Stepping aside from press and social media PR

The nature of public relations as the agent which provides structured concepts and understanding of mean by which ideas are exchanged and flourish is as old as humanity. It is the fundamental which distinguishes civilised man from social animal. It allows man to productively invest the majority of time in relationship building in order that social interactions can cumulatively enhance human existence.

So what does PR do?

• It acts as an agent
• By explicating structured concepts
• Making them available and pertinent using structured means
• With capabilities that extend well beyond social grooming
• In a process with relationship productivity
• Which accelerates evolution beyond biological development

The trouble is that people in PR do not recognise this high calling. It is, for many, far too grand. For some it is even hard to comprehend.

If we don’t look at the stars but look at the functions we can see the work and effects of the continuum.

The media proxy is a tool. PR in its widest sense, is ambivalent about which media it uses. We have become transfixed by the press and press relations (so called) skills. They are useful. It is helpful to have people who do it well. They are functionaries (and mostly very nice people). They are infrequently people who understand PR. They have many solutions to problems - and they are all called press relations.

In the 1960’ PR was much more about politics. It was important because its application formed the bulwark between the totalitarianism of Russion Communism and democracy.

If you look at the practitioner of a certain age like Doug Smith, Peter Walker and many more, they began life as political agents. Some became lobbyists others worked in-house and others ran agencies.

One of the skills that were needed by these practitioners was an ability to work with journalists.  But by no means the only skill.

This was an age when wars were won because we did NOT use propaganda.

Many of the issues were big and  global. A period of Cold War (and Cuban Missile Crisis) were real events. The civil rights movement, the environment, women's demands for equality, the space race and the landing on the moon, as well as the Vietnam War, Mods and Rockers and the Beatles made our lives even more psychedelic! 

For the first time in a generation we had disposable incomes, holidays and consumerism.

The forms of communication included protests and marches, the largest political youth movement in a liberal democracy (the Young Conservatives) met weekly in every constituency in the land. Trades Union committees also met weekly and held open air events in most high streets. Young Farmers was a publicity outlet for the farming industry and there were any number of such clubs from the Chamber of Commerce to the First Thursday group (young marrieds meeting once per month). People went out to meetings. The PR people of the time made sure that their client was represented at such meetings. There was, of course, the press. It reported on these happenings. Sometimes, people like me invited them to meetings or sent editor’s letters. Occasionally we wrote leaders.

Mass Television changed a lot of this.

In 1962, the Pilkington Report  recommending a 2nd BBC programme, separate BBC service for Wales and the restructuring of ITV. First transatlantic TV programmes became possible.

At the same time there was a printing revolution. The stars of Corination Street, with a viewing public of 21 million in 1962, deserved their own spotlight, human interest stories and vox pop magazines to give viewers added information and, it transpired increased interest.

In July 1962, the Sunday Times was reporting 'news' and selling 1,110,457 copies, a rise of 143,397 on the previous half-year. Women's Own, which told of the happenings in Corrie, sold 3 million copies with 120 staff.

Photocopiers, lazer printers, web offset, gravure, colour in daily newspapers,  and the ability to print fast and cheaply brought a concurrent revolution.

PR had to change and the easy, but not nearly as effective, form of PR was to use the now fast growing print media, radio and television. It was indirect but productivity was phenomenal. One article could reach every member of the First Thursday movement. Wow!

It was a communications revolution!

No one went to Young Conservative meetings any more. They were too busy watching Ena Sharples or reading Private Eye.  

The growth in the numbers of titles in the consumer and trade sectors made it quite hard to maintain share of voice in the 1970’s and so PR was directed away from community influence to printed press editorial volume (and for a time a massive burst of fly posting).

In effect, much of PR became press agentry.

And, by 1980, it had become dead easy. We had learned to manage it.

Events, case studies, features and editorial schedules gave any organisation that wanted: presence and huge share of voice.

In the background, there still were the people working to have effects on corporate relationships.

They had work to do in PR. It was manifest as social, economic, political, institutional, community, internal employees and the Board relationship development.

To fulfil the role of PR, there always was a need to have some form of public presence. Speaking to a Young Farmers branch or presenting the “Retailer of the year” award at the local Chamber of Trade Christmas bash still figured (and still do figure) in the range of communication channels used by organisations that have good PR.

So, what happens as one media vanishes and another emerges?

They tend not to vanish but they do morph.

PR people have to change.

Just as TV stopped a form of social interaction in its tracks, So too, the internet cast a cloud over press, radio and TV as the premier medium.

Just as meetings still happen (and protests and and the Chamber of Trade “Retailer of the year” awards), press radio and TV will continue and will continue to have some relevance and importance. It is yet another capability needed by PR to do its job.

Like the 1960s, the new social media ‘PR’ will be full of hype and difficult to understand and within a couple of decades will be easy.

In the background, there will still be people working to have effects on corporate relationships.

They will work and or direct PR in areas such as social media, press relations and meeting   with social, economic, political, institutional, community, internal employees and the Board. They too will use such tools as are sensible to achieve the high goal which affects the evolution of mankind.


So, is the internet different?


To my mind, the internet is different. There is a limit to the range of social media but the internet is much more fundamental.

For PR, the internet is as important as print and television and much more.

It is versatile, has many manifestation,can be part of a personal activity and can affect the world at large. Its many applications in the higher idea of public relations will make it very important.

It is different to print radio and television because it allows development at a faster rate (it is, in its own right, a self fulfilling form of PR).

So, to the question.

If you define PR as press agentry, it’s not going to give you much of a living in the future. If PR continues to act as the midwife of human development, its future is both secure and ever more significant.

In addition, for those organisations that use PR for its real purpose, their future is both assured and very exciting.

A letter to my MP over the Court of Appeal’s NLA's decision

Dear Mr Buckland.

The British economy does not need more restrictions on its most successful sectors. The internet is delivering £100 billion a year to the UK economy and needs reasonable attention to protect the opportunity it brings our citizens.

Specifically, and in this case, I am writing following the Court of Appeal’s decision on the 27 July regarding ‘temporary copying’. The decision means that many UK citizens will unwittingly infringe copyright as they use the Internet.

This situation has arisen as a result of a judgement in Newspaper Licensing Authority Ltd. (NLA) v Meltwater Group and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). Further details can be found here (http://bit.ly/oqhEoX) but the principle on temporary copies extends far beyond this case.

The ruling is such that that the process of your constituent displaying a web page on screen would be considered in law as the same as making a copy, and that anyone browsing a web page is subject to such terms and conditions. Their display of such web pages in their home or place of work is potentially, terns sight unseen, contrary to the law. 

The legal position of your constituents is thereby compromised (and most frequently, in all innocence) and the consequence is not helpful in the interests of the UK's world leading, and economically significant)  position viz a viz the internet.

Owners of web sites have many ways in which they can protect content from even the most ardent hacker as many companies in your constituency can attest. 

In the lead up to this Decision, a number of newspaper proprietors have put themselves beyond normally acknowledged protection offered to your website-publishing constituents and local enterprises. Thus the proprietors seek special pleading and potentially at the expense of Swindon people and  businesses.

For some, there is a need to protect intellectual property and to gain reward for diligent, legal and honest effort invested in content. However putting the onus on users of the Internet to avoid infringing rights sight unseen is counter-intuitive and a threat to the free use and access of the internet.

One anticipates the Hargreaves Review (http://bit.ly/e7jPxQ) will consider this special pleading by media owners and no doubt you will have a constituency interest in his findings and how he will inform the Secretary of State for Business and Intellectual Property.

Professor Bently, Emeritus of Intellectual Property, Cambridge University is of a similar mind and expresses his view here: (http://bit.ly/r9F12U)  

One understands the dichotomy of Members and legislators attempting to keep up with technological advance. In this case, being sympathetic and attempting to give long established, decaying and desperate vested interests due hearing is necessary but need not undermine the legitimate work and play of your constituents.

In this case, browsing content online must fall within a temporary copy exemption and should not require a right-holder’s prior, sight unseen, consent for reasonable use. 

Your etc

Reflections on PR productivity

jellybean1233  http://bit.ly/nzXw81

The Broadgate Mainland survey is a useful contributor in the development of improved productivity for the PR sector.

We need to do something fast to reduce the effects of a perceived professional diversity trap brought about as a consequence of the present structure and practices in PR.

The survey makes us very aware of the key role that a good old fashioned web site plays in Financial (and a lot of other) public/media relations.

In addition, it offers insights into the role of social media as part of the communications mix that influences journalists and journalism.

ABC data:
A blow to an already struggling industry
The Spectator http://bit.ly/pWC84N

Because press agentry is such a big part of current PR practice, and because of the attrition of print media (see left), it is important that research into the interface between PR people and the press is better understood and that the interplay between PR and Journalistic actors is made much more productive.

Source: Paid Content http://bit.ly/aMGo7e

The PR industry which is so dependant on media relations for its living has to acknowledge that it needs a thriving media sector to survive until it has adapted to the new environment. 

The new environment is one where there are fewer editorial pages, fewer journalists per editorial page and where Radio, TV and digital (including social media) are even more important.

It is now urgent that we develop, across the industry, some response to the implosion of the traditional media.

There are a number of other indicators in the Broadgate Mainland survey  that show us where we might begin to look to make the PR industry much more effective and build a defence for the sector.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the PR industry is not the first to have a productivity issue and that we can learn from their experience.

In the case of media relations, the best productivity driver is going to be a combination of quality management, cost reduction and satisfying the media that will eventually emerge from the ashes of the present industry.

It is not the place of this blog to do all the research and to make recommendations to the industry and show it teaches best practice. 

I can point out that PR is not alone, there is precedent and how research can inform the industry to help it become better at its job.

In a post in May, I showed the anatomy of a news story (the killing of Osama Bin Laden). It was evident from the findings that there is an interplay between a range of media for all good stories. It is not one medium or another it is all media that really counts.

In the meantime, who would not recognise a journalistic motivator when given this gem from Broadgate Mainland: "The number of hits a story receives has become the most popular measure of journalist success, followed by how an article is shared online." What this is telling us is that the media and the PR industry both have to take a multi-media view of media relations.

From this, the PR industry can begin to assemble the information it needs to be more productive against a backdrop of a declining, but still critical, media relations practice.

Online readership analysis – is bigger better?
 Show me numbers
http://bit.ly/nZfF2K

Here is an example:If journalists are motivated by the web effects of their stories, is the PR industry obsessed with getting stories published that achieve above the average  number of online page views for their stories in the publication's website?

First we need the data (not hard - see graph) and then know what these data mean for practice.

It is by examining these research findings and others that we can begin to find out what high quality looks like.

For some it is the creativity of the original idea established in the strategy. For others, it may be the quality of writing and for another it may be way a story is pitched to the busy journalist.

But for the journalist what is gold plated?

Well, if the survey is to be believed, a happy editor and publisher is a good start and that means good clean original copy that can be used in the publication, blog and Twitter with a minimum of fuss and with every chance that it will go viral the instant 'enter' is clicked.

For enhanced productivity, we can see that more research is needed and then recommendations can be made, best practice can be developed and practitioners and students can be inspired.

Having a sense of what we need to deliver by way of quality, can we gain some idea of what we seek by way of cost reduction?

Productivity tools may be helpful http://bit.ly/nSrBTS

The practitioner should now be informed about how to manage time and resource to achieve out-takes.

Hit rate, that is, the number of relevant citations matching the campaign objectives (citations in selected magazines, web sites, social media etc should all count today), is a way of measuring out-take. Too many citation or too few citations in selected media are inefficient. This means that setting realistic out-take objectives is important (and because 'all publicity is good publicity' remains a top priority for a lot of clients, now is the time to check them for blood stained knuckles).

Time/cost ratio of output to out-take is what the industry needs to understand and work on. Another way of looking at press relations is the the reach and frequency of citations in selected media per input hour/cost.

What the table (above) is really saying, and it is only one of many productivity tools that can be used, is that there is another way of distributing press releases that has an inherent  and minimum10% productivity advantage. In an industry that grew 13% last year and which is outperforming the market profitability should be brilliant. But its not. Essentially, the industry is living on borrowed time and the long hours of a measly paid workforce.

When looking at services, in house practitioners and agencies should look at their functionality AND productivity gain. Today week Precise launched its new combined monitoring and media contact service.

Here is a case of an integrated service that could offer productivity advantages. But it is a service a million miles from the industry that persists in wanting dusty old paper press clippings as evidence of effectiveness.

Now my cry goes up... who in the PR industry is going to take productivity seriously and take it to the CIPR, PRCA, the universities and other major agencies of the profession?

The industry needs press relations but it also needs to mitigate press relations damage to its productivity.

The case for internet mediated PR to avoid the professional diversity trap

Having identified from the PRCA/PRW survey that the PR industry needs to face up to a big productivity gap and a professional diversity trap, It is time to see what can realistically be done.

In this post, I will look at the development of internet based PR services as being an area for industry investors and why it should be an area worth a close look by the PRCA and CIPR (which are both doing quite a lot of work at the agency end of digital PR practice) and academia (which is floundering).

For every £1 the UK PR industry contributes, the rest of the economy contributes £177. If we look at these data more closely, this is an overly comfortable position and will deteriorate.

As the economy returns to 2008 levels PR's contribution, unless productivity grows fast) will drop to a ratio of about £1:£227 over perhaps five years (depending on how fast the UK can make up the massive hole the last recession made in national wealth creation). This means that the PR industry needs to act now or shrink back in the pecking order of significant sectors and, at the same time, witness the professional diversity trap becoming worse.

For an industry worth £7.5 billion we can see the contribution of the PR sector in a global context from this graph.

The PR industry in the UK has some things going for it which will stand it in good stead if it grasps the nettle.






First of all, this is a country that is used to making its way as an entrepôt economy and by providing services.






So, it may be sensible to look at some of the growth areas and see how they might give the PR industry the lift it needs.


Internet mediated PR is an area of growth that might prove valuable. Getting ahead of the curve so that we can expert expertise would be good for PR productivity.



Among the top economies, the UK does not have a large number of internet users but this may mean that other countries may be valuable expert markets.






This would only be true if the UK could call on a sound base of users and expertise.

And in this case the UK is among the top three countries for Internet use per head of population.





In addition, the UK population is ahead of the curve in the fast accelerating next generation of communication. UK people are more addicted to their mobiles than any other country bar Russia.






Of course, the markets relevant to this sector of PR will need good upload and download speeds and so a measure of this capability is important.





What this UN data is telling us is that the UK is a good place for the PR industry to develop advanced Internet Mediated Public Relations practice and services and an excellent centre for the development services for other, and especially emerging markets.



In PR we are acutely aware of the human condition and so the UN Human Development Report is relevant to help identify markets where stimulation of human development is significant.




With closer analysis of the data, the UN HDI report may also give the PR industry some clue as to where the most relevant markets may be for enhanced online PR services.

There is work to be done to develop the opportunities for the PR sector.

Clearly, these data skim the surface but as part of a contribution towards improving PR productivity to mitigate the professional diversity trap facing the PR industry, I thought it might help PR industry thinking.


Sources: United Nations accessed via Google Public Data Explorer http://bit.ly/pOqBcO

Can PR people write like Journalists?

Over the last few weeks I have been making the case for PR beyond the mass media.

Astonishingly, I have been berated for my lack of understanding of the skills of journalists which empowers them to be able to express themselves in a clear and approachable way.

Worse, I have been told that PR graduates lack the skill and capability of journalists, as if this was a prime component of being a PR person.

Now, I do not in any way want to denigrate the capabilities of the vast majority of journalists to use their language in the best interests of their specific media and many others beside. Who could not but hold in awe the literary exemplars of the medium.

Recently we have considered the capabilities of investigative journalist like Nick Davies of The Guardian newspaper. Imagine not having Neil Harman, the long-standing and widely respected tennis correspondent of The Times on tap almost every day. More of the best in the UK's journalism would be invidious. The best are the best and the rest are not bad either.

Equally one should not dismiss the capability of non news journalists to be creative as is evident in 'The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote' and Carter' by Richard Keeble and Sharon Wheeler.

But what of PR writers?

There are some who are just brilliant. Most are pretty good and most practitioners have to be able to write in styles. Most of us from time to time have been advertising copy writers (I was never good at it) or bloggers, Tweeters, and in-house newspaper editors.

So now, it seemed to me that we need to know how good final year students are at writing.

As PR people they have not only to write, they have to write to an agenda, and because final year PR students are not at university to be taught (this is not school) but to learn, it seemed to me that there is a need for an appropriate challenge.

If one were an employer, for example what would one expect a practitioner to be able to do (recent graduate or not)?

Here are some challenges that I would expect the average practitioner (but not necessarily a journalists) to be able to do:


In the style of Kingsmill-Abbot write a critical essay providing a description of Kant's view of the significance of ethics for democracy. It seems to me that if we do not understand the nature of ethics influence over views of democracy there is no future for a 'free press' or an investigative journalist. Equally, where corporate governance does not understand the nature of ethics and democracy, it has a short term future.

To succeed in this task, the student will need to read Abbot to see what his writing style looks like and will then discover the relationship between Abbot and Kant. The student will also need to be able to take a view of ethics and will need to examine a post modern view of ethics and democracy because of the difference of post modernism and modern views.

My next challenge would be for the undergraduate to write instructions to a newly promoted sales director, in the style of the still hugely popular Jane Austin, on how to formally introduce a member of the Baronetcy to a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. This will require a knowledge of a form literature and the significance of etiquette. Here we can see an acceptance of popular period drama and skills a PR needs to be good at events organisation. It will be a lesson never forgotten.

In the style of David Ogilvy, (Ogilvy On Advertising) describe the importance of Twitter hash tag monitoring to the reputation of FTSE250 companies would be my next task. One of the great copywriters and strategic considerations in social media management in a single assay would be great.

Finally, I would ask my students' to show me how good they would be in explaining the benefits of the PR practice of the media phone round but this has to be done in a script for Simon Cowell during a showing on Britain's Got Talent. Imagining the audience reaction in writing this script and taking it into consideration as part of the exercise will be important.

To be sure that I do not bring my prejudices to the table, perhaps it should be students who award the marks and provide for public scrutiny the critical reasons for the marks given in the style of the Prime Minister.

This would mean they will have to consider the diplomatic elements of criticism without compromising their own future standing among their peers.

My point being that the PR practitioner has to master many skills and to be able to write, as a matter of course, in the language an audience finds acceptable in a place, at a time and in style to meet and match the mood of the moment.

Here is the challenge - an inter-university competition adjudicated by practitioners drawn from organisations that know they have to recruit a PR graduate or journalist in a PR role within a year.

But can we also get this competition broadcast on TV?

How can we make the PR industry more productive and profitable?

Mac Funamizu

Over the weekend I stuck my neck out and suggested that the PR industry needed to be more selective in its activities to release practitioners from the low paid, low productivity trap, short term future it faced by being so immersed in press relations.

Yesterday, I suggested that the industry is a poor performer among a range of sectors with significantly better productivity.

Peter Smith took me to task. He asked if I had any solutions!

In this post I want to extend my brief reply to him in the CIPR group in Linkedin. Here I explore some of the ways I believe the PR industry can escape the low cost trap it has got itself into and evolve into a much more powerful profession.

I did make the point that to see how we can enhance the profession, there is a case for looking at different sectors to see what they have done.

At this time, as the Fourth Estate, Parliament and the Police squabble of the role of journalists and their place in PR, we too can have the same debate. There is a good case for PR to look much more closely at the value of the involvement of journalists in PR. Much of the argument I exercised in my post last Saturday. Today, I would extend those arguments a little. There is a place for a form of press officer to be employed in building and maintaining relationships between and organisation and its press (radio and TV) news journalist publics. They can be drawn from the media, re-trained and deployed. In the same way, there is a case for similar skills in online video media, text based social media, Website design and deployment, SEO, social and event organisation for face to face relationship management, Augmented Reality, widgetry and so forth.

No doubt, as the profession evolves clients will expect PR agencies to have such skills available as a matter of course.

However, having such skills available will not achieve the sea change needed by the PR industry.

First the industry must be much more ambitious in what it wants to achieve. It might, for example set itself the target of being in the top quartile of economic sectors by way of productivity (using all three of the methodologies usually associated with economic productivity evaluation).

Secondly, the industry might, just as other industries have done, go to the PR and management colleges to identify how the industry can seek more productive services, make existing products and services more effective (profitable), train for and deploy them.

Thirdly, the PR sector needs take corporate management and practitioners along with it. No mean task and there will be exemplars and detractors and huge resistance.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing now includes a good module on Reputation Management as part of its Diploma. There is a good case for the PR institutions such as the CIPR, PRCA, IABC and the PR universities to make sure that senior management (the people who employ marketing directors/mangers) understand that press relations and reputation management are only a small part of the PR whole.

I do not want this post to be too overshadowed by the News of the World, hacking story but, it is by no means a co-incidence that a policeman thought that a News of the World journalist was his answer to solving his PR needs. Had the PR industry made its role clear, he would not today be appearing before a Parliamentary Committee.

Of course, it is reasonable to ask what kind of changes would David Phillips envisage that could make so much difference? Is this just whistling in the dark as the PR industry looses face because a bunch of ill informed politicians and policemen joined some equally poorly informed industrialist hired inadequates to 'do their PR'?

In all I would like to see a three fold increase in PR productivity over three years.

The plan will have to consider where early improvements in current practice should be made; where change can be implemented with lowest disruption and optimum return and finally how the sector can move towards greater reliance on advanced productive diversity in practice as well as people.

This means that:

1. A large proportion of the improvement would have to come from PR as it is practised today. That is, largely predicated on press relations and events management.
2. A range of enhanced value activities will need to be exploited which will inevitably mean a move up market into management consultancy and a move sideways to create greater breadth and depth in relationship management (and thereby reputation and brand enhancement).
3. A very significant deployment of opinion to show the value of a holistic approach to management of relationships by the most senior management of, even the largest, institutions.

There is a case of examining other industries which have been in a similar dilemma. Can the PR industry look at other sectors to get some idea of what is possible?

I was working in Bradford in the 1960's when the textile industry was imploding and in manufacturing in the 1980's when we saw carnage in areas like machine tools, car manufacturing and many others.

As I alluded to in my post in Linkedin, the companies and whole sectors that came through these times did a number of extra ordinary things.

Today, the apparel industry in the UK is strong and the fashion industry is worth £21 billion.

One only has to think of the high levels of productivity and quality achieved by the motor manufacturers by Nissan in Sunderland and Honda in Swindon or the Airbus aircraft manufacturing capability to see just how much can change when the effort is put in.

The £100 billion internet industry and the highly productive music industries in the UK are examples of how success can come out of adversity once the people involved realise the opportunities available and the production and change that is required to become globally competitive.

In examining what other sectors have achieved, can PR learn the lessons and move forward?

I can imagine some of the first things that the PR industry can do.

The first is to look at under performing activities and either ship them out to low cost suppliers or automated the process.

In almost every PR office and agency in the land there are interns. Many of them do lowly jobs like filling envelopes, maintaining libraries of magazines and newspapers, prepare clip books and other tasks that consume time and are labour intensive.

The task here is to look at the lowest paid people, examine the tasks they perform and the reasons for them and the enhance such activities to become less labour intensive, higher value and profitable.

If, for example the library activities (press clips, evaluation reports and magazine libraries) of interns was transformed into corporate intelligence, and insights to allow deeper understanding and acquisition of knowledge for all the client board of directors, the mundane jobs would become interesting and very valuable. So much of these tasks can be transformed using modern technologies.

At the same time some activities can be shipped out such that, for example, filling envelopes could be part of corporate social responsibility programmes giving work to the most disadvantaged in our society.

Having turned the intern's most dreary work into a highly significant, intellectually challenging and adsorbing services and removed the lowest value add activities, an immediate advantage is available to every PR office in the country.

What then of the next lowest paid member of staff. Here again, close examination of the activity, its transformation from low value to highest value can be achieved with imagination and application.

A typical example is the (I really can't believe I am writing this) chore of researching and building media and other lists.

Part of the role of the new intern activity will identify those clusters of interest (the nexus of values) and the people with particular interest in such values. Such activities are part of semantic search. If the Bank of England can use such capabilities (to identify economic trends) using Search and Twitter trends, so too can the PR industry. Its not just Twitter but many other forms of expression in media as diverse as computer games, motives for attending events, other social media, corporate transparency and other on and off-line activities that can transform the idea of finding opinion forming and behaviour enhancing activists.

From such developments, the junior account executive's life is transformed from magazine list building into transformative PR campaign management. From just lists of magazines and journalists the activity engages real people and the their motivations. The work of 26% of practitioners paid less than £25,000 per years (according to the PRW/PRCA sector report) is transformed into activities worth as much as a £40,000 a year Media Manager/account Director. The productivity gain is considerable.

This kind of activity is iterative. Take the lowest value activity and develop it into the highest value added activity until you reach the highest paid executive in the organisation/department and productivity enhancements will be extraordinary.

High on the list of priorities in the 70's was quality. Total Quality Management which examined those areas which had lowest quality was worked on until it had the highest quality returns and iteratively, all activity was examined and improved. This was followed by Right First Time. This "do it one and do it right" principle would cut approval costs very quickly.

In another time and in another industry, we went through such challenges and can now apply them to PR.

The first problem we faced then and PR faces now is being able to measure quality.

In almost every PR office you will hear the baleful cry of 'I am waiting for press release/tweet/blogpost approval'. Here is a measure of quality. Approvals, if they are needed should be a joy to give not a chore for the manager involved. Cutting number of people involved and approval times will cut costs significantly.

Imagine, if you will, measuring the uptake of press releases without the awful and demeaning phone round. "did, you receive my press release?" THAT sort of phone call is a symptom of poor quality. Measuring it will immediately focus attention on a productivity leaching activity.

Developing the 'Right First Time' capability is only one part of the process. The other is in motivating the approver such that approval is quick and a joy.

Some of this activity will, no doubt, include that good old fashioned process of delegating up the management chain. Most people delegate down and that is a PR mindset. Try working the other way round.

One of the other major developments we learned all those years ago was the need to be in the vanguard of innovative practice. In PR there are a lot of things we can do to innovate and at present, there are many ways we can enhance corporate relationship management with very exciting new approaches to PR.

I hinted at some of the areas we can look into. At the tactical level there are exciting opportunities in areas such as online video media, text based social media, Website design and deployment, SEO, social and event organisation for face to face relationship management, Augmented Reality, smart phone games, widgetry and many more. They all interlock. Would you believe that journalists like widgets too?

However, such activities are quite mundane when looking at what is available just over the current horizon.

In the development of the high value added sectors in our economy, decisions are constantly being made as to whether it is more effective to make of buy. This means that the PR industry may well become a major economic driver in its own right. It will need a much bigger supply base and that is no bad thing and a big advantage for the sector. The upstream economic value of say the UK Space industry is such that it is needed by governments to enhance national GDP, employment and global influence.

This is another advantage of making the PR industry more productive (as though growth, profitability and global leadership was not enough).

But the industry does have to go much further.

Being not the participant but the initiator of developing vision, mission, objectives and values at the most senior level is a start and when applied to organisational relationships is quite a challenge. It is a challenge that the PR industry is quite capable of meeting.

As greater transparency becomes the norm (and here we get back to one of the outcomes to anticipate from the Hacking scandal) and transparency technologies gain in momentum (a consequence of the semantic web and the Internet of Things), the PR sector will become ever closer to being the expert in developing facilitators as well as drivers of corporate effectiveness.

To be able to do these things, the overarching need is to re-look at the data from the PRW/PRCA research and take from it the urgent need to increase PR sector productivity by factors.

Image by Mac Funamizu http://petitinvention.wordpress.com

PR productivity sucks

It depends how you look at the numbers 

PR Week (15 July 2011) editor Danny Rogers bangs to PR drum hard this week making journalistic claims about the PR industry. He suggests to politicians that his survey, undertaken with the PRCA is proof of the massive and ever-growing value of PR to the British economy. Well, such claims make some people in the industry wince.


He is, after all a journalist and so might be forgiven for a bit of spin but the reality is that the PR is a pretty poor performer among the top flight sectors. Output per employee is dull.

The survey estimates that there are 61,600 people employed in public relations in the UK and that the industry has a turnover of £7.5 billion. This is an estimate combined with an ambiguous statement which could be interpreted as showing turnover per employee of £121,753 per annum.

The sector, like many others, is growing too but compared to most UK sectors, the PR industry has a very small upstream economic footprint. (press clipping and rudimentary intelligence, catering services and normal office overheads). Downstream economic impact is also limited.  Press relations is an example.

Compared to the top performing sectors, PR is not a great act. Here are some examples:

The UK music industry employs more than 120,000 people and has a turnover of £3.9bn per annum showing a £355,000 annual contribution per employee.

A similar sized industry, the Space Sector is also interesting. In the 2010 a sector study showed the industry with growth rates of 10.2% in the last two years turnover of £7.5 billion. With employment of nearly 25,000, economic contribution per employee £300,000.

UK Internet economy is worth £100 billion a year and Internet companies employ an estimated 250,000 staff showing £400,000 contribution per employee.

PR, it seems has a productivity problem. It needs to up its productivity by a factor of 2.5/3 to be considered top flight.

Perhaps this is the real value of the PR Week report. It has shown that, though growing (and not as fast as most of the top performers) it is not getting the best return per employee among the better exemplars.

For most practitioner (84% of practitioners have some form of general media relations responsibility and 77% write articles and newsletters), it is worth comparing journalist and  with PR salaries. Journalists are paid:

Journalism Salary Range Magazine £11,170 - £34,459 Publishing £12,471 - £38,233 Newspapers £11,407 - £35,489 Internet and New Media £13,150 - £40,724

PR people are paid a comparable level of between 28,384 and £36, 500 average annual salary (up to Media Manager/Account Manager level). It would seem from these data that PR practice is comparable with the work of a journalist but PR work extends to 46.5 hours per week.

This would suggest that to compete with the high flying sectors of the economy, PR has to find an alternative to writing as its core activity.

What we now need from the research is some idea of where the high productivity gains can be achieved.

In addition we need some form of breakdown of the low value activities so that we can cut the cost of production of just simply cut out the activity.

Press relations as a PR practice - a diversity trap for practitioners

This week-end will be the first without the News of the World at our newsagents.

It marks another occasion when the number of editorial pages that could be influenced by the media relations sector of PR shrinks.

This post explores print media as an arena for future public relations practice.

The prospects do not look good.

The reality seems to be that there is a declining appetite for the kind of media to which we are accustomed.

This has consequences for both existing practitioners and the likes of Amanda Andrews of the Telegraph Media Group (since 2008) who announced this week that she is about to jump ship to Freud Communications in the role of head of media, focusing on technology, media and telecoms clients.

There already seems to be some reluctance to recruit from the media. A number of senior ex-News of the World journalists have enquired about PR jobs, reported PR Week. But recruitment consultants have warned that the paper's 'toxic' reputation could harm their chances of making the transition.

In a word, will there be any media for these journalists to talk to?

Yesterday (14 July 2011), Fraser Nelson the editor of The Spectator (and ex-political columnist for the News of the World) wrote about how British newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and influence. He said that on Sunday "we will see just how much this process has accelerated." Graphically, he showed that average circulation of daily newspapers is now lower than the worst days of the 1940's Blitz and for Sunday titles, we have to go back to the 1930's depression to find comparably low circulation.

Notably, the trends show steady decline from the 1960's and very rapid decline over the last decade.

In the same week Mark Sweney of the Guardian reported that "...the move to close the NoW was taken on political grounds in a bid to contain the phone-hacking scandal, it is nevertheless a hammer blow – potential relaunch notwithstanding – to a sector where publishers are trying to wrestle with high costs against a backdrop of declining revenues."

He quotes Adam Smith, director at WPP's media buying network Group M: "It is like taking Channel 4 off-air on Sundays, you are suddenly taking out 20%-plus of the market, it is really substantial with no other home [for advertisers] to really go to."

Smith makes the point that: "Taking the NoW's total 7 million readership out of the equation is massive, as there really is no substitute and the market is already not in great shape generally."

Rob Lynam, head of press and media agency MEC, is reported saying: "The Sunday model is busted," adding: "The cost base on Sunday titles is significantly higher than running a daily and publishers are looking to reduce overheads. That is why News International is moving to a seven-day model, that is why Guardian Media Group made changes to the Observer and so on."

In the same article we discover that in May 2007 the total circulation of Sunday newspapers was 12.5m; by May this year it had fallen 22% to 9.7m, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Advertisers have also walked away, with display advertising revenue down by more than 25% over the same period, from £406m to £303m. By comparison the daily national newspaper market has seen a slight increase over the past four years – although it is a very mixed picture with the only major winners the Sun, Metro and Daily Star.

If the model for newspapers is bad, spare a thought for the celebrity titles.

The Mail Online reports that circulation figures for Hello! and OK! make sorry reading.

During the second half of last year the average net circulation for Hello! was 527,000 per issue and that for OK! 487,000 from previous levels as high as 800,000 and 600,000 respectively.

Dominic Ponsford reporting in Press Gazette earlier this year showed that second half of 2010 UK market for print consumer magazines was still in decline overall. Overall, the UK's top 100 purchased magazine titles had an average per-issue total circulation of 28,844,482 - which was a 4.1 per cent decline year on year. A continuing trend.

Is this just an issue for consumer magazines? It seems not.

A Mashable report seems to show that the magazine format has its own problems among consumers. While digital downloads may be down, compared to the print equivalent they “roughly correlate their performance on the newsstand.” Based on the numbers, the decline may not be a lack of interest in the iPad as a digital print platform but rather a general disinterest in magazines.

In the B2B sector life is not very different.

Recently, business publisher Centaur Media announced it was merging its business publishing group – which includes The Lawyer and Money Marketing and it confirmed disposal of titles like The Recruiter, The Logistics Manager and Process Engineering. In November 2009 Haymarket announced the closure of the print edition of Media Week with the axing of 18 out of 58 editorial jobs across the media group as monthly title Revolution went quarterly and the websites Marketing Direct and Promotions and Incentives were merged into Brand Republic. It is putting its network of media titles behind online paywalls from July including Brand Republic, PR Week, Marketing, Campaign and Media Week. We also heard that United Business Media has sold its licensed trade titles to rival William Reed. In addition, Accountancy Age and Computer Weekly both abandoning the weekly news magazine format after more than 40 years and going online only.

Ben Dowell at the Guardian reports that there were 4,733 UK B2B titles being published in October 2010, compared to 5,108 five years earlier.

This decline in support of the media from marketing budgets is part of a significant trend according to PR Week. It reported the the second quarter IPA/BDO Bellwether Report showing marketing budgets were to reduce spend by 4.2% and a decline in PR budgets as well.

This is reflected in a number of other reports. Wark reports on a study suggesting: "The year has proved harder going, particularly in print, and there is a similar narrative coming out of the other big European economies."

So we see the long term decline in print and this must have an effect at some time on the media relations sector of the PR industry.

Meantime, television is doing very well and radio listeners, who were found to be (PDF)  happier than TV watchers and Internet users, reached its highest audience level ever in Q1, 2011 and the internet goes from strength to strength.

There are, no doubt, a lot of people who would argue that print media is only going through a trough and it will bounce back. However, this has the smack of whistling in the dark. The trends are long term and few in publishing seem to have any mould breaking ideas.

Of course, no one should make assumptions about the UK media without reference to Michael Bromley, Visiting Professor in Journalism at City University London, UK Media Landscape study. An enthusiast for the press he may be, but has made the point about the future of newspapers and magazines very well.

Against this backdrop one might expect the PR industry to be on its knees.

But we hear from PR Week that PR is doing well. The International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) reported that the UK PR industry sector witnessed a 13% increase in overall fee revenue, a figure similarly reflected by PR Week's Top 150 PR Consultancies 2011 report, which showed the average growth for a PR agency in 2010 was 9.24 per cent.

Perhaps we find some of the answers in the 2011 PR Census, a joint PR Week and PRCA research project, published this week.

It is a thorough study of the British PR industry and shows UK PR industry contributes £7.5bn to the economy and employs some 61,600 people.

PR could be compared to the UK space sector which is also worth around £7.5 billion to the economy. Space directly employs almost 25,000 people - so there is a considerable - a factor of 2.5 - productivity gap.

At last we begin to see what is happening to the PR industry. It is really dying.

What I read in the statistics is that there are far too many people doing media relations in the shrinking press relations sector which is depressing incomes and opportunities.

85% of practitioners include 'General Media Relations' as part or all of their work (84% are also involved in Media relations strategy planning).

Perhaps it is not surprising that with the media in such dire straights that the part of the PR sector involved in media relations (at least 77% have a direct role) has such a poor productivity performance compared to more advanced industries. Working on average 46.5 hours per week, PR people are doing everything they can to sustain a form of practice that is on the way out.

The numbers offer us an even worse view. 70% of people employed in the PR sector are aged between 25 and 44. This is in the prime of their career, the springboard for their future and it looks bleak.

Indeed the profile looks like white, middle class, middle aged women fighting for a falling slice of shrinking media pages available for editorial content and paid very little for long hours in a dying sector.

We are fooled by the growth in the industry as it bounces back from the recession in 2008 and we see higher turnover based on sweated labour offering misleading and what can only be temporary margins.

In an industry that prides itself on significance to corporate governance, it is evident that this is not a very profitable career choice. Only 30% of the people employed in PR earn £50,000 or more or the going rate for the mass of qualified Financial Accountants. For the average PR CEO/director in a salary of £83,000 is good which compares to the 40%of financial directors in the FT 250 who earn between £300,000 and £499,000 per year.

Media relations would seem to be holding the PR industry back, depressing salaries and creating a diversity trap for practitioners.


Image: DEATH A GROWTH INDUSTRY from Scrape TV

iPad activism and the investing institutions

So much of the chatter about the end of The News of the World has been about reputation.

A lot of it centres on reputation as a commodity. Building reputation is, apparently, about advertising or PR'ing or connections.

Well, in the digital age such nonsense is patently, visibly and completely exposed.

Reputation is not owned by organisations it is proffered by constituents. That complex societal group that is bounded only by its interests in the values surrounding the organisation (as distinct from Publics, Stakeholders, Market segments and followers). This is not about the values of the organisation but its interaction with values held by the constituency.

Reputation management gets on well with marketing because so many people believe reputation, trust and regard are bought with pieces of silver.

Relationship management, which is a two way street, is much harder. In this street, values have teeth and bite.

Relationships and values management are the critical elements that distinguish PR from other disciplines. It is what makes PR different from marketing, advertising, propaganda, spin and publicity.

Without PR, corporate managers like Rupert Murdoch (Newscorp), Tony Hayward (BP), Pierre Beaudoin (Bombardier), Jamie Buchan (Southern Cross) have failed. They believed that PR was about spin and press releases and more fool them and more fool their shareholders for employing such people.

Mr Murdoch needs a PR manager and not a 'reputation' manger and that will allow him to begin to build trust, reputation and regards for his empire.

To do that, he needs savvy shareholders.

Sensible shareholders are now in short supply. Sensible shareholders will by now have worked out that lack of sincerity and ethics as part of the DNA of corporate culture will mean that they will take a haircut sooner or later on the bourses of the world.

Explaining this to shareholders is the job of the institutions like CIPR, PRCA, IAB etc.

It has to be explained among the investing institutions (remembering that institutional investors are in the same mould as the failed banking sector) in simple outcomes terms.

The argument is relatively simple. If the bloggers says the directors suck, fire the chairman at the AGM. If Facebook says service sucks, fire the executive board during interims and if Twitter says it is uncomfortable dump the stock fast.

This is not an ethical brief we have to give to the financial institutions. This is war. The normal citizen can and does become an iPad activist at the drop of a hat. In the case of NotW, as Robin Grant put it "brands were being bombarded in protest – most of whom will have been unused to such a spike in negative attention. This was not just happening on Twitter, with targeted brands’ Facebook pages becoming venues for significant protest too." Unless and until the financial sector gets its act together the pension funds will suffer at the hands of social media time after time. This is why it is in the interest of the financial institutions to be assured that they have proper Public Relations managers advising the Boards they invest in. Andy Coulson, is not and never can be a public relations practitioner. He is a journalist. He does not have what it takes to be effective in modern PR. Gaming the system was fine when Coulson was the editor of the biggest circulating newspaper in the UK. Try Gaming Google+ and the online world will crush the company and shareholders with it.

Why pick on G+? Because it is of a new breed of services with in built web 3.0. The semantic web. Semantic as in searching for and exposing secrets (automatically soon enough too).

A number of authors have been making this point for years (first time I published a book about it was in 2008). There is nothing new here.

What we now need are some PR institutions that are aware of what is happening in the fields of communication and who are prepared to make the point to corporate managers and investors and in public if need be.


Cartoon by the clever Vicky Woodward

Return on Values

Yesterday, I began to  look at ROI in a slightly different way and Philip Sheldrake and Tim Marklein maintained the argument for staying with a financial measure of public relations based on cash investment providing an incremental cash return.

For some PR trades, this is a perfectly adequate. One press release reaches a readership of a million people who in turn repay the client the cost of the press release and then some. The effect on the relationship between the organisation and the readers as well as tertiary publics such as journalists, editors and the process of WOM is ignored. Crude, better than nothing and informing management very little about effect.

Lets see if we can improve on that.

Suppose the PR practitioner was to ask the client:

• "Do you have values?"
• "Does your organisation have values?"
• "Do you invest time explaining, even re-enforcing, your values and the organisation's values to the Board?"
• "Do you and the Board invest time explaining your values and the organisation's values to your shareholders, employees, customers, vendors and other stakeholders?"
• "Do you use your values and the organisation's values to single out your brands among consumers/customers?"

I think that most managers would agree that their values and the values of the organisation are very significant competitive differentiators and that valued have value.

Now, lets make this harder. What if you ask the CEO:

• "What is the Return on Investment from your values and the values of the organisation?"

Ummm......

Now, in PR, we do have the answer.

Not marketers, not accountants, not business gurus.

Although many do recognise values as important even if they are not really sure how to identify values I cite: Charles Handy, Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg plus L Chen - 2009; H Donker 2008; M Chong 2010; J Cambra-Fierro & Y Polo-Redondo 2008; NL Trapp 2010 etc. etc).

In PR, grounded research (much better research than brand mangers have - and explained in this post), show that, among different segments of the public, there are drivers that build relationships between them and the organisation. They take the values of the organisation and where those values coincide with personal or group values, they find an affinity with the organisation.

An organisation can be described as a nexus of values and, to extent that they chime with the values of people or groups, there is a coincidence of interest.

We also know from a range of research and academic writing that organisations need to be able to understand the affinity between consumers and brand values to be effective and successful.

I cite, for example: JN Kapferer 2008; S Boo, J Busser, 2009; KL Keller & T Apéria 2008; S Srinivasan 2009; N Mizik & R Jacobson 2008; AE Cretu 2007; J Kim & JD Morris 2008 ....

For PR, deeper and more relevant measurement is to be able to identify the Return on organisational Values.

Does the organisation understand the values of its constituents? Does the organisation have values that chime with its constituency and in explications of its values, is it creating, sustaining and enriching positive relationships.

There is significant literature which explores the concept of Return on Values and much of the literature touches on matters like ethics, trust and reputation.

I cite for example: P van Beurden 2011; KS Cameron 2006; DA Waldman & MS de Luque 2006 LL Nash 2010 etc.

With rich, sustainable and supportive relationships, organisations will prosper both in the short and long term.

The return on investment in having clear, relevant, supportive and mutually acceptable values with the organisational constituency is a great deal more than cash out and cash-plus back. Yes, there is cash-plus back today but also cash-plus back tomorrow and with wider audiences. The real ROI will be seen to deliver real shareholder value, lower cost of doing business, a stable workforce with lower recruitment cost, enhanced vendor relationships and a more supportive licence to operate (Keller, Handy, etc etc).


Return on Values seems to be a much more sensible way of measuring PR.


Image from http://thefinancialbrand.com.

Brave new PR

In an exercise with some students we looked at a project in which the PR person was given responsibility for a university open day with the objective of increasing the number of student registration to 110% of capacity.

The university was running at less than 95% so this was quite a challenge.

The rules were simple. No budget constraints and stick to the brief.

Of course we undertook a detailed analysis of the primary publics and their interests and drivers: candidate students, existing students,the faculty etc.

By the time we had students wearing tee shirts with QR codes printed on them, it was obvious that the internal  communication activity was going to be critical.

To get fulsome buy-in from the dominant coalition and starting with the Principles, QR codes were liberally evident outside their offices linked to web sites about achievements, interests and Facebook friends to like selected with salacious care (every lecturer has glamorous Facebook friends - it goes with the territory).

In (classroom tests) it became clear that although the staff was completely oblivious to the secrets of QR codes, the students had no such barriers. Here was a subversive form of communication that was just right for the target audience but also really useful to achieve in-house buy-in (after all when you come out of your office and a bunch of giggling students are pointing phones at the notice boards, even the crustiest academic is curious).

The ideas for the programme, now an interactive university wide exhibition, continued as exemplar courses were given the QR treatment. Film and Vision has a wonderful challenge to use their studio to create YouTube events (inspiration came from here)  for visitors providing attendees with QR codes in hard and soft copy. The stars in the show, academics, students and visitors alike were offered staring roles.

Imagine proposing to a librarian that the PR department wanted to deface books with QR codes converting them into interactive documents incorporate text pictures and video. A deeper richer experience and above all fun. Perhaps even creating Slate books.

Meantime the maths majors were (hypothetically) working on creating a virtual environment about a new form of seminar with the lecturers in class and the students in the bar (sounds credible to me).

A new way of annotation for course work was thought to be a good idea for visitors to the open day.

The whole university was offered help to work on Wikipedia entries with each paragraph having its own QR code with free help from local wikipedians.The resulting codes were photo-shopped into a walk through department exhibition using a really appealing invitation for the young men expected to take an interest

The chemists had a ball developing Avatar presented activities.

Of course all universities need to keep local communities involved and a small team worked on how they could create web presence and interaction between visitors, students and the community and local enterprises. In addition there was a case for creating new ways to stay in touch with school and university alumni.

Having scoped out what was possible, the next major consideration was reaching out to the target audience. Direct contact, involvement with schools, local press, radio and television and, of course the places where young people (and their parents) go. Every new media idea that the class had come up with had a novel, interesting and compelling application for enhancing media relations and extending interest and coverage.

Progressively, this imaginary event  became bigger developing ways that people could interact with the open day exhibitions using Augmented Reality.

The need to be able to use print, email, personal visits, social media, traditional media, shops, clubs and community institutions became significant. Detailed analysis of ways to reach the, now growing range of internal and external publics needed careful analysis. From Twitter to Linkedin, building lists and approaches needed careful planning (and careful risk analysis too). Timetabling the plan was becoming harder.

The wonderful thing about students is that they suddenly come up with a new, and compelling idea.

The idea that so many communication capabilities came from the internet of things inspired by the Corning video brought a whole new range of new communication ideas.

To be able to attract a Corning demonstration, there would be a need to make the open day bigger, requiring wider involvement of the local, and, notably, commercial community.

There are two serious drivers for commerce: incremental sales or, alternatively lower cost.

What, for example would happen if these truly exciting events could extent to the wider community? What self respecting club could resist a QR code enhancement - if only on tee-shirts and wearable transfers, badges, table mats, drinks and even the bands. What is all these electronic gizmo's were all branded to keep promoting the university?  Can the open day become an interactive community interest in shopping malls and, in doing so, increase footfall?

Could visiting prospective students apply for a course using Bump technology? Could a local manufacturer use the new knowledge that the university was acquiring in communication skills for commercial gain? Is mobile phone bump technology helpful in replacing office access passes (Bump payment is now passée) and at the same time a message board on employees phones as part of the process adding internal employee communication to access control. Communication was invading and enhancing ordinary corporate function.

As the conversation progressed, each new application, every new idea offered new and interesting tertiary opportunities to engage a huge range of media from Facebook to YouTube and every news channel going.

By now, a simple open day, a normal PR activity, was becoming an agent for organisational change.

It was creating new and additional motivations for the establishment, lecturers, students and the community.

The kind of thing they would want to do because it is fun.

What we witnessed was where advertising, sales promotion and PR blur into engagement. Relationships that needed careful and structured management to gain the most potent effect.

Congratulations to the creative students at  Escola Superior de Comunicação Social.

Exhausting isn't it?

Image from http://listverse.com/.