We need to take a more fundamental look

I am writing a paper examining why it is important for the PR industry to take a more profound look at the internet. It is, even by my standards, pretty controversial.

I thought that I might expose where I have got to progressively and invite you to comment as the thinking emerges and I refine its presentation.

Here is the first part.

A large part of the public relations industry is now actively involved in some form of, or the management of, what is described as social media (Curtis et al 2009).

In addition, a significant proportion of academic papers and not a small part of student and practitioner education is devoted to internet mediated communications studies. “On the skills side,” noted long time academician Kevin Maloney, “the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney 2010).

This paper takes this as a theme to explore both the practice and more fundamental drivers that can be explored by the public relations industry and academia.

“On the skill side” is a telling comment. It would suggest that the legitimacy of these new media or the internet’s societal significance is not as pivotal or central to public relations practice or theoretical development as its recent practitioner popularity would suggest (Fortune Magazine 2010).

The contribution and involvement of the public relations (and communications industries in general) in the recent European Commission study ‘Envisioning Digital Europe 2030’ (Misuraca et al 2010) was notable by its absence. Such fundamental deliberation was not supported by the public relations industry or with PR academic or industry supported involvement. With so many organisation’s constituents affected by the communications industries’ digital activities both current and in the future, there is a case for examining the fundamental significance of the internet to public relations.

The considerations are underpinned by the European Union funded CROSSROAD Project (CROSSROAD, 2010a), which identifies a research area taxonomy that classifies research in ICT for governance and policy modelling. The considerations into 5 categories:

1. Open government information and intelligence for transparency;
2. Social computing, citizen engagement and inclusion;
3. Policy making;
4. Identity management and trust in governance; and
5. Future internet for collaborative governance,

The fact that so much future gazing has resonance with the objectives of the public relations’ client base and The Global Alliance Stockholm Accords (The Global Alliance 2010) is significant.

This paper explores the legitimacy of the public relations’ sectoral internet mediated interaction beyond the mere ‘skill set revolution’ and examines its significance at the heart of any future evolution of PR practice.
It is not that there is a dearth of evidence as to the influences of the internet and its societal, economic or even social media effects in either attitude or behavioural change.

The use of social media enabling users to interact, create value and influence commercial and public institutions has been well documented (Huijboom et al. 2009). Social media facilitate creation of social identities (Castells 2001); creates a process sometimes called social contagion or viral activity (Lewis et al. 2008) and comparison (Grevet and Mankoff 2009) by allowing people to share and amortise personal effort in the process of delivering behavioural change (Garrett 2006).

Indeed the empirical evidence of behavioural change wrought through the use of social media is also documented (Cugelman et al 2009) with some considered views on influence (Cugelman et al 2009 /2) and the impact of initiatives driven by the internet including social media as a disruptive force that may affect the power balance between markets, governments, consumers / citizens and NGOs (Langley et al 2010). Other evidence from health (Richardson 2010) to business (Gillin 2010) shows how behaviourally affective internet mediated communication can be and cannot be (Christakis 2010).

From the abundance of reported evidence it would appear that internet mediated communication can and does act in changing values, attitudes, behaviours and, thereby, relationships.

There is significant anecdotal evidence of under reporting of these effects (Phillips 2011).

The evidence suggests that Internet mediated PR has a fundemental, if under-rated, place in considerations of public relations theory.

In its 2008 White Paper, the Authentic Enterprise, the Arthur Page Society (Iwata, J 2008) noted that, at the same time that, as the multinational organisation and its management systems “were taking ever clearer and more defined shape, three countervailing trends were arising that have revolutionized the environment in which businesses operate: the digital network revolution, global integration and stakeholder empowerment. Together, they call into question many basic assumptions of the 20th century corporate model.”

The Society, in promoting its 2011 conference, makes this point on its website “The world is changing faster than many of our organizations are prepared to handle, and increasingly falls on the Chief Communications Officer to help management teams develop and remain true to their culture and values, while staying on top of the dynamic pressures of an increasingly transparent and digital world.”

There is considerable literature to support evidence for such trends. As far back as 1995, when Nicholas Negroponte (1995) explored the early influences of social media to the Clue Train Manifesto (2000) to Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams recent book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010), a range of academics and business leaders have been reporting on a range of extra ordinary internet driven changes. These changes are affecting organisations in every sphere as well as a high proportion of the world’s population.

The nature of such change provoked by the network effects of internet communication is empirically validated in PR literature by, among others, Amaral and Phillips (Amaral and Phillips 2009). Global integration is reported as a corporate pinch point at the start of 2011 according to a Forbes report (Forbes 2011), In addition, in PR literature Van Dyke and Vercic, (Van Dyke and Vercic, 2009) offer a well argued case.

Evidence offered by Patrizia Nanz Jens Steffe as far back as 2003 argued the extent to which democratisation of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an internet mediated transnational public sphere and is well documented in the PR literature from Dahlgran (2005) to Jackson (2010).

The forgoing offers considerable evidence to demonstrate why the internet is important to PR and PR theory. It demonstrates that, without much by way of the PR industry’s actual engagement, the effects of these technologies have begun to changed the practice of managing relationships, reputation, constituent engagement, development of trust and organisation’s licence to operate. Equally one must not dismiss the significance of the changing face of all forms of media.

The evidence suggests that the PR industry has some way to go. In the UK, consumers used the Internet extensively to buy things in December 2010.

Graham Charlon at eConsultancy in a report ‘Christmas e-commerce stats round up’ (Charlton 2011) revealed that consumers had continued to engage with ecommerce at a very considerable rate.
• 44% of Britain's online adult population upped their online spending this Christmas compared to 2009, pushing the total amount spent online to £2.8bn.
• 45% of those who shopped online encountered website problems while doing their Christmas shopping, and 32% abandoned purchases as a result.
• 86% of UK consumers logged onto the internet over Christmas Day and Boxing Day this year, an increase of over 10% when compared with figures from 2009.
• 22% of online users accessed the internet on their phones, confirming the importance of mobile commerce for retailers.
• 30% of online consumers used the internet to shop online on Boxing Day, while 62% of online consumers shopped for sale items and discounted products across the two days.
• Online sales at John Lewis reached £500m this year, and sales in the five weeks to January 1 were up 42% on the same period last year.
• On Boxing Day, eBay and Amazon were the most visited e-commerce sites, with 9.96% and 7.02% of visits respectively.

These data would suggest that social media among many other things had some considerable effect (Gillin 2010) which would lead the observer to imagine that advisors to companies would be making the case for significant activity.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

The 2010 Econsultancy's Social Media and Online PR Report (eConsultancy 2010) revealed that:

• Some 40% of companies say they have “experimented with social media but have not done much”, while just over a third say they have done an “average amount”.
• Around a quarter of company respondents (26%) said their most senior managers were “very interested indeed” in social media, compared to 19% who said there was “very little interest”.
• Social network profile creation and management is still the most widely used social media tactic, although the proportion of companies who do this has decreased from 65% last year to 56% this year.
• Direct traffic (72%) is still regarded as the most important metric for assessing social media activity. Almost three-quarters of respondents say this is one of the three most important metrics they use.
• 45% of responding companies don’t have any policies or guidelines for the use of social media.
This is not a British phenomenon. Online retail sales in France grew 24 percent in 2010 to 31 billion euros ($43.31 billion) according to the French e-Commerce Federation (Fevad) and reported by Reuters (Reuters 2011).

It is reasonable to ask if the PR industry is supporting such sales evidenced in near comparable growth.

The PR industry has been, it might be said, dragged along by a force it does not comprehend very well.

Maloney (ibid) suggested that “On the skills side the rise of new media is the revolutionary change.”

In many ways PR is overwhelmed by the pace, extent and implications of this change and has to include and develop skills in response to this evolution.

Skills are by no means enough. The industry has to understand the economic, societal, political and technological developments as well and must prepare for even and evermore fundamental change. To be taken seriously, the PR sector has to invest in developing theory and practice before it is overwhelmed by each successive evolution.

For any industry sector to invest heavily in anything radical it has to be sure that such an investment is grounded.

Perhaps, given the evidence we can challenge the assumption that “new media is the revolutionary change.” (Maloney ibid).

Is it that the rise in use and application of ‘new media’ is a revolution? Indeed, is it that the internet and its technologies are revolutionary or, in human evolutionary terms, a human an inevitability?

To be able to argue that the $ multi-billion PR industry needs to take a more fundamental look at the significance of the internet, we need to address some of the assumptions about the internet and its effects.

There has to be some consideration as to why the internet evolved and the nature of its evolution in human as well as technical terms to be able to identify if new media is the extent of the revolution.

Will the internet die and go away?
What will there be when search and social media, as it is now known and recognised today, loses its current relevance?
And what does the industry and notably its research base need to know and do in preparation for such evolutionary events?
As things stand, the PR industry urgently needs to recognise it has to do more, collaborate with other initiatives and develop an agenda that will take it from failing to recognise the significance of the internet to a point where it can play a complete, even leading role, in societies’ evolution wrought by the still growing power of the internet.

David Phillips (2011)

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Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (forthcomming 2011) A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Princeton University Press

Boyd R and Richerson P J. (2006) Culture and the evolution of the human social instincts. In: Roots of Human Sociality, S. Levinson and N. Enfield, eds., Berg, Oxford

Castells, M. 2001 The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford University Press

Charlton G. (2011) Christmas e-commerce stats round up http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7026-christmas-e-commerce-stats-round-up-2 accessed 11th Jan 20011

Christakis, N (2010) The networked nature of Twitter weblog http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/12/nicholas-christakis-on-the-networked-nature-of-twitter/?=sidebarpromo accessed 10th Jan 2010

Clue Train Manifesto (2000) Basic Books; ISBN-10: 0738202444

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Online PR delivering sales

In research for Google, Boston Consulting revealed that the UK ecommerce sector is worth £60 billion and is growing at the rate of £6 billion every year.  

For companies and their agencies, this is a huge opportunity. For organisations harnessing the power of social media this is an awesome opportunity (http://goo.gl/cPYDQ).

This post explores how effective social media interventions have been in delivering real tangible returns and how effective and knowledgeable consultants working as social media partners can deliver effective results.

Traditionally the relationship between most PR activities and sales has been tenuous. Today, the direct link between online activities and very tangible outcomes, including sales outcomes is pretty common.

Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign

 “Old Spice Body Wash sales jumped 27% in the six months to July 2010, 55% in the latter three months and 107% in July, according to research firm Nielsen Co,” reported Emily Glazer, of Dow Jones Newswires. (http://goo.gl/oKDuK).

It would seem that the old output, outtake and outcome model of PR measurement has lost the outtake road block. Online PR delivers customers. 

We know from eConsultancy research that the majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring ROI (http://goo.gl/lPJnf).

 However, working closely with people who do have the numbers, including website traffic data, marketing and sale returns as well as using effective monitoring, the stumbling blocks to finding the cause and effect derived from online interactions is not quite as hard as many believe.

More generally we can use results based case studies that cover a wide range of PR sector practice to get valuable insights from Olde Spice to computers.

Lauren Fisher writes in The Next Web that ‘Sony have proved the power of Twitter with a fairly covert social media campaign that incentivised people to purchase their products and it worked. They reported an increase in Sony Vaio sales from Twitter in that period of $1.5 million. This is a pretty impressive figure and also puts into action this new way of buying – social commerce,’ (http://goo.gl/GD5B).

Of course, many people look at the claims that have come across the Atlantic but the results are just as compelling from case studies in the UK.

For Asos, a Facebook campaign achieved s 2.6% increase in ASOS Denim sales and a significant increase in the number of weekly new fan sign-ups during the 2-week campaign period, (http://goo.gl/6K2XI).

While the UK may have fewer case studies, there is every reason to believe that the UK should be even more responsive.

The Boston Consulting report shows that the UK is exporting internet goods and services at the rate of £2.80 for every £1 imported with an online advertising sector worth £13bn.

What is more, its per capita internet involvement (including online purchasing) is globally competitive and ahead of the USA, Germany, France and Italy.

 Bearing this in mind, it is useful to examine best practice worldwide. They offer experience and ideas that can be adapted and re-purposed by the savvy consultancy. There are any number of such examples and we have chosen a representative few in this paper.

Domino's credits Facebook and Foursquare promotions for lifting online sales by 61 percent in the U.K. and Ireland during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2009. The international pizza chain also announced on Monday that web-based sales now account for 33 percent of its revenue, compared to 26 percent in 2009.

http://goo.gl/yI4ob

There is no doubt that practitioners’ do need to have a comprehensive view of the facilities that are available for best practice online. The lines are blurred between different communication practices and the adoption by a PR consultancy may be equally used by a marketing promotion company or other agency.

Shoppers using the Wet Seal  mobile phone tool are 40% more likely to buy something, and buyers spend 20% more. "Shop with friends" users become buyers at 2.5 times Wet Seal's average conversion rate online.

The iPhone app generates about 5% of Wet Seal's overall Web traffic, and the app has been downloaded more than 65,000 times. Girls look at about 500,000 outfits a week with their iPhones -- traffic that spiked to about 750,000 a week the two weeks before back-to-school.

Facebook has become one of the largest marketing bases for store traffic, thanks to coupons and campaigns, and one of the biggest drivers of traffic to WetSeal.com

http://goo.gl/Xr1uu

The value of using social media marketing is not confined to the biggest of clients. As one might expect big consumer tech companies should do well. But it comes as something of a surprise that they can be sufficiently light of their feet to create real returns using Twitter.

 Dell’s big announcement that they tracked $3 million in sales through their Twitter account came over a year ago in June 2009. What we are seeing now though, is a shift in user behaviour that shows we’re now more likely to purchase through social media. http://goo.gl/QANW

Even the smallest enterprise can benefit which means that consultancies with social media ready practitioners can help contribute sales to even the smallest account.

Curtis Kimball, the man behind the enormously popular Creme Brulee Cart in San Francisco, has quickly amassed over 12,000 Twitter followers in a little over a year. He knows that most of his business comes from people who follow him on Twitter because Twitter is the only way you can find the cart’s location for the day, says Kimball, a former construction worker turned creme brulee expert. “It gives people a valid reason to follow me,” he says. http://goo.gl/FUoZ

Last October, Dentist Dr. Vaksman signed up for a Groupon deal in San Francisco, and received 320 new patients because of the deal, which was for a patient exam and x-ray. The Vaksmans say that the deal propelled the five month old business in the right direction and boosted its patient base significantly.

The ability to adopt ideas from around the world is important for clients and consultancies and there are any number of examples to choose from.

Examples include  Delta Airlines which introduced a flight booking option through their Facebook page. 

Gap recently ran an offer with Groupon that offered users the chance to purchase a $50 giftcard at $25. This earned them $11 million in revenue.

Public relations, using social media can come up with really creative ideas that can even help turn underperforming capacity into a marketing win.

Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account will Tweet an exclusive deal to its nearly 10,000 followers. Followers have only hours to book the steeply discounted room rate. For example, this past Tuesday, it offered $79 rooms at the group’s Galleria Park Hotel in San Francisco in November and December. The company also operates similar deals for its 5,000-plus Facebook fans on Fridays.

In less than a year, Joie De Vivre has booked over 1,000 room nights through these types of deals—rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty. 

One of the most common responses consultants get is that social media is confined to consumer facing PR. A study by eConsultancy reveals that this is not true. Their research shows that there is not a significant difference in the extent to which B2B and B2C organizations are engaging with social media marketing (http://goo.gl/KWMgJ). Perhaps this shows that even B2C has a long way to go and justifies the Boston Consulting Group’s projection of growth at the rate of £6 billion per year.

The Direct Marketing Association expects digital marketing channels, driven by social media, to overtake traditional platforms, in a new report.

While direct mail is currently the top avenue for businesses, online channels are expected to surpass it within the next 12 months, according to TMCnet. Social media is the top emerging platform for many B2B firms, with 88 percent maintaining a social media presence. Professional sites, such as LinkedIn, are the most popular, followed by microblogs, including Twitter.

TMCnet quotes the DMA as saying, "these results clearly underscore the recognition that marketers see the need to experiment with new marketing channels which offer the opportunity to break through the marketing clutter with more personal and engaging messaging."

Social media is part of a multi- billion explosion of marketing and sales activity. It is effective at delivering very tangible results. There are case studies from around the world that have relevance in the UK, one of the top most active e-economies worldwide.

Every sector can benefit and there is significant evidence that growth in this sector is set to outperform other marketing communications sector over the next few years.

The online marketing model has gone through many transformations in the last decade. The turn of the century idea that ‘in your face online advertising’ would work was quickly dismissed as users just left such sites in a huff.  Pay per click remains useful but as the power of search emerged as the number one way to find new information, Search Engine Optimisation came to the fore. Now, we have seen that the power of the online community and how it can translate into real sales and behaviour changes. The shift from broadcast to community plays into the hands of the online PR practitioner used to holding conversations.

Understanding this transformation is really important because of what is at stake.

Online sales are predicted to grow at the rate of 10% per year. Put another way, which organisation can pass up an opportunity to take a slice of £6 billion next year and which organisation can withstand the shock of consumers disserting their traditional marketing effort by going online.

This is a journey. A chunk of Facebook and trickle of Twitter is not a strategy. If the objective is to take a slice of £6 billion, it may mean some serious conversations about business models as well as development of essential social media strategies to participate in exploitating the fastest evolving part of a growing economy.

PR can ignore if you like but the internet is now for turning

In examining the legitimacy of new media as pivotal or central to public relations theoretical development I have re-read the recent European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies ‘Envisioning Digital Europe 2030’(PDF).

It offers four scenarios:

In the Open Governance Scenario, users
will enjoy unprecedented access to information
and knowledge. By shifting cognitive capacities,
the work of memorizing and processing data
and information will be passed onto machines,
while humans will focus on critical thinking
and developing new analytical skills. This will
enhance collective intelligence (both human
and ICT-enabled).

This is something we know and many prefer.

The Leviathan Governance Scenario assumes
that an ‘enlightened oligarchy’ will emerge
that uses high-tech tools and systems to collect
and manage public information and services.
Judgment and decision-making will be based
on analytical processing of factual information
from the many by the few for the benefit of
all.

This is not so far fetched as its seems. Europe went there twice in the 20th century.

In the Privatised Governance Scenario,
society will be shaped by decisions taken by
corporate business representatives. Discussion
on social issues and about the role and behaviour
of citizens will be muted, as people will be
pawns whose needs and desires are managed by
large corporations.

How far do we trust our clients in such a scenario? Can we adopt the Stockholm Accords and engage clients with them sufficiently for this scenario to be tolerable?

The Self-Service Governance Scenario
envisages a society where citizens will be
empowered to play the role of policy makers. In
small expert communities, citizens will devise
policies in accordance with the do-it-yourself
principle; they will choose from a menu of public
services those they need and consent to. This ICTenabled, self-organised society will be able to
address emerging problems faster than traditional
government could.

This has its attractions and I can see this as being possible.It will be very disruptive, of course, and society will need to be brave led by ethical PR practitioners operating in quite distinctive constituencies that cluster round values not unlike brand values we know today.

As the paper explains, in such a scenario "The process of gradual disappearance of institutions and lack
of trust in government will result in the need for new trust providers. Reputation management, for content and people, will play a significant role in service provision."

PR is now at a crossroads if these ideas are to be believed (and the people involved are at the top end of internet thinking). We choose between taking sides between these ideas.

Do we have the leadership to guide us?

The value of values

Facebook is a site fill of values.

People explicitly and implicitly fill its pages expressing what their values are and share them among people who have similar values. It has made the site very valuable.

According to the Economist Facebook’s implicit value has risen fivefold since mid-2009.

The article goes on to say that sceptics doubt that a firm whose business model is unproven is worth more than established media giants such as News Corp and Time Warner.

What we know of Facebook is that if it was to fail, it would leave a big hole in the lives of millions of people. Not only would they loose a lot of the time and effort vested in their profiles, they would loose all that social interaction and community activity that humans have valued through the evolution of our species (Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson).

This is a value beyond measure if it is to be counted in mere money terms.

This idea is significant for public relations.

It goes to the heart of trust, reputation and those core social needs we are beginning to understand more precisely than ever before.

The value of community, of being part of an interrelated civilisation and being a member of a social environment including our closest friends, neighbourhood and work colleagues is so important that, as recent studies have shown, we go into a decline when cut off from wider society.

In A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (forth coming) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis say:

Our ancestors used their capacities to learn from one another and to transmit information to create distinctive social environments. Resulting institutional and cultural niches reduced the costs borne by altruistic cooperators and raised the costs of defection. Among these socially constructed environments, three were particularly important: group-structured populations
with frequent inter-group competition, within-group leveling practices such as monogamous reproductive pairing and the sharing of food and information, and developmental institutions that internalized socially beneficial preferences.

This sounds very much like Facebook to me and puts its value well beyond the valuation created by Digital Sky Technologies (DST), a Russian group, and Goldman Sachs.

In public relations we have a role in creating the opportunity for constituencies to create communities and many of them will be in image of Facebook. It is in these circumstances that PR really does create value.

BP, issues management and 150 million adverse internet citations

Shares are holding up well after BP and its partners were accused of a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the oil spill that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast over the summer, the White House oil spill commission said on Wednesday.

What is coming out in the aftermath goes much wider than the loss of life, an unprecedented environment disaster, threat of being taken over and the loss of some top executives.

Over and again, we hear criticism of poor communication. BP might expect some criticism in PR Week but is now in the spotlight as a poor communicator in the Wall St Journal, Financial Times, and BBC and has been associated with poor communication over 30,000 times online in a week.

The Monthly report will be un-nerving with critical coverage in news sites (5,000 articles this month), blogs (50,000 posts), Twitter (11,000 times), Facebook (14,000 times) - yes they have all be there. This mountain of criticism is now online and will not go away any year soon. long after the beaches are pristine again, the online aftermath will be there.

I am not going to criticise whoever was the manager in-charge of PR at BP (it could or perhaps should be among these people). I am going to offer a view of the two million online citations that have been generated in this last terrible year for  the company.

Crisis management is about preparation and the PR industry does have some very good tools to help in this regard. Planning and managing for crisis is hard work but not hugely complicated (compared to other areas of PR management). BP did not have much of a crisis communication plan in place according to the US commission report.

Recovering from a crisis is much harder and often one crisis sparks another (death - oil spill - share price fall - top executives desert - takeover threat - pressure on other operations - cost of being in the spotlight - legal costs/management disruption). The level of added distraction for the Board, cost and range of threats is now significant and for some organisations such pressures can be crippling.

What is to be done?

Well, after the PR crisis management plan has been put in place and the complete review of how BP and its industry moves towards improving transparency (oh no! not another TV series about the oilmen)  and next shuffle of the Board, there will have to be a change of structure (retail separate from exploration and production for example) name and identity.

Why change of name and identity? Basically BP has to find a way to escape from the mountain of adverse online content that will follow it round like a bad smell for years.

The question is what is the timing for all this.

For good financial reasons, who will get stuck in for the sake of future PR

It is the time of predictions and finding out how good we were last year. Most predictions are not much more than fun but there is good reason for more serious analysis of trends that lead to effective insights.

It is these insights, when they are accurate,  that provide the basis for confidence and investment in the future of organisations, and economic sectors.

I am not shy about forward predictions and the brickbats that come when I get it wrong. Equally, I get very frustrated by peers whose view of the future is too short term, narrow or based on ill considered facts.

Being critical of the PR industry's lack of performance over the last 15 years is not based on 20:20 hindsight but on a combination of professional institutions, academic and industry failure to appreciate predictions made, for example, 15 years ago and empirical often self/shoe-string funded research (like this) which demonstrate modern capabilities that can allow the PR industry to fulfil predictable potential. 

The key here is in knowing how good we are at predicting the potential. I had a go at looking ahead 20 years in 1995 and here is my, verbatim, contribution:

‘The new media will enfranchise the individual with more one-to-one, one to many and many to many communication which will be easy by personal ‘phones, E-mail and video conferencing.

'Person-to-person-to-machine and database communication will be more important, electronically managed and more global. Increasingly this broth threatens brands and corporate reputation and needs professionalism to immunise (our organisations) or doctor the effects of the brew.

‘In its most perfect form, reputation management sustains relationships with publics in a state of equilibrium during both evolution and in crisis. This enhances corporate goodwill (a tradable asset).

‘The big change is that many-to-many global communication brings with it loss of ‘ownership’ of language, culture and knowledge and that there is a breakdown in intellectual property rights, copyright and much plagiarism. This is already a major problem.

‘News now travels further and faster and is mixed with history, fantasy and technology. Reputation in crisis is even more vulnerable. At a growing rate, the new media uses reputation as ‘merchandise’, stripped from the foundations which created it, then traded for pieces of silver - and at a discount’. ...

(David Phillips CIPR symposium in 1995)

A decade ago, some contributors dealt with what seem to be modern issues such as crisis management mediated by social media. Here is Alison Clark's 2001 contribution:

Corporate reputation managers need to put new systems in place to permit timely and appropriate response to the increased level of comment on significant issues that the Internet enables. Collecting the commentary is a preliminary step only. Most of public commentary is on the World Wide Web or in usenet. The originator?s choice of medium is revealing of their objectives and motivations. The management response may be pre-emptive or consequential, but essentially it is limited to six options, which may be supported by protocols prepared for timely response. 

Perhaps the time has come to do more research and backfill some of the old prediction with new research to show the provenance and reasons for the industry to invest in its own future.

I shall start at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011 with some new thoughts. It will be interesting to see which practitioners, consultants and universities can look beyond 'online' to identify whether Public Relations is adapting, evolving or failing.

The real question here is to seek evidence of  contributions by practitioners, consultants and universities. 

Is it Dell, Robert Phillips, or a university leading the charge? Will they provide insights to guide this under performing industry.

Four strategies for social media campaigning

Setting online objectives is as traditional as beef and Yorkshire pudding. Online, objective setting remains the starting point of all activity. It is good management practice and objective setting is as basic as being specific, measurable, achievable, resourced and time bound.

But we seldom see what the next step is before approaching the tactics we need to deploy.

Strategies are important and we don't very often see examples.

I thought I might share some that I have found useful in some of the approaches to client social media management.

In future posts, I will add to this list but this is a start and if you have strategies you would like to add, that will be good too.

It is not reasonable to imagine that a generic post such as this one will cover all exigencies. Each organisation is different but to give a flavour of the strategies that might well be put in place by an organisation, a number are outlines below. Some are useful for meeting most objectives others fill basic needs of good corporate governance while yet others are drawn from experience and have more specific application.

Communication planning, says Anne Gregory in her book ‘should include both systematic and creative elements. Both are essential to information interactive communication work’.

With such a wide range of communications channels the selection of media has a lot to do with the reception of an organisation's stance. Ensuring that the relevant messages chime with the most suitable media is important.

The ‘internet has made interpersonal and mass communication instantaneous’ and care needs to be taken when engaging the organisation's values with stakeholders'. Once interactions are public in the online landscape it will is impossible to retrieve or erase them completely.

For this reason, it is important to have a number of strategies in place to arm the organisation with capabilities and a range of options to meet ambitions and contingencies.


Media Selection Strategy

It is really easy to elect to use some social media because it’s fashionable and cool. Twitter and Facebook come to mind.

Some media are more appropriate to achieve objectives than others. Consideration of audience use and application is essential. For example a podcast has some appeal for the visually impaired while the use of a photo sharing service would need to be used with care.

Part of a media strategy will need to include reviewing the wide ranging landscape of communications platforms and channels. Some will be well known, others less so and many useful new channels emerge from time to time.

In considering media, it is worth looking further and at how the selection of media can interact one with another. For example, many Facebook pages include a Twitter feed. It’s not compulsory but adds interest.

In addition, consideration of time and resource are important. Facebook and Twitter require a lot of attention.

Setting up a presence and proselytising values requires constant attention. For the most part, social media presence will require a minimum of an hour per day for each channel and in some cases, much longer.

In essence, using one of these channels, once created, will require content and, in time, people will respond to it. They in turn often need a response as part of an online ‘conversation’.

Once channels have been decided upon as a strategic decision, the tactics can be thrashed uot and will be informed by a number of other strategic approaches.


The key elements of a media strategy are:

• Knowledge of the audience
• A review of the range of relevant and practical platforms (PC’s, laptops, mobile phones, slates etc)
• Interest in the many channels such as Blogs, Facebook, Wiki’s Twitter and many other services.
• Media interactivity
• Time and resource needed to maintain the channel/s
• Capability to maintain a ‘conversation’

Timed and timely programme strategies

Used correctly, social media programmes are a great way of bringing awareness and attention to initiatives, events or projects.

Unlike traditional media communication, the advent of social media has changed the nature of timing communication.

Once, an organisation might issue a press release or press briefing which in due course would be published.

Once read, the resulting article would be discarded with the paper or magazine. Today, that same story would probably be published online, might attract online comments and or may be references in a blog, social network or microblog immediately or at any time in the future. The life of a story is now potentially much extended. Stories from long ago can quite suddenly reappear. The internet ‘time shifts’ content. Not just content from a newspaper but all online content.

In addition, as most social media programmes use more than one channel for communication, the timing for issuing content or responding to content may have to be co-ordinated such that all audiences see it at the same time or, depending on the campaign, at different times.

The key thing is that the activity has a timeline and is planned to meet the key objectives. The strategy should outline the timescales and activities to achieve the level of interaction to meet the objectives.

Then there is the opportunity to develop a story over time. The plan may be to develop a story over time and to engage a community progressively as the story develops. There is no reason why, using social media, an organisation might not involve its constituencies in the development of an initiative, story line or announcement. The online community will then be involved and will act as ambassadors right from inception.

Timing strategies have two other dimensions.

One is time of year and seasonality. Most organisations have a time of year when they are at their most effective. In addition, there are times when competition is at a peak. For example during October and November the BBC charity event ‘Children in Need’ provides both focus and overwhelming competition for a host of charities involved in child based charities. In the chill of a British winter, there are good reasons to promote holidays selling family holidays in the early Autumn is not a great idea.

• Timing strategies have to be created to deliver objectives on time.
• Timing will take account of the range of modern multimedia communication.
• Timing can be aimed at a single time/event or can be an evolving number of activities with goal posts.
• Time of year and competitive activity will affect strategy and has to be considered.

Internal communication strategy

Even with small teams the need for effective, timely and transparent communication is important. As the internet forces organisations to interact with an undoubted and existing online presence, internal audiences can and are affected. It is better that any online communication is both available and well under stood by employees and other stakeholders.

The strategy covering internet usage in the organisation should cover the explicit policy for employees and volunteers which should carry the full weight of the dominant coalition.

Most people are more productive when they can access the internet. As a rule, people access the internet using work computers, home computers and mobile phones. The device in the pocket or purse has now removed the ability for organisations to build communication walls round internet access at work and so the implications have to be managed.

This means that there is a need for employment to know about and policies to cater for the new online environment.

At the same time this also affects the management and other internal stakeholders.  This would suggest that a strategic decision on whether internet access policies and expected behaviours should be made internally or publically online.

Such policy statements about attribution, confidentially, respect for the law, notably copyright and much more can be considered as part of online strategy.

In brief, internal strategies need to consider organisations’ access policies, what access and behavioural policies shall be made available internally and externally and how people can be expected to represent the organisation and behave online in the interest of the organisation.

The Importance of Auditing, Monitoring Measurement and Evaluation strategies

Monitoring online presence is important. Much of what is written about or represented in images and videos online is provided by third parties.

As part of setting objectives there will be a need to audit presence and there are a number of ways this can be done. Many such tools are made available here.

In addition, watching how many visitors there are to the charity’s web site, how long they dwell, numbers of pages seen and from where they depart is very useful to identify what activities have prompted people to take an interest in the organisation and what interests them (or puts them off) may help in development of a more effective web site presence. Fortunately the service is free and is provided by Google Analytics.

There are a number of free facilities that will be found to be very effective. Google Alerts .

Online issues and crisis management strategies

Many organisations have a problem with getting involved with a form of communication over which there is little control and which, for some, seems to have so little by way of measurable benefit.

The issues are simple management judgements about resources and effects and the potential for crisis seem to be self evident. Most of the heat in such arguments are based on prejudice, ignorance as to the capability to manage online issues or sheer funk.

Even today, many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management. The PR practitioner can allay such fears and to a huge extent remove risk

Much of internet activity does not follow the usual linear models for management. The sequence of events can be disrupted by the online community. So too can many, if not most, management activities. Online PR is no different to managing any other organisational function.


The solution to mitigating risk is to adopt practices from other disciplines in which “management of the unknown” is common. Some of the greatest benefits to modern living have become possible because we know how to manage where there is uncertainty. Examples of how organisations have developed risk management strategies range for the UK Health and Safety Executive to Stephen Ward's studies at Southampton University.


Risk and opportunity

Organisations can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques well established in other disciplines .

One thing we know is that risk and opportunities changes are dependent on complexity. If a programme is very complicated there is more to go wrong and online PR, with its range of platforms, channels and contexts, is quite complicated. But as we also know the opportunities for considerable incremental success is greater.




Fig 1. The relationships between complexity, criticality size and complexity

In most online interactions there are risks and opportunities. To manage them we need to identify them. This can be done by an individual, a focus group or management team or can be established from research. It’s a great opportunity for a brain storm with someone making notes!

In preparing a strategy for an online programme it is worth looking at where there may be influences that can affect it. In online interactions it is possible to second guess many, if not most, of the potential risks.

It is also possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.

An example might be that confidential information could leak out of the organisation and into the public domain because an employee has a blog or other social media presence. The risk evaluation team can come to a conclusion as to the probability and and impact and in doing so can list risks and the extent to which they are probable and or would have a significant organisational impact.

Having described risks and potential for effects, the organisation's PR evaluation team will asses each element in terms of likelihood of occurrence and impact. It helps put the risk or opportunity into perspective.

This is a technique used by many corporate and public sector organisations. It is the kind of matrix that might be used to assess risk for a PR campaign, school outing and is also used in project management.



Assessing the impact of events which can be estimated before any action is taken (now) and again after mitigating policies are proposed by the team, it will be possible to see if the potential if the risk is lowered (and acceptable) prior to implementation or exposure.

The process for mitigating risk is to create a mitigation (or contingency) plan, process or protocol to reduce either of both risk of likelihood or impact.

For example, to reduce the effect of an employee saying something our of turn in social media, a simple policy statement by the organisation distributed to all employees and a disclaimer by the organisation about personal views and opinions of the organisation's web site will reduce risk and often to an acceptable level.

Once a mitigation plan has been worked out, a new assessment is made of the likelihood or impact to see if the proposed actions for mitigation has had an effect that makes the risk acceptable.



These methodologies can be used in making all manner of decisions including the extent to which the internet should be made available during working hours (knowing that most people have access on their cell phones anyway). This structured approach helps inform such decisions.

Using such a process through each part of the planning process reduces risk to a manageable level and also helps to make precise projections of expected outcomes.

Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.





Of course, for each risk there is an opportunity. By applying the same technique but looking for opportunities and means to optimise such opportunities, the organisation can enhance the effectiveness of any approach to a campaign.

It is all too easy to imagine events in stark black and white answers. This is seldom the only solution and, as a result practitioners can work on contingency planning

There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.



Disaster seldom comes unannounced for most organisations. There tend to be number indicators that presage the public event.

The key is to be able to identify the stages as they present themselves. They are:

Variation

All plans have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning (see above).

Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. Often such occurrences are small. These are 'variations' to the plan.

Good monitoring will give teams notice that remedial action can take place and contingency built into the plan will calmly eliminate the risk and opportunity for escalation into crisis An example might be a contingency sum in a budget and some flexibility in campaign delivery time built into the PR plan.

Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the PR team cannot be sure will occur or when an under known circumstances it will occur.

 To mitigate foreseen uncertainties, the plan will need to include the capability to identify the event and a capability to deploy a pre-planned contingency programme.

An example (and not uncommon event)  might be unscheduled maintenance of a computer that is running the campaign blog. One big issue is website uptime (especially if a campaign is very successful) with issues such as a slowing of response times of the organisation's web site or, disaster of all disasters, the web site being so overwhelmed that it stops responding (in retail, this is the equivalent of the organisation's biggest shop being closed).

When a web site goes down, it is a PR problem. It is not an IT department problem. Risk analysis is critical in identifying and mitigating these events. Practicing for such events has to be included in any plan. Who does what, when and how and if they are not available or facilities are down who else should be included as part of such a plan.

Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B.

The team will be unaware of the event’s possibility or will consider it so unlikely that there is no in-built contingency plan. To be able to manage such events a comprehensive monitoring and alerting process is critical. Allis not lost, it is possible to have contingent plans in place to ensure that the right information (e.g. Information about internal manages and key issues management personnel, lists of journalists, bloggers, Twitter friends etc) is available and accessible (good idea to have it in the cloud so that it can be accessed in even the most dire circumstances) . There is a need to have alternative managers available if key figures are not available and of course many facilities can be put in place from 'dark' web sites to off site facilities to work from.

Unknown unknowns

Sometimes refered to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always caused by spectacular events or issues. They can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events, each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. The best management practice here is attention to detail and constant re-evaluation of the crisis and issues plan and its application.

Managing risk and online crisis is not very difficult. The hard bit is gaining commitment and resources to mitigate risk and plan for issues and crisis management.

There is also this very helpful process developed by Alison Clark for the joint CIPR/PRCA internet commission in 1999. The PR industry has had so many tools to help manage issues and crisis management for such a long time. Well done CIPR and PRCA!




In Brief:

• Many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management.
• The sequence of events of online programmes can be easily disrupted by the online community.
• Plans can allow organisations to grasp opportunities and manage threats with tools that can be deployed at short notice.
• The practitioner can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques.
• Online PR, with its range of platforms channels and contexts, is quite complex. But the opportunities for considerable incremental success are greater.
• Risks can be identified and conform to a number of recognised variables.
• It is possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.
• Development of plans to mitigate risk before implementation will reduce threat.
• Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.
• There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.
• Planning for programme variation, foreseeable uncertainties, unforeseen uncertainty and the unknown is possible and practical.

The strategic decision that can be made will cover the extent to which issues contingency planning will be part of the online activity.

The time and resource that will be devoted to issues and crisis management.
Who will be involved in issues and crisis management and that structured methodologies will be a applied.

Finally the strategy might consider how the organisation will practice contingency planning.

This post is relies extensively on the chapter on risk and issues management in the PR in Practice series of books, Online Public Relations a CIPR practice manual. Practitioners may also find Michael Register's book in the same series very informative.

Now we have another (practical) form of communication

Microsoft launched Kinect this week. It represents a new, practical and already available form of communication. It is part of what I have described as the Experiential Web.

Forget cave paintings, scrolls, books, letters, newspapers, telegraph, radio, phones television, the web and social media. They all require a mechanical interface. Now communication is possible just through movement.

Adopted and used by the PR industry, it can help the industry begin to achieve its full potential in this technology led era and should add a new and additional revenues stream.

I imagine that in two years there will be in excess of £250 million worth of PR fees connected with this single product alone and that it will grow the industry and significantly. I am not so sure that this will be the PR industry as we know it but it will definitely be PR and the first Kinect trained PR students will emerge into the market within a year.

Kinect's capability and application has a role in communicating with almost every organisational constituency.

No overalls, gloves, wands just a person going about daily activities can be involved in this form of communication.

How this is achieved has been talked about a lot already and it requires only a tiny imagination to see applications in almost every form of PR activity.

Mostly, Kinect is aimed at games and rather standard communication like conference calling but that need not deter the PR practitioner.

Just by having a constituent move in front of a sensor, the practitioner can now deliver a message, interact in real or virtual way and can engage directly. With its face recognition Kinect can deliver messages to people  based on no more than a photographic image (offering a whole new dimension for direct interaction with attendees at the corporate AGM, launch, political rally, press conference not to mention the retail outlet, sporting event etc).

To do all this the practitioner may want to partner with games developers like Scott Henson, at Rare who says:

You saw our big bold vision for Kinect when we rolled it out last year and now we’re going to enable that. It’s amazing to me how much we’re going to deliver to consumers at launch but we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do....

Kinect is not a game it is a new form of communication.

In response to Tom Watson

Dear Tom. It is very kind of you to comment in such detail and to explicate the work of Bournemouth University in such detail.

I am concerned that you or anyone can imagine that I could possibly wish to imply that any PR academic or tutor is somehow cheating students and agree that such a view would be offensive. I do know how hard they work, their dedication to students and some of the absurdities they have to put up with.

I recall attempting to up-date a module about internet mediated PR and finding (I was told) that there was neither budget (time) nor sufficient flexibility in the system to make this possible in the year when Twitter burst upon us with all its potential for speed of communication and news gathering. The university in question could not provide any time for research, preparation or course development over and above direct teaching hours.

Of course one still finds this is the case in other courses demanding utilitarian approaches to education.

My original post came from a comment I made on Stephen Waddington's blog in which I expressed amazement "that the CIPR could not even refer to its own publications and the work of Gregory, Theaker, Tench and Yeomans and others".  I might have added Watson & Noble and Malony etc all of whose work is evident (truncated and sanitised) in the document.

I am aware of the time it takes to develop such theory to guide practice which is a million miles away from the 'shoot from the hip' methodologies propounded by oh so many people offering ill considered quick fire answers to real issues.

The CIPR Toolkit borrowed extensively from such research which in now inculcated into much practice and the Toolkit and yet failed to recognise the contribution made by academia.

I have no doubt that teaching budgets are tight. That is exactly my point. This narrow view of PR is in stark contrast to other courses and I am sure you are more aware than I of this short sightedness.

As you may have noted from other posts in this blog, my view is that the PR industry is firing well below its potential for want of vision (and consequentially is  performing at less than a fifth of its true potential). 

I agree that, for a majority of students, the year placement is a very valuable experience and great preparation for industry as well as that crucial final year transition from learning to thinking.

As for the level of research, while applauding the work of BU, and I do within the constraints imposed, you must agree that PR research in the UK is pretty small beer. For an industry sector that had  (in 1995) and has today and will again have in the next evolution of communication,  the potential to contribute as much or more than the financial sector to the UK economy we have to do much better.

Twice in the last 15 years, I have suggested a route for the industry which it has ignored to its cost (at best £100 billion, at worst £50 billion) and we now have a much greater opportunity.

Stirring the industry is hard when its sights are set so low and its opportunity to excel is not rigorously explored   (and I am in admiration for the History of Public Relations initiative which is strategically important and notably so for the UK industry).

Rigorous research into such opportunities are few and far between especially when compared to, say, the financial sector or even (am I allowed to say it), marketing (now in turmoil as a discipline), business studies (which are so good that its pupils saw a search engine more capable of automating car driving ahead of the auto industry) and publishing (which has the exemplar of the Times Group which has more difficulty gaining a market (and revenue) that a 140 character iPhone App).

Having, controversially, opened the debate I trust that it sparks some interest among many more people.

Richard I am grateful for your comment. I think you are right in saying that PR degree courses are under threat (as I well know) because they haven't necessarily reached the size or maturity of other, easier to teach, disciplines.  We now have size (more PR’s than Journalists?) but I agree about maturity, which is my point. PR academia has yet to delve into the potential and yet is not investing in the research. It is seriously cheap for the universities. Can one compare the (relative value and) cost of DNA research to knowing more about the nature of relationships (one of many PR disciplines) in this war torn and often starving world.

Duncan, I am surprised to find your comments relating so closely to the arts of Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire when your practice is promoted for rigorous research. But there is a solution. LMU used to have a skills course which taught the basic skills of PR agency. I hope you had an opportunity to employ them before the course was abandoned. 

Why does the PR industry ignore PR academics?

After a comment I made on his blog, Stephen Waddington, a candidate in the CIPR Council Elections, asked why is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? He notes that this is not the case in places such as Sweden and the US, for example?

Could it be that PR academics are wilting flowers? Is it that they follow rather than lead PR practice? Does this mean limited research that is none contentious? Is it the case that such milk and water teaching  and research reflects mostly recent (and largely American) history and is thus of so little consequence to the industry or are the reasons more profound?

Perhaps we should look inside the universities for its response. This is an era of rapidly changing platforms and channels for communication. Can the universities (and the PR industry) cope with the consequences? The hard science which explores the human brain to aid psychologist identify human drivers would seem to be beyond current teaching and hardly figures in PR courses or research. Computerised part of speech analysis which reveals semantically the values attaching to organisations and brands is becoming very advanced and yet PR academics seem to know so little about it. Access to technologies, that driver of human evolution, is changing the very nature of organisational structures and is better explored by other disciplines despite the obvious significance to PR practice. There are many other such issues facing all communications research. Have such changes pushed real PR beyond the limited wit of academia.

Maybe there is another reason. It is possible that the PR industry has been ripped off by academic administrators? The contribution undergraduate PR degree courses have made to Universities is huge. A real milch cow. Easy money. Cheap to run degree courses. Just under 200 PR students in one university contribute £600,000 from their own pockets every year. This means that diverted government contribution is funding other activities. This university is spending a fortune (£3.2 million) on teaching jobbing trades such as journalism, publishing, radio and TV.  Perhaps we await an academic who dares blow such a whistle?

Could it be that academia is truly frightened by the effort and (by historical standards very, very high) cost of the grants and sponsorship it needs to fund and execute ground breaking research for one of the key disciplines of modern management, namely Public Relations?

There could be a further conspiracy founded on the discipline taught in the universities being so threatening to the other institutions they dare not acknowledge the contribution? The PR trade association that publishes a guide that does not acknowledge its academic underpinning; the consultancy feeling more comfortable to provide safe haven for an ex FT journalist than a trained practitioner and the bank that employs a communications expert (even when provided with the evidence - PDF) is incapable of insisting that a breakdown in relationship and trust would lead to the collapse of the financial sector. These university taught practitioners are jolly dangerous folk!

Why, Stephen asked, is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? 

As part insider and part outsider, I think it is all these things and a few more. But the question still stands and perhaps, as universities re-examine their role, this is time for a proper and properly informed debate.

Why is the UK PR industry only achieving a tenth of its potential?

In the next two weeks the CIPR will elect its next president. Will the next one be able to look over the horizon or will the leadership in the PR industry continue to muddle along missing every opportunity on the way?

Poor leadership, lack of good research and timid practitioners have, and continue to, miss the big industry opportunities and, worse, re-enforce practices that may have a very limited future.

PR has to find some way out of its obsession with media relations. It is a reasonable question to ask if the PR industry is too big for the size of traditional media available. 

In the meantime, the industry turns its back on the really big opportunities.

In 1995, in response to a request to look 20 years ahead I spoke to the CIPR annual conference about the significance of the internet and suggested that the newly emerging World Wide Web offered a new and profitable communication opportunity for PR practice.

Today, the internet industry is worth £100 billion. If it were an industry in its own right, the internet would be nearly as big as the financial services sector, which accounted for 9% of GDP in 2009.

In 1999, I wrote Online Public Relations (first edition) saying that gaming as a form of communication was an important communications channel.  The economic contribution of the UK games sector is significant: in 2008, global revenues generated by UK video games were worth £2.03 billion, and contributed £1 billion to GDP.5 It is worth bearing in mind the economic contribution of the sector as an employer: the industry directly employed 10,000 people (and a further 18,000 indirectly) in 2008

In 2000, the joint CIPR/PRCA internet Commission made it clear that interactive online communication was a big opportunity for the PR industry. Ten years on, the tiny tip of revenue earnings from social media activity, advertising, was worth £2bn in the first half of 2010.

In 2006, I was blogging furiously about the content opportunities offered by mobiles.  This year the new communications platform, tablet and slate technologies, will achieve 20 million units sold while there were 346 million mobiles sold in the third quarter of 2010. These platforms are content hungry with associated App and content industries worth many millions.

There are many more examples of the PR industry failing to grasp the opportunities.

Perhaps the missed opportunity is a fraction of the above but at least half was within our grasp when the notion was first mooted. That is £52 billion and today the PR industry is, perhaps a tenth of that size and with the decline in print media, its threatened.

Why is the PR industry so reluctant to look ahead and learn enough to be part of these phenomenal opportunities for relationship building, content creation and take the centre ground?

Could it be that it is not able to bring together practitioner, consultant, futurologist and skill sets?

These are opportunities, not for the geeks and tech heads.  They touch on practices in politics, corporate affairs, internal communication and in every sector of enterprise.

It is about time that all the institutions including the CIPR, PRCA and the academics decided on a strategy that would inform the industry as to how it can and should thrive and grow over the next ten years.

This is all about money, big money and an industry at least ten times bigger than today.

The Experiential Web

The time has come to look at the 'next big thing' and its a big thing for PR.

Way back in 1999, I noted in the first edition and expanded in the second edition of 'Online Punlic Relations' that PR practitioners needed to watch the evolution of platforms  for communication. Then it was the PC, the laptop, mobile phones and games machines.

Today one would add smart phones, dongles and memory sticks, television sets and the  ever expanding internet of things.

This we all know about and can see evolving before out eyes.

But emerging in the background are the internet based experiences that are comming to the fore.

One example is Augmented Reality, another is location based smart phone apps and yet a third is intelligent smart cards that open doors and provide access to the underground. All useful and all primative.

While Skype may make it easy to make an international video conference call it is a long way off creating a virtaul office of sitting room experience.

As more optimies software and bandwidth comes available, will it be possible to be the person winning the 100 metres at the London Olympics from the comfort of your garden lounger? Will you be able to experience the trension, the agony and the thrill?

Well, we are, step by tiny step moving in that direction.

We already have High Definition 3D augmented reality (without glasses) and we have the ability to take a photograph of our surroundings and translate that into information about the object, street or store.

But what if the street or store was created using semantics intelligently combining our history of interets and the many realities that reflect the image we photograped with similar or related objects, sounds and even smells. Tuning into our physiological, neuropsychological and cognitive mechanisms is already part way there as our smart phones monitor our biorythms.

Now it seems that many of the building blocks are in place.

What are the implications for developing relationships, sharing values creating virtual community interactions and offering richer exoperiences through this new media?

Well,there is no doubt that this is a Public Relations issue. It is about media, it is about relationships, it is about personal and community values and it is about publics/stakeholders/social and user genertaed communities.

I wonder how far the universities with public relations or media academics to deploy on how to write a press release are begining to extend the idea to working with the experiential web?

The first such centre will be at the laeding edge of our profession.