Someone might tell BAA that it sometimes rains at Gatwick in may which makes customers baggage soggy when thrown on to the back of an open truck.
And anyone can photo their practices and blog about them in near real time!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
BAA baggage handling
Someone might tell BAA that it sometimes rains at Gatwick in may which makes customers baggage soggy when thrown on to the back of an open truck.
And anyone can photo their practices and blog about them in near real time!
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The statistics that say you must take social media seriously
Image via WikipediaI have been working through a range of statistics that show how significant social media is for PR and marketing.
While UK internet users are all saying they want to hear from brands and companies on line, with rare exceptions, marketers and PR people cant quite make the leap of faith to do it.
Perhaps this list of links will suggest to them that it is their inhibitions that are the problem and not whether this space is commercially important.
Perhaps this too, will suggest that online PR is a great career move. Perhaps this will show the Universities they need to be able to teach this stuff.
So here goes (and if you want to add any... help yourself)
London School of Economics Reports: a 7 per cent increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1 per cent additional company growth.
http://tinyurl.com/aohth
Internet usage growth out performs all other economic activity worldwide.
http://tinyurl.com/6aaxc2
National statistic office report six in ten Internet users go online dail
http://tinyurl.com/5sky8aIMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Online retail sales in the U.K. grew 54% in 2007 over 2006, reaching £46.6 billion from £30.2 billion http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x
IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. 15% of all British retail sales took place online last year. http://tinyurl.com/62ee4x
40,362,842 UK Internet users in Nov/07 http://tinyurl.com/6255h5
66.4 % penetration, of the population http://tinyurl.com/6255h5
Growth in social media
Britain's blogging army is now 4m strong http://tinyurl.com/2uzh2k
YouTube is now the most popular social networking website in the UK http://tinyurl.com/26h7vo
Social Media affects consumer behaviour
Social media is affecting audience behaviour. According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006) , social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9
UK visits to Facebook
http://tinyurl.com/yt6ax5
Top Brand mentions in social media
http://tinyurl.com/5av73g
- Reasons for people going online
(Source: National Statistics Office)
What people do online
5.7 million users were browsing via mobile devices in January of this year. http://tinyurl.com/4xn2z9
Social media affects every stage of the shopping process
A study by DoubleClick shows that the web is the most influential medium in shaping consumers’ purchasing decisions, with shoppers using it at every stage of the shopping process, from first awareness to final purchase. http://tinyurl.com/58coe9
Should be % of marketing spend
Internet advertising has again buoyed the UK advertising industry with above-expectation 41.3% year on year growth in the first half of 2007. This takes the sector to a half-year high of £1,334.3 million – compared to £917.2 million just a year ago – lifting online advertising’s market share significantly, to 14.7%. http://tinyurl.com/2xg2kr
Where is Internet advertising going?
Audience engagement in online advertising is 18 per cent more effective than its print equivalent, and people are also 15 per cent more engaged in magazine articles online than in print. So much for print advertising. http://tinyurl.com/4kzf3c
But is advertising the answer? Nope!
New research into the effectiveness of different advertising mediums has revealed that advertising on social networks has had very little impact on consumers so far. http://tinyurl.com/657yj2
Since July 2006, Topshop has seen more visitors to its site come from its pages on social networks like MySpace than from search engines. Advertising don't work involvement does http://tinyurl.com/5tgpfm
Over 90 per cent of marketing departments are planning to launch a social media campaign in 2008 http://tinyurl.com/66pq63
A survey, conducted by LEWIS PR at PR Week’s New Media Conference, revealed that 75 per cent of attendees are planning to use a blog as a social media asset in 2008 – an increase of 50 per cent on 2007. The number of firms planning to use social networking is tipped to increase from 33 per cent to over 70 per cent. http://tinyurl.com/66pq63
What Web 2.0 is most effective for US companies http://tinyurl.com/57xrgh
Online v’s print media (popularity, growth etc)
Average Time Spent on Social Nets 3X Longer Than News and Media Sites
For any target demographic there are numbers;
What sites are 18 – 35 working women visiting? (not just media)
In all countries except the UK and the US, more men than women use the internet. In the UK, the split is equal (50/50), while in the US 52% of internet users are women, with 18-34 year-old women being particularly active in both countries (Ofcom).
Women outnumber men for the first time among UK residents going online. Females between 25 and 49 spend more time online than males the same age.” http://tinyurl.com/3lac2o
18-34 age group is where women spend more time online than men (57 per cent compared with 43 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/2pms2u
Two thirds (66 per cent) of 18-35 year olds in the UK are actively engaged in social networking and almost two in five (38 per cent) are members of two or more online forums or social networking sites. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh
Negative comments posted on online forums and social networks put off customers. http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh
Nearly 1.5 times as many 18-35 year olds would rather accept a friend request from a brand than have banner adverts on a social networking profile page. The best way to get users to accept friend requests was identified as through offering special offers and discounts (60 per cent) http://tinyurl.com/5qoksh
In a survey in 2006, 1000 women were surveyed revealing some extremely interesting insights:
70% are 25-44 y/o. 70% are in long term relationships, 83% are employed over half full time.
28% 'couldn't do without it'
More important that TV, magazines and radio
Internet is six times more than nearest rival (TV)
Compared with other media the internet is regarded as the most important, achieving a 37% share. TV followed and only managing 24%. 63% of those surveyed ranked online first or second in terms of importance and 45% considered the internet “very important to me” with 28% of women going as far as to say they couldn’t live without online!
67% regard the Internet strong on community. That three times greater than magazines!
92% of women identified shopping with their use of the internet, over nine times as much as its nearest rival. Buying fashion online is now as important as booking travel, with 63% of women claiming to do both.
The convenience of being able to research products and services before purchase online or in the high street is also valued with 75% of females identifying this as important. The internet is enhancing women’s lifestyles. 67% of women considered the internet to be strong on community, with 84% using the internet to keep in touch with friends and family.
55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%. http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8
A recent poll by Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nin-tendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%). http://tinyurl.com/22tlp8
"Video streams at broadcast network TV websites were nearly two times more likely to be viewed by women age 18-34 than men, who accounted for 22% and 12% of streams respectively. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu
Different types of products are likely to be best advertised on different types of video websites.
For instance, a female products brand may have better luck effectively reaching its target audience through a network TV website than through YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/67qjxu
Corporate site important but declining
How regularly do folk go online
88% of women who use the internet aged under 44 use the internet daily.
Most adults (59 per cent) who had used the Internet in the last 3 months used it every day or almost every day, with the age group 25 to 44 using it the most (63 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/46u4wc
Where are client target audience currently reading about the brand online?
Its easy to see how far the client has got: Only 16 in Blogs, 26 videos, 288 mentions in MySpace, 14 people and 14 groups in Facebook. A profile in Wikipedia and was last updated 17 days ago (five changes). But it does not figure in Twitter. There are 26,400 indexed pages that refer to the client in Google (Budweiser has seven million).
We cab see where the online communities are active. e.g. Social Networks are the most popular social media for this client.... But how active are they in other media?
Who’s doing digital well?
The web continues to drive sales at PetMed Express. In fiscal 2008, e-commerce generated 65% of sales and accounted for 83% of growth. http://tinyurl.com/437p8
What are competitors thinking of doing?
More than three quarters of company respondents say that the importance of online customer engagement to their organisations has increased in the last 12 months.
The most frequently cited benefits for companies implementing customer engagement initiatives are 'improved customer loyalty' and 'increased revenue'.
More than half of respondents say their companies are either using or planning to use web-based widgets to engage with their customers more effectively.
Around two thirds of respondents say the mobile channel will be 'essential' or 'important' for customer engagement in the next three years.
Here are some examples in the public sector campaigns:
Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea for an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.
National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get involved too.
Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities led by GCN.
Downing Street - it’s use of ePetitions
Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software.
Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with government data made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.
DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK’s web users have accessed government services via DirectGov.
Ministry of Justice - Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain.
SS/SIS - a bit of a Is involved in a range of interesting developments.
Do we know or have an idea of how much other brands are spending on digital activity alone?
I hope you enjoy the links.
There are zillions of them and they all point one way.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Seven Strategy Steps for modern communication
I thought it may help to examine how organisations can develop strategies. This is at the beginning of the thinking and in no special order but its a start and I only have seven considerations.
I guess the place most people will start is that place of record. The company or brand web site.
Strategically, for a corporate web site we can imagine it as the place where the most visitors come each day to engage on corporate matters. For an etail site it is the flagship store and the trade site is an invitation into the biggest and busiest warehouse and so forth.
Strategy consideration 1
So our first strategy action point is the examine investment at a level that reflects the opportunity. For example there is significant evidence that corporate web sites are extensively used by financial analysis, investors, prospective employees, NGO's, regulators, vendors and many other stakeholders. Equally, if in general, retail sales on line are 15% of all retail activity, does the etail site offer an opportunity to access this business and will that be incremental business, will it enhance sales at bricks and mortar sites, will the return on investment be recovered at a lower cost to deliver added bottom line profits. All the indication suggest this is the case.
We now have available a lot of information about who, why and how people visit our web sites.
For example, the research is telling us that prospective customers come to a web site for a whole range of reasons through the buying process including, according to the Enquiro study, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase and, one can add, to reconfirm and justify the decision after purchase.
Strategy consideration 2
Our second strategy is to consider each of these instances and have relevant content for each of the visitor's needs. The strategy will set out to resolve the requirements for why people should search for, explore, find information and save it ready for the next visit.
Of course, as part of this process, the strategy will include SEO and will ensure that every page of the web site reflects the relevant company values which will be both obvious to the visitor and to the semantic algorithms used by search engines.
Strategy consideration 3
Our third strategy consideration is one of access.
In an era of user created market, and social segments that change and morph all the time, it is important to maintain an interest in the wider adoption of online media to create access.
Is access only to be through a PC or laptop or will it include games consoles, USB ports, mobile phones, kiosks and the panoply of devices that are available across the market?. How do people keep engaged with the company, product or brand? Is it one device or many and, for the time being, never mind the volume of people or even the number of visits because should the devices engage enough and is interesting for people at different stages in relationship building the pay off will come elsewhere.
For example Twitter. We have some good figures about the number of people who visit its web site But we don't have a clue as to how many people use tools like Twirl, mobile phones and Blackberrys to engage through Twitter. These dispersed metrics are going to be ever more diverse and difficult for the traditional marketing person to manage.
Strategy consideration 4
My fourth strategy focuses on content and content management. Lets take the case of a new product launched in California at 10 am local time. Of course, it missed most of Europe because they are enjoying an aperitif and, by the time the news cycle reaches Stonehenge, the story is so old there is not a journalist on earth who wants to cover it. No, the content strategy has to start at some point and as it goes through the time zones it needs refreshing with new and relevant insights, references to comments about it and to give a reason for bloggers and journalists and Susan and her friends swapping the news in Bebo. At what point in this cycle are employees engaged and those many organisations that work for the company (like consultants, vendors, and commercial partners)?
Strategy consideration 5
This content strategy also has to be able to serve many channels for communication. Can the strategy encompass words for twitter, bloggers, newspapers, feature writers. Does it have capacity for associated pictures, interactive AJAX graphical content, news updates and other mashups or widgets. Is there, strategically, room for video, podcast or an interactive second life avatar that can be controlled with a Nintendo Wii? Does this story warrant its own social media microsite, wiki, poll or user evaluation?
Strategy consideration 6
The sixth strategy are those management imperatives such as rules of engagement for employees and other organisations closely associated with the organisation.
Strategy consideration 7
The seventh strategy consideration encompasses both risk management embedded in the approach and crisis management capability - because we are all professionals.
Of course, there will be other versions. I welcome comments.
I guess the place most people will start is that place of record. The company or brand web site.
Strategically, for a corporate web site we can imagine it as the place where the most visitors come each day to engage on corporate matters. For an etail site it is the flagship store and the trade site is an invitation into the biggest and busiest warehouse and so forth.
Strategy consideration 1
So our first strategy action point is the examine investment at a level that reflects the opportunity. For example there is significant evidence that corporate web sites are extensively used by financial analysis, investors, prospective employees, NGO's, regulators, vendors and many other stakeholders. Equally, if in general, retail sales on line are 15% of all retail activity, does the etail site offer an opportunity to access this business and will that be incremental business, will it enhance sales at bricks and mortar sites, will the return on investment be recovered at a lower cost to deliver added bottom line profits. All the indication suggest this is the case.
We now have available a lot of information about who, why and how people visit our web sites.
For example, the research is telling us that prospective customers come to a web site for a whole range of reasons through the buying process including, according to the Enquiro study, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase and, one can add, to reconfirm and justify the decision after purchase.
Strategy consideration 2
Our second strategy is to consider each of these instances and have relevant content for each of the visitor's needs. The strategy will set out to resolve the requirements for why people should search for, explore, find information and save it ready for the next visit.
Of course, as part of this process, the strategy will include SEO and will ensure that every page of the web site reflects the relevant company values which will be both obvious to the visitor and to the semantic algorithms used by search engines.
Strategy consideration 3
Our third strategy consideration is one of access.
In an era of user created market, and social segments that change and morph all the time, it is important to maintain an interest in the wider adoption of online media to create access.
Is access only to be through a PC or laptop or will it include games consoles, USB ports, mobile phones, kiosks and the panoply of devices that are available across the market?. How do people keep engaged with the company, product or brand? Is it one device or many and, for the time being, never mind the volume of people or even the number of visits because should the devices engage enough and is interesting for people at different stages in relationship building the pay off will come elsewhere.
For example Twitter. We have some good figures about the number of people who visit its web site But we don't have a clue as to how many people use tools like Twirl, mobile phones and Blackberrys to engage through Twitter. These dispersed metrics are going to be ever more diverse and difficult for the traditional marketing person to manage.
Strategy consideration 4
My fourth strategy focuses on content and content management. Lets take the case of a new product launched in California at 10 am local time. Of course, it missed most of Europe because they are enjoying an aperitif and, by the time the news cycle reaches Stonehenge, the story is so old there is not a journalist on earth who wants to cover it. No, the content strategy has to start at some point and as it goes through the time zones it needs refreshing with new and relevant insights, references to comments about it and to give a reason for bloggers and journalists and Susan and her friends swapping the news in Bebo. At what point in this cycle are employees engaged and those many organisations that work for the company (like consultants, vendors, and commercial partners)?
Strategy consideration 5
This content strategy also has to be able to serve many channels for communication. Can the strategy encompass words for twitter, bloggers, newspapers, feature writers. Does it have capacity for associated pictures, interactive AJAX graphical content, news updates and other mashups or widgets. Is there, strategically, room for video, podcast or an interactive second life avatar that can be controlled with a Nintendo Wii? Does this story warrant its own social media microsite, wiki, poll or user evaluation?
Strategy consideration 6
The sixth strategy are those management imperatives such as rules of engagement for employees and other organisations closely associated with the organisation.
Strategy consideration 7
The seventh strategy consideration encompasses both risk management embedded in the approach and crisis management capability - because we are all professionals.
Of course, there will be other versions. I welcome comments.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Agnostic evaluation of media content
Image via WikipediaThis weekend, I have been playing with a sentiment engine and thinking about people's perspectives.
This one does not take sides. It is agnostic. It decides if a press story is positive or negative from a neutral perspective.
All you do is past text into a box and it analyses the content as positive or negative and shows the structure of sentences that leads to this conclusion.
You can try it here.
The returns it makes is an academic minefield. It challenges your thinking about truth.
It has a first cousin, that can add perspectives. For example, it can make similar decisions from the perspective of the actors (company, person brand etc) which is why it was invented but the returns with no perspective are very interesting.
Sometimes this programme gets it wrong but not often.
It is able to glean content that is negative but which contributes to the positive side of the article and you can see how it does it.
I have tried news articles, book chapters, reports and even client presentations to see where the sentiment lies.
So where is the beef?
This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.
Try it out and be challenged.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Touch the virtual
I have a new word for everyone Realtuality.....
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, "EVE Online," Habbo, MapleStory and "World of Warcraft" are the next step in "network intermediated" social and economic interactions according to Andrew Burger at Linux insider.
But he missed a significant element. They are now combined with the Nintendo's Wii. Wii adds a physical element.
These developments are easy to dismiss and put into the PR no go area of Games.
As you may know, this has never been my view. Games are a form of communication and online games now allow players to interact with millions of other players round the world.
But the Wii is different. The players can interact, not only in the virtual world but in a mashup between the virtual and real dimensions.
A movement using the Wii from Stonehenge can be transferred to a movement on a screen in San Francisco and in real time and in the existing, simulated or game graphic renderings or virtual world.
David Stone, an MIT research fellow claims the motion-sensitive controller is "one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science." He offers the Wiimote as a key to building realistic training simulators in Second Life.
Add to the Wii and virtual worlds a huge mass collaborative development effort and you get where I am coming from.
Take Nancy Smith, president of the Sims label, who says Sims attracts creative people of all ages and both genders and have a track record of 4.5 million players visiting the Sims site monthly, and 70m downloads of player-created content including user created avatars and environments.
These are pretty big numbers and pretty active communities and they are not alone.
Corporate investment in post 2000 technologiesis already interesting. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million in 2007 and has at least nine more developments in train.
A study by Virtual Worlds Management, a Texas-based research company identified $184.2 million this year pouring into companies that run virtual worlds.
You can bet these will be very different and will need to include Realtuality, with its physical dimension to compete.
Intel add fuel to the flames. It say that the next generation Wii will not need controllers. Camera technology and sensors will mean they are obsolete.
The pent-up capability to create applications, the technical advances and money is now converging. The breakthrough cannot be far off.
Virtual offices, virtual homes, virtual friends and all interacting with real offices, real sports, real homes and real people stretches the imagination and yet is not far off.
Does this mean that the press conference is acted out by real people in virtual worlds or virtual people in real environments. Yes to both.
Does this mean the end of the travelling salesman, yes it does, and is supermarket shopping now a case of really walking but down virtual aisles, yes it does.
But these are pretty ordinary transmogrifications. What happens when we mashup email, twitter, VoiP and that old fashioned place of record, the website and add people being both themselves and their alter egos in dynamic activities in dynamic environments and physically involved too. Now add millions of people doing all this in full-on creative mode.
Well... Facebook is, by comparison, dull. Even the announcement by Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company behind the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, that they seek a partner to license a pole dancing game for the Wii is tame.
Development of new markets, new inventions and new societies already happens all the time in microcosm in these emeging worlds and at a pace that makes following twitter seem sluggish. But as these people bridge the gap to what our generation believes is mainstream, the effect will be astonishing.
Building relationships between organisations and their publics in existing games has a very new dimension and is culturally very different. Second life using a Wii is different again and adding big bucks investment and open tools and open source to both is a daunting prospect.
And what is going to drive this revolution?
I think fun and sex. These environments are novel and fun and they open up whole new opportunities for romantic interaction.
Millions, of people using open tools and open software backed up with significant investment by business angels will begin to deliver products that make the exponential growth of YouTube look sluggish.
The commitment to life in these environments will drag people from television, the cinema and night clubs to the next mashup generation beyond today's Wii and big home screens, games and virtual worlds.
The first shops in these environments will soon become the biggest mall anyone ever walked down.
Today, we think we are cool with our corporate blogs, wiki's podcasts and social media involvement but perhaps we should now begin to think of the next digital generation.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The new telegraph HQ
Today, I was given a tour of the Telegraph new editorial centre. Its 67,000 sq ft of open plan editorial space.
My host was Chris Lloyd Assistant Managing Editor ( my nephew).
He has been with the project from its inception and was both a charming host and brilliant in his outlook for where the internet is taking publishing.
The Telegraph has shown thousands of people, including competitors, from all over the world round this amazing facility.
With its extension of My Telegraph due soon and raft of well known bloggers not to mention the growing capability and range of content at Telegraph TV, the evolution fom print to all media is a revelation.
The BBC and Guardian are both creating new centres now.
The big issue now, is can the PR industry raise its game to support these new capabilities?
The pic is Carl Courtney (Chairman of Publicasity - for whom I work three 50 hour days a week), sitting at the editorial hub in this huge centre.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Measuring the value of PR - the values that make relationships
Over the next few days I will be working on development of tools that allow me to look at corporate and brand values.
You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.
First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.
My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.
This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.
These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.
With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.
Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.
But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).
We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.
The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.
Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.
We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.
The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.
That's the theory.
Now to see if it works.....
You see, it’s quite hard to really see what organisational values are. There are the things organisation say and claim as values and then there is the reality.
First we need to be able to see what values are claimed by organisations.
My route is, as you might expect, mechanistic, replicable and agnostic. To achieve this computer programme will examine the public face of the organisation (government department, company brand) as is evident on their web site. Yes, it does mean opening up every page, extracting the text elements and, to identify potential value statement, process the text to identify the semantically important phrases. I have elected to choose the most significant ones and limit them to a maximum of three per web page.
This will, experience shows, provide a heap of sentences and they have to be refined. Using part of speech analysis we can identify those phrases that are adjectival.
These phrases can be considered the values of the organisation.
With this smaller group of phrases (values), we can explore those that have semantically similar content and identify generic value systems on the web site.
Hey presto, this is a way of identifying the public expression of values of the organisation.
But, as the more cynical of us might imagine, these values will be those that the organisation wants us to see (they may not be in the same order of significance that a company or government department one brand manager would choose - but we are being agnostic here).
We now need to test these values in the cauldron of public opinion.
The first cauldron is that host of people who have expressed an interest in the organisation. That is, those people who have linked to it. What are their values and which ones do they have in common.
Then there are the commentators like the press, bloggers and others who don't link in.
We can now test the expressed values of the organisation against the values of its publics.
The extent to which there is dissonance is an expression of the value of the organisation's public relations.
That's the theory.
Now to see if it works.....
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Clip Book
Working part time in an agency gives an insight into how far they have regressed.
In the 1980's and 90's I ran a PR consultancy. We had a sister evaluation company (Media Measurement) which did all out work on clip book production as well as evaluation to meet a range of client needs. In those days we used a lot of trees in PR.
The evaluation team were specialist, had all the software and equipment to deliver product on time and right first time.
Professional PR people and awesome writers were not wasted on clip counting and mounting.
Easy.
Now, a decade later I find that agencies are still using PAPER! The Clipbook carbon footprint in the PR industry is massive.
Because clients want it?
Now, I don't care about the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) demand for huge amounts of money to force organisations to knock over more trees. Its time to face them down.
I am not a person who believes that you can't read off the screen. We all do it.
I don't care about size for size Advertising Equivalents spreads and all that complete AVE rubbish. That was invented to satisfy the 20th century egos of Marketing Directors. In those days they had secretaries who typed letters!
Paper guard books offer so little information compared to digital ones. Today, would professional managers accept cash flow forecasts without drill down?
But what I resent most is the complete an utter waste of intelligent people’s time and on every count. Cost, wasted skill, environment damage, encouragement of lazy, typically innumerate, PR practice are all reasons to move away from paper.
Partnering with a professional evaluation company is the right direction for agencies (and I mean partner – not supplier) and this needs to be a three way, transparent relationship with the client.
In cost saving alone, it makes sense.
In the 1980's and 90's I ran a PR consultancy. We had a sister evaluation company (Media Measurement) which did all out work on clip book production as well as evaluation to meet a range of client needs. In those days we used a lot of trees in PR.
The evaluation team were specialist, had all the software and equipment to deliver product on time and right first time.
Professional PR people and awesome writers were not wasted on clip counting and mounting.
Easy.
Now, a decade later I find that agencies are still using PAPER! The Clipbook carbon footprint in the PR industry is massive.
Because clients want it?
Now, I don't care about the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) demand for huge amounts of money to force organisations to knock over more trees. Its time to face them down.
I am not a person who believes that you can't read off the screen. We all do it.
I don't care about size for size Advertising Equivalents spreads and all that complete AVE rubbish. That was invented to satisfy the 20th century egos of Marketing Directors. In those days they had secretaries who typed letters!
Paper guard books offer so little information compared to digital ones. Today, would professional managers accept cash flow forecasts without drill down?
But what I resent most is the complete an utter waste of intelligent people’s time and on every count. Cost, wasted skill, environment damage, encouragement of lazy, typically innumerate, PR practice are all reasons to move away from paper.
Partnering with a professional evaluation company is the right direction for agencies (and I mean partner – not supplier) and this needs to be a three way, transparent relationship with the client.
In cost saving alone, it makes sense.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Search v Value
In recent weeks I have been working for Publicasity. They are developing their online skills - and the new web site, blog Twitter etc. is due in a few weeks (of course).
But we have been working on audits for a range of clients and companies and one the striking statistics that emerge is search volume.
More than once, we have un-nerved marketing directors with a graph that they recognize as sales graphs.
These search graphs are now beginning to be important. A way of being able to identify the how well companies are doing over the counter and online in terms of sales.
It struck me that there are more applications for these kind of data.
Knowing that search volume tells us about the commercial success of an organisation means that these data could also be useful to investors and others.
This conjoin between actual activity and online activity is another way of expressing the value of online work.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Find top bloggers - pre alpha
Here we are. The client has asked us to begin a blog outreach programme for their new widget. You need to find the top bloggers in the field. Goog and Technorati provide a huge list. Which are the top bloggers. Whose influence in the bloggersphere really counts?
Well, this is a pre alpha experiment and I will welcome comments. You can try it here in an iFrame or go to the web site here which is easier on the eye.
Enjoy!
Well, this is a pre alpha experiment and I will welcome comments. You can try it here in an iFrame or go to the web site here which is easier on the eye.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
In preperation for Euroblog 2008
Tomorrow, I will be joining a panel at Euroblog 2008.
I will be in the august company of
We are tasked with examining:
I thought that I would get my thoughts ready before the event.
In the first instance we need to be sure that there is a changing media environment and whether the extent of any such change is significant.
A year ago, I presented evidence of the changing media environment. Based on work at Bournemouth University I showed that at a time when more people were online; when people were spending more time online and when access was increasing because of the uptake of broadband there was a paradox. In 2006, I showed that traffic to search engine sites and retail web sites was not reflecting the extra eyeball or eyeball hours. Worse still, traffic to these sites was in slow decline. Where was all the extra 'traffic' going?
It was going to social media. Blogs, wiki's, social networks, YouTube.
These finding legitimise the the first assumption in our discourse and are a vindication of my repost to the views expressed by Betteke van Ruler, Professor of Communication and Organization at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, in April 2006. Social media is significant and has a huge role to play in communication.
Of course, it would be wrong to blithely make the assumption that there is significant evidence of the generality of business being affected by the changing media environment.
What, then is the evidence that online interactions are affecting business?
Over the last two months, I have undertaken in-depth studies of the digital footprint of five companies. One of the resources used has been Microsoft adCenter Labs . In presenting to a B2C client with over 600 UK retail outlets, I showed this graph of search driven numbers of visitors to their websites.
For the marketing director this was a surprise. This graph was a match for their volume sales! In subsequent analysis for a range of other clients we were able to demonstrate similar correlations.
It would seem that people go online before buying and search extrapolation from these data suggests that they do so in significant numbers, mirroring other research of this nature in areas like B2B purchasing.
In answer to the second premise for our discussion, I contend that companies and the internet are now joined at the hip. Even for company websites that are not e-commerce enabled, the internet is having a significant impact on business performance.
The next issue we need to face before we go further is the extent to which the internet is affecting business.
Once again, we now have evidence of what companies believe they are achieving online.
With some confidence we have evidence of the demographic nature of the website by sex and age profiles:
But when we go and look at who is actually visiting the site we get a different picture:
The age and sex profile is not the same:
What we are seeing is that it is the consumer who is deciding what they want and need from the internet. This is full blown evidence of the phenomenon of 'user' segments. The marketing people (you remember - those folk who held sway in the 20th century) have got it wrong.
There is other evidence that is interesting. If you examine the SEO keywords used by webmasters, they are more often than not at variance with keywords people use to search for products and services (which also demonstrates the poor SEO of most websites). In this case, we are seeing evidence of people online deciding what they believe are brand and corporate values. In the majority of cases (in the five surveys I have done so far) there is significant dissonance between what the company thinks are its brand values and what their website visitors believe.
Progressively, companies are changing their keywords as the attune to the power of SEO. The companies are being changed by the online community.
But is this enough? What about the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication.
In the UK there was a very significant change in the behaviours of the interactive community.
As a generality, and for years, the numbers of blog posts about companies has shown a progressive increase.
But last year (round about November time) there was a sea change.
The rate of growth in the number of posts moved from progressive to exponential. It is not the numbers of posts that is important. It is the rate of change that is so significant.
Once again, in each of our surveys the results showed the same dynamic.
From the foregoing, It is reasonable to accept the premise of the session at Euroblog. There is a :
Not that risk cannot be managed it can and so I hope that the discussion on risk is based on good research, practice with good assessment and in a structured way.
This is going to be fun.
I will be in the august company of
- Toni Muzi Falconi,
- Ansgar Zerfass (University of Leipzig, Germany),
- David Weinberger (Fellow at Harvard Berkam Center),
- Frank Ovaitt (President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations)
- Gilles Klein (Le Monde),
- Tim Macmahon (NY University)
- Wolfgang Luenenbuerger, (Head of Social Media, Edelman Europe)
We are tasked with examining:
The changing media environment and how it is affecting business, academia and its implications for the future:
- What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
- How can we measure it?
- What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.
I thought that I would get my thoughts ready before the event.
In the first instance we need to be sure that there is a changing media environment and whether the extent of any such change is significant.
A year ago, I presented evidence of the changing media environment. Based on work at Bournemouth University I showed that at a time when more people were online; when people were spending more time online and when access was increasing because of the uptake of broadband there was a paradox. In 2006, I showed that traffic to search engine sites and retail web sites was not reflecting the extra eyeball or eyeball hours. Worse still, traffic to these sites was in slow decline. Where was all the extra 'traffic' going?
It was going to social media. Blogs, wiki's, social networks, YouTube.
These finding legitimise the the first assumption in our discourse and are a vindication of my repost to the views expressed by Betteke van Ruler, Professor of Communication and Organization at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, in April 2006. Social media is significant and has a huge role to play in communication.
Of course, it would be wrong to blithely make the assumption that there is significant evidence of the generality of business being affected by the changing media environment.
What, then is the evidence that online interactions are affecting business?
Over the last two months, I have undertaken in-depth studies of the digital footprint of five companies. One of the resources used has been Microsoft adCenter Labs . In presenting to a B2C client with over 600 UK retail outlets, I showed this graph of search driven numbers of visitors to their websites.
For the marketing director this was a surprise. This graph was a match for their volume sales! In subsequent analysis for a range of other clients we were able to demonstrate similar correlations.
It would seem that people go online before buying and search extrapolation from these data suggests that they do so in significant numbers, mirroring other research of this nature in areas like B2B purchasing.
In answer to the second premise for our discussion, I contend that companies and the internet are now joined at the hip. Even for company websites that are not e-commerce enabled, the internet is having a significant impact on business performance.
The next issue we need to face before we go further is the extent to which the internet is affecting business.
Once again, we now have evidence of what companies believe they are achieving online.
With some confidence we have evidence of the demographic nature of the website by sex and age profiles:
But when we go and look at who is actually visiting the site we get a different picture:
The age and sex profile is not the same:
What we are seeing is that it is the consumer who is deciding what they want and need from the internet. This is full blown evidence of the phenomenon of 'user' segments. The marketing people (you remember - those folk who held sway in the 20th century) have got it wrong.
There is other evidence that is interesting. If you examine the SEO keywords used by webmasters, they are more often than not at variance with keywords people use to search for products and services (which also demonstrates the poor SEO of most websites). In this case, we are seeing evidence of people online deciding what they believe are brand and corporate values. In the majority of cases (in the five surveys I have done so far) there is significant dissonance between what the company thinks are its brand values and what their website visitors believe.
Progressively, companies are changing their keywords as the attune to the power of SEO. The companies are being changed by the online community.
But is this enough? What about the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication.
In the UK there was a very significant change in the behaviours of the interactive community.
As a generality, and for years, the numbers of blog posts about companies has shown a progressive increase.
But last year (round about November time) there was a sea change.
The rate of growth in the number of posts moved from progressive to exponential. It is not the numbers of posts that is important. It is the rate of change that is so significant.
Once again, in each of our surveys the results showed the same dynamic.
From the foregoing, It is reasonable to accept the premise of the session at Euroblog. There is a :
changing media environment and how it is affecting business and academia and it does have implications for the future.These finding also help us with our examination of:
- What are the potential opportunities and risks for businesses in investing in new media?
- How can we measure it?
- What is the role of higher education in navigating these opportunities.
Not that risk cannot be managed it can and so I hope that the discussion on risk is based on good research, practice with good assessment and in a structured way.
This is going to be fun.
Friday, March 07, 2008
You are not the words you write
I chanced upon Daniel Chandler's essay on intertextuality (looking up more reading about value systems) in which he notes
Essentially the reader has his/her own context and interprets both the author and the work from a personal and cultural perspective. But the sentence stood out for me because of its immediate parallel with the significance to user generated content.
Here there is no authority except in the author but many interpretations. In a sense, we cannot make clear our written intention nor can we expect common acceptance among readers.
Thus the values we express are not all of our own making but of the readers making.
It was good serendipity.
In 1968 Barthes announced 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader', declaring that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination' (Barthes 1977, 148).
Essentially the reader has his/her own context and interprets both the author and the work from a personal and cultural perspective. But the sentence stood out for me because of its immediate parallel with the significance to user generated content.
Here there is no authority except in the author but many interpretations. In a sense, we cannot make clear our written intention nor can we expect common acceptance among readers.
Thus the values we express are not all of our own making but of the readers making.
It was good serendipity.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Finding nice bloggers - finding nasty bloggers
In recent weeks, development in using Bayesian inference on Latent Semantic Analysis of blogs has been keeping me up at nights.
From a simple engine developed by my friend Girish, I have been thinking about how one can use this information as a predictive tool and it has some promise.
Let me go back a bit.
Here is a simple application to find out the sentiment of bloggers between two competing entities. You can try it out. Try comparing 'clinton' with 'obama' and see who is getting the most positive and most negative blog posts.
You will also see that the programme also measures the extent of objectivity in the content analysed.
Because of the way we have set this application up if the comment about the candidates is neither positive or negative it produces a nul return (because of the nature of the experiment).
This experiment has moved on quite a lot and soon I hope to have a more advanced example you can try out here.
The experiment we are working on is to use the concepts identified in the blogs to monitor what subjects are growing and which are retreating and the sentiment attached to them.
The next phase is to predict where such concepts are going within a level of confidence that is acceptable.
Now comes the theoretical leap of faith. When a new concept emerges, it will be disruptive and may well provide an insight what future news will be.
Now that really will add a new dimension to PR practice.
From a simple engine developed by my friend Girish, I have been thinking about how one can use this information as a predictive tool and it has some promise.
Let me go back a bit.
Here is a simple application to find out the sentiment of bloggers between two competing entities. You can try it out. Try comparing 'clinton' with 'obama' and see who is getting the most positive and most negative blog posts.
You will also see that the programme also measures the extent of objectivity in the content analysed.
Because of the way we have set this application up if the comment about the candidates is neither positive or negative it produces a nul return (because of the nature of the experiment).
This experiment has moved on quite a lot and soon I hope to have a more advanced example you can try out here.
The experiment we are working on is to use the concepts identified in the blogs to monitor what subjects are growing and which are retreating and the sentiment attached to them.
The next phase is to predict where such concepts are going within a level of confidence that is acceptable.
Now comes the theoretical leap of faith. When a new concept emerges, it will be disruptive and may well provide an insight what future news will be.
Now that really will add a new dimension to PR practice.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Relationships the missing link in Clay's book
At last after some long train journeys I have finish Here Comes Everybody
, by Clay Shirky.
He brings to the modern time the work of a number of American researchers and weaves some great case studies in a very engaging way.
The one element he needs is the dynamic behind why 'if you publish it people will come'. Of course this is not true but is a truism and it all comes down to the basis of relationships and notably relationships online.
Relationships form when the values of one entity (or person) finds another entity (or person) with values in common.
We go to the places where we know there will be like minded people. We talk to people with similar interests, we seek contexts where the values are akin to our own when we are in the 'mood'. We migrate to the blogs that interests us and then pass along the best to people who follow our blog.
On page 217, Clay explains the nature of 'networks of dense clusters', with a nice explanatory diagram which is a social media take on social networks.
There is some interesting work from the Haas Business School Alumni Networks' blog Group Scope which is not theoretical but is similar and from real life mapping and which shows the diversity of organisations (click here to see interactive version of the graphic) that form around a range of relatively narrow values and through a range of online channels for communication.
It is the basis upon which the Relationship Value Model ( a very European model) is predicated.
Group Scope have been investigating ‘hot company’ networks based on the idea that key people and investors can help point the way to new companies. They point out that the goal of a ‘derivative network’ is to take a network of interest (aka values systems) and ‘invert’ it to see another view of its affiliations. In each of the ensuing three derivative maps, they expose new sets of people and companies that are not in the group of ‘hot companies,’ but are related to that group through these derivative networks because they have common value systems interests.
In other words, the common themes of 'hot companies' (aka 'hot company values systems') are of interest to a wide, interlinked, network.
Its the values that encourage people in networks to find and then distribute the values in networks of dense clusters.
Here is a Touchgraph image of this blog and we can see the networked relationships:
It is closely interlinked with a relatively few (but germane) other blogs and sites.
BoingBoing.net, for all its reach is not as heavily networked. It is like a newspaper, a broadcast medium. It is the point well made in Clay's book.
What PR can take out of this is that the 'top blogs', the ones with a big readership and consequently relatively little interactivity, are really just publishers of stuff like any other mass media. If the content from these 'broadcast bloggers' is picked up by the network of dense clusters, great. But if not, try an advert in The Times.
On the other hand, further down the power curve, people who are interactive will pass on the news adding value (commentary, personal recommendation, insights and other values) on the way.
Thus PR is about relationships in this milieu where values are added to the values public relations explicates for its clients. In the networked community, values have a dense relevance among people who have a close relationship with them. These communities are very affective. They are the real key to reputation, for when content in the communities migrates to other (including, but not exclusively broadcast) media, the effect is significant because of the added values contributed by the networked communities.
And, values come before communication. So PR is not just about communication.
Let me explain. Suppose two actors (people) have common interests in similar values but there is no communication between them. In such a case there is no possibility of a relationship forming. However, in a network of dense clusters, there will be a third party who can act as the bridge between the two original actors and will show the values one to the other either overtly or, more often, through other values that are common to all three.
It explains the phenomenon of why RSS is so powerful in bringing relevant people and information to us so quickly. It explains how some activities truly 'go viral' online and it also shows that effective values systems, including corporate values systems have a wider and diverse online 'community' of direct, related and indirect interest. To miss quote an ex US president 'its the values stupid' .
In recent weeks, I have been exploring values and value systems for clients. Of course, driven by the idea that 'key messages', a 20th century marketing idea for brand exposure in mass media, most client have such messages in the meta data on their web sites (although some are far from well optimised). But often these 'keywords' are at odds with the actual content that people seek or read. Even worse, the value systems offered in texts and images on web sites miss the mark which shows up in the demographic data now available from services like Google Trends and MSN labs.
So far, every time we have shown these results to clients, there is an element of shock and a demand for re-evaluation of corporate and brand value systems as well as web design. The former falls directly into the lap of the PR practitioner who now can clearly see where the disconnect (dissonance) between the 'user generated social (sometimes market) segment' and the organisation lays.
Here we begin to see how whole organisations can be changed by the 'messages' (aka values) and how the online community is having a direct influence not only on brand positioning but corporate positioning, not to mention direction, as well.
There are more than a few organisations that are beginning to see that corporate values are critical to long term survival.
The book is worth reading and with just the one further, relationship values, step, would be seminal.
Thank you Clay.
, by Clay Shirky.He brings to the modern time the work of a number of American researchers and weaves some great case studies in a very engaging way.
The one element he needs is the dynamic behind why 'if you publish it people will come'. Of course this is not true but is a truism and it all comes down to the basis of relationships and notably relationships online.
Relationships form when the values of one entity (or person) finds another entity (or person) with values in common.
We go to the places where we know there will be like minded people. We talk to people with similar interests, we seek contexts where the values are akin to our own when we are in the 'mood'. We migrate to the blogs that interests us and then pass along the best to people who follow our blog.
On page 217, Clay explains the nature of 'networks of dense clusters', with a nice explanatory diagram which is a social media take on social networks.
There is some interesting work from the Haas Business School Alumni Networks' blog Group Scope which is not theoretical but is similar and from real life mapping and which shows the diversity of organisations (click here to see interactive version of the graphic) that form around a range of relatively narrow values and through a range of online channels for communication.
It is the basis upon which the Relationship Value Model ( a very European model) is predicated.
Group Scope have been investigating ‘hot company’ networks based on the idea that key people and investors can help point the way to new companies. They point out that the goal of a ‘derivative network’ is to take a network of interest (aka values systems) and ‘invert’ it to see another view of its affiliations. In each of the ensuing three derivative maps, they expose new sets of people and companies that are not in the group of ‘hot companies,’ but are related to that group through these derivative networks because they have common value systems interests.
In other words, the common themes of 'hot companies' (aka 'hot company values systems') are of interest to a wide, interlinked, network.
Its the values that encourage people in networks to find and then distribute the values in networks of dense clusters.
Here is a Touchgraph image of this blog and we can see the networked relationships:
It is closely interlinked with a relatively few (but germane) other blogs and sites.
BoingBoing.net, for all its reach is not as heavily networked. It is like a newspaper, a broadcast medium. It is the point well made in Clay's book.
What PR can take out of this is that the 'top blogs', the ones with a big readership and consequently relatively little interactivity, are really just publishers of stuff like any other mass media. If the content from these 'broadcast bloggers' is picked up by the network of dense clusters, great. But if not, try an advert in The Times.
On the other hand, further down the power curve, people who are interactive will pass on the news adding value (commentary, personal recommendation, insights and other values) on the way.
Thus PR is about relationships in this milieu where values are added to the values public relations explicates for its clients. In the networked community, values have a dense relevance among people who have a close relationship with them. These communities are very affective. They are the real key to reputation, for when content in the communities migrates to other (including, but not exclusively broadcast) media, the effect is significant because of the added values contributed by the networked communities.
And, values come before communication. So PR is not just about communication.
Let me explain. Suppose two actors (people) have common interests in similar values but there is no communication between them. In such a case there is no possibility of a relationship forming. However, in a network of dense clusters, there will be a third party who can act as the bridge between the two original actors and will show the values one to the other either overtly or, more often, through other values that are common to all three.
It explains the phenomenon of why RSS is so powerful in bringing relevant people and information to us so quickly. It explains how some activities truly 'go viral' online and it also shows that effective values systems, including corporate values systems have a wider and diverse online 'community' of direct, related and indirect interest. To miss quote an ex US president 'its the values stupid' .
In recent weeks, I have been exploring values and value systems for clients. Of course, driven by the idea that 'key messages', a 20th century marketing idea for brand exposure in mass media, most client have such messages in the meta data on their web sites (although some are far from well optimised). But often these 'keywords' are at odds with the actual content that people seek or read. Even worse, the value systems offered in texts and images on web sites miss the mark which shows up in the demographic data now available from services like Google Trends and MSN labs.
So far, every time we have shown these results to clients, there is an element of shock and a demand for re-evaluation of corporate and brand value systems as well as web design. The former falls directly into the lap of the PR practitioner who now can clearly see where the disconnect (dissonance) between the 'user generated social (sometimes market) segment' and the organisation lays.
Here we begin to see how whole organisations can be changed by the 'messages' (aka values) and how the online community is having a direct influence not only on brand positioning but corporate positioning, not to mention direction, as well.
There are more than a few organisations that are beginning to see that corporate values are critical to long term survival.
The book is worth reading and with just the one further, relationship values, step, would be seminal.
Thank you Clay.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Here comes Everybody Part 3
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky should be in the library of every business and PR school. Its out later this month and will challenge most minds when thinking about online public relations. Its engaging style, modernity and use of case studies makes the arcane come to life.
There are some interesting new insights and explication of previous work in a modern context and responds to Harvard's John Palfrey criticism at the same time.. The one that is powerful is his explanation of Power law as it applies to interactivity online and notably, blogs. There have been interesting papers, notably with contributions from Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer.
In response to some ideas of David Sifrey Jason Kottke did the math.
Back in 2003 he noted:
In a part you can see this in the scatter.com video that Anthony Mayfield has on his blog:
The notable elements are that this is a continually morphing process, that the most powerful influence is not from the big broadcasters but from the many smaller nodes interacting and range of elements that contribute to both connectedness and significance.
Online PR is not about big numbers it is about a range of changing and relatively small nodes that have a small interaction with other nodes. It is the number of small blogs that is important not sheer reach.
There are some interesting new insights and explication of previous work in a modern context and responds to Harvard's John Palfrey criticism at the same time.. The one that is powerful is his explanation of Power law as it applies to interactivity online and notably, blogs. There have been interesting papers, notably with contributions from Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer.
In response to some ideas of David Sifrey Jason Kottke did the math.
Back in 2003 he noted:
The dotted blue line is a linear equation, the dashed red line is a quadratic equation, and the solid black line is the power law equation. The linear and quadratic equations fit the data poorly. So the quadratic is an improvement over the linear equation, but neither compare to the excellent fit of the power law.
What this means for PR people is interesting and comes from another part of the book dealing with the nature of networks online.
First the power law part. Bloggers range from people with a lot of followers, who because they have so many, cannot be very interactive with them all, to the blogs at the nexus of a few chums (who interact a lot with a few). This means that the 'average' blogger is probably a long way down the curve and 'average' is a meaningless approach to identifying influence.
We come across the power law a lot in online activities. Wired magazine's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in article in October 2004 where he coined the expression 'The Long Tail' shows a commercial interpretation.
But the next part is also important. His explanation that to achieve connectedness (and enter the illusive 'viral' nature of the internet), then it is the properties (like blogs) that have very modest numbers of connections that are the most powerful.
In public relations terms and to identify content that will move people to respond to a brand or issue, it is not the people or online properties with the profile of publishing (Boing Boing being the apogee example) , it is the people with much more modest numbers of links that really count.
In a part you can see this in the scatter.com video that Anthony Mayfield has on his blog:
The notable elements are that this is a continually morphing process, that the most powerful influence is not from the big broadcasters but from the many smaller nodes interacting and range of elements that contribute to both connectedness and significance.
Online PR is not about big numbers it is about a range of changing and relatively small nodes that have a small interaction with other nodes. It is the number of small blogs that is important not sheer reach.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Here comes Everybody Part 2
I have a review copy of the new book by Clay Shirky 2008 Here Comes Everybody Penguin.
The subtitle is "The Power of Organizing without Organizations"
It is an idea that I contest.
A long time ago, last century, Mark Adams, Prof Anne Gregory, Infonic’s Roy Lipski, Alison Clark and some others worked on the key drivers that would be delivered by the Internet (CIPR/PRCA Interet Commission). There were three: Transparency, Porosity & Agency. They are proved right.
Organisations now have all three. There is greater transparency between actors inside organisation. Past departmental silos are dismembered, corporate hierarchies are an ever moving feast and the distinction between an employee and consultant, supplier and manufacturer not to mention factory owner and factory user are a nicety. The boundaries of organisations are crumbling and ubiquitous interactive communication has been the lubricant for this process.
This gave rise to a concept I call the relationship cloud. Transparent values (ethos + tangible and intangible assets) are exercised with transparent responsiveness and the internet facilitates employee relationship clouds with the networked relationship empowered online and offline actors.
There are no organisations any more. The transition is too far gone to make such assumptions.
All we have is the remnants of the 20th century pretending that Toyota is a company, the Prime Minister is Presidential and the shop is the home of retailing. We still use the names and the images but the reality is that the transition is too far gone to plan ahead on such assumptions.
We are already at the point where there is 'Power of Organizing without Organizations' is in daily practice even among the organisations but we all hasten not to recognise it. It is too far out of the comfort zone of all too many?
Next... page 19
Where are the values?
The subtitle is "The Power of Organizing without Organizations"
It is an idea that I contest.
A long time ago, last century, Mark Adams, Prof Anne Gregory, Infonic’s Roy Lipski, Alison Clark and some others worked on the key drivers that would be delivered by the Internet (CIPR/PRCA Interet Commission). There were three: Transparency, Porosity & Agency. They are proved right.
Organisations now have all three. There is greater transparency between actors inside organisation. Past departmental silos are dismembered, corporate hierarchies are an ever moving feast and the distinction between an employee and consultant, supplier and manufacturer not to mention factory owner and factory user are a nicety. The boundaries of organisations are crumbling and ubiquitous interactive communication has been the lubricant for this process.
This gave rise to a concept I call the relationship cloud. Transparent values (ethos + tangible and intangible assets) are exercised with transparent responsiveness and the internet facilitates employee relationship clouds with the networked relationship empowered online and offline actors.
There are no organisations any more. The transition is too far gone to make such assumptions.
All we have is the remnants of the 20th century pretending that Toyota is a company, the Prime Minister is Presidential and the shop is the home of retailing. We still use the names and the images but the reality is that the transition is too far gone to plan ahead on such assumptions.
We are already at the point where there is 'Power of Organizing without Organizations' is in daily practice even among the organisations but we all hasten not to recognise it. It is too far out of the comfort zone of all too many?
Next... page 19
Where are the values?
Here Comes Everybody Part 1
I have a review copy of the new book by Clay Shirky 2008 Here Comes Everybody Penguin.
I was going to read it cover to cover and then review it. But it's such a good book that I thought to express my responses as I go through it page by page (ok, few pages at a time).
It is written in a very engaging style and the first page that pulled me up was 17.
There is an assertion he makes that is interesting:
If we look back at the history of changed ways of communicating is there evidence?
Was writing so important. Did those long boring inventories in the ruins of Babylon change that society?
How did the printing press change society?
Is this Middlemarch and the reach of the telegram translated into the 21st century? What of radio's influence in the 1930's, television, tapes and CD's.
Is society so changed? Do the have nots stir? Are communications changes always accompanied by social upheaval? Can common humanity ameliorate the effects?
The questions this simple sentence offers us also predicate social and economic upheaval.
The Battle for Seattle, McSpotlight, Al-Qaeda, Cyber assault against Estonia in 2007 and a host of threats against the systems for delivery.
The sentence has much more to it.
With all our modern systems for communication, are the starving fed, the poor rich?
Do new communications always have to divide peoples?
Do new communications always benefit an elite?
Was it really new communications systems that brought about these ills? Or would they be there without them? Are we really going to see society change, by that I mean, is it inevitable that evil will be exposed again as a consequence of the introduction of there new forms of communication?
Is ubiquitous interactive communication different?
So far, it does seem to be different. There seem to be sets of values that spread through these channels that provide checks and balances that past systems for communication did not seem to have.
Transparency the sword and scales wielded by ubiquitous interactive communication may yet have a part in this saga.
The book has to return to this theme.
I was going to read it cover to cover and then review it. But it's such a good book that I thought to express my responses as I go through it page by page (ok, few pages at a time).
It is written in a very engaging style and the first page that pulled me up was 17.
There is an assertion he makes that is interesting:
"When we change the way we communicate, we change society."You have to test assertions like that.
If we look back at the history of changed ways of communicating is there evidence?
Was writing so important. Did those long boring inventories in the ruins of Babylon change that society?
How did the printing press change society?
Is this Middlemarch and the reach of the telegram translated into the 21st century? What of radio's influence in the 1930's, television, tapes and CD's.
Is society so changed? Do the have nots stir? Are communications changes always accompanied by social upheaval? Can common humanity ameliorate the effects?
The questions this simple sentence offers us also predicate social and economic upheaval.
The Battle for Seattle, McSpotlight, Al-Qaeda, Cyber assault against Estonia in 2007 and a host of threats against the systems for delivery.
The sentence has much more to it.
With all our modern systems for communication, are the starving fed, the poor rich?
Do new communications always have to divide peoples?
Do new communications always benefit an elite?
Was it really new communications systems that brought about these ills? Or would they be there without them? Are we really going to see society change, by that I mean, is it inevitable that evil will be exposed again as a consequence of the introduction of there new forms of communication?
Is ubiquitous interactive communication different?
So far, it does seem to be different. There seem to be sets of values that spread through these channels that provide checks and balances that past systems for communication did not seem to have.
Transparency the sword and scales wielded by ubiquitous interactive communication may yet have a part in this saga.
The book has to return to this theme.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
The Influentials theory debunked.
Fast Company runs an article in which Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, puts to test the idea that trends are sparked by a handful of highly connected individuals, or the influentials, as they have become known after the best sellers The Tipping Point and The Influentials.
It was Ilya Vedrashko in his Adlab blog who brought me this gem.
The Influentials is debunked. Katz and Lazarsfeld are questioned and Stanley Milgram "Six Degrees of Separation" plays differently when you run the analysis using robust and life size samples.
In an environment where individual values are the starting point and where they are explicated as tokens and when they provide the basis of attraction online which can be proven over and over again, I am with Watts.
It was Ilya Vedrashko in his Adlab blog who brought me this gem.
The Influentials is debunked. Katz and Lazarsfeld are questioned and Stanley Milgram "Six Degrees of Separation" plays differently when you run the analysis using robust and life size samples.
In an environment where individual values are the starting point and where they are explicated as tokens and when they provide the basis of attraction online which can be proven over and over again, I am with Watts.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
There is a ballance between marketing and Public Relations
There is a balance between marketing and hype and public relations, that discipline comprising management of relationships, transparency and communication.
On the one hand there is a part of human nature that makes people want to be noticed in the social order. This is true of companies too. We like and need marketing. On the other, there is a need to share values using communication which is at the core of relationships. Sharing requires transparency to engender trust and confidence among the people in the group - the heart of good PR.
Over the last few weeks we have seen what happens when markets respond to too much marketing and hype without the modifying influence of relationships.
Lets get to the nitty gritty. In the USA and to a less extent the UK (although it led to the actualitie of Northen Rock going bust - what ever one might call the 'rescue plan') the markets believed the President of the USA and the British Chansellor of the Exchequer when they said that these two economies were strong. They believed the political marketing of, well, the politicians.
Within the closed gardens of the financial institutions it is all too easy to believe such hype without digging too deep. That, and a lack of transparency as so many institutions ignore the conversations that surround them, and there is every belief that the West and notably the US and UK will continue to be financially secure.
Just look at the response to the Edelman Trust Barometer which revealed this week that business opinion formers seem to believe that they can trust the marketing hype of businesses when almost anyone who audits the online community conversations can see less than enthusiasm for corporate speak.
What we have seen is the corporate assets based on tangible assets turned into tradeable products and services using Intellectual Properties and process know-how have been hyped. The sub-prime lenders, celebrity brands and extravagant personal and government spending, funded by loans from the savings of ordinary folk and topped up by China and Indian economic surplus is not a receipt for endless success. The interest, if not the principle, has to be paid back.
It is not that we did not know that Gordon had sold gold at the bottom of the market or that he had borrowed endlessly to fund hospitals and city academies. It is that the balancing effects of transparent relationships and communication, the real drivers of added value have been suppressed. In the UK leaks have replaced Parliamentary announcements, Big Tents have silenced critics and EU jobs have extended political sell by dates with labels that look similar to an ad agency designed price sticker.
In the end it required very little by way of transparency, notably in the shakiness of the US sub-prime loans and the exposure of poor banking practice revealed in the collapse of Northern Rock , and the whole edifice collapses. Trust and confidence is lost when the true nature of the relationships is revealed.
Relationships when undone by transparency crack trust and confidence and we are seeing the effect in spades this week.
This is why I believe that the PR industry needs to have a much better understanding of what drives relationships, why they are so powerful and why they can act for an against the interest of clients big and small.
The values that underpin relationships, including those values that surround corporate and government attitudes towards transparency need to be articulated and, in order that people should be drawn towards them, communicated in an honest and trustworthy manner.
Without such governance in PR, we will continue to hurt the most vulnerable and will undermine the nature of our civilisations.
Image: Diseno
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