The Real Time Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is one further flaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Day PR Monitoring and Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handling online issues - PRW keeps running scared

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

The Next Big Thing Online

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

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

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

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

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

Values have value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

created at TagCrowd.com

Tactics v Strategy

Sometimes in this hurried world you nearly miss a gem.

Brian Solis blog is worth following and I try to.

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

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

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

"The client wants.....

'A viral....

'A Facebook ....

'A blog ....

'In Twitter....

Absolutely NO! NEVER! EVER!

The client must have Strategy.

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

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

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

Her comments on Search Engine Optimisation are valuable:

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

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

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

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

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

The year of Mobile PR

E-consultancy has an interesting post this week.

It said:

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

I think that there are lessons here for PR too.

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

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

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

There are other people talking about Mobile.

ReadWriteWeb commented this week too.

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

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

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

How Google selects news

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

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

This video helps a lot

This Guardian articlee is very useful too.

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

Public Relations - define

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

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

It re-defines Public Relations.

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

This person really only has one role.

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

It is really quite simple.

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

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

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

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

Productivity comes to marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is manufacturing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This productivity is lost to most organisations.

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

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

What our web sites say about us

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

It has been fun.

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

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

This is a word count:

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

created at TagCrowd.com

and this is the semantic view:

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

created at TagCrowd.com

The difference is huge.

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

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

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

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

Crisis? Prevention is better than cure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Twitter hath murdered time

This post is not just for Online Public Relations professionals. It is for every practitioner.

The dynamic of public relations has changed. In an short article that Philip Young and I contributed to Kogan Page newsletter recently we examined how, inevitably, Twitter has changed actual practice. I offer an edited version of the content we provided.

Public relations is moving into a new dimension, a scary and thrilling future in which reputation is instant and responses’ times are evaporating.

For pro-active PR professionals, it is not just what you say, or how you say it, but how quickly you can say it too, and ever more dominant social media platforms are bringing challenges of time and geography into ever sharper focus.

Not long ago the news and comment agenda was set by media deadlines. Newspapers published daily and most magazines monthly so PR worked to their publishing cycle.

Today, everything has changed. An hour is a luxury.

New tools, such as Twitter, means the window has almost vanished. We are now seeing real time conversations about organisations, people, brands, events and issues. We discover, subjects that are interesting journalists before they write them. We see public opinion as it changes and morphs in real time. Organisations’ priorities and individuals’ foremost thoughts are on very public view. A Twitter search using tools like Twitterfall or Tweetdeck can be very effective to learn people’s thoughts and reactions immediately.

These nuggets of opinion come together to form reputation and shape relationships. They are public, linked, aggregated and searchable. They matter.

Responding to real time and very public conversations is now becoming one of the biggest challenges facing public relations practice.

Take the experience of one transnational giant I was working with just a few days ago. The organisation, a household name known to all computer users, wanted to promote an event. As is customary, the agency issued news releases to the media and reached out to carefully targeted bloggers. They then began monitoring online conversations. What they saw was a fast-growing discourse on Twitter.

It was clear from the online profiles of Twitterers that a new and significant public was emerging – a group of people, including bloggers, who were unknown to the organisation until very close to the event.

At the same time a number of new issues began to emerge until the event was in the top ten most popular in the ‘Twittersphere’. Over 3000 individual ‘Tweets’ in the space of a week-end was pretty good going and Twitter was setting the communications agenda.

To ensure that it was part of this conversation, the multinational in question had to increase its contribution to the debate in real time and respond to comments (which also involved some criticism) without delay.

The extent to which the Twitter community was engaged with the conversation was very evident. At one stage the ranking of Twitter comment about the event fell to sixth. An appeal via Twitter to the people who had been involved in this speedy conversation created a huge response pushing the ranking of the event in the ‘Twittersphere’ to third within minutes.

Learning to adapt to this rate of operational change is but one example of how quickly management has to respond to new pressures in a digital age.

Next time you issue a press release - even if only to the traditional media, watch Twitter. Did your copy change the agenda? Can you respond?

Public Relations is changing fast.

Ad Fab, the BBC and Public Relations

Today, the PR industry seemed to celebrate a PR campaign and managed to get the BBC to talk about PR without using words like stunt or 'cheap and easy' and mixing publicity with PR in its usual way.

Its story says that "the campaign to secure settlement rights for Gurkhas undoubtedly owes much of its success to the fact it had a household name in Joanna Lumley to champion its cause."

So the barb was there.

They then found an expert who blew the gaff:

However, according to public relations experts, it was thanks to a unique set of circumstances that it won such a remarkable victory.

Prof Anne Gregory, director of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, said celebrity "ambassadors" have been used to good effect by charities such as Unicef.

But she said Lumley's close ties to the Gurkhas - her father fought alongside the Nepalese warriors during World War II - were crucial.

"She was the perfect figurehead," said Prof Gregory.

"She has that real personal connection. She's not doing it for the money or self-promotion and people feel she has the right to speak on the Gurkhas' behalf."

Public perceptions of the soldiers as "noble, brave, altruistic and loyal to the Queen without necessity" made the Gurkha Justice Campaign stand out from other causes, said the professor.

"People feel we should be generous to them in return for their loyalty," she said.

Even so, without Lumley's backing, Prof Gregory said the campaign may have waited much longer to achieve its goals, as leaders struggled to make their views heard.

In other words, the public relations campaign would win with or without Ad Fab glitter.

I think that Lumley did an excellent job. But it was a good (not great) public relations job and not an exercise, stunt, 'cheap and easy', or publicity.

Liberal Democrat Peter Carroll who was the power behind much of the strategy said: "There was pretty ruthless planning that went on to ensure that Joanna Lumley chose her moment well."

A planned and sustained effort.

Well done to them...

I wonder, as Nick Robinson might say, if they have learned the lesson.

After all, the BBC is a mighty publicity machine but will need some hard public relations to sustain its reputation as it exposed expenses to public scrutiny and ups the licence fee in the midst of recession.

The Publicasity press release about our book

Public relations professionals who want to do business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading. The online world had has changed since Online Public Relations’ first edition in 2001, and this new edition is a comprehensive study into online communication and interaction. For public relations practice the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again; the advent of an online world means almost every aspect of the discipline needs to be rethought.

“It’s not just the practice that is changing, it seems, but its role and purpose. After a short section on the basic toolkit, this book deals in concepts: transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach.”

Richard Bailey – review in Behind the Spin

“The internet brings public relations closer to the heart of corporate re-engineering, corporate governance, corporate and brand relationships, reputation promotion and issues management.”

The book “...provides clear pointers for organising public relations professionally now and indicates a vision of the future. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct his or her business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as a must.”

Professor Anne Gregory

“In the past, a PR person might have been judged by the volume of coverage generated for a client. The key today is not volume but influence: that is, how deeply into the networks did the story reach and for how long did it actively set the agenda in the online ‘conversations’?”

The internet is revolutionising the practice of public relations. This revolution has not only affected the way PR professionals communicate but has changed the nature of communication itself. This thoroughly revised second edition of Online Public Relations shows you how you can use this potent and energizing change intelligently and effectively.

This second edition is a timely and authoritative review of the new world of online public relations, supported by numerous online resources. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading.

About the authors: David Phillips is an online public relations pioneer. He has written three books about online public relations, lectures at Gloucester University and Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal. He is also the Head of Digital

Consultancy at Publicasity. Philip Young is a senior lecturer in public relations at the University of Sunderland, specializing in social media and media ethics. He is a lead researcher on the European Public Relations Education and Research Association’s EuroBlog project and has run the Mediations weblog (http://publicsphere.typepad.com) since April 2004.

Evolution or Revolution

In his review of the two new books about online public relations Richard Bailey opens up an interesting point.

He asks “Online public relations: evolution or revolution?”

It is a debate worth considering because it matters to the PR industry if it is and if it is not.

In this post I shall, by using some of the new search tools announced by Google this week, provide evidence and reason the believe that online public relations is probably an industry revolution rather than evolutionary.

What is a revolution?

The OED definition is:

1 a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.
2 a dramatic and far-reaching change.
3 motion in orbit or in a circular course or round an axis or centre.
4 the single completion of an orbit or rotation.

I guess the test should be to see the extent to which online public relations does or does not satisfy the first two OED definitions.

The extent to which online public relations has contributed to the overthrow of a government can be tested from experience. Certainly the Barack Obama election campaign was heavily mediated by online public relations but to say that it was the single of even the most significant cause for his success in the Primaries and the overthrow of the Republican incumbent government is stretching the point.

The public unrest in Iceland was certainly a factor in the proroguing of parliament this year but it is unclear to what extent the internet was the instrument of the over throw of the government. It is probable that it had an effect but whether this was a public relations activity and that it was the prime cause is not evident anywhere.

It's pretty fair to say that online Public Relations is not, yet overthrowing governments.

Perhaps we can look at the extent to which online public relations is evident in the forcible overthrow of a social order. Here we can see the evidence of activist public relations having an effect. In “Change Activist: Make Big Things Happen Fast” Carmel McConnell, the ex-Greenham Common activist turned consultant suggests that planned and sustained interaction (sounds like a re-write of the CIPR definition of PR) can change social order especially in business. But in the wake of humble apologies (did I really write that?) from bankers, one gets the impression that it is an idea that has not got a lot of traction yet.

Certainly, advertised jobs do not seek online skills as a rule.

There are no signs of forceful overthrow in recruitment job profiles. Indeed, there is very little evidence of a need for any online skills at all!

On the first definition. It would seem that the PR industry is not going through a revolution.

Now to examine the notion of revolution being dramatic and far-reaching change.

This should take us first to a definition of the work and role of the public relations practitioner. In 2005, I did a little exercise to see if I could shed some light into what Public Relations is (PDF).

Looking at these definitions and job titles, we can compare and contrast the role of the practitioner then and now and the extent to which online public relations is now a part.

It’s not easy. The self defining methodology based on the job titles given by CIPR members extends from external affairs to publicity manager.

There is a case for examining these definitions one by one to see the extent to which public relations, the designated job title, and references to ‘digital’ or ‘online’ have changed.

This might give us some inclination about the nature and extent to which there is a change in perceptions.

This is a research project that does need doing as the following results indicate based on a swift look on a wet Sunday in May.

One methodology (which I thought might give us some interesting results) could include the use of Google’s time-line tool of mentions of search terms associated with dates.

It would give us a response discovering the user of PR terms associated with dates over time.

This is an example for a search: 'online "public relations" publicity for the UK.

(fig 1)

It seems that there is a growing correlation.

Here is the counterpart for online "public relations" "external affairs" for the UK.

(fig 2)

I think it is fair to say that on a small sample we can see that there is growing association with job titles and online public relations.

From this small example it would seem that there is evidence of PR jobs being associated with online. Using such a tool, one might be able to see the extent to which different PR jobs are being associated with online and digital PR.

The extent to which this is ‘far reaching’ might be tested using such a methodology (although I would want other methods to be included in such research for it to be considered ‘grounded’).

Using this methodology there is evidence that there is a very definite change happening. Using the same method results based on UK searches about

“Online Public Relations” mentioned with dates gives some interesting insights.


(fig 3)

(One has to consider the underlying ‘noise’ in this form of analysis with about a quarter of the results seemingly being unreliable returns)

And “Digital Public Relations”


(fig 4)

(There would seem to be less ‘noise’ in the sample)
This form of analysis suggests that there is change. But is it a dramatic and far-reaching change.

I then searched for references to public relations that did not include the words ‘digital’ ‘online’ or ‘web 2.0’


(fig 5)

This form of discourse analysis would suggest that in recent years the use of the term “Public Relations” has been quite stable but in decline for the last 18 months when not associated with online. Indeed, the number of mentions about public relations is increasing but is in decline when not associated with Online.

This would suggest that there is an important change taking place.

Is this a dramatic and far-reaching change?

I think that if the term “public relations” on its own had been stable for the last 18 months, it could not have been considered dramatic. But the decline suggests that there is a move towards public relations being associated with online public relations. This is ‘dramatic’.

But is it ‘far reaching’?

In the Google analysis we have see a steady rise for a decade for the notion of online public relations. This suggests a long term trend but that is not the only way of testing the notion of 'far reaching'. I thought I might apply a semantic test as well and this gave me an opportuity to try out the new Google ‘Wonder Wheel’ tool. It gives us a related search view of the subject we are searching.

Online public relations is associated with digital tactics is a big way:

(fig 6)

While digital public relations is less broad based.


(fig 7)

With comparative related search capabilities, ‘Public Relations’ on its own has a wide semantic meaning online according to Google.


(fig 8)
Google is showing us that there is an equivalent range of search associations for ‘online public relations’ and ‘public relations’ suggesting there is an equivalency in semantic association.

This is ‘far reaching’. It suggests that there is an association in the presence between online activity and PR in the minds of people looking for PR and that, semantically, both normal PR and online PR have a considerable hinterland of similar force.

Bearing in mind that the web presence of online PR is very new compared to ‘public relations’ this is pretty good going.

I would suggest that this evidence has the hallmark of revolution.

For the sake of clarity, one has to bear in mind that this is based on a UK search. For other parts of the world results will be different.

This is not much more than ‘finger in the wind’ research and drawing any big conclusion from it would be a bit too much but it does give us the basis for a debate and suggests that the PR industry might like to look more closely at how much PR is changing, how fast and where the investment in marketing, training, education and sector development should go.

Thank you for starting the debate Richard.

The Web is in Trouble

The Web is in Trouble

Tweeted about by the Guardian's Jack Schofield almost before the ink was dry we see that Bryan Appleyard, in today’s Sunday Times, is being controversial.

He says:

“The web is in trouble. Last week craigslist, a vast classified-ads site, had to abandon its “erotic services” category because of claims that it was an “online brothel” being used by sexual predators. And in France L’Oréal discovered eBay could not be forced to stop selling cheap knock-offs of its products.”

Well I never. Imagine.... Porn on the Internet. What is the world coming to?

This sounds like the crackdown on Bolton’s on-street vice trade which resulted in more than 150 prostitutes and 115 kerb-crawlers being arrested in the last two years.

As for counterfeit being trades on eBay it’s almost as bad as Hua Xue. He was stopped by police when he was riding his bicycle in Southbourne and was carrying some counterfeit films which had not been released in UK cinemas. Gosh! Is this what happens on the internet too?

Mr Appelyard was doing his best. The internet is giving newspapers a lot of grief. It is giving journalists more. They have to be very good to survive.

So Bryan dragged up the 2006 book by David Edgerton. He writes:

“The internet”, says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, “is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Edgerton is the world expert in tech dead ends. Fifty years ago, he points out, nuclear power was about to change the world; then there was supersonic passenger flight, then space travel. The wheel, he concedes, did change the world, as did steam power. The web is not in that league.

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year’s oil price shock and this year’s recession, not to mention every year’s looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy. In fact, says Edgerton, we may, in retrospect, come to see coal as the dominant technology of our time. China and America have lots of the stuff and they plan to burn it. The web, like it or not, uses energy, quite a lot of it, and that will continue to be made with big, heavy, industrial-age machines.”

An excellent example of a specific viewpoint.

Because it is in the Sunday Times, it will have traction and notably already has online.

This week I, with Philip Young of Sunderland University launch our book (Online Public Relations – Kogan Page) which offers a countervailing view (Twitter #opr2ed)

There are two issues to consider.

The first is that, like coal, the internet offers mankind the opportunity to be more productive. That is, an ability to add intellectual properties to ‘things’ that make people more effective in their lives.

Coal does this by providing energy beyond the capability of human physiology to bring water, food, improved housing, health and facility. By using our big brains we can do this better than other species (none of which have come close to the human capability).

The internet, among other advantages, makes people more productive by reducing the time it takes to bring co-creators together by levering up the human need for social groups sharing common values and facilitates new ideas to extend our physiology in other ways. It extends knowledge freely available to mankind and provides much facility in the use an application of such knowledge.

There is a further advantage for the, still young, internet. It has the capability for very fast, human moderated evolution. A small proportion of the billion or so users of the internet are deployed in developing its capabilities not just in Open Source activities such as Linux or Wikipedia but in the capability to use Open Systems such as Yahoo! BOSS and other such ventures now becoming apparent from the likes of Google, Proctor and Gamble, IBM and many more.

None of these companies could afford tens of thousands of developers but, the Open Movement is harnessing the capabilities of hundreds of thousands.

Some of their inventions will make a big difference to many lives (an example is in development of mobile micropayments for India’s small farmers). Others will be shooting stars and most will have no significance at all.

Internet evolution and the evolution it offers other forms of individual, corporate political and cultural activity is very dynamic.

There is whiff of industrial revolution in this form of change.

Yochai Benkler tells us about these changes in spades and answers Bryan pretty comprehensively on the specifics of values and copyright.

As David Edgerton will remind us, that was a time of social change too and the attack on the rights of people was pretty dramatic too.

People, that is, the members of the species that adapts so well, will resolve the issues that arise including issues of privacy.

The Ethics of AVE’s

There are elements of the publicity industries that use Advertising Value Equivalents described by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication as the "Equivalent cost of buying space devoted to editorial content".

As I wrote in "Evaluating Press Coverage" in 1995.

"The relationships between reader and publication and between editor and reader is symbiotic, and invited with permission by advertisers - advertising value equivalent (AVE) and editorial are not the same and you can't use the same tools to measure effectiveness. There is no advertising equivalent to editorial nor is there a measure of advertising avoided because of editorial coverage. There is no common measure for advertising and editorial. Measurable factors include whether it is timely compelling, relevant, useful authoritative."

Today I would add 'in context'. These arguments would have a lot more traction these days.

This year I was criticised for my work on online advertising opportunity by Katie Paine who obviously had not read my views on the relationship between advertising and editorial but, these days, her views are quite valid.

The contribution of Jim Macnamara, Professor of Public Communication University of Technology Sydney, is one of the most significant (PDF).

There is very good research into PR evaluation here and there are some excellent blogs on the subject which are listed on Katie's blog under 'Best Sources for more measurement info'

Well, now we know where I stand.

Now for the Ethics part.

I suppose its worth looking at different approaches to ethics and ethical behaviour.

Ethics in PR is quite complicated and I outline some of the considerations in slides to accompany my ethics lectures to undergraduates.

AVE's are a utilitarian approach to publicity. They provide happiness and least pain for the greatest number of people involved. Namely the agency and the client managers involved. However the consequentionalist use of AVE's, if determined solely by consequences or production of the greatest good consequences and least bad, have to be considered as does the need for everyone affected to have universal and equal consequential benefit. If you like, this might be how John Stuart Mill, might take a view of AVE's. He might like them especially because of the quality of happiness they bring to so many.

All well and dandy, until one begins to apply Bentham's theory. If AVE's are not proven and the company auditor says they cannot be added to the value of the company's goodwill, then they are bad from an ethical standpoint even from a utilitarian perspective.

A Kantian view would ask if such actions are universalisable. If they are, then they would apply in every case. We know this is not possible (how would one apply AVE's to a BBC post on one of its many blogs?).

Bernard Williams would, of course have a fit. He would see the doctrine of negative responsibility for the fact that AVE's are OK as a measure but only among a small clique of publicist as an affront.

Perhaps we should use descriptive ethics and do what people think is right. We might choose normative ethics and ask how should people (practitioners) act or perhaps we might consider applied ethics and take moral knowledge and put it into the practice of using AVE's.

So where do PR practitioner get guidance?

The CIPR code of conduct asks of members to respect the customs, practices and codes of clients, employers, colleagues, fellow professionals and other professions in all countries where they practise.

Thus it would seem that if a client likes to use AVE's that's fine and ethically utilitarian.

On the other hand the Institute says its members deal honestly and fairly in business with employers, employees, clients, fellow professionals, other professions and the public. This would suggest that practitioners will honestly reflect the advertising value of editorial coverage and will apply integrity (part of the code) by checking the reliability and accuracy of information before dissemination. That makes AVE's bad ethics.


This is not unlike the PRCA code which says its members have a positive duty at all times to respect the truth and shall not disseminate false or misleading information knowingly or recklessly, and to use proper care to avoid doing so inadvertently.

And PRCA member agencies also must have regard to all the circumstances of the specific situation and in particular the complexity of the issue, case, problem or assignment, and the difficulties associated with its completion such as, for example, measuring editorial as though it was some form of advertising.

Now, if we take the view of people like Jim Macnamara that there is no such thing as editorial and advertising equivalency add to it a view of ethics (utilitarian or otherwise) then members of the CIPR and PRCA will not use AVE's because it is unethical.

Is there then an ethical case for using AVE's and is it ethical to use them in contravention of the codes of conduct which are the ethical basis of membership of the professional bodies?

At a time when the banks and UK parliamentarians are facing ethics issues as never before the questions associated with AVE's are significant, as is much management practice, now a potential problem for the practice of publicists and public relations practitioners.