The Cloud - Home of the PR gods

god of thunder by ~zzjimzz

Social Media is a manifestation of Cloud computing.

We have used the Cloud for a long time. At its core is the idea that if you can communicate to and from a device, the computing processes and the memory can be done on a computer located anywhere.

Today there are many services which offer facilities described variously as:

” Web Services that offer a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.

”One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business.”

Most of us are familiar with some manifestations of Cloud computing.

Email services online including Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail are Cloud based services. Pinterest  and  Photobucket, Flickr and many other services are ways of keeping photographs in the Cloud. YouTube,  Keepvid,  Metacafe and dozens more meet needs to store video online.

Keeping documents in the Cloud is common and so the story continues.

 But there are other dimensions. As we have seen, you can use software online.

Without a programme installed on your computer you can write letters, email, essays, even books online.  You can create presentations and complete spreadsheets (with cells that do calculations), create software programmes and have the whole process done online. All you need is a reasonably fast internet connection and a browser such as Chrome, Internet Explorer or Netscape..

Compared to running such services on company computers, such Cloud services are very low cost and, often, more reliable.

As more of what we do is done using laptops, tablets, smart phones and games machines that are connected to the internet, the logic for a company to keep much more expensive and much less secure computing systems in-house is becoming difficult to justify. In fact, one might ask, do we need such complicated and expensive interfaces with the internet any more? The answer is, of course, no.

  

Now for the leap from technicality to Public Relations.

You can create relationships online too?

After all, what is Facebook? It is a relationship acquisition and management capability in the Cloud.

Yes, although Cloud computing is huge, a large part of it is commonplace activity we know as social media.

It is the ’complete’ package. Words, pictures, moveis, emotions, group encounters and one to one tete-a-tete are at the fingertips of mobile phone and tablet user as well as games machines, laptops and PC devotee.

If the Cloud is capable of facilitating relationships, then it becomes a public relations medium. It requires attention and study and has to be followed closely and beyond the present fashion of social media to where the Cloud offers a wider range of facilities often faster, frequently cheaper and most certainly on computers located at a place that is a mystery to most users.

Relationship data can be access on many different types of machine from anywhere where there is internet connection.  The significance of which is that the medium does affect how information is received.

An intimate conversation is cool on a phone and un-nerving on an 80 in. screen.

PR in the Cloud is already well established and gaining ground.  There are many organisations working to help client’s have a more effective Facebook presence, or Twitter profile and the Google+ PR practices are a sizable business in their own right.

It has to be remembered that Cloud computing it is not the-same-but-on-line.

Simply building in levels of security and accesses, making sure that content is device agnostic and backing up the online content are all issues that need to be dealt with.

Once those concerns are dealt with, the practitioner is free to do so much more than in the days of rigid systems.

The constraints of word processing software, the ability to assemble multimedia briefing content including word documents, presentations, video, pictures and diagrams with voice and apps is a gift for any communicator.

Such capabilities, that can be deployed for a Chief Executive, Board, blogger, journalist or conference in a few minutes is a boon.

The ability to create such content, and for it to be so device agnostic that it can be seen on everything from a phone to a cinema screen, is a dream.

Being able to use, edit, share editing and processing with a wide or narrow community,  re-use information and present it in a variety of ways is a huge saving and the content can be generated by a wide range of people almost anywhere in the world.

Cloud computing driving a car may seem far fetched but will progressively come to be norm.

In PR there is also a need to consider hybrid Cloud computing. For example 3D printing.

3D printing is disrupting the design, prototyping and manufacturing processes in a wide range of industries, according to Gartner, Inc.

”Enterprises should start experimenting with 3D printing technology to improve traditional product design and prototyping, with the potential to create new product lines and markets. 3D printing will also become available to consumers via kiosks or print-shop-style services, creating new opportunities for retailers and other businesses.”

One of the first controversial products was a working gun. The gun was made (that is, manufactured) on a 3D printer that cost $8,000 (£5,140) from the online auction site eBay.

It was assembled from separate printed components made from ABS plastic - only the firing pin was made from metal. The design is downloaded and available to anyone and caused a furore when it was announced in the USA in 2013.

Being able to communicate with 3D artefacts is not as novel as one might image. After all what are public statues but a three dimensional exchange of ideas.  Being able to send instructions to make such icons over the internet is just an extesion of communication that is thousands of years old.

Some cloud computing which is familiar also has reputational issues attached. Examples are e-commerce and e-retailing and forms of payment. Values services such as online banking are other examples. The idea that a shop can be online is pretty old hat now. But pause for a moment, a shop – online? If a shop can be online, the 'shop assistant', that person so much part of the relationship between the customer and retailer,  is also 'online'. Sometimes the experience is not very much in the mold of the personal relationship in the high street but its there nonetheless. Now, using such ideas,  the creative PR person might put much more into the Cloud.

The capability to have demand driven movies and television pulling content from many sources at will and to meet your personal needs and interests is almost there. What, then will the BBC do in the future? Perhaps curation is an alternative to programme commissioning and editing.

But there is a rub. From time to time, people will exploit these capabilities to the disadvantage of the organisation; the internet and cloud computers, although very reliable, do have moments when they do not work, downtime contingency planning is important too.

Monitoring, evaluating and managing such interactions are needed now. Today, every organisation has relationships questioned in Twitter interactions. Cloud PR has already started and it goes further than social media relations.

The Semantic Web and PR

Semantic Web Explained

Perhaps there is no better way of describing the Semantic Web that to use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) explanations (http://www.w3.org/wiki/SemanticWebCerealBox)

Here's an explanation of the SemanticWeb by way of analogy:

Let's say you're going to the grocery store. At the grocery store, you get a box of cereal, right? So, you go to the self-checkout, and shout to the computer, "I am buying a box of cereal!"

Of course, in this day and age, the computer doesn't understand you. It just says, "Please slide the item across the reader..."

So you find the bar code on the cereal. You slide it past the laser reader. Suddenly- bingo. The computer knows what the item is, how much it costs, how many you've bought so far, etc., etc., etc.,. Computers don't yet know how to just "look" at the item, and know what it is.

So we make it easier for the computer: We tell the computer in a language easy for it to understand. Every item in the store has been given a number. That number has been correlated with other information in a database. The number has been encoded into a bar code, because the laser can read the bar code.

And the whole thing results in a computer that can reason over a box of cereal that you're holding in your hand.

Resulting in faster and more accurate check-out.

Back to the Web

So, what's that have to do with the web?

The SemanticWeb is like bar codes for the web.

Say you visit your friend's web page. You can read all this information on the web page, look at picture, etc., etc.,. But your computer doesn't understand a thing about it.

If your friend wrote, "Hey friends! Call me up! My number is 555-1212," your computer just sees it long stream of text. Sort of like: If you write a letter to your friend about cats, your computer still doesn't understand a thing about cats.

But now, let's put your friend's page on the Semantic Web. Following the cereal analogy- let's make a little bar code tag, and connect it to your friend's web page. Now, when you see that web page, you can look for the attached bar code tag. In SemanticWeb terms, the bar code tag is written in RDF. When your computer finds the RDF, it can read out all the information.

Suddenly your computer knows your friend's name, what his phone number is, who his friends are, etc., etc., etc.,. Maybe this all appears in your address book. Or maybe you discover friends with similar interests.

The SemanticWeb will completely revolutionize the way that we use computers.

At an ever faster pace, the semantic web is beginning to influence how the internet interacts with us.

A tablet automatically tells you the weather at your location. When you change location, guess what? The weather report is automatically updated to the new location. You train arrival times are also automatically updated. The internet ’knows’ what you are doing and can make decisions for you (for example to look up the right information for your current location).

In public relations it goes much further. It is why the Lisbon Theory is so important. The Lisbon Theory provides a ‘bar code tag’ that allows computers to understand what is being said and its relative significance. The element of the ‘bar code’ are:

"From the values perspective (v) of an entity (n) to what extent (e) is this object (o) significant (s)”.

If each of these elements are used to tag semantic concepts using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), very significant developments are available to the profession.

One of the joys of using LSA is that it identifies highly linked concepts which, PR academic Bruno Amaral showed, have close alignment to the values people hold. LSA is an approach to computerised content analysis. In this it helps us manage relationships in an age of BigData.

With this information, the computer can get to know what the content is about in public relations terms.

In addition, these technologies can learn from human beings how they assess content from these five elements and learn to emulate the human reaction to such content.

This means that, for example a human can teach a computer to evaluate a corpus of media citations (press clips if you are still of the old school).  This will mean that it comes much easier to follow those Tweets ’in bad taste’ as they happen or identify good and bad content in blog posts and Facebook exchanges.

Before this book is too old to count, it will also mean that a computer could respond online in near real time too!

At the time of writing, research in this area is ongoing but gives us a view of what the potential of the semantic web brings to public relations.

PR's Internet of Things

From http://popupcity.net

 The media takes on so many guises once the Cloud is deployed. It might be content and interaction using an app. It may be a hologram on a Railway concourse and it could even be a message delivered via a pair of glasses.

Predictable pathways of information are changing. The physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what’s called the Internet of Things, the sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects—from roadways to pacemakers—are linked through wired and wireless networks, more often than not using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.

If you look at almost anyone’s mobile today, it doubles up as a gateway to services from train times to weather forecasts. The screen full of apps is a manifestation of a physical thing that was once a mobile phone and is now a gateway to services and a provider of information to the Cloud. Your phone knows where you are and can pinpoint it on a map in a form of two way communication which you know little about and probably care less.

Today, there is no reason why many things cannot be connected to their wider environment. However, it is not automatic.

As Kishore Swaminathan  Accenture's chief scientist reminds us “Even among the RFID ( Radio-frequency identification ) based applications (which can be replaced by any number of identification technologies, such as magnetic strips and biometrics), there is very little in common besides the RFID tags themselves.

“In other words, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept, not a single technology you’d buy off the shelf.”

As a consequence, it tends to be a bit of a surprise when it enables something.

Often it seem commonplace. We already have TVs and set-top boxes that can be controlled remotely using a smartphone. Other household gadgets, such as baby monitors and hi-tech alarm systems, also benefit from similar connectivity to phones and other wireless electronic devices.  The BBC’s R&D team reveals, is has a proof-of-concept intended to demonstrate the UniversalControl system, a way of getting internet-connected devices to perform specific functions in time with TV shows on-screen.

The question one could ask is whether the PR practitioner will create content that is only enabled for specific physical media, days and times and only in the presence of a person or thing.

Newspapers are already there. ’InteractiveNewsprint’ is a research project led by the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) and funded by the Digital Economy (DE) Programme. A newspaper that has interactive content, recordings and other interactive content delivered off the page is interesting. A brochure, book, poster and many other applications can be envisaged.They are developing an entirely new platform for community news and information by connecting paper to the internet to create what is believed to be the world’s first internet-enabled newspaper. By touching various parts of the page, readers can activate content ranging from audio reports, web polls or advertising – all contained within the paper itself.

The use of digitally connected Google Glasses, was proposed in 2013 to help an organisation recruit a an employee for a remote location. The candidates had the opportunity to sit at home and link-up with a person thousands of miles away and go on a tour, experiencing the views and listening to their guides as they went on a remote walking tour of the location.

  

The Internet of things is now here for PR to work with its 20th century partner, the print media!

Meantime, there are already predictions that more than 9 million Google Glass-like devices expected to ship by 2016 (IMS Inc. research in 2013)

The anatomy of the internet

In watching the internet outage in Syria, I came across the CloudFlare video showing traffic routes. It is a dynamic view of the internet in a war zone.

You can see where the traffic is important and when it is being disrupted.

It should be noted that even with a government blackout, there still remain ways for the internet to be used.

There are a number of issues to be addressed in this area and in an age when Cloud computing and social media is becoming commercially significant, there will need to be some work done in this area. It is both a reputation and a relationship issue. Here is the Wired view.

You may also like to know that you can see outage of Google services from a transparency service they run here.

Mind bending Public Relations

You are what you search.

Perhaps this is the simplest way of  describing recent findings into the the short and long term effects of the internet on humans.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"  was the headline to an article by Nicholas G. Carr, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and which sparked off a  debate championed by sections of the press expressing views that the internet was dumbing mankind down to the point of imbecilic infancy.

But now we have facts. Peter S. Eriksson^, Ekaterina Perfilieva, Thomas Björk-Eriksson, Ann-Marie Alborn, Claes Nordborg, Daniel A. Peterson and Fred H. Gage demonstrated that cell genesis occurs in human brains and that the human brain retains the potential for self-renewal throughout life. That the brain can and does change is not news said neuroscientist  Michael Merzenich in a recent TED talk.  “Everything you do changes your brain,” says Daphne Bavelier, associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “When reading was invented, it also made huge changes to the kind of thinking we do and carried changes to the visual system.” Gary Small and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles used fMRI to study observed brain activation of subjects interacting with a simulated search engine.  Small and his colleagues asked Google rookies to go home and train by searching the internet for an hour a day for five days. When the test subjects came back and were rescanned, the researchers found that the net-naive had already increased activation in the frontal areas where they had previously lagged behind the net-savvy.

Use of the internet, it seems, changes our brains.

Have we evidence in our own experience? We have all done it... can't remember a fact - Google it! The big 'know-it-all' in the pub is no longer the bore in the corner, its the person who can type faster on their mobile. 

It can be extrapolated that the way we use the internet has a cultural effect on us.

It is now worth considering whether some people have a Facebook culture or a Google Plus culture. Is there a World of Warcraft culture? What is the difference in cultures (opinions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours) between nations able to use Google Search and not being able to use it. Are such cultures hard wired into how we think and behave or do they have a different, brain changed, view of the world.

The evidence is beginning to mount that is already the case.

This has far reaching implications for public relations. In the sphere of consumer PR there may be a case for considering different platforms, channels and approaches as between different digital cultures. In Public Affairs it may mean that divergence in ideologies is so extreme as to presage international rifts and even, in extremis, culturally divisive understanding as dangerous as Nazism, Soviet Communism or worse.

That there are effects and that they are different as between different users of differing technologies is not in question. The extent to which this is an issue for day to day PR and our understanding of relationships is a matter for future research.

The CIPR Presidential Election Debate

Is this the CIPR's view of the internet? 

Perhaps the nature of the change wrought by the internet requires deeper consideration by the CIPR.

There are two points, I would make following the debate on LinkedIn.

I am uncomfortable with the expression 'social media' because it hides the wider issue of Cloud computing. Cloud computing, I was reliably informed by a marketing academic, is not much more than moving what you have in the corporate network to AWS. He was abashed when I suggested that Cloud computing has allowed a new form of relationship to evolve and suggested Facebook as an example. 'Social Media' in many respects is a subset of Cloud computing.

But it is more. As more apps deliver more via a mobile phone, tablet, Google glasses, motor car etc. the nature of relationships change. It was only when I found it helpful that my tablet automatically showed the weather forecast in Cheltenham (a place to teach) as opposed to Swindon (home and office), that I fully realised the power of mobile. The information changed my behaviour (and relationship with students) as the snow forecast a couple of months ago became serious and class was dismissed early. But, it took an

Cloud computing - Wikipedia

example of neuroplasticity to prompt me to, 'quite naturally' check my tablet. The Cloud is doing much more than just host Social Media, there are direct subliminal and actual behavioural issues. These evolving developments are more significant to PR practice because they demand a practitioner who can contribute the sense of the evolving nature of relationships as they affect organisations. In my example the tablet changed the way the university worked as a result of my unilateral action. We have to  think such changes through.

The other area of change is the one remarked on by Ardi Kolah today. He made the point "It’s a big mistake to make assumptions that people like ‘John’ will think, act and behave in a certain way. That’s crap marketing, isn’t it? So why do we have a blank spot when it comes to the over-55s??"

This is part of a change we see and an effect of the open and 'democratic' web envisioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee.

Once, it was common to think in terms of a vertically structured society (god at the top, peasant at the bottom - to borrow from the Greatful Dead) or organisationally defined segments. The socio-economic, demographic, consumer segmented person was always a compromise. It served its purpose for marketers and 'opinion formers' for a very long time. Today such techniques are less valuable.

The internet (mostly the Web) now allows anyone to opt into many forms of relationships. We now have segments that can only be describes as being of the value perspectives of a person as from time to time they are relevant. This, Lisbon Theory, idea of segmentation is very different and it is of the internet. It is only practical when we have a capability to identify people's values and we have studies to help us use the Semantic Web to do these things.

The Grateful Dead

Here is how it works: from the perspective of the values of Stephen Waddington/Dr Jon White, to what extent is a debate like this one valuable/important/relevant? What we see is a way of assessing this debate from the perspective of a Public of one (yes, the Grunigian excellence theory fits in this instance).

Once again, this calls for a practitioner with the knowledge and skills to be able to identify values systems that are affective for organisations to guide policy and activity.

This is a problem for me when very experienced and highly qualified members of the profession who I respect see only social media and only communication (indeed requiring craft skill, though necessary, at best).

This means that there is more to this debate. It goes to the heart of what the CIPR has to do now. We do need a strategy and we do need to know when we achieve our strategic aims. This means that the CIPR has to progress from courses in Facebook Likes to encouraging much deeper research to aid practice beyond the craft because the internet is changing our social, economic, political and cultural norms quite quickly. Indeed, many would say that governmental censorship round the world will create different forms of neuroplasticity with its implications for culture trade and even peace.

Neuroplasticity

What the CIPR has to do will be in some depth and it will be uncomfortable; will be much more than Communication', 'Reputation'  '+Management' and much more about how PR represents the effects of the internet on social, economic, political and cultural norms in the development and evolution of organisational relationships.

The Public Relations Future (tomorrow) is Very Very Different

In an average month,  BAE Systems will be included in 600 web pages, it is the subject of many references. In Linkedin there are more than ten new references every day. In addition, it will be the subject of comment described in any number of other ways or in its significant share of organisations like Airbus and Armor Holdings.

In any day 20 Tweets is a very quiet Friday in April.. But these numbers can quadruple (Twitter much more) over the mention of a board director and when contracts or financial results are made the volumes are huge.

For a producer of consumer products or services whose customer leave a trail of digital crumbs even as they find or pass a third party retailer the reality is even more daunting.

Far too much to be read by human eyes in real time.
 
In managing the present many organisations need to work hard. Managing the present in an historical context which is accumulating online content at an accelerating pace is significantly harder.

The reality is that most people do not know there is so much data around but the PR practitioner does need to know. All this stuff provides a digital feast for computers all round the world. More and more it is these computers that are setting the reputational and relationship agendas.

As I mentioned yesterday it is now possible to use Google analytics for analysis of offline stuff as well. The information environment is setting the agenda for so much that affects people and the institutions that affect them.

This is about the teen swooning on line but also the influences affecting the North Korean leadership as it turns the US military and economy to a new relationship with the world. It is also big stuff.

This then is the reality of the Public Relations environment emerging today.

Over the next few days I aim to work on some answers .and any contribution will be very welcome.


Are we aware?
Are we ready?

A robust internet - your future, is it safe?

How robust is the internet?
Over the last decade, a number of commentators have suggested that the internet is not particularly robust and could be subject to failure.
There are a number of reasons to believe that this would be a real problem.
The "internet economy" was worth £121bn in 2010, more than £2,000 per person, or 8.3% of the economy according to the Boston Consulting Group. That made it bigger than the healthcare, construction or education sectors.
The Google report, The Connected Kingdom showed that the internet's contribution to GDP is set to grow by about 10% annually, reaching 10% of GDP by 2015. The UK, according to the report, is the world's leading nation for e-commerce. For every £1 spent online to import goods, £2.80 is exported.
This calculation does not include the facility that the internet offers every citizen from texts, email, radio and TV. No internet would be an economic disaster.
David Eagleman author of  "Why the Net Matters", suggests four way the internet could be interrupted in an article for CNN:

• Solar activity
• Cyber warfare
• Political interference
• Physical attacks on infrastructure such as data cable.

Todate, although there have been attacks from each of these sources, the response by governments and the industries have been swift and effective.

This huge resource powers the nature and scope of knowledge, the epistemic core. The internet extends into every aspect of modern civilisation.

Certainly it is in the interests of all sectors of the economy to sustain and protect the internet.
For all industries and no less

 Public Relations, there is a critical dependence on the internet.

Nearly all PR is now mediated by the internet. But what would happen if someone switched it off?

Over the last decade, a number of commentators have suggested that the internet is not particularly robust and could be subject to failure.

There are a number of reasons to believe that this would be a real problem.

The "internet economy" was worth £121bn in 2010, more than £2,000 per person, or 8.3% of the economy according to the Boston Consulting Group. That made it bigger than the healthcare, construction or education sectors.

The Google report, The Connected Kingdom showed that the internet's contribution to GDP is set to grow by about 10% annually, reaching 10% of GDP by 2015. The UK, according to the report, is the world's leading nation for e-commerce. 

This calculation does not include the facility that the internet offers every citizen from texts, email, radio and to TV. 

David Eagleman author of  "Why the Net Matters", suggests four way the internet could be interrupted in an article for CNN:

• Solar activity (Not unusual. Sometimes not benign)

• Cyber warfare (It is ongoing. Some State sponsored and some just criminal)

• Political interference (Remember Egypt tried it during its revolution)

• Physical attacks on infrastructure such as data cable.

For all industries and no less Public Relations, there is a critical dependence on the internet and so we do need to know how it is being defended.

Centralised services are vulnerable ‘pinch points’.

Search and retrieval of information over the Internet and the Web are centralized for efficiency and economy of scale. Typically such centralised services like Google Search and Bing are subject to ever tighter control and taxation by vested interests (the French Government extracted a Euro 60 million fund from Google to help French media organisations “improve their internet operations” this year). Thus administrators of those centralized facilities, as well as government agencies can cause information accessed over the Internet and the Web to be selectively filtered or censored completely.

An alternative distributed search and retrieval system, without centralized mechanisms and centralized control (and taxation), can reduce people’s concerns about filtering and censoring of information on the Internet. They exist and include the iTrust system which is a decentralized and distributed system for publication, search and retrieval (http://itrust.ece.ucsb.edu).

Other  internet and associated systems are becoming more robust and come from developments such as the "systemic" computer.

This self-repairing machine now operating at University College London (UCL) could keep mission-critical systems working. For instance, it could allow drones to reprogram themselves to cope with combat damage, or help create more realistic models of the human brain.

Jeff Patmore, head of Strategic University Research at BT offers us another reason to believe in the strength in depth of the internet.

He notes that if only one per cent of the people on our planet created a blog entry or a video on YouTube just once a year, their contributions would amount to at least 60 million new artefacts each year.  This gives people a commitment towards the efficiency and survival of the internet.

With the enormous and growing repository of content on the internet, an almost ‘Darwinian’ effect takes place. Those items that become popular through vast numbers of 'hits' and viral communication survive, often becoming part of popular culture, and those items that do not come to the attention of the population, or have few 'hits', eventually vanish. 

We all contribute to this ‘voting mechanism’ every time we access content and click on a hyperlink.

However, the Berkman Centre at Harvard is developing technologies to ensure information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.

Such decentralised systems tend to be very robust and are more difficult to hack.

Another reason to believe that the internet and associated systems are becoming more robust comes from developments such as the "systemic" computer. This self-repairing machine now operating at University College London (UCL) could keep mission-critical systems working. For instance, it could allow drones to reprogram themselves to cope with combat damage, or help create more realistic models of the human brain.

The internet is here to stay and there is a lot of work going on to ensure that it will continue to serve us.

Sources:

 http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/10/tech/web/internet-down-eagleman

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Ftechnology-21302168&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6YkWG1sRrar2o6NAgn_KW1goJzQ

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729045.400-the-computer-that-never-crashes.html
http://www.btplc.com/Innovation/Innovation/Darwinism/index.htm

Advertising industry is fading away - survey

Among people who have an interest in Adversing and PR, Google data is showing the stark reality. Against all searches for social media, adversing and PR, interest in social media is up 543% over the last five years. The once dominant newspaper and advertising sectors are in serious and progressive decline but the data does not suggest that the malaise can all be put at the door of social media. The decline in interest is much more marked than the rise of Social Media interest. These data show that the new kid on the block has had a very big influence. Not that we didn't know this before but confirmation from Google Trends show just how much the communication industries have to change. PR has done well not to follow the Advertising industry by so much and the results in different sectors of the economy vary but there are lessons here for us all.

The most internet based economy. The most internet based PR sector?

Last month a British Government Cabinet Papers declared 'The UK has been proclaimed as the ‘most internet-based major economy’. 

Comet, HMV, Jessops, Blockbusters et al have been influenced by it for sure (a more balanced view is given by Cliff D'Arcy)  and by 2016, predicts the Boston Consulting Group, 23% of UK retail sales will be made online, bringing in total revenues of some £144.6bn. So, not one-in-ten shops on the high street closed but one-in-four!

Is the PR industry ready to support this evolution?

I teach a student who, in her last year at university, has started a PR business specialising in the use of Facebook by the medical profession. She is doing very well already.

Their are a number of interesting aspects to this approach.

• It is media and sector specific.
• It is entrepreneurial.
• It will be a great resource for the medical industry and the PR and marketing agencies that support the medical professions and its supply chain.

In addition  she is able to use her dissertation to create a knowledge base about global best practice in the use of Facebook PR and marketing  and, thereby gaining considerable academic support in her quest for excellence.

In the first week of the New Year, I was invited to assist a consultancy to enhance its digital offering  It has a strong presence in the tourism sector and was a bit taken aback when I suggested that a most powerful media it could use was Google Maps. It had not considered Google Maps as a medium! It did not have such specialist expertise and thought it would have to buy it in.

I do not know of a boutique agency that specialises in Google Maps PR (I know how because I can mash-up Facebook, Twitter and this http://www.google.com/mapmaker in a PR campaign - not many people know this).

Gartner predicts that that the number of apps downloaded is set to rocket from 45 billion in 2012 to a staggering 305 billion downloads in 2016. I wonder how many PR App makers there are?

This got me thinking.

There is a massive shortage of digital skills available to the PR industry.

Efforts by the PR sector over a decade and a half have still not created the skills base needed to support those industries that do not want to follow the high street crash of January 2013.

It is time for the PR industry to be pro-active and creative in addressing the problem and to build an education, training and skills base that will put it on a stronger footing.

The big issue we face is that there is a huge range of platforms and channels. From tablets to Google Maps the mix and match of media is very wide.

No in-house team nor agency (even the very biggest) has the breadth of expertise needed to meet the diverse skills needs of our client base. Few can even offer comprehensive client consultancy.

However, there is a very strong case for encouraging the development of a boutique sector to provide support for the industry as and when it needs capability and capacity.

It is in the interests of all in-house and agency businesses to support such developments and to buy them in as and when required.

Certainly, in the next three years the internet will change businesses that provide PR incomes and it is time to invest in creating the support infrastructure that will be needed in that time frame.

There is another requirement that the PR industry has face.

The PR sector supported education structures are weak when it comes to training and education.

Many of the CIPR endorsed degree courses do not teach some of the basic elements of online public relations (in many cases these universities do not even have the appropriate books in sufficient quantities for first degree courses in their libraries!).

There is a need to create the incentive for such institutions to get up to date and build the education and training needed by the PR sector.

For an organisation like the CIPR, help is at hand. At long last the government has created funds to support initiatives designed to build capabilities in the online sphere. If the institute wanted to take on such an initiative, it would find that it would be funded and it could signpost funding for its members, including funding for further academic education  (there is even a case for having a specialist advisor for members).

What might an institution such as the CIPR do?
What might the Universities with PR degree courses do?

For the sake of us, the practitioners, there is a case for the CIPR and PRCA to bury the hatchet and tackle the big issues again.

• Support research in Universities (I know, a complete novelty for most of the universities that CIPR and PRCA support but things can change). Penalise those that do no research for the PR industry but pretend to teach it.
• Support undergraduates and graduates starting niche businesses at the edge of what we know.
• Don't be frightened of niche
• Upgrade communication among practitioners about what the internet is doing to the economy, communications, relationship management and society (the rate of change is getting faster according to the experts).
• Stop being po-faced about recommending expertise - shout it out loud!
• Do not do nothing 
• Do not believe what you are already doing is enough - exponential rate of change is does not stand still.

The segmentation rules for Public Relations

Has the internet made public relations too complicated?

We have lived through a massive evolution in the way that people and things get along.

In the 20th century the need to be able to classify people became a necessity. To deliver products and services and social benefits, there was a need to be able to address people’s interest. This extended to target consumers, voters and other constituents and their interests. Advances in social segmentations and opinion polling made great progress.

The concept was so ingrained that instruments such as newspapers and magazines targeted social groups with ever narrower interests. At one time, there were over 10,000 different publications serving the select interests of their readers. A large part of the advertising and PR industries were predicated on this range of media.

This approach to relationships between organisations and the public was so pervasive that they entered into the language of business.

Demographic segmentation is a common form of segmentation and is a process of dividing a population or market into groups based on variables such as age, gender, family size, income, occupation, education, religion, race and nationality. There are many variants of segmentation and such variables are amongst the most popular for segmenting customer groups.

In 1984  R. Edward Freeman published his book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. This gave rise to a form of segmentation based on people who had a ‘stake’ in organisations such as employees, suppliers, customers and the local of the employees.In the same year Professor James Grunig and Tod Hunt published Managing Public Relations which identified problem recognition is which individuals recognise a problem and respond and do something about it as a group they called publics.

This process of segmentation  became ever more granular and reached out into many more forms of human endeavour.

Today there is a segment that can be called Twiterers and Facebook Likers. There are those people who are defined by the pictures they share on www.pinterest.com.

In addition there are now segments that can be defined because the use location based apps on their mobile devices. Examples like http://centrl.com/, http://dailyplaces.com, http://electricpocket.com/findme/ and many more.

So much for human segmentation, there is also technology based segmentation. Of particular interest is location based digital segmentation.

These, so called Location-based services are used to include specific controls for location and time data as control features in computer programs. As such (LBS) is an information and has a number of uses providing  service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and which uses information on the geographical position of the mobile device.

Some LBS services use a single base station, with a "radius" of inaccuracy, to determine a phone's location. This technique was the basis of the E-911 mandate and is still used to locate cellphones as a safety measure. Newer phones and PDAs typically have an integrated A-GPS chip.

Another example is Near LBS (NLBS), in which local-range technologies such as Bluetooth, WLAN, infrared and/or RFID/Near Field Communication technologies are used to match devices to nearby services. This application allows a person to access information based on their surroundings; especially suitable for using inside closed premises, restricted/ regional areas.

Another alternative is an operator- and GPS-independent location service based on access into the deep level telecoms network (SS7). This solution enables accurate and quick determination of geographical coordinates of mobile phone numbers by providing operator-independent location data and works also for handsets that are not GPS-enabled.

Users can proactively implement LBS using Google Latitude or Find My Friends (using Apple’s iOS).

There is a common practice of using technologies which provide location information, such as GPS, for business purposes such as location-based services. An example of l-commerce would 0be to allow cellphone users to find the nearest restaurant to their current location.

Such technologies can be combined using services such as the 2012 roll out of Cisco’s on location-based analytics technology intended to help retailers understand consumer behavior and deliver more compelling experiences, including personalized advertising. Designed to help businesses and institutions capitalise on existing infrastructure by transforming the Wi-Fi networks communication channels

For example a website such as Amazon.com is able to intelligently engage customers because it can access information from those customers' respective purchase and browsing histories -- data to which physical stores have, at best, incomplete access.

In addition to the mobile infrastructure there are facilities based in Internet Protocol addresses,

There are several online services that will display an IP address and the associated city, state, or country with that IP address or any other IP address entered into the site. Often this information is associated with where the Internet Service Provide  is located and not the exact location of the person of that IP address.
http://www.ip-adress.com/
http://www.liveipmap.com/
http://geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

Today, there are many ways of segmenting a populations that are far more personal and individual than historic segmentation ideas.

We have moved from using crude measures of social class, through segmentation by association to being able to identify a very large part of the population as anonymised individuals  because of the traces they leave behind as they use the internet.

As these individuals do things, they leave traces of activity.

This trail, like the white stones and bread crumbs left behind by the Brothers Grim character Hansel  are signs that can be recognised by those of us who need to know about the interests of society and to find our way in deep dark wood of the internet.

Online, this Hansel like trail of white stones is a huge mass of personally created metadata. It is information about where they are, who they know, who they are in touch with, what messages are they creating and what channels and platforms they use.

This Hansel effect provides signs about who internet users are and what they are doing or have been doing, where they are doing it and much more. This is the new semiotic web.

One of the most used parts of the semiotic web is semantics. It deals with the words people use in what they write and the the words they use in search engines.   Over the last five years the semantic web has become very important but now we move on to get more and different signs of activity best described as the semiotic web.

In the new world of public relations we now have segments of one. Individuals leaving an anonymised semiotic trail of activity and interests. Semiotic Public Relations has arrived!

Such is the quality of the semiotic public relations practitioners are now able to plan and execute relationship initiatives from the perspective of users.

To demonstrate the nature of the semiotic web, we can use common and easily available online tools to prove the theory.

Using facilities such as the Google Adword Keyword Tool, the practitioner can identify the words that people most associate with ideas, brands and organisations. These words semantically describe ideas, brands and organisations from the perspective of their written associations.

As a form of segmentation this is a powerful capability.

In this Google Adwords example, we have used the search expression ‘handbags’.

Feeding such words back into search engines (without the primary keyword) is interesting.

We used:

uk black leather cheap for sale red large ladies womens designer

Feeding these words back into Google, the result (which excluded the word handbag) yielded, as if by magic this result:



The result, even though we do not use the term ‘handbag’ in the search term, yields six out of six pages mentioning ‘handbags’.

This then is a semantic result. But now we can experiment with a semiotic experiment. In this case the semiotic ‘sign’ we will use if Facebook.

By limiting the search to the social media site we find people with an interest in Handbags in Facebook:

Once again even without the word ‘handbag’, as if by magic the returns show people with interest in handbags.

Of course, it is possible to build up a very precise list of people with a specific and public interest in the subject across a wide range of digital media using these semantic words.

Add to such analysis a selection limited to more semantic markers such as a geographic area (UK), a media platform such as mobile and a particular social medium and with the semiotic marker of the previous year and we discover even more closely defined information about people with an interest in ‘handbags’.

From semantic (just the key semiotic words) to semiotic (words, time frame, type of platform, location), the PR practitioner is now able to identify the people who both have an interest and who also have an online influence.

It is now possible to build a Public Relations programme from the perspective of the relevant constituency and explore the potential for a dialogue based on common interests.

Semiotic Public Relations is much more precise than PR based broader social and economic segments.

The semiotic values we choose to use can also be interpreted in another way.

The words, time frame, type of platform, location (and many other semiotic values) represent values that are important to the constituency. We now have the ability to tap into the values of our constituents.

Semiotic Public Relations takes the discipline into new realms of activity based on shared values and relationships based on shared values.