google's dominance is likely to expand, partly fueled by a wide
variety of non-search related products that create a virtuous cycle
of brand affinity for Google.
10. Video ads will be the driver of the next major growth in brand
advertising and getting additional dollars shifted from traditional
media to online.
11. Ad networks are experiencing increased demand due to increasing
Internet fragmentation, desire for more targeted inventory,
increasing usage of networks for branding and increased site
visibility.
12. Agencies are rapidly evolving into more sophisticated,
technology-savvy entities that combine best of breed offerings.

Delete Ads, insert relationships.

How do you know your blog is interesting?

The Uses and gratification theory, first identified in the 1940s by Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1944), attempts to explain why mass media is used and the types of gratification that media generates.

Rubin (1986) states that there are two underlying presumptions of the uses and gratifications model. First, researchers need to understand audience needs and motives for using mass media in order to comprehend the effects of the media. Second, understanding audience consumption patterns will enhance understanding of media effects.

A social cognitive theory of Internet uses and gratifications: toward a new model of media attendance by LaRose & Eastin, (2004) is very interesting and links U&G to Internet use.

Denis McQuail (McQuail, D. (1987): Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn.). London: Sage) offers a schemata to help establish the quality of web sites. When reviewing a site, this is a method that may be valuable to gain insights into how people will regard and use a web site (or a blog).

Morris and Ogan (1996) poit out that U&G is a comprehensive theory and is applicable to Internet mediated communication ( see also McLeod & Becker (1981).

INTERNET PUBLIC RELATIONS - interactivity

INTERACTIVITY

As we go through the aspects of Internet mediated public relations it is noticeable that someone has secretly sneaked into the place where they keep management, public relations and marketing rulebooks and scribbled on most of the pages.

In traditional management teaching, public and stakeholder relations created understanding of the culture or context for a company or organisation. People ‘understood where they were’. This relationship, largely crafted by companies, and other organisation (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations etc) created an environment to allow a company (or organisation) to effectively promote its products and services. This created and context and public knowledge and (sometimes) an empathy with the public. Within this context, advertising and marketing promoted products and services to achieve sales. The chain of supply, production, distribution and payment process took over and distributed the product or service. It was simple.

Figure 1 (c) David Phillips 2007 The Traditional Information Value Chain

This process is now changed – someone has scribbled in the book! The public relations (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations marketing, advertising and value chain transactions) contribution is now increasingly subsumed into an Internet driven context.

This conquest is both overt and hidden.

The overt presence (promotion and interaction between an organisation and its constituency) is now largely transparent and available in the Internet network. This is because of the application of web sites, news distribution, Internet marketing and market makers, in business to consumer and business-to-business environments.
The subliminal influence of the Internet, as the means by which an organisation is evident in the human (and machine) context, is not difficult to uncover.
The presence of information and messages about organisations is spread by, and through, web crawlers, search engines and RSS (note these are technologies not people). They are also distributed by people using email, Mobile text messaging, Instant Messaging, blogs, newsgroups, chat, personal, media and corporate web sites and much more.

Even tracking a new message in cyberspace is daunting. Monitoring all the messages, new and old, is already too difficult. The Internet is thereby in charge of creating context in which an organisation is evident to a broad constituency.

Such change is of the Internet. There is more. This change is affecting the ‘traditional’ context more than most understand.

Because a large part of the physical world is now dependent on information delivered across the Internet and through a range of devices, the once separate relationship between traditional and Internet driven relationships has gone. For example, reporters and news providers have become heavily dependent on the Internet which means that ‘traditional’ newspaper readers are reading Internet driven news by proxy. Traditional banks, manufacturers, logisticians, lawyers, physicians.... (the list is too long to enumerate) and more now depend on the Internet for information to allow them to operate. The context by which an organisation is known is only as good as its ability to use the Internet and to be part of the Internet culture. The web site is now the front window and front door for most organisations.

New employment dependencies are becoming apparent such as the print, publishing and distribution of books and CD’s benefiting from the on-line success of Amazon, Barnes and Noble and their competitors. This true of so many industries.

Progressively, overtly and subliminally, Internet technologies throughout the supply/demand chain, or, more appropriately, the value chain, but more significantly throughout the ‘value network’ have taken charge. Now, the whole population is dependant either directly or indirectly.

The context in which an organisation can thrive is rapidly moving from its ability to create relationships with publics (public relations) to relationships created by and across the Internet – and mostly via third parties beyond its control.

Figure 2 (c) David Phillips 2007 The New Information Value Network

The value network, extending upstream to suppliers and downstream to customers also includes the value added third parties to the transaction as well as other tertiary contributors in a network of networks. At an ever-greater extent they attenuate processes as information flows transparently through the whole of the transaction network. At once the supplier can be customer, partner, social commentator and commercial foe in such a networked structure. The consumer of news is also its author, editor, distributor and promoter as bloggers file their copy, pictures and videos and journalists comment upon them.

The international effort to sequence the human genome resembled an open-source initiative. It placed all the resulting data into the public domain rather than allow any participant to patent any of the results. This has resulted in a wave of new drugs and treatments, criminal investigation techniques, archaeological research and so forth. The information, once made public has created wealth in many directions.

The Internet's capability to allow people to access information comes through the nature and use of search engines, a very popular form of interactivity, but so too is an ability to interact with products and service, buy and sell, to pay taxes and to hold conversations, exchange virtual artifacts like pictures poetry and films.

Any analysis of pages viewed or searches made this century will show that interactive sites get more people involved.

More people have access to the Internet, more people can get 'stuff' faster because they have broadband, people are spending more time online. Industry has responded. It has invested in 'better' web sites. More graphics, eye tracking to optimise page layout and many other methodologies.

The result is disappointing.

Corporate web sites, by and large, have seen little by way of exciting growth in the amount of access by Internet users. Exceptions are those that offer opportunities to play, interact or buy.

Is the relatively poor performance of the generality of institutional web sites just because there are many more sites for people to visit? Is this because search engines have made it easy for people to find new places to go?

The Myspace, YouTube and Second Life phenomena suggests otherwise. Analysis of these types of web site, hugely interactive both in terms of their technologies and as the means for development of social groups, shows dramatic acceleration in numbers of users, frequency of use and interactivity. Even more significant is that these sites are key recommenders. People share information about their favorite web sites.

Conversations have been important for Internet users since it began but now these conversations are among millions, are easy to use and are huge drivers.

Interactivity changes organisations. As users interact with organisations, the organisations have to change. They have to respond. As a result they create systems, protocols and processes to re-act. If an order is placed online, a company has to devise systems to deliver goods, services and interactions with users. The Internet is changing organisations. Processes are included in the intellectual capital of organisations which is one way in which the Internet is changing the asset value of organisations. The online relationships are affecting the value of organisations.

Internet mediated Public Relations adds value in its own right and, additionally, as its evolution as a catalyst for empowering users in their relationship clouds, it becomes a bigger player in changing the value of organisations.

The demographics of the web - broader than you think

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found according to the Daily Telegraph.

Emailing and online chatting to friends and family was the favourite internet activity of the retired people surveyed, followed by researching information, booking holidays and shopping.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes.

Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers.

This are the baby boomer generation. The generation that most marketers do not target online.

Which beggers the questions

Who is no longer part of the Internet generation?

What media is valuable for engaging with these people?

Is the PR industry using it?

Radio as we don't know it

The announcement of the latest Rajar figures is heralded as a great success for radio broadcasting by the broadcasters and the media. It is nothing of the sort.

Radio was dieing.

Then came the Internet

Then came that hackers and illegal file sharing folk

Then came light. Broadcasters found that MP3 was a friend, streaming Internet Protocol radio shows was a friend. The long tail is a friend.

They told the copyright lawyers to go away - well almost.

The shared their shows and find that digital radio is up, Podcasts are up, radio on TV's is up, Radio via mobile phones is up, listening via PC's is up.

Top programmes are up, niche programmes are up, listening to historic programming is up.

As the Independent put it: The digital revolution and the expansion of new ways of accessing information through the Internet has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.

There is one other angle. You can listen to the radio and do other things. It is great multitasking medium.

The research says that we we do things concurrently by switching from one task to another when we multi task so that is worth bearing in mind. This is not full and complete attention for much of the audience for much of the time.

PR practice has a big challenge, alongside the Rajar channels there are all the podcasts. Dozens of them.

Offering content both in terms of talking heads and ready made content is now a very definite part of the communication mix for PR.

Bang! Bang! Marketing

I shudder at a Guardian article about modern day marketing.

I Quote:

"We got a group of 14 or 16 actors, who were all football fans, but pretended to be fans [of the unnamed club]," explains Graham Goodkind, Sneeze's founder and chairman. "And they went round bars and clubs around the ground, in groups of two, saying that one of their mates had been sacked from work because he kept on getting these text messages and talking to everyone about it, and his boss had had enough and given him the boot. So they were going round with this petition trying to get his job back - kind of a vaguely plausible story.

"And then the actors would pull out of their pocket some crumpled-up leaflet, which was for the text subscription service. They'd have a mobile phone in their pocket, and they'd show them how it worked. 'What's the harm in that?' they'd say. And they could have these conversations with lots of people - that was the beauty of it. Two people could spend maybe 20 minutes or half an hour in each pub, working the whole pub. We did it at two home games and reckon we got about 4,000 people on the petition in total."

The petition went in the bin, of course, but subscriptions to the club's texting service soared. "The week after we had done the activity it went up to 120 sign-ups," says Goodkind, who is also boss of the Frank PR agency.

A lot of this is spured by the poor performance of advertising:

A 2004 study by Deutsche Bank found that, in the short term, just 18% of television campaigns in the US actually generated a positive return on investment. In the long term this figure rose, but only to 45%, suggesting that most TV advertising is little more than a fun way for a company to waste its money.

There is much more to this article and it is worth reading iffor no other reason that to look at the ethics of moderndat Marketing, advertising and - I regret to say PR.

Social Media stats keep comming in - and its good to talk

I have been commenting on the rise and rise of social media in the Internet firmament.

I noted Heather Hopkins contribution to this meme on Monday and added BBC news about the phenomenon in Google searches.

If PR really wants to offer an effect for its clients, these are the statistics that should be on the tip of the collective indutry's tounge.

Today Heather offers more evidence.

At the risk of taking her thunder here are some of her facts:

• Adult websites are down 20% in market share of UK Internet visits comparing December 2005 and December 2006.
• Gambling websites are down 11%.
• Music websites are down 18%

• Net Communities and Chat websites are up 34%.
• News and Media websites are up 24%.
• Search Engines are up 22%.
• Food and Beverage are up 29%.
• Education (driven by Wikipedia) is up 18%.
• Business and Finance up 12%.

Google accounted for 25% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in December. The #2 source was Hotmail, accounting for 3%, and #6 was MySpace accounting for 2%.

• Search Engines (including Google) accounted for 35% of upstream visits in December, up 13% year on year.
• Net Communities and Chat accounted for 7% of upstream visits, up 64% year on year.
• News and Media accounted for 5% up 26% year on year.

Where does PR education go now?

The use of communication technology is ubiquitous in contemporary public relations practice, and often there’s no choice but to adopt the newest communication technology. So says the Commission on Public Relations Education in its recent report.

In the preface it says: For example, even the smallest and most traditional businesses require the Web sites that their customers expect, and the submission of a simple news release to a mass medium’s electronic newsroom must satisfy the technological requirements of that medium. Organizations must continually monitor blogs, recognizing that harmful rumors can spread worldwide in minutes. The contemporary practice of public relations requires practitioners to immediately respond to emerging issues and crisis situations via Web sites, blogs and other new media. Today, the choice of communication channels is dictated by technology: a practitioner must seriously consider which message forms and channels would be best for specific publics. Often, new technological forms and channels, such as electronic pitching, podcasting and blogging, prevail over traditional news releases and media kits.

This is recommended reading.

Social media continues to take over

Some time ago I noted how social media is growing compared to traditional media. This post showed how social media page views and reach is dominating web evolution Now there is more evidence from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. She reports that social media search is showing this evolutionary trend too. The BBC has noted the same effect in Google searches.
Social media is a critical area for PR development and we need to embrace it fast.

British companies seem reluctant to create their own web logs, but are they missing out on free exposure?

So asks The Independent and it is an indightment on the PR industry that it has not yet given UK business these tools!

The Indy article notes that "An internet search reveals the rapid growth in online blogging - web and marketing consultants, politicians, journalists, media companies, authors, academics and students are all heavily into blogs (or web logs - online diaries). But it is difficult to find small firms that blog outside of those in the internet and media industries."

So what's the problem guys? The CIPR could start with a more robust attitude I guess which is now down to the survey being conducted by Francis Ingham and it is up to you to make you voice heard.

Edelman discover the Relationship Value model in research

In every region (EU, Asia, North America, Latin America), respondents most often named “shares a common interest with you” as one of the top three characteristics that would increase their trust in a person sharing information about a company reports the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.

This is evidence of how the Relationship Value Model works.

People congregate round people and institutions that share common values. They trust people with such values.

Return on Investment of blogs - a critical examination

It would seem churlish of me to criticise Charlene Li who was brave enough to attempt to gain some idea of Return on Investment of blogging.

In particular, it is with some sadness that I make a number of points after she kindly accepted some of my papers in her initial scoping of the research and then allowing me to see her finished article.

I admire her work and the work of Forrester.

But we do have an endemic problem in marketing and it has insidiously worked its way into the industry's folk law.

At the core is a misunderstanding in the difference between advertising and editorial. I think that Charlene has fallen for this urban marketing myth. My views on the use of advertising equivelents (AVE's) is pretty well known and is based on a lot of work by many reserachers.

People are really quite clever and discerning. They do understand the difference between the two. Research by many people and notably Guy Consterdine had demonstrated time after time that people both see and read advertising, even advertising deeply disguised as advertorial, that is advertisements disguised as editorial, differently.

We also know from his research that there are special relationships between people and the publications they read which, I think we can reasonably extend to blogs. People get different gratification from different publications and that applies to blogs too.

Indeed we know this from online responses to these two forms of communication. People seek information by searching the bloggersphere and through their social links online. People do not seek out advertisements. Click through rates show that only a minute fraction of advertisements exposed to people, however much they are presented in context, are explored by the online community.

Dwell times for advertisements are also different with editorial gaining many times longer than advertising.

This reflects the work many of have done over the years with other media such as newspapers and magazines.

People see and precess editorial and advertising differently.

Then we go to the content and context of the two forms of communication. Advertising presents an semiotic image of the organisation as the organisation would like to be seen. They are offered in context as near to the ideal as the advertiser can achieve. By contrast editorial, especially editorial mediated by the Internet, is presented in the context of the editorial vehicle. It is the context of the blog, discussion list or web site. This has an influence on how people perceive the content.

Then again, the content can be presented in passing or in great detail. It might be the content of a whole and lengthy critique or in passing or it can be a fragmentary comment. It can be offered in approving or critical tones and it can be presented that endorses or subverts a point of view or third party views or analysis.

So not only is editorial different to advertising, it comes in many contexts, in many forms and in many ways. Measuring the value of these different editorial approaches is near to impossible and can at best be an extrapolation after detailed analysis of a huge proposition of a large corpus.

My only experience of attempting this was extrapolation of over a million press articles at Media Measurement and that only gave me for a moment in time some very broad conceptual certainties that could not be measured in simple monetary form.

The problem is this, even if you have some measure of values, they are of value only from the perspective you take. For example, a high value editorial to the Chief finance officer might be a nightmare for the legal team and an inexplicable shot in the foot for the salesman.

In the analysis presented by Forester there is another misconception. This is in how to calculate value.

The research offered attempted to make an assumption that in some way, the cost of advertising reflects the value of editorial. Cost and value are two different measures and should not be assumed to be the same in any way shape or form.

To get some idea of how different forms of media analysis can be used, this paper is perhaps the starting point for a professional communicator in the 21st century.

I then turn to the issue of return on investment.

ROI, even in its simplest form has many faces. The actual investment is, as Forrester found, very difficult to guess. The actual cost and alternative investment or replacement cost can be very hard to identify. Investment in one moment is of different value to another. Online, these changed values can be very quick and so what seemed like a good investment in July can judged a disaster in December. One only has to look at the financial markets to realise this and for a judgement on ROI over a period of, say, a year the numbers seldom stack up. It is fashionable to talk about ROI in marketing circles but there are very few management processes that truly reflect cost.

When ever we seek to identify ROI we have to distinguish between raw return and discounted return. In the case of the Forrester research there does not seem to be a distinction. Before a return can be used in a business context we have to discount the value of the return by the amount of return that could have been archived by using the resource in some other way. Like investing the money in a bank or other parts of the business.

These then, are my two principle issues. First there is no such thing as advertising equivalent for editorial. It is a myth that has entered the heads of the marketing community and second there is no such thing as return on investment unless you take into account the discounted value from a given perspective.

There is a lot of research available for those who wish to follow up on this topic.

Regrettably, Charlene, we differ on this occasion.

New ePR book

This week David Meerman Scott released the second edition of "The New Rules of PR: How to Create a Press Release Strategy for Reaching Buyers Directly,". The second edition of the eBook features a foreword by David McInnis, CEO & Founder of PRWeb and social media expert.

Scott's new eBook provides communications and marketing people with tactics and techniques to take advantage of the new media landscape. It include:

* Optimizing your news release to achieve primary placement in search engines and news portals (SEO)
* Using online news distribution services to reach thousands of Web sites and blogs throughout the Web, and connect directly to your key audiences
* Leveraging interactive features including TrackBacks and tagging to encourage circulation in the social media space
* Developing content to attract key audiences and drive Web site traffic.

I like David's thinking and look forward to a good read.

It is the time of year for surveys

I do not know how many PR students there are in the UK.

Lots seems to come to mind.

A lot of final year students are busy trying to get good evidence that can use in their final year dissertation.

Francesca is a case in point. She has a survey here http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB2263NG2VR9E
and desperately wants PR professionals to complete it ... well?.... go.... complete it for her... she need your input.

It just seemed to me that it would be really cool if we were to get a little round robin going to expose some of these surveys to a wider audience for our students.

What difference does social media make.

I, and no doubt others, have some difficulty trying to explain just how significant the change in marketing and communication, but most notably PR, is in the Internet mediated era.

Once upon a time it was quite easy. There was a framework of interactions that were governed by a range of institutions that allowed the media, governments, and a range of other institutions that offered a link between the dominant coalition and the publics (stakeholders if you like) and it was relatively easy to maintain the status quo.

The model looked like this:


Progressively a number of capabilities have allowed people to comment interact and form ever morphing but culturally close communities. They form round individuals at the nexus of the groups in one of more social media environments.These environments are characterised by MySpace and Digg or Podzinger and Second Life. There are many (oh! so many) forms of community environs. Each forms a relationship cloud. And, as technologies and fashion dictate, these clouds bubble up and absorb energy from participants. The nature of these clouds is that the basic software and service is relatively cheap But the combination of participants, their content, their tagging, their involvement with other participants and their 'Google Juice' created value (Google bought YouTube for $1.6bn and thereby gave us a clear view of how much a corporation values these 'clouds')

This many people have knowledge and insights, a thirst for information and interaction (including buying stuff). To accommodate these people and to gain energising knowledge and interactions, organisations make information ever more transparently available. I agree, not always willingly - as the music industry attests (and is punished for).

The effect is that even the nature of institutions is changed as information empowers different coalitions inside organisations. The wider values of organisations become transparent and all forms of interaction become mediated by the Internet.

In addition, the very interactions in and around the organisation are transparently available for all to see and if not, the newly porous nature of organisations allows the information to leak out into the blazing netshine.

The role then of public relations changes as it navigates the relationship clouds and interacts in such a way that all but the merest whisp of turbulence can be observed. The role is in empowering the relationships in and between the relationship clouds.

The organisation too becomes a relationship cloud and by the marriage of values among the users of the clouds, a merging and morphing of interests, satisfies the newly morphed and combined interests. Sometimes for a fleeting moment or for a long, long time.

Offending in this space brings down the might of the relationships bound together by common values.

Does this help us understand?

Here is just one tiny example that all in PR can understand. Where once a press release would do, the authentic voice of social media is now doing better. More praise is heaped in print on more organisations than ever before without the lifting of a PR finger or, for the most part, its practitioner's knowledge. To see this in action, just look out of the window and see the sparkle.

The end of PR as you know it

Chris Anderson has an interesting post.

He says: I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves. Take Microsoft's 3,000 bloggers who are, for many of us, a welcome substitute for Microsoft PR. Internal project managers like Major Nelson of the Xbox 360 team are a trusted and timely source of information, and have largely replaced the formal press release with blog posts. He and other Microsoft bloggers like him are part of a transparency movement that grew out of the company's developer relations team, but it could have just as easily been driven by an enlightened PR team.

Yes, this is a legitimate argument as far as it goes. It does not take into account the rest of PR such as the analysis and explication of the values relevant to the organisation in relationship clouds among the nexus of values that represent the organisation. Nor does it explore the role in developing the use and application of channels for communication b eyond blogging.