A New Look at PR Decision Making

White and Dozier (Excellence in public relations and communications management 1992 Lawrence Erlbaum - Ed James E Grunig) provide a view of management decision making in the context of a pre internet time.

They quote L D Phillips (1982) Requisite decision modelling: A case study. Journal of Operational Reserach Society,

'When abstract decision problems are detected, decision makers must resort to their imaginations to construct scenarios so that decision making can proceed. Such scenarios are not precisely defined. At best, they are simplified models of possible futures that help focus attention on crucial variables and decision points. Such scenarios are requisite when they provide a sufficient basis for solving particular problems through an appropriate decision. Requisite scenarios are social constructions; they are fashioned through communication among decison makers and are developed in an iterative manner.'

This process (often used inside a structured form of risk management) like most Applied Information Economics is akin to the academic practice of testing hypothetical questions and which, explored in Phillips & Young (2009) as PR risk management, is part of public relations in both the Excellence and the Relationship Values models.

There is now a need for a new and closer look as the internet forces understanding of transparency, porosity and agency (as well as richness and reach) on all practitioners.

The post web era emphasises the nature of the organisation as the nexus of relationships (and as this sequence of posts shows, changes the nature of the firm) and asks us to re-think many past practices. PR becomes much more of a (post modern?) management practice. In such an environment the practice will be at the point when there is a formation of tokens and values that will attract actors into a nexus of relationships to be, or to challenge, the 'dominant coalition'.

In the excelence model there is a requirement for dissonance in the form of an issue for an organisation to be a public and thereby exist. Issues might come in the shape of the extent of the need for profitability, growth and size, sales etc. These are second order activities but necessary in a a case where tangible assets are the drivers of corporate management.

Based on the nature of the firm (Coarse) being moderated by contracts (a form of issues mitigation) this is fine. It is no longer adequate.

In the Relationship Values model there may, indeed, be dissonance and or issues tokens but there is the potential for other constructs for relationships to be formed through a common and mutual understanding of values expressed as tokens. The process is to seek relationships through better understanding and adaptation of values in order to create relationships and which is both a mutual activity and far from an issue, a form of self actualisation.

The firm, now evidently being the nexus of relationships, can now be much more flexible in response to problem resolution. Furthermore, the formation of groups based on common understanding of tokens extends beyond both the old construct of a nexus of contracts to a nexus of relationships.

All of this comes from work that is now five years old and in less than a year developed quite well.

It is very hard to imagine most advanced online public relations without the relationship model at its core. But this is a much more cerebral form of public relations management than most 20th century practice.

Developing Post Digital PR Practice

Many people tell us how the new online paradigm offers data and transparency which can be used in PR.

What most don't tell us is that this is fine for some media (on and off line) for other media its not quite as comprehensive as it might seem. A lot of the measures are not as transparent as they might be and the opportunity for measuring apples as oranges are even worse that AVE's.

As a Klea Global director I have been looking at how existing technologies can help and how measures can be developed that are both communication platform and channel agnostic.

This is work in progress and I some of the processes proposed are still in development but will be available (if not common) by the end of the year.

Of course, there is a lot to add but it is a beginning for the student and practitioner.

What most will find amazing is the modern capability to collect all new media citation in fractions of a second and in only a few fractions of a second more, to be able to fit this content into the overall pattern of an organisation's presence.

There are a number problems that still exist. Semiotics covers text, images and video as well as Augmented Reality added content etc and so we have some way to go.

The key, as always, is to have drill down transparency, comprehensive and timely motoring, evaluation and insights.

Pictures and video is much less amenable to semantic analysis at present which will be really powerful when it arrives. However, we can see how powerful semantics can be with the results that are evident using the 'Reputation Wall' and other semantic analysis of content.

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I will be delighted to see how far this form of PR goes.

Situational Theory and the Relationships Values schools of thought

Bruno Amaral has responded to Professor James E Grunig's critical review of Philip and my book Online Public Relations. His treaties entitled Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation provoked an extensive response from Philip Young as well. Once again, Professor Grunig has responded. It is a wonderful response.

I have responded on Bruno's blog and this is by way of a slightly extended cross post of my approach.

I guess it is appropriate to disclose the earlier work which I posted to this website some years ago. This provides a much wider view of the relationships model for public relations and was the basis for the paper 'Towards Relationship Management' (also published in JCM) which is the published manifestation of some years of thought.

The present interest in the Relationship Value model is interesting and I am grateful to Bruno, Philip and to Professor Grunig for pursuing the differences between the Situational Theory and the Relationships Values schools of thought.

We seek to identify the situation of organisations in the natural discourse of its constituency and how such discourse affects and changes the organisation'. If we can do this, it is possible to observe, from one perspective, the nature and drivers of relationships. It goes without saying that I explicated that relationships are a core value for organisations some years ago. In addition, with effective tools and grounded as well as comprehensive procedures, we will be able to present to the public relations industry the Relationship Values hypothesis. It is developments in these techniques that has drawn me to a methodology to provide a proof.

What I found interesting when Girish Lakshminarayana presented his latest Latent Semantic Analysis tools was the extent to which one can identify, develop and explore a huge corpus in a very short space of time.

This capability provides excellent opportunities to explore the hypothesis in considerable depth and, with Bruno this year we moved towards a proof of concept for the methodology.

Bruno showed at Bled last July how useful semantic analysis is for this kind of work in his proof of concept paper.

This has led to a form client content analysis research which I aim to develop in answer to Professor Gunig's paper Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation and which has a number of steps:

• Identify the semantic concepts in the client website
• Identify the semantic concepts of the web pages of third parties who link into the client web sites (I call this the client sphere of influence).
• Identify the the semantic concepts or the web sites of third parties who link into the client web sites
• Explore all web pages indexed by search engines for the last year that mention the client and extract the semantic concepts.
• Explore all web sites where pages have been indexed by search engines for the last year that mention the client and extract the semantic concepts.

This process can be done in time series which allows one to see concepts emerging, gaining in significance morphing and even declining. A simple example (and useful conceptual model and helpful to test the methodology) of the outcome can be seen using the Klea Global Labs Reputation Wall.

In my paper Towards Relationship Management, I expressed a view that relationships are formed through shared understanding of values. In the next part of developing the Relationship Values theory I propose that the semantic concepts extracted by the software can be viewed as discursive expressions of the actor’s values and we can follow them as they emerge, are adopted by internet users, and gather to them a wider group of online actors.

What we are able to see from this form of analysis is an agnostic, semantic, content analysis of the corporate view of the client by the client (evident in its web site). In addition we have the emerging and changing view of the client sphere of influence and can view this in the context of the wider interests of these external (sphere of influence) actors.

Adding the wider, search, sphere creates a view of the wider context in which the client is of interest.
This is an astonishing amount of data.
The results so far have been most interesting.
I am not, at this stage, sure as to whether the Relationship Values proposition will identify the extent to which values based relationships are also issues. This research process is much more granular and is based on two assumptions.

The first is that semantic concepts are the same as relationship values and that the internet is sufficiently pervasive to be representative of other forms of human discourse.

No doubt that in due course, and to answer Professor Grunig's concern, it will be important to find out the extent to which values and ideologies relate to problems and expectations and the extent to which in analysis of semantics in discourse the Situational Theory of Publics emerges as one of the drivers in the formation of an affective nexus of relationships. The extent to which the nexus of relationships based on values are publics will then be evident.

This is very exciting for the PR industry. If we can find out how relationships are formed and change we can seek ways in which organisations can, more effectively, create and manage the very foundations of their wealth.

Frenic Web

I predict (it’s that time) that the day of the aggregated social media personality online will become passé. It is a flawed idea. It flies in the face of community psychology and Maslow. There is no actualisation in being famed in Facebook and tweaked in Twitter at the same time. Where is the joy of community? More important, where is the science?

Most people who know would not associate me with the Bristol DJ Frenic.

Running gigs around Bristol and a long standing member of Myspace (2004), with the massed ranks of 24,000 profile views (that's 13 visitors a day on average), he last did anything with his presence three months ago.

Obviously not the top priority for this Hip Hop DJ.

Frenic says that “Bristol is an amazing place to play, the crowds are so into their underground music but their never snobby about it."

He talks about underground music. Some of this music might not be shared with all your friends in Facebook or Myspace but might be shared using Instant Messenger.

Some people have an online presence and group of friends who are not all the same as their public profiles would suggest.

For some, this could be put down to Dissociative identity disorder but does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Kate Lindsay, Principal Investigator / Manager for Engagement and Discovery, University of Oxford has a more interesting view:

Last October she wrote: Even without the Internet we still have different personas or profiles that we project to the world, for instance our ‘work’ persona and our ‘home’ persona. However when we start to put these profiles online they can become quite difficult to juggle. Of course, developing multiple online identities has its usefulness: providing context for a specific area you are networking in. However they can produce some mental anguish, remembering all those passwords for one thing, for another I may not want my professional cohort who look to my blog for musings on e-learning or user engagement to find out about my passion for burlesque dancing via some careless identity clues (oops). But it happens, so how can we help academics through this minefield? We are currently researching a new course to be run on the subject of online identity in collaboration with the Oxford Learning Institute. She notes David White talking about yet another principle of web use (remember ‘immigrants’ and ‘natives’) in terms of Visitors and Residents.

“The visitor goes online they do what they need to do they come away again, they leave no trace, they have no social persona online….The resident lives out a portion of their life online….they have a form of their identity which stays online, even when they log off.”

“Think about social networking….the current extreme Twitter….if you want to stay on top of that stack, you have to keep feeding that machine….residents within social media places are treating their own personal identity like a brand, they are selling their brand into these spaces and keep their visability high”

“A resident sees the web as a social space”

“Visitors are primarily concerned with privacy”

Here is David’s video http://blip.tv/file/2714106

The three main forces that typically affect the dynamics of social networks are size, feeling of community and relevance. These forces are constantly in flux (Stutzman, 2006). There are thousands of such networks available. Some are not big. Many are small. Some very small and the very small ones often have intensive community feel and are so relevant to their community that they can be written by a Times Correspondent but declared as “a form of vanity publishing. No wonder most content is instantly forgettable. And does that which survive really have a beneficial impact on society, on political discourse, giving a voice to those who genuinely can’t be heard as some proponents claim?”

But the key here is that there are lots of people who have a range of personalities and drivers in an even wider range networks and centres for interaction and the big ones like Facebook, eBay, Amazon and Myspace are not where ‘the underground’ really is.

Franic in Myspace is the same in Acid Planet where he is promoting an artist with free downloads and there is more.

He pops up everywhere and in the strangest places and with different personalities.

His activities on line are cool, not collective.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV TR (Text Revision). Arlington, VA, USA: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.. pp. 526–528.doi:10.1176/appi.books.9780890423349. ISBN 978-0890420249.

Picture:

JackIt...

X-Factor Directors Beware

An open letter the corporate managers

Dear Director

For all but a few company directors, the breathtakingly successful money making machine, The X-Factor, must have seemed as much a fairy tale as father Christmas. That is until Jon and Tracy Morter, launched a successful campaign to prevent The X Factor notching up yet another Christmas number one and replaced the top spot with Rage Against The Machine, a rap metal act.

At that point the rules were broken. All that marketing investment, with an average of 16 million people watching a brand on line every week, surely must mean that it will be the brand leader.

BBC News Entertainment correspondent Colin Paterson said “It is simply one of the biggest shocks in chart history.” Bookies for the last few years have only been taken bets on who would be Number 2, because X Factor always won by a clear margin. It only took a campaign from a Husband and his Wife, to take away the strangle hold that Simon Cowell had on the festive charts.

Rage Against The Machine had set two new records, for the first single to reach Christmas No 1 from purely download sales, and for the fastest selling download single ever. This is not because everyone suddenly got honest a British Phonographic Industry (BPI) survey has revealed that despite stringent measures for controlling illegal music download, one in every three consumers still get their music via illegal web sites.

This is a really high profile warning. It is alarm bells sounding for every board room.

Why is this?

It is because Internet agency, transparency, richness and reach, crushed the establishment and established management thinking in a few days.

This is not a new phenomena, all manner of industry sectors have been changed by the internet.

Cast around and look at retail banking or fashion or logistics and distribution, or perhaps the mail. Even the darlings of the digital age are being caught off guard.

The UK’s first home online banking services were set up by the Nottingham Building Society (NBS) in 1983. But it was not until 2007 that the electronic banking system changed banking forever in an unusual financial panic event. A banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot honour its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic.

Like the Christmas number one, the nature of the event was unexpected. It was a manifestation not so much of the web but of the internet at work. Big internet enabled systems are essential but their use has to be managed.

No one believed you could sell clothes online but today Jaeger said its online retailing operation now ranked as its second largest store after Regent Street in London. The ‘Threshers’ name is to disappear from the High Street tomorrow as the remaining stores close because of online competition.

2010 will continue to be tough for retailers, according to a new report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), and yet online retailing will continue to outperform high street shops. But we will continue to see manufactures spend more on Point of Sale than Point and Click.

Should the public know what is in the warehouses of transport companies? UPS.com makes a virtue of declaring the most up-to-date information about the status of shipment. Shipment movement information is captured each time a tracking label is scanned in the UPS delivery system. This is serious transparency and a different way of managing. But when will we see it applied to the last mile delivery or how long will the Government be able to support Royal Mail's pension deficit of £6.8bn before a big change upsets the apple cart.

“Everyone is selling something they don't have possession of, and the cost and revenue are not linked,” said Andrew Bud, chairman of mobile billing company mBlox at the Future of Mobile event, run by Westminster eForum in October. “There will be an initial boost but it will then come crashing down, unless there is a radical change in the business model,” reported eWeek in the wake of a huge data failure by O2 this weekend.

The OECD presented evidence three years ago of blurring of the distinction between manufacturing and services (PdF). It’s simple to understand why. Manufactured goods are, by historic standards, wholly reliable. When buying a car, does one buy the design, an intangible, the chassis, engine or wheels? No. We buy the service package. The regular servicing, the automated fault finding from the on board computer and so forth. Do you really know where your car was made? Did the engine come from South Wales or Mr. Tieyan (Tony) Xing from Shanghai Tongxiang? You see, I know his name but not the name of the company representative from Ford at Bridgend. Trading with Mr Xing is fast and I buy from the man not the company.

So that is how Jon and Tracy Morter upset the marketing traditions of more than a century. They are people more real in Facebook that Simon Cowell with 177,000 fans with whom he can have no conversation at all (too many people).

By comparison the Morters have lots of interesting people involved and offering stuff and a manageable number of friends and the interesting Rage Factor page and site.

We have, after a very long time, reached a tipping point. The levels of involvement of ‘the commons’ are such that they have real power. The power is irresistible the Bastille will eventually fall. This is as powerful as the near revolution that brought about the Reform Acts combined with the advent of the Edmond Burke’s forth estate. It is a power that will be more potent because it is still evolving in very dramatic ways ten times faster and, after a pretty average period of development, sooner than most believed.

The lessons are all there. If you are a traditional company or not:

• The next internet event will affect the most conservative industries as well as the most ‘with it’.
• Your company will have to face a very big marketing and organisational shock soon.
• The internet is now being taken over with masses of information not of your making but about you, your company and its stakeholders and its impact is direct and fast.
• Someone in your organisation must be monitoring the internet in real time.
• If your company managers do not have digital plans for 2010 ask them to justify why not.
• If you do not see significant re-structuring of management budgets and personnel deployment this year, you should ask why your organisation is immune from Internet effects – and get back a very convincing argument.
• Take down the silo walls when talking about the internet because its affects everyone (young and old, men, women, skilled and unskilled, graduate and school leaver).
• There are no digital experts but there are some well informed people who try to understand.

Last year was the last year to experiment, that window is now gone. It’s time to take the internet very much more seriously.

Its going to be hard for the NLA to make its tax stick

As always Stephen Waddington is on the ball with industry news.

He is writing about the NLA seeking to charge people who make a living out of collating media coverage online by selling their researches to customers.

I commented on his post that I thought that this might be a bit difficult for the publishers.

Now that we have the semantic web red in tooth and claw, it is very hard to disguise who contributes to the outputs of journalists.

All the sentient conversation leading up to a stunning original take on any subject by a journalist can be found.

This means we see the extent of original content and the extent of information, ideas and concepts that originate from elsewhere.

Sure, one wants to see original or creative content recognised and getting its just reward. But the heavy size 11's of the NLA is not the way to go.

There are many, many ways to generate value from original or new, newsworthy content. The present models we are being offered are full of holes.

This is an example I sent to Stephen: I went to this page in The Times http://bit.ly/4vMupX Analysed it to get the semantic concepts http://bit.ly/5xx7Y1 Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publication wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times http://bit.ly/7Lb6Fn I asked in Stephen's blog:

Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?

When The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagiarises from them as well as suing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?

Of course, we are using software that is not optimised for this purpose but does show what is possible. I even suggested that there could be people out there who might take affairs in their own hands. I wondered who will write the application that automatically identified the url's of same/similar content on a Google sidewiki to let everyone see where the media stories really come from? Such an application, I contend, will mean that everyone will see, this or that press story really came from a press release/blog/wiki etc...

I guess that the really brave, creative and future publishing successes will be the aggregator (and I declare an interest). But to see a publication like the Telegraph assembling news in real time and considered content from the greatest writers, creative thinkers and others regardless of time constraints being much more successful that firewalled plagiarists.

The value may well then not come from content but from the delivery channel. But that is another story.

The anatomy of a crisis

You are invited to watch a PR crisis being played out in front of you.

The University of East Anglia is in the eye of a storm about emails that cast doubt on the accepted wisdom of human involvement in climate change.

I am conducting a series of monthly reviews across the whole of the web showing how this crisis is affecting the reputation of the University - and you can come and watch too.

This crisis also affects science, climate change scientists, governments and politics across the world and there are issues now emerging that affect the nature of science and politics and climate change and global warming.

This is quite transparent research. You too can watch it and can have access to the data.


The first data available is a view of the major semantic drivers evident from internet citations.

You can see the semantic drivers affecting the University of East Anglia here http://bit.ly/8SdZwf

The effect in comment on climate change and global warming is shown in the results here http://bit.ly/5PeNrs

In both cases you can use the slider to go back a year which helps you see how the issues change. At the end of each month the 'Wall' will be updated but every day you can see the new citations that will be added for analysis and presentation in the following month.

In addition, every week, I will present on my blog leverwealth.blogspot.com an analysis of the number of citations identified each day and the citation broken down into news sites, blogs, discussion lists etc.

I will be saving all the citations for both these projects and will make available to universities the list of citations, the most covered national audiences, type of web site (news, blog, discussion list etc), numbers of citations per day etc.

This will mean that, for the first time ever (and as the newspaper paywalls go up) possibly the last time forever, we will have a comprehensive view of the anatomy of a crisis online for research today and in the future.

Below you will find a list of significant climate change bloggers, a Google map showing how far the story has spread and other facilities that a reputation manager might use at a time like this.

Finding the online opinion formers for the University of East Anglia

Alongside the print, radio and TV media, the 150 blogs talking about Climate Change this month with significant audience reach per country may be worth watching.

I think that I would want to add these blogs into the ones to read before I built the list for interaction (using Blog finder http://bit.ly/8WtT5R).


Eating Clean Works , http://eatingcleanworks.com, United States
Wake up America , http://wwwwakeupamericans-spree.blogspot.com/, United States
The Betrayal , http://www.oilforimmigration.org/facts/, United States
The Plain Truth , http://www.plaintruth.com/the_plain_truth/, United States
The Punekar , http://punekar.in/site/, India
Black Bear Blog , http://mainehuntingtoday.com/bbb/, United States
Liberally Lean From The Land Of Dairy Queen , http://skattershooting.blogspot.com/, United States
India Startups Business News , http://indian-startup-news.startups.in/,
India TechCrunch , http://www.techcrunch.in/, India
RAC Motoring Forum , http://www.rac.co.uk/forum/index.php, United Kingdom
Fanhouse Main , http://www.fanhouse.com/, United States
RealClearPolitics - Articles , http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/11/2009s_top_gra..., United States
ABC Live-Online News,Breaking News,World News , http://abclive.in/, India
XDTalk Forums - Your XD/XD(m) Information Source! , http://www.xdtalk.com/forums/, United States
YID With LID , http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/, United States
Political Animal , http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/, United States
Nice Deb , http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/, United States
TigerHawk , http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/, United States
Loan Modification Forum - LoanSafe.org , http://www.loansafe.org/forum/, United States
C-Questor Carbon Markets and Climate Change... , http://cquestor.blogspot.com/,
American Conservative News Politics and Opinion... , http://www.thelandofthefree.net/index.php, United States
Voices.IdahoStatesman.com blogs , http://voices.idahostatesman.com/blog, United States
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias , http://newsbusters.org/, United States
Mangan's , http://mangans.blogspot.com/, United States

PWCToday , http://www.pwctoday.com/, United States walls of the city , http://www.wallsofthecity.net/, United States
Nation and World , http://www.twincities.com/national/, United States
Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association... , http://forum.pafoa.org/, United States
Marathon Pundit , http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/, United States
fmaidment's Diary , http://www.redstate.com/fmaidment/, United States d
eweyfromdetroit's Diary , http://www.redstate.com/deweyfromdetroit/, United States
The Wire , http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-wire/, United States
Riehl World View , http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/, United States
Crooks and Liars , http://crooksandliars.com/, United States
Worth Reading , http://blogs.rep-am.com/worth_reading/, United States
Iain Dale's Diary , http://iaindale.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
ecopolitology , http://ecopolitology.org/, United States
Probe International - Rethinking foreign... , http://www.probeinternational.org/node/6633, Canada
Media Matters for America - Limbaugh Wire , http://mediamatters.org/, United States
catallaxyfiles , http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/, Australia
DBKP - Death By 1000 Papercuts - DBKP , http://deathby1000papercuts.com/, United States
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Local News , http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_wsu_new_college..., United States
Power Line , http://www.powerlineblog.com/, United States
Brutally Honest , http://www.brutallyhonest.org/brutally_honest/, United States
Orange Punch , http://orangepunch.freedomblogging.com/, United States
ARRA News Service , http://arkansasgopwing.blogspot.com/, United States
The Beacon , http://www.independent.org/blog/, United States
SciGuy , http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/, United States
StudentMidwife.NET , http://www.studentmidwife.net/, United Kingdom
Political Punch , http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/, United States
Bible Prophecy In The News , http://www.prophecynewsheadlines.com/, United States
Griper Blade , http://griperblade.blogspot.com/, United States
Reason Magazine Full Feed , http://reason.com/, United States
Hit and Run , http://reason.com/blog, United States
ExFn.com Daily Fresh News , http://www.exfn.com/, Turkey
Tim Oren’s Due Diligence , http://due-diligence.typepad.com/blog/, United States
Video on The Huffington Post , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/video/, United States
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raw_feed_index.rdf, United States
The Blog , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/, United States
Europe on The Huffington Post , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/europe, United States
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/, United States
thetorydiary , http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/, United Kingdom
Crosswalk.com - News , http://www.crosswalk.com/news/, United States
Right Wing News , http://rightwingnews.com/, United States
John Lott’s Website , http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/, United States
It's Happening Forums , http://wincoast.com/forum/, United States
The Archdruid Report , http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/, United States
From so simple a beginning... , http://www.desipundit.com/ashutosh/, India
Great News Network , http://www.greatnewsnetwork.org/, Pakistan
Lancaster Unity , http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
Liberal Democrat Voice , http://www.libdemvoice.org/, United Kingdom
Consequence of Sound , http://consequenceofsound.net/, United States
HolyCoast.com , http://holycoast.blogspot.com/, United States
Midwest Voices - , http://voices.kansascity.com/, United States
Midwest Voices - , http://voices.kansascity.com/node, United States
Newsweek Blogs , http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/default.aspx, United States
Politics , http://www.covenantnews.com/politics/, United States
skippy the bush kangaroo , http://xnerg.blogspot.com/, United States
WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society , http://newsociety.com/blogs/index.php, United States
Wizbang , http://wizbangblog.com/, United States
Science Codex - Science news, science articles,... , http://www.sciencecodex.com/, United States
The Daily of the University of Washington... , http://dailyuw.com/, United States
Climate Skeptic , http://www.climate-skeptic.com/, United States
OrthodoxNet.com Blog , http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/, United States
On Target Blog - Accuracy In Media , http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/direct-your-tweet-outrage-..., United States
Change.org's Stop Global Warming Blog , http://globalwarming.change.org/, United States
The Rule of Reason , http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/, United States
Climate Progress , http://climateprogress.org/, United States
AmSpecBlog , http://spectator.org/blog, United States
MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory , http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/02/14/sensational-video-on..., United States
Get Energy Smart! NOW! , http://getenergysmartnow.com/, United States
Kiwiblog , http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/, New Zealand
Burning our money , http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/, United Kingdom
StreetHop.com , http://www.streethop.com/forum/, United States
ForestTalk , http://foresttalk.com/index.php, Canada
Knowledge Problem , http://knowledgeproblem.com/, United States
Birmingham Weekly , http://www.bhamweekly.com/, United States
The Michigan Daily , http://www.michigandaily.com/node/49181/talk, United States
WSJ.com: Environmental Capital , http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/, United States
Gawker , http://www.gawker.com/, United States
CanadaFreePress.Com , http://canadafreepress.com/, United States
Public Servant Daily - Latest News from... , http://www.publicservice.co.uk/archive_news.asp, United Kingdom
The Last Ditch , http://lastditch.typepad.com/lastditch/, United Kingdom
Atlas Shrugs , http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/, United States
Blog entries from Aratus , http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=Ara..., South Africa
The Real News Network , http://therealnews.com/idirectep.php?e=57, United States
The Dread Pundit Bluto , http://dreadpundit.blogspot.com/, United States
Science Guardian/Global Health Review/Paradigm... , http://www.scienceguardian.com/blog/, Canada
Friends of Dave , http://friendsofdave.org/,
Chandler's Watch , http://www.chandlerswatch.com/, United States
Asymmetric , http://www.nelsonguirado.com/index.php, United States
All MNN Content , http://www.mnn.com/, United States
Stereo Net Australia , http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/, Australia
British Democracy Forum , http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/, United Kingdom
Lonestartimes.com , http://lonestartimes.com/, United States
Climate Today , http://rankexploits.com/news/, United States
Right Soup , http://rightsoup.com/, United States
Democracy Now! , http://www.democracynow.org/, United States
Israpundit , http://www.israpundit.com/2008/, United States
Amateur Economist , http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/, United States
Switchboard, from NRDC Dan Lashof's Blog , http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dlashof/, United States
GupShup Forums , http://www.paklinks.com/gs/, Pakistan
EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty , http://econlog.econlib.org/, United States
Pete’sPlace , http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/, India
KnowledgeOman.com , http://knowledgeoman.com/forums/, Oman
Flopping Aces , http://www.floppingaces.net/, United States
Signs of the Times , http://www.sott.net/, United States
Bishop Hill , http://bishophill.squarespace.com/, United States
Moonbattery , http://www.moonbattery.com/, United States
Next Big Future , http://nextbigfuture.com/, United States
Trackpads Community , http://www.trackpads.com/forum/,
University of Salford - News , http://www.salford.ac.uk/news/, United Kingdom
antimisandry.com , http://antimisandry.com/, United States
Letters , http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/contemp..., Australia
Andrew Bolt , http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php, Australia
Care2 News Network , http://www.care2.com/news/, United States
The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG , http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/, United States
Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog , http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/antitrustprof_blog/, United States
ScienceBlogs Select , http://scienceblogs.com/, United States
Investing to Wealth , http://blog.macroaxis.com/, United States
Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office > News , http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/news/, United Kingdom
TechNewsWorld , http://www.technewsworld.com/, United States
The Oil Drum - Discussions about Energy... , http://www.theoildrum.com/frontpage, United States
Theodore's World , http://theodoresworld.net/, United States RealClimate , http://www.realclimate.org/, United States
Current Green Blog , http://blogs.current.com/green/, United States
Politics articles at Blogcritics , http://blogcritics.org/politics/, United States
Irish Blogs , http://www.irishblogs.ie/, Ireland
Technology, Science, Entertainment, and... , http://www.tgdaily.com/, United States


Its nice to know if you are managing a PR crisis that this sort of capability is readily available.

Who and how is reporting on the University of East Anglia

A really quick way of finding the most authoritative sources talking about a subject is to use a semantic site search.

For The University of East Anglia, it may be helpful to know which are the most authoritative sources

I have not yet got the widget to work but this link will take you to the site.

Media interest in the University of East Anglia

The University of East Anglia has appointed distinguished Scottish civil servant and former principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, Sir Muir Russell, to head an independent review into the email allegations concerning the scepticism of the human effects on climate change.

For the university, this storm has created a global buzz about the University.

It might not want it, but here is how far the story is news




You too can make media maps like this here.

Fun huh!

The Practitioners' Rough Deal

An excellent post by Stephen Waddington, prompted me to to resond to some of the comments it evoked.

The original post is here and I have extended the arguments below.

The initial comments was:

The challenge of identifying the authority of a blog was raised yesterday at econsultancy’s Online PR roundtable.

Technorati recently changed its blog authority ranking to reflect the real time potency of a blog rather than influence over time. Consequently only very high profile blogs are being rated.

The number of inbound links combined with Google PageRank was proposed as a solution at yesterday’s roundtable.

And then there are a lot of differnet methodologies.

My response was:

Typical of the PR industry, come up with black art reaction and ignore the research - soooo professional. The research work presented by Bruno Amaral this July (bledcom.com) is based on blog discourse. It shows the proof of concept in analysis of (blog) discourse for the creation and development of relationships (oh, and for those who want to know buying and selling is part of a relationship for lots of people as well). What, it seems, this debate might be about is the extent to which there are common tokens identified and expressed with mutual understanding as to the values that are attributed to them by actors which will ensure relationships are created, re-enforced and extended. One way of doing this is to use semantic analysis to identify commonly held and agreed values (which is what Bruno did). This may provide the same answer as a mash up of inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations, number of readers/subscribers, words published per day, number of comments etc. The one thing we do know is that one approach is definitely built of sound science and three years of solid, peer reviewed, research and the other may not be. If one was betting the survival growth and profitability of your company on the methods used, there might be a reason for choosing one methodology over another.

My principle beef is that there is a lot of good research about that the PR industry ignores. A lot of research is conducted in the universities, is converted to dry academic papers and some long and boring books that a few undergraduates and even smaller proportion of PR Masters students have to read.

The chance for a practitioner to get at this stuff is zip.

Its not as though organisations like the Chartered Institute of Public Relations or the PRCA help much - if at all. In the case of the CIPR one struggles to find the courses and conferences that are leavened with expert academic research because the institutions do not list the people and qualifications of the teachers and trainers. Of course, knowing which PR celebrities, old codgers and underemployed practitioners are engaged by the CIPR would be interesting but the web site is a bit shy about revealing this.

On the other hand, there are the academic institutions. These places, where PR academics count how fairies on pin heads communicate and undertake senility surveys of ten past it practitioners. They are stunningly secret.

Sometimes they invite the world into their cloisters and sometimes they are seen at conferences wearing their habits.

I was a bit surprised to discover that universities with PR degrees are staggered that the PR industry needs social media expertise from students emerging into the sunshine of modern practice. This reeks of academia polishing the ivory towers.

PR academics NEVER criticise practice or practitioners. As the financial industry went into melt down not a single PR academic suggested even meekly, that banks like other institutions needed to manage relationships if they were going to lend to each other (and customers?). Not much good at grasping the hour these PR academics.

Here they are without an argument to put about really great measures of successful PR such as ... well we all know how much Advertising Value Equivalents are used.

I really do want to see the survey of top 1000 company CEO's who use the measure, rely on it, base the future of their companies and careers on such a profound measure of ...... ummmmm.....

I know of a university with a PR course that has a PR office that uses Ave's. Where is the PR equivelent of:

Three more scientists have resigned from the UK drug advisory body after the home secretary sacked of its chief advisor, Professor David Nutt, for disagreeing with government policy on marijuana.

So am I really surprised about the comments of Stephen's blog. No.

Am I amazed at the PR institutions and academics lack of spirit in pouring scorn on iffy methodologies. No.

But I believe that practitioners deserve more.

A New Monitoring Tool - Real Time

Greg Cohn is the Director Strategy & Business Development at Yahoo! Today, he is making a big thing about Real Time Web and I am delighted.

The reason I am thrilled is that a company I am associated with, Klea Global, has launched a Real Time Monitoring service called NextMention. The basic service is free... as you would expect and a raft of commercial services are due out soon.

What is does is simple. It monitors everything. News, Blogs, Twitter, social networks, web sites, Google's Sidewiki and lots more and if your organisation or issue is mentioned it alerts you. The alert can be by instant messenger or email and for paid for services by SMS, Skype and lots of other communications channels and platforms.

For PR, monitoring clients 360 degrees of internet content is a big deal. You will be surprised at how much there is.

CIPR has a £700k hole

PR Week reveals today that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a financial problem of £700,000.


Its hard to believe. In the name of transparency the Institute had no media statement on its website at time of writing. Its CIPR in the news page made no mention either.

But, we are told by PRW that:

The executive board met last week and agreed a programme of immediate cost savings, along with a three-year strategy that focuses on the needs of the CIPR membership and the profession.

‘Our cash flow position remains positive, and we are committed to turn round the finances in the next year,' said CIPR President Kevin Taylor.

‘We believe our new base at Russell Square, with its improved training, conference and office facilities, will help in that turnaround. Services to our members will remain our priority.'

This is no time for long term members like me to rock the boat but we can make constructive criticisms that may help the Institute develop a three year strategy that is more in keeping with the needs of the public relations profession than has been evident in recent years.

Ethics, modern communication education, dramatically enhanced and modern management theory are desperately needed as bedrock career skills.

But, above all, there is a need for a complete overhaul of PR education and research.

These are changing times.

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.