Day 3 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

Day 2 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)


Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic representation for Nick Clegg

Semantic representation for David Cameron

Day 1 Semantic analysis of the UK general election

This is the first daily semantic wall about three political leaders David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.
The methodology being used is described in this post.
You are invited to comment and criticise as much as you like :)
This is not a full 24 hours so we can expect the returns to vary over a few days.

Semantic web visualisation for Gordon Brown

Semantic web visualisation for Nick Clegg

Semantic web visualisation for David Cameron

What is most interesting is that this is already showing major differences. I am curious to know what happened to Gordon Brown in his own analysis?

Semantic Public Relations - a future PR discipline or just future PR?

Over the last week, a number of people have asked me to explain what I mean by Semantic Public Relations.

I could spend a lot of time writing a definition of semantics  or the semantic web.  I could show how the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee finds it all absorbing, why Google thinks its is essential to its future survival, and how some serious thinkers see how it is important for the future of society.

It's a much more fun to put on a practical demonstration. That is what I am going to do.

The demonstration will seek to show that it is possible to identify as a moment in time the key semantic notions that define a genre and individuals in the genre.

The methodology I shall apply is listed in this post but I shall also provide the practitioner with the tools that allow practitioners and researchers to replicate  the findings.

To ensure that this is a relevant case study, I shall take an example of major competitive public relations campaigns, the UK General Election. Specifically I shall look at the semantic similarities and differences of the three leaders: David Cameron, Conservative; Gordon Brown, Labour and Nick Clegg, LibDem.

This is a big project and we are limited (by the technological challenge I face) to sampling the corpus. In the future we do not have to be limited by such constraints.

The methodology I am able to use is as follows.

• Every 40 minutes I shall use and automated bot to interrogate the internet to identify new web pages published in a day which mention each of the three major party leaders. I anticipate this will be of the order of 200,000/300,000 every day (or more). Of these I will select 1000 pages (citations) on the basis of number of views and mentions of the leaders in headlines and first paragraph. This content will include publicly available items of:  news media pages in online newspapers, magazines and other news outlets (offering news that is not hidden behind robot blocks and paywalls); blog posts, Twitter tweets, Social Network contributions, wiki pages, Bulletin Boards, discussion lists, List Serve, Sidewikis, comments about photographs and videos, slideshows and other web based pages.
• Each of these selected citations will be parsed (software available here) to extract the the contiguous text which will be retained for further analysis together with an audit trail giving date found and URL.
• Each citation will then be parsed using latent semantic indexing software which will identify the semantic concepts in each citation (here is software that you can use to extract concepts from web pages).
• I will then rank the concepts in order of frequency of use in the citations for each day. This will provide a rather boring list of words and their daily count.
• To make it easy to see the result and to compare the three Party Leaders, I will use a wordwall for visualisation purposes so that you can compare the most significant semantic concepts for each of the three selected leaders.
• These will be posted on this blog every day until polling day.

What do we anticipate this is going to show?

1. This is a proof of concept demonstration showing the semantic differences between the three competitors. 
2. This will show how using a sample of online content selected for its reach and readership the web reports the three campaigns.
3. The analysis will show how these citations represent an online view of the competitors' similarities and differences.
4. It shows how all manner of online influences can represent the three candidates.

As the evidence appears day by day, it will be interested if there is any advice that a PR professional would propose to a candidate based on what the online community is 'thinking'.

Of course some of the PR response will be based on the relationships at play; values that attach to the candidates and the extent to which these responses are driven by people who are motivated to do thinks (like post comments or vote?) and other factors.

Then, we have Semantic Public Relations.

I suspect that what I will be showing in this demonstration is that the online community is driving the agenda and what I think we will find is that the competitors are ignoring a large part of that agenda.

I suspect that the PR response that I hope you will provide will be in near real time and will interpret the results as part of a process in working out what future, internet mediated, ubiquitous interactive communication will look like for effective PR practice.

Enjoy.

It should be remembered that the methodology has not been fully tested (mostly so that it can be available quickly for the CIPR SM committee to see how the internet is moving on and in support of Philip Sheldrake's work). If this was to be a research project to provide a research base for PR practice, it would be conducted differently But this is a nice demo (and, of course, I am very happy to help anyone who wants to do this work for the PR sector).

Excellent! At last the CIPR puts together a powerful digital team

"The CIPR has gathered together some of the UK’s foremost social media thinkers and contributors to provide input into the Institute’s policy guidance, education and training,"  says the Institute.

Headed by CIPR board member and Author of  "Public Relations and the Social Web" Rob Brown, the panel will look at issues including online reputation development, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement.

This is an excellent initiative and more about it is available at Profile Extra.

Some panellists stand out. For my money these folk will be interesting contributors:

• Simon Collister - Head of Non-Profit and Public Sector, We Are Social (@simoncollister) 
• Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future (@katyhowell)
• Stephen Waddington MCIPR – Managing Director, Speed Communications (@wadds)

The make-weights are headed by Danny Rogers – Editor, PR Week, who leads in the 'I don't understand'  brigade and who hopefully will get a quick education to the extent of their abilities.

Whether Wadds and Simon are able to move this group out of the 'social media' rut is a mute point. We have to remember that social media is 28 years old this year and is only a tiny component in the effects of ubiquitous interactive communication. It is worth noting that the President of the Institute limits the remit of the panel to  “A core theme in our three-year strategic plan ... social media and the impact on the public relations profession."

This may be because she wants the Institute to look at the internet effect more fundamentally elsewhere. I hope so. Certainly it was a core part of  the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission almost exactly 10 years ago which is recorded in  the Journal of Communication Management - vol 6 No 1.

Only this week, we have seen just one example of the extent of these influences. Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, dpa, the Press Association, and Thomson Reuters will support standards that will provide news agencies, PR agencies, CIPR, PRCA , IABC and  other vendors (and a minority of PR teachers in universities) with a uniform method of exchanging multimedia news content. Of course, under the old regime, the PR initiative that was part of this development, XPRL, died for lack of sympathy for anything more technical than closing an envelope with its invitation to another CIPR award party.

The alternative view is that the CIPR has mandated this committee to do no more than work out a recommendation for the application of Facebook for selling chocolate Easter eggs - and monitoring the number of 'fans'. My  issue is not that media channels do not affect behaviours as well as attitudes, emotions and more. They do. It is not that we do not need excellent technicians in media relations and notably beyond the press,radio, TV,  blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We do. We also need strategist who can work on the effective and affective application of these techniques. The solution is simple: get the craft teaching universities to turn out 22 year olds who can do that.

Much more significant for grown up Public Relations is the significance of the internet on communication; its influence in relationships and its capability to change reputation, which affects the value of what organisations are and do. For those who have read Shirky and Benkler there are the other issues about how quickly the nature of IP and corporate structure will morph into different forms of relationship dependent wealth development.

This does mean that XML, semantic web, values management, transparency, porosity and internet agency and other 21st century developments are core issues (not wholly ignored by many senior practitioners or all academics in the past, it should be noted) . However, it may be this is: too big for the CIPR; it wants to ignore past attempts to add some sense of digital influences or that it, in really, or wantonly, wants to cede the real issues to others.

Rob Brown's committee has to draw the line in the sand. Where might this be, I wonder.

As a CIPR Fellow, I am  agog.

What is the right balance between using a pen and a keyboard - a CIPR breakfast meeting

Yeasterday, I received an invitation to a CIPR breakfast meeting proffering advice on 'Digital & traditional: The right balance"

I am amazed that anyone in communication can even think such a thought in 2010. Perhaps I am missing something. Is it just me?

This is the full description of the event:

Digital & traditional: The right balance – book now
Tuesday 25 May

Digital communications must be aligned alongside traditional channels for maximum results. Engaging with audiences via social platforms is an essential part of communications and is no longer the responsibility of another person or team. During this session you will look at the current digital media landscape, why some of the more traditional channels are here to stay and how best to combine both new and old channels to connect with your stakeholders.

To be sure everyone understands where I come from. I am a Fellow of the Institute and co-author of its PR in practice book 'Online Public Relations'.

Now for the subject matter in hand.

To my mind, there can be no balance between digital and traditional. Everything that is 'traditional' is mediated by the internet. Can there be a divide? Is media not media regardless of its description?

Is today's issue not about the the role of media in discourse and how an organisation might be involved in the values and with values that are relevant and affective in the in such exchanges?

I am not sure that I can think of anything that is done in the realm of Public Relations that is not mediated by the Internet.  Every face to face meeting has an internet trail and that means this most basic tactic of 'traditional PR' is mediated by the internet. Remembering that everything you do online is there for ever, that trail surrounding the one-on-one meeting is now part of the values and reputation of the organisation. Perhaps part of the breakfast session will be about the durability of the printed media. The answer is, of course, a long time. Equally, today the media is mediated by Twitter and the PR needs skills needed have to be good at transformative interactions in such an environment. This is post 'degree' skills training. Surely not for practitioners of more than five years standing.

Can one now ask, what the meeting should really be about?  Should it really be:

How does the profession deals with members who believe that it is possible to implement PR strategies and tactics without a range of internet elements? 

For senior practitioners, that is a real problem.

There are all sorts of things that make me cringe. For example, I watched a team planning a conference recently. It took an hour to realise that it needed a web site to offer (more) information and the means to sign-up and pay online. Look at how many press conferences do not have a such facilities. It is quite bizarre.

I think, however, I will go. If only to find out the answer to my question.

Semantic Public Relations

I am taking the first steps in developing a Semantic Public Relations theory. At a recent celebration of the 21st year of the Bournemouth PR BA course, I bent Tom Watson's ear about how narrow I though PR research was. He was polite as I ranted away and my lurid arm waving did not help the furtherance of the idea on the British South Coast.

The trouble is, they have lots of students and enough to help in the development of, as Kevin Kelly puts it, connecting all the nouns.

Underneath all this is a thought that there is a way to demonstrate that reputation is able to turn intellectual properties, intangible and tangible assets into tradeable value in a relationship (and only in a relationship).

It is a nice thought because it is good for PR and very good for the evolution of Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web.

My question is: Using online discourse and automated semantic analysis, can elements of platform, channel and values be identified to show attributes of reputation that affect the value of people, products, services and organisations.

This is how the scenario goes:

You have a pretty looking (intangible) car (tangible) and you know how to make it (know how) and you know what you need by way of components and logistics (know what) and now you want to sell it.

But until you tell people about it, you cant't sell it. 

So advertise.  You have reach - hooray!  But you did not sell anything. So now you start to tell people about how pretty, how well made, how you acquire components and deliver it to customers.  You make your organisation more transparent.  This transparency means you expose the values that are so important to you. 

There are people out there who find these values coincide with their own and they want to know more about your organisations. They check up by searching for you on Google. If they find nothing, they do not think you have much of a reputation and so don't buy your car.

You do lots of online work and get more of a presence talking about  your values and more people now find you and like your values and the values that make the car pretty. They also can see your online presence and like what they see. 

Here is the catch point. At this stage have you done enough to share your values and build enough reputation for people to trust you and take that extra step and buy your car.

Reputation turns your car from a bunch of tangible and intangible liabilities into an asset.

If we only knew what values comprise reputation so that we can build reputation, then people will pay to acquire those values.

In the scenario above we have a number of clues.

• We need reach. Lots of coverage. 
• We need to be transparent and expose values in value rich posts and web pages. 
• We also need that gossip by third parties about us.The sort of insider endorsement. The stuff of porous corporate walls. 
• We need richness. Richness which exposes our values. Not just a few brand values but values about the way we work and interact across a wide range of activities.
• We need to use a lot of online channels where people can find out about our values and use the networks, in and outlinks and search engines to seek out the source of these much loved values. The internet acting as an agent brings the public to us and us to them.

For the last ten years we have known that transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach are important. They were elements that came out of the work of the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission.

We have very powerful evidence from the work of Bruno Amaral that the words found using latent semantic indexing act like (and are) semantic values. We also know from his work presented at Bled last July that these semantic values work in networks to draw people under their influence into relationships (we live in an era of near Ubiquitous Interactive Communication which makes the internet network very powerful).

The new element I want to put in the Amaral equation is trust and I am not sure how to identify what it is that engenders trust in internet mediated relationships.

I guess, I am looking for people who would be interested in taking this thinking further.

We are fortunate to have access to Girish Lakshminarayana's LSI software which has the ability to identify semantic values in discourse, we can begin the research on what components are involved in the development of reputation in internet communication.

What is so cool about this is that we already have the corpus (its in the Google cashe), already have the automated semantic tools to identify values and we can create relationship models on pre-existing online discourse to test and evaluate in weeks not months or years.

In a few months, a dedicated research team would have a more than a working hypothesis to change the value of organisations through enhanced reputation management.

In this research we would get tantalisingly close to a new type of value (probably more than one) to compete with money but which also could be exchanged for money in an open market.

Hello Semantic Public Relations. You are very exciting.

Where PR has to go

In the groove of where PR has to go to survive, perhaps one might follow the CIPR agenda.

The critical element is public relations as a relationship discipline.

As Bruno Amaral made clear at Bled and Euprera, someone, and it might be (fingers crossed) the PR industry, is now empowered to identify the nature of relationships. His exposition of values based relationship analysis in discourse based on detailed mass observation is as compelling as any.

The PR industry is now in a position to understand how relationships work and can now move on to see how and why reputation works in the creations of value and wealth.

Half a decade ago, I put forward a thesis that we needed to understand how relationships were formed and were changed to be able to move towards relationship management. Bruno has taken this forward and PR theory is now changed. We now have huge amounts of empirical evidence to show, for example that tangible and intangible assets are expressed as the nexus of values and that social entities are attracted to and, from time to time in context, form round values. 

We also now have the machinery needed to identify the values we need.

As the PR industry knows (one hopes), tangible and intangible assets exposed in relationships offer the means of adding money dust: Reputation.

Of course if there is no relationship, there is no opportunity to convert brands, products services, personalities and other intellectual properties and tangibles into money or even wealth.

Organisations, products, brands and people are more highly valued if they have a good reputation. Reputation is the stuff of, and is the sparkling  magic that turns products and services into profit.

This then, is the nature of public relations for many of us.

Arming CIPR members who sit on or advise boards with the capability to hold the hand of directors in other disciplines who want to make their organisations wealthy will demand some pretty powerful corporate services.

In the public sector, voluntary and other areas of practice, being a valued institution through effective relationships capable of developing reputation value to achieve vision and mission is central to government, governance and significance.  Here too there is a need for services to help senior practitioners.

The PR industry will need high-end research, robust discipline and determination to be of any real value. The Institutes' capability should move the wealth creating needle of a nation.  With our new knowledge it does not take a genius or creative guru to see how the PR profession can do this. It does need some focused grounded research.

Now we know about the nature of relationships and have direction for relationship value theory, there is an area of research I call Semantic Public Relations which can identify the value of reputation. I am also of a view that good reputation is the only means by which new wealth can be created. Reputation is the only currency that can be used in such a way that intangibles can be traded at a premium.

I guess these ideas are a step too far for the PR institutions for the nonce. Back to what the industry can do for itself as a small number of us (incidentally, outside the UK academic research institutions – can you imagine 60 PR students arriving at Bournemouth this autumn who will not have any exposure to semantics or semantic research!)  struggle with semantics.

Let’s start with a small ambition. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer and Business Minister might, under some pressure from an active PR institution, have a manifesto commitment to insist that companies whose potential failure would affect the tax payer have a relationship reporting structure. For a PR manager to be legally mandated to report on the nature of corporate relationships to the main board and sector regulator is a very simple clause for the next finance act. The effects could not be further reaching.

Imagine Glaxo's PR team having to report Glaxo’s relationships with User Generated Groups/stakeholders/publics to the senior board and the MHRA (http://www.mhra.gov.uk/index.htm), let’s say, quarterly. As a form of corporate governance, this would be pretty hard. Most corporate managers up to now would find the idea awful, restrictive, uncompetitive, intrusive  da dee da. In truth, it would give the organisation a huge competitive advantage. Global reputation and trust that would sell products ahead of global competitors every time, time after time. For the first time boards would be mandated to have regard for reputation across its whole constituency (and not wrapped up in furry CSR ‘programmes). The simple sanction that a regulator would need is to report to the relevant Minister any company with more than three quarters of deteriorating relationships.

The board would not dare run the kind of risk played out by the banking industry in 2008 of having relationships that would, but for the tax payer, kill off the industry and there would be a powerful early warning system in place.

Yes, PR is that powerful! If only its institutions were capable of thinking such impossible thoughts. In a single move the industry would trump the lobbying moves of the present Government, the FSA attempt at regulation and would make the PR institutions much more valuable in all they did.

Yes, the CIPR needs to look hard at corporate services.

Developing the capability of the PR profession has to recognise the difference between theories of public relations and their evolution, PR strategy management and niche service facilitators.  Simply put, the PR educator, professional blogging agency, conference organiser or press relations agency are critical to the PR industry. They are, however not the industry. There is a case for each of these professional crafts to be recognised. In the same way that tax advisors and cost management consultants are part of the accounting profession so too should, for example, wiki editiors be part of the PR profession and governed by the same advantages and constraints (this you understand coming from a post modernist).

The PR institutions have to go and look at vendor institutions. They are going to be iPhone app developers,  blog list builders and monitoring agencies and a host of others disciplines. In each, there is a skill capability required and an understanding of the wider PR roll is needed by all these specialities.

The Institute needs to be able to help them and to work with the PRCA to develop such capabilities.

Of course, professional development has to move pretty fast to be able to both recognise the significance of these capabilities and recognise their contribution to values explication, relationship development and asset advantage through ethical corporate reputation development.

There is a case for clear recognition and support for specialist activities together with mandating of minimum standards that contribute to the practice of the present, and future, of the industry.

Evolving better practice is not as simple as better CPD. Why should anyone bother to lean about the perfect press release when journalists are making way on 140 characters? I agree, at present there is a tick in a box benefit. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

A simple way of developing better practice is to simply remove CIPR accreditation from all PR courses (internal and external). Two things happen. The Institute has to work out what it is prepared to endorse and why. 

The education agencies (including the universities) have to come up with education solutions that aim at a vision and satisfy a mission for the industry. There is nothing like impending death to concentrate the mind. Oh yes, and I am perfectly aware that it takes years to change the content of a degree course but it is the Universities that are teaching budding PR's how to mark clay tablets. Incidentally, for those universities that imagine PR can be part of something called media studies had better have an improved idea. Media studies can be part of a PR School devoted to creating new wealth -  but not the other way round.

There is a simple challenge here. The PR institutions (not just CIPR) should aim at a direct sector contribution in excess of £15bn in the UK in five years and a sector contribution to the wider economy of at least 5% year on year. If that is what the PR sector is offering, it is worth getting people trained up to do it.

Current reports of a profession with flat growth at a time when the economy needs wealth creating reputation in spades is just rubbish. Poor understanding of the value of PR or poor leadership in a word.

Close proximity with practitioners reveals a very conservative view of the modern economy. Blind faith in the future of control and conquer even in a post Mandelson web age is misplaced.

CIPR policies that imagine that somehow PR management is equal to control are doomed. As governments proscribe the internet in the name of defeating terrorists and pedophiles and equally spurious media hyped nonsense, the alternative protocols will flourish. It is not in the interest of the Institute to stand aside when internet governance is debated. The internet is affective for its communication capacity. PR has a dependence on all forms of communication. It should be part of the communication debate at all points. Equally it should not be part of forcing new protocols to flourish because of idiot political control.

Of course, all this has to be paid for.

The CIPR is typical of many middle ranking professional institutions. It is digging for gold when the money is in selling shovels. The approval license per student across the sector with some added goodies like the free to students peer reviewed research is much less onerous than employment of 20th century PRs to teach 'working with the media'.

The sectors (call that the whole economy) that depend on PR get away with it dead cheap because we are so bad at evaluation. Now we know the significance of  tangible and intangible values combined with constituent’s values in relationship building, we are well on the way to better practice.  Equally we now know the importance of values in reputation building and that reputation has the power to transform tangible and intangible assets (e.g. products and services) into wealth .

We now have theory that stands up to scrutiny about value of PR! Now we need to focus academic research to turn theory into practice. Just like the nation would  (through some mysterious research funding juju) if it wanted to develop a new high yielding milking cow. PR needs some research investment and a good juju stick.

"Dear Next Prime Minister, the political institutions you now represent have a crap reputation. This means they are undervalued. Only PR can change that. The economy you inherited has a bunch of sectors that have reputations that are even worse. Only PR can change that.

This Institute has a clear mission to develop practice, skills and capabilities to grow the sector to £15bn in five years and from 2012 contribute 5% to the economy year on year.

To meet our target, we need to, and will, put a bonfire under a number of departments and institutions and hope you understand the reason for the heat.

In addition there are some policies that run counter to our aim. Network neutrality is a big issue, corporate reporting is a big issue, copyright is a big issue, bandwidth is a big issue and we intend to make our points clearly in order to deliver on our mission.

Sincerely, etc."

"Dear CIPR member, Next Tuesday we are supporting an application by xy university for research funds funds to identify how the profession can add 5% to the economy. You are asked to write to your MP, sign the petition and and turn up as a flash mob on a date yet to be identified when the academics decide on funding.

Yours etc."

Colin Farrington bid farewell

I understand that the Director General of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, Colin Farrington left his post at the end of March.

I had little experience of direct dealings with Colin. On the occasions that we met, he was always a polite urbane and considerate.

Our relationship was quite fun. I am a good deal older but have this funny internet obsession. The younger Colin was by no means an enthusiastic observer of ubiquitous interactive communication.

His preferences were of the order of the CIPR President’s Grand Prix Awards marking the end of the CIPR PRide Awards and self selecting Chartered Practitioner status badge, which is awarded to CIPR members who can demonstrate an outstanding level of professional practice and knowledge (beyond, say, PR professors).

Colin was the man in charge when the IPR gained its Royal Charter. He saw to it that the research showed an industry worth £6.5 bn. The online opportunity at the time (2005) would have doubled this value had the Institute grasped the opportunity. It was more than aware of the opportunity from the work of the IPR/PRCA Commission in 1999.


He is  a member of The Guild of Public Relations Practitioners which aims to ‘foster its profession, trade or craft’. This purpose is achieved through charitable works, education, fellowship, and trade and commerce.
The Guild of Public Relations Practitioners therefore works to promote the PR industry.

He is a gentle person compared to the rough-house of the Brown babe Angela Smith telling the CIPR to stuff its Public Affairs Council; local press jumping on shallow thinking in the provinces; getting rolled over by a bunch of incompetent jurnos who can't cope with spam not to mention  the shaggy  Neanderthals at the NLA ambling out of the ice age tundra.

Who ever may take up the mantle of guiding practice in the future will no doubt be pleased with Colin's achievement in the evolution of the Global Alliance.

There are some quite big issues that the Institute has to face. It needs very different leadership now.

The big issue about the nature of Public Relations needs attention (The Charter says it is: "the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics"). We live in different times. The very nature of an organisation is different. The nexus of contracts is replaced by a nexus of relationships. Not everyone subscribes to a view of social groups being defined by the excellence model, if indeed, we should define groups at all in a post modern era when 'user defined groups' are so fluid. The new models of public relations theory are designed for a new century and are based on research. This research is pivotal. It gives practitioners powerful tools (download) to understand how organisations can perform better with enhanced PR practice.

There is the question of PR education. Lots of folk are coming from any old trade into PR without having to re-train. People like Ben Smith of PRMoment  - great critic of the industry skimming over the realities at a journo level (and all in 140 characters). It is going to be tough turning down all those ex-ministers lining up to do 'PR' after the election and we have to remember the difference between facility houses and PR. Some are very good but they are but facility houses to the profession.

The Institute think's its cool to be both regulator and provider of PR courses (but that's how we make money init). The PR degree courses are a mess. All too many are not much more than a course in spamming 'press releases' and having a 'creative idea' to fly a barrage balloon over the Houses of Parliament.  Some are excellent and need heavy promotion from the professions' promotion of professionalism but some are dreadful and don't even include compulsory ubiquitous interactive communication studies (UIC).

Practitioners in-house and in agencies are finding internet mediated civilisation a tough call. Social Media has now been with us 30 years and it is just a view of tactics in communication. PR is about much more. It is staggering that some people in the communications industries, and notably the PR industry are inadequately qualified to manage its rate of change and even junior novices are at a premium. The whole idea that there should be a 'digital' module in a PR course is not just quaint, it is a cruel joke to play on innocent practitioners. UIC changes society. It is not 'just another communication channel'.

What role is the institute playing in PR research? In communication Tim Berners-Lee, Google, Microsoft and large parts of language research is deeply into the study or science of meaning in language using semantics. Is the institute able to grasp and run with what is now already part of PR research and advance the opportunities now we understand the nature of relationships. The PR industry did not find XPRL  very interesting (as communications facilitator, now important for RSS, on one hand and semantic web on the other) and so it is unlikely that another game changing development will go much further without hard nosed foresight and drive from Institute professionals.

The present review by the Institute has to be pretty thorough and needs to look forward. It also has to be much tougher on itself and its members. Being professional now does mean that an average PR manager should hold a reasonable degree. In the UK that means a Masters. More PR people on the boards of more companies means there is a need for research based training for aspiring managers.

So Colin, you have had your victories and now is a time for a very different harder, much more professional Institute.

How well is PR coping

Talking to Mafalda this weekend the issue of how well the PR industry is coping with the intrusion of the internet into practice and the profession as a whole.

It is not as though the industry has been coherent at marketing its offering:

Jason Falls suggests that the social media monitoring industry has been the single fastest-growing niche in the world of technology over the past three years.

The universities are at sixes and sevens as to what they should teach and have very few truly qualified lecturers. A lot of what is taught and many of the mores just do not hold water as tactics without strategies.

The whole of the online interest has grown 150% in the last three years.

Do we see this level of commitment by the industry?

Consistent huh!

The professional institutions do not want to look beyond social media as a communication channel despite the fact that in almost every area of PR except Marcoms, the wider use and application of the internet has a much bigger impact on corporate competitiveness.

Perhaps its time to look at the agenda for the profession facing the Internet because it has to.

Government Communication On The Social Web

What we are seeing here is evidence that multi media communication is more effective. But we knew that - didn't we?

Government Communication On The Social Web

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The Death of Public Relations

In a few days time I will be presenting at Euprera. The title for my talk is "The semantic anatomy of a crisis."


I was going to talk about the nature of a crisis from the aggregation of terms (concepts) derived using automated  semantic analysis of the day by day newly indexed web pages in a year long  research programme using The University of East Anglia's issue over the quality of scientific rigour. This is an interesting study that allows us to see the differences in concepts as they change in frequency month by month. 


In recent weeks, with my colleagues at Klea and Publicasity I have been able to monitor the nature of the Toyota issues as concepts arise day by day. Now we can see not just the anatomy of a crisis month by month but the DNA of an issue emerging every day. Today, I noted that the word humphrey had become significant to Toyota and by using Goole to backwards verify the relevance of the word could see the provenance of the concept as it is affecting the Toyota corporate brand. It is the sort of insight that a corporate affairs manager (or her agency) or academic researcher might find valuable.

These are the kind of data that, one would hope, is pretty well bog standard among universities with an interest in reputation management, corporate and brand reputation, public relations etc. Using these data and matching them the Toyota's responses for the press   and through social media etc, is now really easy and allows the researcher to identify:

Cause and effect across different media:

Fig 1 Share of alerts by web media for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or by sentiment:

Fig 2 Share of alerts by automated PoS (Part of Speech) sentiment analysis for Toyota week to 14 Feb 2010 (courtesy Publicasity)

Or perhaps one might want to compare these effects against other third party responses such as share price:

Fig 3 Five day share price taken from Yahoo Finance.

What made me pause was the latter chart.

I would not mind betting, that there are people in Toyota who would be more than happy if all this damaging content online would just go away.

What would happen if the 152 million web pages mentioning Toyota indexed by Google or the billion pages indexed by Yahoo or the 278 million  pages indexed by Bing just vanished?

What if only the printed pages in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, posters and brand promotion was the visible evidence of the company and Toyota was erased from the internet  (and would the media find this comfortable or even part of its approach to news distribution - it seems not)?

If the 'Toyota Way' was not in so much trouble and the distribution of coverage in the media was more competitive, would the internet presence be more interesting?

Fig 4. Woldwide online media distribution over the last week for Kia Motors  (courtesy Publicasity) .

Would Toyota forego the two million visits to its North American web site each month?

Perhaps it would be happy not to be mentioned in 140,000 blog posts or even the 800 pages and groups it got covered in Facebook during a typical (2009) February.

These pages (and many others) represent a lot of brand exposure.They create the opportunities for those Google ads to pop up when people think about cars when browsing and much, much more.

What we are discovering is that these pages online are useful, give competitive advantage and are really an asset. But that is not how Toyota sees it? In reality, once engaged the social media is mostly helpful.

The issue here is who owns the online asset?  Does the company?  It would seem that this is an asset that does not appear on the Balance sheet. In fact its not a line item (PDF).  Is this because the head of, well, corporate affairs/public relations has not made it clear to the Board that online presence is an asset. It is an asset that can be both positive and negative on the balance sheet. Last year the line item would have been part of  prepaid expenses and other current assets....................................................  $6,439 million.
This broad sweep of  assets is  part of  total current assets of $115 bn. So not much as a proportion of the whole. There is no line item for brand assets - try running a company without them! But that aside, an asset never-the-less.

We do get a better view from Juergen H. Daum who has examined the intangible assets (PDF) of Toyota. 

Relationship capital is now hugely internet mediated as are all the other intellectual properties and online relationships.

There is no escaping it: the internet asset is very significant for organisations.

So, who is the manager responsible for this asset?

If it is the PR manager, so much to the good.

If not, the responsible person will ask the PR manager to 'fix' the bad online content or get more coverage to force criticism 'below the line'.

My talk to  Euprera will be a question: are we teaching, researching and supporting the PR  industry to be asset managers or functionaries?


If, PR is at the 'Fix' end of asset management, it has no future - this is not even agentry, it's mostly computer programmes.

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.

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