Investor Relations takes an age

We are beginning to get the first really public comments about IR and social media.

IR Web report made this comment last month

Until recently there’s been no obvious social media platform for public companies to engage investors. That’s why the marriage of social media and investor relations has failed to take off. And while a number of investment sites have attempted to appeal to public companies, they’ve done so inconsistently.

 In the UK the world is different, the vast majority of investors are institutional and thus the numbers of people involved in active investment is less.

None-the-less, the range real time social media available to the investing community is pretty thin and is built on really old forms for communication such as email, Twitter and telephone based services.

Now that Google Finance (beta) has arrived, the time has come for much better (faster, comprehensive,) intelligence.

Being able to watch the markets using the Google service is interesting but has a lot of short comings.

Financial sector summary

Sector	Change	% down / up
Basic Materials	-0.81%
Capital Goods	-0.76%
Conglomerates	-0.52%
Cons. Cyclical	-0.69%
Cons. Non-Cyclical	-0.51%
Energy	-1.03%
Financial	-0.48%
Healthcare	-0.48%
Services	-0.09%
Technology	-0.36%
Transportation	-0.58%
Utilities	-0.13%

Part of the problem is that this service is supported by the institutional view.

The FT, Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall St Journal and the Economist figure large. There is none of the Big Data content and analysis there and ready for the investor and sweeping up the scuttlebutt from Facebook, Blogger and Twitter is well beyond current capabilities.

It does not have to be this way. There are plenty of capabilities that can help and which are available.

One day soon, someone will fill the space and they will have a field day. It might even be an entrepreneurial Public Relations professional.

The empathetic computer comes to PR

This is an article that shows how human empathy can be used in public relations evaluation by a computer.

Yes, I have heard it all before. It is not true that computers are bad at being empathetic. It is not true that they are bad at identifying tone and it is not true that they have no sense of nuance.

What is true is that the gap between computers and their software engineers and the frenetic anti-science public relations profession means that far too little time and money has been devoted to computerising public relations activities.

Today, I am going to attempt to explain, without getting too
 technical,  how a computer can learn to reflect information from the perspective of a human being. This is part of PR being transparent and doing replicable research and offering such capabilities as part of daily relationship management.

If you would like to use this software, please give me a call. but in the meantime, lets explore the sentient computer.

An age of information

It is not hard to find information about any subject, industry, issue or society. The internet has loads of it. So much so that it is hard to read and digest everything we need to cover the full spectrum of  important commentary out there. Can we find the important research; consumer reactions,  competitor activity, supply chain impact and the changing regulatory landscape? In such a vast corpus it's hard. Furthermore, can we identify if the work of a public relations professional is creating the right ambiance and atmosphere and social or behavioural change needed by the client? Is, to be pedantic, PR having an effect?

You need some fancy software to read everything and then report back to you just the important stuff to read and some sense of what all the rest of the information affecting your organisation looks like.

It can be done and I will explain how. This will show that we able to use technologies for PR that are based on well established, global research and standards.

Find the corpus

First of all, we need to be able to find everything. We need to be able add an individual web page, all the content of a web site of a number of sites. Obviously we need the corpus that comes from our clipping agency. Perhaps we also want to add to the media we are going to examine from RSS feeds, search engine returns or emails to the company. The Twitter 'fire-hose' is not the only one and we need all of that content too. Everything.

It could be everything about the company and key competitors, the whole industry sector and across the world. It's big.

Next we need to be able to get at the meat in each web page, email and URL shortener. There are services available to help us do that (and help explain the issues involved - if you  need to delve into the detail).

Finding the meaning of words

The next thing that we need to be able to do is find the meaning in the text. One of the common ways of doing this is to use a capability called semantics. Latent Semantic Analysis/Indexing (LSA/LSI; Deerwester et al., 1990, Landauer & Dumais, 1997) has proven its mettle in numerous applications, and has more or less spawned an entire research field since its introduction around 1990.

Everyone has head about semantics, but do we know what is involved and what it means. Semantics is part of the study of signs (semiotics) and explores the relationship of signs to what they stand for. To put it into PR speak, it is how machines can find the meaning of text.

We are able to use this range of technologies to allow a machine to do what a human does to understand words in context. You know, for example, that if I mention space shuttle, ship and train  in  the same sentence, I am talking about transport. This is how semantics  works out the meaning behind a text.

The process is about finding the meaning behind syntax.

For example, here are three ways of saying the same thing:

I Love Lucy

  

I  Lucy

I   Lucy

This is the difference between syntax and meaning and semantic software learns to understand the meaning (I love Lucy). 

PR using universal research to get clever

What we can see above is a basic form used in semantics in a wide range of applications.

Every sentence has:

• the subject (I)
• the predicate and (love)
• the object (Lucy)

It is explained in some depth at The Internet Grammar of English at UCL. Beyond simple grammar, we now have computer programmes that use this simple element of basic grammar which is, not surprisingly part of the W3C (World Wide Web) group of technologies called N-Triples. 

If we has a corpus of words, can we describe them as forms of grammar (Part of Speech) and semantic concepts.

It is possible to weight semantic concepts.

If we look at a number of simple triples, how it can be used in public relations becomes clearer.

Line 1 ... I love Lucy

Line 2 ... I love Mary

Line 3 ... I am David

We may want to find out how significant each element is in this corpus and how significant different parts of the corpus are.

We ask a human curator to provide scores for each of the semantic concepts.

In this corpus 'I' is obviously significant. We could give it a three +'s for being significant:

I = +++

Love is also significant we can give it two +'s

Love = ++

Lucy, Mary, and am are all the same so we can give them a + each.

But now we know that I and David are the same thing David gets a score of 3 +'s.

Lucy = +

Mary = +

David  = +++

am = +

From this you can see that it is possible to 'score' semantic concepts to help us decide how significant a corpus (or even and editorial item)  is. We need to know this in a data rich age. Insignificant content is too time consuming to contemplate (but we also need a capability to find those serendipitous articles too). 

Viewing content from different perspectives

Now lets look at each element of the corpus and look at them from a number of perspectives.

From the perspective of Lucy:

Line 1 would score three +'s for I plus two +'s for love and one for Lucy. The total score for line 1 = + 6

Line 2  would score three +'s for I plus two +'s for love,  and none for Mary in fact Lucy is jealous and so makes it -1. The total for line 2 = 4

Line 3 would score Three for I one for am and three for David. The total for line 3 = 7.

'Lucy' would score this corpus 17 and so would Mary if she was to score the corpus from the Mary perspective.

'David' would score this corpus total with 19 from David's perspective.

'Love' would score this corpus total with 16 from Love's perspective.

From this you can see that it is possible to 'score' semantic concepts from different perspectives.

What this means is that we can identify the relative significance and attitudes manifest in the corpus.

If we add just a few more concepts, you can see how the software can begin to make interesting assumptions:

Line 1 .... I love Lucy

Line 2 ... I love Mary

Line 3 ... I am David

Line 4 ... David lives in Swindon

Line 5 .... Lucy lives in Swindon

How cool is this for Lucy and David!

It may seem hard to score every word and so it is. Much better to teach a few items (articles) and the get some software to give the top semantic concept a slightly higher score and lesser concepts a lesser score but let such concepts accumulate scores as they re-occur. In this way, we can use the time of curators much better.

After a short time, the computer programme is going to be quite accurate but not all the time. In addition there is that need to identify those serendipitous articles.

Teaching computers empathy

This means that we will need curators to teach the software from a number of perspectives.

Here are a few more obvious ones

• To what extent (lets say, on a sliding scale of +5 to -5) are citations ( articles, posts, Tweets, comments etc), relevant to the organisation (CEO, CFO, industry sector, competitor - there are lots of such perspectives).
• To what extent (on a sliding scale) and from the very focused perspective of the CEO (or perhaps CMO, CFO, HR, Vendors, Customers, competitors etc) is this citation positive, neutral or adverse. 
• To what extent (on a sliding scale) is this citation relative to an audience bias (for example the bias of a Londoner, resident of the South West or Wales). 

This means that the curator will need to make such judgements in a very empathetic way for each article. Then the software will add weighting to all the semantic concepts evident in the article, and the next article and so forth.

After a while, using the weighting of the semantic concepts, the programme is able to rank the most relevant articles for importance, tone and (in this instance) location. It is possible that a curator may be assessing an article for more than three perspectives. In some cases a lot more.

However, progressively, the software will be ranking citations (articles)  more accurately until it is able to predict the perspectives of citations with an accuracy of better than 80% compared to a human curator. 

It is at this point that serendipity comes into play.

Imagine that a citation is dismissed by the programme as not being very significant but that there are some semantic concepts that score exceptionally highly but do not lift the citation high enough to be of consequence?

This is a citation that needs a second look and the software can say to the curator, 'Can you have a look at this one - I am not sure about it'. The computer is now asking a curator to refine the judgements it has made and is getting help from the human curator.

Computers can learn and can ask for help when they lack knowledge.

How is this going to help PR?

We now have a computer programme that can look at this massive amount of information that is relevant to your organisation. Not just press clips about the company but internet citations as well and about a range of corporate, brand, organisational consumer, regulatory, political and cultural perspectives. The objective is to extract important and helpful knowledge not to mention to identify threats.

The medical sector has been using these approaches for the last decade. Examples include:

The value of the Semantic Web  for aiding neuroscience researchers. http://bit.ly/yAcEMT; Through the use of CSIRO’s automatic semantic text analysis services, seamless and value added information extraction can be achieved while substantially reducing the effort for manual abstractions. http://bit.ly/AvgIID; automatic feedback generation for virtual patients, using semantic web technologies http://bit.ly/AhNFYZ.

Such programmes used in public relations mean that evaluation of activity from the perspectives of range of stakeholders is not only possible but reasonably easy to undertake.

An example will help understanding.

The range of events influencing and changing the practice of public relations today is as broad as lobbying, media relations, financial and corporate, social media and evolving practice in internal PR and much more.

With the best will in the world, being able to read all the academic papers, the government consultative documents and submissions to an array of commissions and enquiries is beyond the capability of most practitioners. Add to that all the new and best practice in social media, the arrival of new communications channels like Pinterest all requiring development of knowledge, skill and best practice. Print and specialist media is changing fast and the practice not to mention the debate over churnalism are problems of the moment.

The new semantic capability can search for all citations (including academic) by subject, it will offer up the most significant and relevant content form perspectives of the institutions and practitioners, academics, regulators, recruiters, journalists and many more. It can offer this for those with an interest in news, education, in-house, consultancy, criticism and much more. 

Of course, being able to provide similar intelligence about adversing and marketing, social media and SEO sectors would be a significant advantage.

Users would be able to view the industry in much the same way that a Sky subscriber would for television and on smart phones, tablets, PC's and even the big screen in reception.

There are some fun by-products too. This type of analysis makes it easy to identify the most powerful media,    authors and critics.

As  for the public relations industry so to for baking, banking and biscuit making.

Todate, the PR industry has sipped no sup and craved no crumb of these new capabilities and they are very new but they are going to mean big changes.

Useful authors 

Deerwester, S.; S. Dumais; G. Furnas; T. Landauer; R. Harshman; Indexing 

by Latent Semantic Analysis. Journal of the society for information science. 

41(6), 1990

Landauer, T. & S. Dumais; (1997) A solution to Plato’s problem: the Latent Semantic Analysis theory for acquisition, induction and representation of knowledge. Psychological review. 104(2),

Defining PR ethically

We suddenly have an American definition of Public Relations from the PRSA.

Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

For our American colleagues it raises lots of issues and they will have to ponder deep and hard at what it means for them.

They may want to consider what a "strategic communication process" is and, in addition, what are "mutually beneficial relationships" not to mention what is meant in the 21st century by the word 'publics'.

These are, believe it or not, ethical questions.

Let me start by asking if composing a song or writing a mobile app might be part of a strategic communications process. If it is, should we be teaching a wider range of communications capabilities such as song writing and app building in PR courses? If it is not, what are the elements of the process? Is it a virtue of Public Relations that its practitioners should be both conversant and capable in all forms of communication? From an Aristotelian perspective would it be unethical to be ignorant of the value of semantics in communication?

A beneficial relationship is an interesting concept. Is building a beneficial relationship with the President of Syria also going to create a beneficial relationship with Syrian rebels? If not, where is the essence of mutuality over time when some rebels will be in power? John Stuart Mill might suggest that there are major ethical issues here.

Finally if publics are a description of those people who form round issues (Grunig), the idea of mutuality means that organisations will need to take sides. Once again this raises ethical issues of Kantian proportions.

Why on earth should this matter?

Well it does because it moves the debate on towards the PR industry's approach to Codes of Conduct and ethics. Here are three current reasons:

• The Lords Communication Committee has been taking evidence focused on the “adverse impact” of public relations on investigative journalism, and concluded that PRs should be forced to abide by a “stringent code of behaviour”. It seems that simple press relations now has to face ethical oversight.
• In recent decades, elected and appointed officials in Europe have come under increasing pressure to demonstrate and strengthen their ethical credentials. Now, the spotlight is turned on PR. PR Week reports that CIPR moves to stiffen ethics guidelines as (UK Parliamentary) lobbying scrutiny intensifies." The House of Commons began to explore lobbying a year ago. Government's consultation began in January and UKPAC relaunched its register last week.
• Right now, there is also a major debate about how PR practitioners can be editors of Wikipedia. 

It is time to explore this ethical element much more closely.

The Wikipedia argument goes along the lines of '... all they ever write is biased in favour of their paymasters and is, thereby incompatible with the Wikimedia ethic...'

The evidence (and some of the profession's responses) they use is described quite well by Amanda Guisbond at Shift.

She says that Shift have a Wikipedia policy not to edit Wikipedia because it is against the rules and is not ethical.

Having evoked the ethic argument, ethically she cannot stop there.

Is it acceptable for someone or an organisation to claim the ethical high ground, and point the finger at a competitor, when they are perfectly aware of many contributors to the Wiki (who are academics paid to be knowledgeable about their subject by, for example, a University) are sullied by 'cash for contribution'?

Where is the arete in standing aside? How can we find happiness when there is so much Wikipedian equivocation. Kant would be dissatisfied and Bentham and Mill would weep.

When we have definitions they are used, as in the case of the PRSA, as part of their code of conduct. Members sign up to such codes for the PRSA (which has a largely deontological code of Ethics) and the CIPR, IABC (a Kantian approach code of ethics), PRCA (Professional Charter) and many more PR organisations.

This means that if a CIPR/PRCA/PRSA/IABC Member were to make entries in Wikipedia, they would be much more ethically qualified to make contributions than many of the present (and all too often, anonymous wikipedians) because they are subject to the codes of conduct laid down by their professional organisations. In the case of the CIPR, their Charter status provides for heavy duty sanctions against the Institute and any miscreant members.

Lets also take the PR evaluation case.

When a member of the CIPR tells a client that its process for evaluating outcomes of its PR programmes is of a particular nature (called PR evaluation), such a report cannot be gain said. It is the truth (AVE's and all). 

Why?

Are all PR claims about looking after reputation quantifiable? Can we demonstrate that people understand organisation better because of PR. Do PR activities really influence behaviour? What do we mean by mutuality of understanding?

Because the member is governed by the CIPR code of conduct and it would be against the code to present anything other than factual, audit-able, replicable and transparent evaluation of our work and all the capabilities and results we claim we can deliver.

It is time to work on all this which means we have all the joys of examining the CIPR definition:

Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

Perhaps we can have a go at examining this definition in due course which will help us face the pressures facing members who lobby, contribute to Wikipedia and even provide press relations.

All the PR data you can eat - without getting indigestion

In the next few months, I and some friends will be creating a new resource for PR practitioners, evaluation companies and academics (and a lot of other people too).

The idea is really quite simple.

If you could search online for all media (that includes all kinds of media from Twitter to the Telegraph) stories and comments about your organisation everyday (or hour, week, month, year etc) and put them in a database, spreadsheet, list or a web page that would be pretty average, but useful. If you could do the same about competitors, market sectors, business partners or individuals such as journalists, Wikipedians, FB friends that might be useful too. We are going to make this happen.

Each article (citation), will have a lot of information attached to it. We have some indication via Alexa, of  the age, sex and location of readers. We will also add all we know from Google Trends and Google Analytics that there is a lot more information that attaches to stories, blog posts and online comments. We will collect it  (and more) all and attach it to your story's URL.

Of course, it will be useful to be able to extract the text (without the HTML mark-up and advertisements)  and make it searchable, summarise-able and with lists of tags, mark-ups, semantic concepts (ranked in order of significance), Parts of Speech and hyper-links in and out. So we will add them also so you can use the information if you need to.

Now comes your part.

We will make these data available to you. The full set. Via an API, spreadsheet and a range of other formats so that you can download just what (that is, only the data and no more or less) you want. Yes, that's right, we will collect it, but you don't have to use it. So, if all you want is a news feed every day that's OK. If you want international trends by the hour, that's cool too. You can choose to smell the ocean or sip from the fire-hose.

Now you will be able to make your own news apps, evaluation apps and subject specific web news outlets.

You will be able to match media data with business data (enquiries, sales requests for information etc etc - anything you want). Making a list of Twitter users mentioning your brand will be as easy and that list of blogs mentioning your competitors or Slideshare mentions about your CSR programme. All the information will be ready for you to mine.

We will offer an API that any friendly programmer can use to make you anything you want.

We will offer some tools too. A de-duplication tool will be useful so that you can set up your own de-duplication parameters (all those re-tweets can be counted without having to edit every one) and a smart curation capability would, we guess, be helpful too.

Perhaps you have some ideas as to what you would like to include in our data set (mentions in Facebook ? - we're onto it).

If you are in-house, an agency or an academic PR, or evaluation company or research organisation and you want to be a beta tester, or early adopter, we will be delighted to talk you through what we have in mind to do.

In due course we shall be holding open events and application developer seminars but all that is for the future.

Right now we aim to offer a simple, though significant service.

Getting to grips with the future of online promotion

This is a complicated subject and we really do need an economist.
I am working through the numbers and, at present they look like this:

Work in progress but shaping up.

Dreaming into oblivion

Spurred by the responses to my enquiry into the attitudes of the CIPR presidential candidate's attitudes towards online public relations, I have been looking at the research and umpteen surveys (third party, good provenance,  UK centric, affecting online PR) available that could inform my thinking.

In the last year, there have been well over 100 items of research and surveys.

Many surveys would, in any other discipline be dismissed as fanciful.

For example, in an economy growing at less than 2% per annum:

• The number of UK visits to internet video platforms in September rose by 36% year on year, to 785million[i]. 77% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2011[ii].

• Debenhams unveiled a more than 70% rise in online sales during its latest financial year. Online value was up by 73.8% at £180.4m. Online now accounts for 7.4% of Debenhams’ total sales[iii].

• Online grocery sales at Sainsbury’s grew in the order of 20% in the first half of its financial year.  Dairy Crest showed fast growth for its online grocery service. Sales are up  50% on its sales at the same time last year[iv].

• Online retail in the UK will grow at a ten percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years[i].
• Forrester projects that online retail across 17 of the largest EU markets in Western Europe will hit €114 billion by 2014
• UK Internet use will be up by a factor of 3 in 5 years.
• 190 million Europeans will shop online by 2014 (up from 141 million today).
• Internet marketing budgets in the autumn of 2011 are up 16% and search marketing is up 9% four times more than all other marketing activity.
• The console games sector remains the most lucrative platform. 
• With an estimated £1.6bn spent on console gaming in 2011; £450m on PC/Mac games; £400m on casual games, £350m on MMOs and £330m on PC/Mac downloads with £300m on mobile gaming.
• British gaming is big. We spend 43m hours gaming every day^[i]. 
• This is a huge sector and with Kinect being made available for PR applications, an interesting area for development^[ii].
• The cultural component of PR in areas like languages are also significant[i]
• Human Resources and internal communication is now much predicated on the internet with some companies[i] creating social networks inside the firewall[ii]; 
• recruitment today is mediated online[iii] with the UK lagging in international comparisons[iv].  Practitioners need the capability to manage corporate doubts and expectations to inculcate internet thinking as a culture^[v].
• Meantime 60% of organisations have not yet implemented internal social media training which is a serious internal communications issue[vi]

Fascinating stuff.

Then came the big story. 

The Connected Kingdom report of 2009 (PdF) revealed that the online commercial sector internet earnings is £360 billion. 

Now, as a very general rule of thumb if you add up the budgets of advertising, marketing and sales promotion of most companies you will find it is between 3-5%.  Is this £10 to £18 billion, I hear you ask.

Well the whole of the UK PR industry is worth £7.5 billion.

With a bit more calculation, I estimate that online PR is worth about £5 billion and is growing at the rate of 10% compound per year.

Is this reflected in the shape of the PR sector or are we dreaming that it might all go away and we can all go back to el Vino's.

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[i] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/102011-private-social-networks-252220.html?source=nww_rss

[ii] http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/sectors/food-and-drink/coca-cola-readies-social-network-for-staff/3031482.article

[iii] http://neville.posterous.com/managing-your-online-image-across-social-netw?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+NevillesPosterous+(Neville's+posterous)&utm_content=Google+Reader

[iv] http://blog.adlib-recruitment.co.uk/digital/us-leading-the-uk-in-social-media-recruitment-uptake/

[v] http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/10/how-it-can-empower-your-employ.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)&utm_content=Google+Reader

[vi] http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/stuart.bruce/state-of-social-report-2011-by-econsultancy

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[i] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/03/asos-idUSL5E7LV32A20111103

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[i] http://bit.ly/uiYRgM

[ii] http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/11/10/microsofts-kinect-eyes-path-beyond-gaming-into-other-industries/

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[i] http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/march/uk-online-retail-to-sustain-double-digit-growth

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[i] http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/EmailNews.news?ID=28990&Origin=WARCNewsEmail

[ii] http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingReport2011.pdf

[iii] http://www.internetretailing.net/2011/10/debenhams-new-chief-executive-outlines-multichannel-ambitions/

[iv] http://www.internetretailing.net/2011/11/strong-growth-in-online-grocery-sales-for-both-sainsburys-and-dairy-crest/