The tipping point for Public Relations

March 2006 was the tipping point for Online PR. PR' role is not as comfortable as some may believe.

According to The Editor's Weblog The latest figures from the UK Audit Bureau of Circulation show that every British regional paper, both morning and evening, lost paying readers in the second half of 2005.

Reports that the The Newspaper Society, sees some light in the dark numbers and claims that "websites, niche magazines and broadcast platforms, ‘Lite’ editions for commuters, podcasts, mobile phones and e-editions are all allowing people to access news and entertainment on the move, and are proving increasingly popular for regional press consumers.

We saw this month that people in the UK spend more time on-line than watching television.

This tells us that the tipping point is here and now.

The content manager at Northcliffe Electronic Publishing, Robert Hardie, said, "Readers who were previously disenfranchised for geographical or logistical reasons from buying their local paper can now access it online, and both the age and social demographics are different for the online audience than they are for the traditional newspaper-buying one.”

Communications director of the Society, Lynne Anderson feels that "Measuring circulation alone clearly no longer gives an accurate picture of a regional centre’s reach . The challenge is to develop a national method of multi-media audience measurement which provides more meaningful figures for advertisers and agencies." This suggests that PR media planners and the PR Evaluationsist have a problem. Apparently evaluation reach numbers are now suspect! Circulation is not king. The engaged readers is more powerful and more committed. An engaged reader not going to believe a BuzzAgent? The person who is intruding and getting in the way of what 'I' want to find out'. In the networked community, this is a receipt for market oblivion.

The Big Gorilla announcement that News International is working hard at developing its on-line presence is really important. It says that on-line is now top priority for PR. According to The Economist, Murdock's News Corporation spent more than a billion dollars buying barely profitable internet companies. He did not do this for nothing.

“The debate is one of the side-effects of the digital revolution in which the dinosaurs must adapt or die. As one of the biggest beasts, ITV has already swallowed up a new competitor, the Friends Reunited website,” commented Jennifer Cunningham in the Herald noted this week.

The BBC which is no slouch when it comes to bridging the gap between traditional and on-line media, has signed up Dan Gillmore to explain the development of citizen media.

Georgina Harvey, managing director of Trinity Mirror's regional titles, said: "Trinity Mirror is rapidly becoming a multi-platform publisher.

This on-line presence must now open up new PR jobs to assist in influencing the changing face of PR with all these new communications channels opening up so fast. Press relations is no longer enough.

The future of Public Relations is no longer in print. In fact, it is no longer about narrow definitions of stakeholders or publics, such approaches need robust methodologies to succeed and PR has to work at a more profound level.

This new world is much more to do with social frames and understanding the nature of organisations. It needs these tools to help us use the language, content in context and appropriate communication channels. The 'long conversation (durring which the organisation may sell something) is now critical to relationship creation, building and management. The power curve militates against artificial WOM. People just don't believe plugs, spin, advertising and all the rest of the mantra you hear from the marketing and advertising industry based on OTS.

This brave new cultural world is a different form of PR. It includes the traditional techniques but to make them work needs not just and overlay of digital icing. PR practice now needs digital PR in the DNA of practice.

Hurry up! Hurry up! We don't have all minute.

Picture: Classic pics and art

Global PR Blog Week 2.0 » Blog Archive » Groupbytes: Digital/Social Rules for the post-Google Economy

Global PR Blog Week 2.0 » Blog Archive » Groupbytes: Digital/Social Rules for the post-Google Economy: "To understand the power and force of new media, it's important to appreciate what came before it. From our perspective, the most important driver and antecedent for new media is search, for this one technology alone has recruited many millions of people to go online for their many information needs. Granted, other technologies have helped to create the very large online population that exists today. But search is the dominant driver for the huge wave of recruitment we're calling 'the great migration.'

The second wave is where most of us - the PR bloggers reviewing this short paper - live. We're calling this 'the socialization of the Web.' In part, this socialization is a reaction, for one of the defining attributes of the first wave is that many people who have migrated to the Web for their many information needs have abandoned - willfully or inadvertently - offline communities. This has created both a crisis and opportunity for business and technology leaders. The groupbytes below are a distillation of the social rules that technology leaders have been importing or that have naturally arisen in a very large online experiment that's underway. Which leads to the controlling idea of this paper, and our wiki: technology and business leaders are now importing offline social rules into online environments. The winners will be those who best understand those rules, because the rules will influence all markets - online and offline. But how can we all get smarter?

Finally, we expect the lessons from the second wave to dramatically influence the third: the offline world's eventual adoption of lessons from the online world. This is already happening (the three waves are not exactly sequential), and it is one reason that the rules should matter to everyone, whether they are sold on the idea that they should have a new-me"

NEW PR JOBS FOR THE POST-BLOGGING ECONOMY

The range of Public Relations consultants are now looking to areas of practice that lie beyond traditional press relations is growing. Much of this new thinking is fresh and exiting. Giovanni Rodriguez of Eastwikkers has offered some refreshing insights.

This kind of thinking needs wide exposure because it is about change in the PR industry.

I like this approach because it is about relationship managment and chimes with my relationship managment model.

I have summarised (OK, if you are in the USA 'summarized' - and I just love my summary tool) their blog post here:

NEW PR JOBS FOR THE POST-BLOGGING ECONOMY: "To make things simple, here are five new roles for PR people that have already emerged in our profession. For each role, we name an historical role model (or 'archetype,' for the Jungians out there), and contemporary role models (PR people who are already doing great stuff in the industry today).

The Researcher -- This one is way obvious. In this age of conversational PR, which is largely happening in the digital world, research and measurement people have a privileged place. They've always understood the value of listening, as well as the value of numbers. But unlike the pollsters and researchers of old, the new leaders will not use what they find to respin the message, but rather to enable the teams they support to enter the conversation truthfully. Historical role model: George Gallup. New-media role models: Katie Paine and Tony Obregon.

The Anthropologist -- corporate communications will learn a lot from the world of design that companies like IDEO has helped to evolve; like product and experience designers, communications people will go into the field and observe how people are actually using the tools. We'll see a lot more of this as companies accelerate the adoption of DIY community tools such as wikis. It's the social rule, not the tool, that many new communications professionals bring to the table. Historical role models: Margaret Mead. New media: Elisabeth Albrycht and Dianna Miller, who are studying wikis for SNCR.

The Gardener -- to build and maintain communities, you need more than just anthropologists. You also need people who are talented in "caring and feeding" the community, and sustaining online environments that sometimes get fractious, unstructured, unproductive. This is a special talent, in rare supply, and the most enlightened members of this lot will always have work. Historical role model: Voltaire ("we must cultivate our garden"). New media: Constantin Basturea, Dan Forbush.

The Architect -- Sometime the tools are just as important as the rules ... if you are smart enough to really know how to use them. A few folks in the PR world are way ahead of others on the technical side and are helping their clients to make sense of the technology tool kit so that they can actually do stuff, and build things (what a concept). Note: building is as much of an art as it is a science. The best folks in this group are creatives. Historical role model: Frank Lloyd Wright. New media: Phil Gomes, Mike Manuel, Jeremy Pepper.

The Impresario -- some PR people will lead by the sheer force of their personality, their work output, or the artistry/fun of their writing (after all, blogging is a writer's medium). For these folks, it's an opportunity to define and shape a new industry. We expect a number of people to emerge here, each with a different strength or style. Historical role models: Ivy Ledbetter Lee and Edward Bernays. New media: Richard Edelman, Steve Rubel, Scott Baradell, Neville Hobson.

Picture: Chimes

Brave Cultral World

We have rapidly moved from the information economy to the networked economy and, in my view are approaching the 'cultural economy'. It chimes with the view that 'capitalism is a finished chapter in world history' according to Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company, and former head of Shell's Group Planning Unit.

At the same time we see Antony Mayfield at Harvard Communications giving us a view of the “The authentic voice of the global media market, Rupert Murdoch hails the coming revolution that the Internet will bring.” Murdoch has shifted the goal and talks about 'all... on a journey'. He has moved away from the corporate to the cultural in one leap. And, according to The Economist, his News Corporation spent more than a billion dollars buying barely profitable internet companies.

He said: "It is a creative, destructive technology that is still in its infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything in its path. We are all on a journey, not just the privileged few, and technology will take us to a destination that is defined by the limits of our creativity, our confidence and our courage."

It chimes with the view that 'capitalism is finished chapter in world history' offered by Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company, and former head of Shell's Group Planning unit.

Gitte Larsen review of the Geus thesis summarised here:

“When the capital market became a buyer’s market in the late 1990s, there came an economic price, a world price of capital, and why should we keep on running companies to maximize shareholder value? Today, you should run a company to maximize the value that is returned to the people that are a part of the company. The reason that doesn’t happen yet is that you have an internal reality in the company that says results are entirely the result of human talent, while at the same time you have an external reality that says you must continue to see capital as the dominant production factor.

“A hundred years ago, a company was based mainly on capital; the human element was a minor element. The most important was capital assets. That’s absolutely untrue today, because the human talent you have in the company defines your success, with other assets playing a lesser role. Just look at how many assets Microsoft has, for example. Its capital assets are minimal compared with its market value. The difference between market value and the balance sheet is the value of the human ‘community’ in the company. That’s completely ignored in the language of today. And that’s the tension or great challenge for companies today. We have to change the way we talk about companies. Business is about people working together to produce economic material wealth and quality design. Denmark has beautiful examples of how good ideas and good design quality are essential – for example, Lego and B&O. Their success is based on the quality of the people that work there, not the quality of their machines.

“The Living Company doesn’t have employees or abilities. The company has members, and these members have a set of shared values. And this is certainly the “mysterious thing” about Toyota. Toyota has a strong ‘corporate culture’; if you are a member of Toyota, you share the values of that culture. That’s just one aspect of the Living Company, but it’s a very central and important one,” says de Geus. “There are examples of companies that have survived a long time – Shell, for example, is more than 100 years old – and these successful old companies have a strong culture. They have a set of values that the people in them share. That’s the biggest difference between a living company and how we usually define a company; that is, according to legal and economic definitions. The living company is a community of people from the start.”

Here is an mp3 of the Arie de Geus interview at the Busieness Innovation conference in Copenhagen this week.

Picture: City of Bradford

Cracks in the Foundation of Stakeholder Theory by: Andrew R. Weiss Introduction

Some time ago I looked at the Stakeholder Model in the light of the Relationship Value Model. My conclusion is that Freedman's idea is OK as far as it goes but is not a complete theory. Great for Guru's bad for Companies....

Anrew Weiss has also found problems and here is what he is saying.

Cracks in the Foundation of Stakeholder Theory by: Andrew R. Weiss Introduction: Stakeholder Theory has become an established framework within which to identify and examine the impact of organization action. It has been used to inform discussion of corporate governance, business ethics, strategic management and organizational effectiveness.

Donaldson and Preston note that 'a dozen books and more than 100 articles with primary emphasis on the stakeholder concept have appeared and that 'the stakeholder model has become a standard element of 'Introduction to Management' lectures and writings' (1995:65-66).

In fact, one might argue that Stakeholder Theory is approaching paradigm status. It consists of a general system of ideas and assumptions, standard examples and established assertions.

Given its broad impact, the general foundation and assumptions on which the broad outlines of Stakeholder Theory rest warrant examination.

Stakeholder Theory posits a model of the enterprise in which 'all persons or groups with legitimate interests participating in an enterprise do so to obtain benefits, and there is no prima facie priority of one set of interests and benefits over another' (Donaldson and Preston, 1995:68).

The model rejects the idea that the enterprise exists to serve the interest of its owners, be that maximizing their wealth or some other reason for being in business. Rather, the model is based on the idea that the enterprise exists to serve the many stakeholders who have an interest in it or who in some way may be harmed"

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility as Stakeholder Management:

"The term corporate social responsibility (CSR) may cause unnecessary ambiguity for companies. In particular, global scale companies including SAMSUNG electronics and LG electronics keep spending various resources for the related activities without coherent notion on the concept of CSR.

But what does corporate social responsibility mean to companies?

Without clear understanding about the meaning of CSR, how can companies respond or take actions on it? In this study, CSR indicates corporate stakeholder responsibility.

Having relevant key stakeholders in corporate business activities, companies may know how to respond or deal with them in a strategic way without losing competitiveness.

This study attempts to answer how and why companies respond differently to their stakeholders.

The study found that identified key stakeholders by decision makers resulted in different strategic choices or responses.

It may imply that unidentified stakeholders have no influence or impact on corporate business activities.

PR Evaluation Blog

Richard Gaunt now has a PR Evaluation Blog and notes that the USA’s Institute for Public Relations, which offers all of its research and publications free on the web, has published a new edition of the Dictionary of Public Relations Measurement and Research (pdf - 198kb), edited by Dr. Don W. Stacks of the University of Miami.

Media is booted and on-line time exceeds TV

Newspaper audiences may be growing online, but Web sites don't deliver the kind of revenue that can support large staffs of editors, reporters and photographers, reports TMCNet today.

Using figures drawn from a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism describing what it calls a "seismic transformation" in the media landscape, it argues that declining print circulation -- down another 3 percent last year in the USA -- could have major consequences. The industry has lost more than 3,500 newsroom professionals since 2000, a drop of 7 percent. The Washington Post said last week it would seek to cut 80 newsroom jobs through voluntary redundancies, the second such offer in just over two years.

The papers have plenty of company. Circulation declined last year at the big three news magazines. Network evening news ratings dropped 6 percent and morning show ratings 4 percent. The number of network correspondents is one-third lower than it was in the mid-1980s.

Early-evening news ratings for local TV were down 13 percent, the project says. And 60 percent of the local TV newscasts studied by the group -- once traffic, weather and sports are excluded -- consisted of crime and accident stories. What's more, the proportion of stories presented by reporters dropped from 62 percent to 43 percent between 1998 and 2002, leaving these programs increasingly driven by anchors.

The growth has been among outlets such as Google News and Yahoo, which aggregate content from other sources; blogs, on which, apparently, only 5 percent of posts involved original research; and satellite radio, which serves up news, talk, entertainment and music but little or no original reporting.

Another report in the UK this week has noted that people are now spending more time online than watching TV.

In addition, not to miss the audiences, TV is rushing to get on-line fast.

I have doubts about such services as subscription services.

Picture: How did broadcasting begin from the BBC

Framed for more effective PR

OK so you read it here first. The idea of Social Frames is becoming more relevant after results from A team at University College London claimed to be able to tell how well memory will serve us before we have seen what we will remember.

Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information.

They also suggest that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.

For some time I have been working on an approach that can help us to understand what to say, when to say and how to say in a dialogue for optimum effect.

Lead researcher Dr Leun Otten from UCL Psychology and the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said: "It sounds a bit like clairvoyance in the sense that we're able to predict whether someone will remember a word before they even see it." But we are now understanding how important it is to for time, place and content to chime with the audience. In other words to be available in the public's social frame.

The idea behind social frames can be summed up like this: Being in the right place (shop or bath) with the right interactive capability (shop assistant or bar of soap) with the right values in mind (I'm in a shopping mood), will have the greatest effect.

Leun says: "That's really new - scientists knew that brain activity changes as you store things into memory but now we have found brain activity that tells how well your memory will work in advance."

What this means is that to have the best effect, PR communication needs to be presented into the right environment: through an appropriate communication channel and couched in terms that resonate with culture of the public involved.

Picture: Mechanical Mirage

The Future of Public Relations

This week I was asked about the future of public relations and what were the issues we face.

I think that the evidence now accumulating in Neuroscience is going to be critical to the future of all relationship, social value, reputation and communications disciplines. The ability to 'look into' the brain to see its responses to personal, social and other stimuli is advancing so fast that we can test theory really quickly.

This has implications on Public Relations practice too. Over the years I have heard many wacky theories about how and why PR should work this way or that and how and why marketing or media or politics or lobbying or all sorts of things is the practice and only legitimate practice of Public Relations. Enter neuropsychology and we can see quite clearly the isms, fashions, the silly concepts and we can test claims of practitioners and academics alike.

This is going to be hard for many practitioners and not a few academics and researchers.

The first future issue is that our clients now have the tools to see through ill conceived theory, programmes and ideas in practice. This is evaluation of a new kind and it is red in tooth and claw.

The second big issue is the evolution of social media. This time I do not mean blogs, wiki's, 'New Media' as seen today but the truly interactive channels that will emerge for the population brought up with Xbox and Playstation. This generation is practised at interactivity using a wider range of communications such as visual and physical interactions as well as words and sounds. It expects rich media and the Internet is now getting faster and available as is the mobile media as well. These two convergent developments mean that multi-touch, multi-sensory communication (including the use of gaming technology to provide a 'physical' presence for the disabled) is upon us and will be part of the communications mix to be used by our students as practitioners in the next decade (or less).

Ethics, once a soft subject now has a hard edge. We can see exactly how a lack of ethical practice can be commercially damaging in real time and at a personal level. We are now also beginning to understand the relationship between wealthreputation.

The link between PR and Marketing is broken and now there is some doubt about the future of marketing itself. Nearly all its basic tenets are under pressure. Even the tenuous attempts to to see marketing with a supply chain rolefalling off the edge the old world.

The nature of the practice of public relations has to be based on a firmer footing. I believe that we have to invest in understanding the practice of relationship management. The CIPR research into size of the industry was a classic of how not to see PR. A large part of practice evidenced in their research showed that events management is a big part of the industry's activity but they just did not take the thinking to its logical end. Much of the practice of PR is well beyond the narrow thinking and narrow mindedness of a practice that has had its day (mostly press relations). If the rump of 'old PR' continues to be taught and practised as it is today, there will be no PR in ten years time. The world will have moved on and the PR institutions will continue to be 'old boys clubs'.

The critical issue is the time-scale for these developments to become mainstream for PR practitioners and the speed at which the traditional practices are usurped which requires changes in teaching as well as practice.

Lets take traditional press relations as an example and explain why I think press relations as taught and, for many, practised is now dramatically changed. The many pressures that drive the news agenda can now be mapped. Google News is no longer the only means by which media stories are disintermediated by computers. The outputs can be summarised, the story can be re-purposed and the content can be 'mashed' with other content and all of this is done by machine. This means that original content is very valuable and thereafter its application can go in many directions. We no longer write for the 'press' we write for the mashed media, a multi 'stakeholder' environment. So, we have to think of the press release as an original document that can (and probably will) be used in many ways, by many people and machines and that instead of writing for the press, we are writing for 'the media'. Press relations as we know it is dead. I guess this happened without us really knowing it in the last three years! LeedsMet, where I have my affiliations, as with other Universities has to grasp what has happened. The change is no longer in the future.

And then there is the notion that an organisation is not the 'nexus of contracts' (Coarse) or 'nexus of conversations' (Sonsino) but is the nexus of relationshipsless hard bounded than we tend to teach our business studies students and MBA's. I do not see the Business Schools going down this route. Too many vested interests are involved not least the notion of Stakeholder Relations which is not well understood. But I do see management practice evolving because of these changes. In a cultural economy where globalisation is no longer a wide eyed surprise, a lot has to change.

Things like PR evaluation have to grow up. Media relations can only be valued in terms of the number of communications domains reached (see social media above) and so is now not about counting clips or the reach/readership of a newspaper because the reach of the media is now dictated by the extent that it is 'pulled' by readers and referenced by commentators across a vast array of, mostly electronic, media (I thought that there was an exception in consumer media and now discover it is going the same way as B2B publishing). In other evaluation areas, I am not sure that ROI (return on discounted cash flow) has a role in PR especially as we now can see the effects of our actions at the level of a neuron in the minds of our co-conversationalists in a practice evolving round relationships. and (disintermediated manurfacture, disintermediated distribution, dissintermedated markets) is under pressure as we move from a information to a networked and progressively to a cultural economy. Advertising as we have known it for the last generations seems to be and is much

PR has to change and the clock is ticking faster than most believe.

Picture: Virtual space for learning and collaboration

This is a commercial - make summaries for blogs - automatically

Sorry, and I don't do this very often but I am hugging myself over this little programme developed by Girish (my partner in language software in India).

So, you find a web page. Its a long story and too long to blog. You want to blog a summary?

This little programme does it for you.

Its a tool bar for Internet Explorer (Firefox to follow) and is available here. You download it, install it and thereafter any time you want to make a summary of a web page you click the summary bar and it makes a summary.

Automatically.

You can edit the summary and can cut 'n paste.

You can blog it (Blogger only at this stage) and its virtually automatic.

There is an embryo wiki about it here (this is the fastest development and marketing event ever. We only started development last week and alph and beta tesing was - well - quick so we are keeping our fingers crossed).

Is there an ethical issue here – it rips off IP so fast!

The programme does include hyperlinks to the original but is that enough?

Try it, have fun and let me know how it goes. You get 50 free summaries and then we will be charging for the programme but not so as to break the bank ($30 – even PR thinkers have to eat!).

PR Lessons from the brain

Endless 'bargain offers' and in your face advertising and PR messages can be counter productive and that's official. In fact many of them can turn people off in a big way. We now have a much better idea of which half of the advertising budget does not work and it all comes down to empathy. No empathy half of the messages fail!

Using functional MRI technology, which measures activity in the brain, Sanfey, UA psychology graduate student Katia Harle and colleagues at Princeton University, Emory University and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands have been watching what happens when a person is on the receiving end of what they call "The Ultimatum Game." In a lab setting, one person is given $10 cash and has the choice of how much to offer the test subject. The subject can either accept or reject the offer -- but rejecting it means neither person gets a dime.

The Ultimatum Game leads to a battle between the two brain structures. People who consistently reject unfair offers -- thereby cheating themselves and their fellow subjects of any money at all. People who accept more unfair offers tend to have the reverse pattern -- possibly because they're focused on the goal of making money.

About half the time with unfair offers, "people turn down money in order to make a point," and are prepared to make sacrifices to 'punish' organisations they perceive act unfairly.

Picture: Isaac Asimov book covers

How to scoop and be scooped

Earlier this month Milwaukee blogger Jim McAdams, was called by New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro who was "pretty irate."

"Do you get your jollies out of this?" McAdams recalls Barbaro asking.

What McAdams did was to scoop Barbaro on his story about how Wal-Mart was sending tips and information to sympathetic bloggers as a way of getting its message out. Barbaro, who maintains he was not irate, says he was "disappointed" that McAdams and other bloggers would "post what it is I was reporting on" after he sent them e-mails seeking comment -- with a request that the e-mails not be publicized. The online chatter enabled the Wall Street Journal to publish a short piece the same day as the Times.

McAdams, who teaches political science at Marquette University, says he had no obligation to keep confidential the fact that a reporter had sent him an e-mail. "You're talking about a bunch of conservative, pro-business bloggers who are sympathetic to Wal-Mart," he says. "This isn't really news. Wal-Mart is simply doing with bloggers what flacks have been doing with broadcast and print media for decades." In his posting, McAdams listed all the e-mails he had gotten from Wal-Mart's PR firm, Edelman, saying he used some and ignored others.

Newspapers have to build relationships too. Some of those relationships will be via print, Some will be in Google News, in another guise it may use other outlets of the many I identify here and monetisation of news will have different shape in the future – but it will be part of a conversation.

Picture: "Scoop" From Joe Giorgianni's collection.

Science of reputation, Significance of ethics

A team, led by professor of psychology Robert Johnston, a research psychologists at Cornell University has shown that different areas of the brain react differently when recognizing other people, depending on the emotions attached to the memory.

Professor Johnson says: "Humans clearly have an incredible ability to recognise, remember and store huge amounts of information about individuals - even individuals we have never actually met. This ability is the core of circuits that one might call the social brain." As one of the most social of animals, this is important and for Relationship Management is pivotal.

What is important for public relations is this ability to recognise and remember information about people we have not even met. One might speculate that capability to ascribe values to people from a distance is what we call reputation. That there is now a Neuroscientific proof behind the social science of reputation. This is important and offers underpinning of the work of ethical public relations (is there un-ethical PR?). It also shows how important the discussion on ethics was at the new Communications Forum with Philip Young and Max Kalehoff (VP Marketing at BuzzMetrics).

Picture: Lifted from The Stanford Medical Ethics conference and not a very ethical use of someone elses IP.

Context is King

There is a science called semiotics which is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems. It is important to Public Relations because it underpins the work we do in developing visual signals and graphics to convey messages. Effective communication is at its best when it is multi-touch and offers additional ways to change people's attitudes, throughout their lives. It is one of the reasons we have to celebrate the breadth of PR practice (and why press relations alone is not enough). According to Scott Murray: "Our eyes only tell us part of what we need to be able to see. The other part is done by the brain, taking the input from the eyes and making guesses or inferences about what's out there in the environment. Usually these inferences are very accurate, but sometimes they lead us astray in the form of visual illusions." This means that, in ethical practice, we need to be aware that, in communication, there is a need to provide lots of context to our publics to ensure that the images that have of our clients is as complete as possible. This is more than a photocaption. It requires a that we provide a wide range of cues. The mantra so often heard in advertising and marketing circles about getting over 'our core message' is, from these studies, obviously wrong. Context is King.

Picture: A visual illusion of two identical spheres makes the rear, or more distant one, appear to be larger. Image by Huseyin Boyaci

The Clarity Concept / Stakeholder Map

The projection onto a screen permits Focus Groups to agree on aspects of nearness of icons to represent Influence of stakeholders; size to represent Importance and colour to represent Attitude.

In this way maps are created in a visual form while the computer programme stores data which can be used for management reporting, decision making and evaluation.


The Clarity Concept / Stakeholder Map

Hot Wired Humans

The neoro scientists are telling us that we are hot wired to respond to the influences of the contexts that are created by Public Relations. The broader the PR campaign is the more effective the programme will be.

So that if the PR programme includes a range of communications channels, and creates a range of contexts suited to the relevant 'social frames', for a social group (which may be identified using methodologies such as focus groups and visualisation), The world we are immersed in literally helps to shape our brains. As we grow up with precisely timed development programmes, the world helps construct our mind's circuits and continually reshapes them as we experience new things and call on new skills. This process does not end in adulthood it happens throughout our lives. New neurons are are born in the adult brain. The survival of these neurons and and how quickly we learn new behaviours depends on the richness of the environment. Genetically, we are designed to be flexible. It is our nature to respond to nurture – throughout our lives.

Organisations can be described as a cultural entity in their own right and they fit into and influence the wider cultural entity of our societies influencing them in a continuous and evolving process. In the past this phenomena has been evidenced in the broad applications of corporate public relations, brand building and political movements. It is Public Relations working in its broadest sense and as relationship management.

The Neuropsychologists are showing how significant relationship management really is. In addition, they show how, through a process of creation of new neurons, PR adds new values that can become very powerful in society.

Photo: Wordswinker

Where Grunig Where Freeman

In travelling to and from The New Communications Forum, I have been reading about developments emanating from the the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salt Institute and in particular the Book by Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski, Liars Lovers and Heroes.

It has been an effort to come up to date with the way our brains work, developments in the debate about nature and nurture and the influences that act on humans from a wider perspective than the traditional public relations and marketing perspectives.

The first thing that is apparent is that in the 20 years since Grunig and Freeman first conducted, on the one hand, the research and the other promulgated their theories, Much has changed.

We understand much more about how the mind develops and what inspires our actions.

Not least in this mix is the power of culture in this mix.

There is a rich vein here.

Picture: Post modern Thinker

What is in the conversations - BREAKTHROUGH

In five days time, I will be at the New Communications Forum with Elizabeth Albryght talking about strategies and tactics needed to focus on building, extending and nurturing the entire universe of connections (people) for organizations. In particular we shall discuss how relationship management strategies will play a key role.

One of the key elements in such strategies is intelligence.

For the last three months I have been experimenting with how we can find the drivers of on-line conversations. Of course, we are not the only ones with this kind or interest.

At the 'Network Building: The Corporate Communicator's New Strategic Objective' session on March 3rd, I will show the results of this research.

What I will show is a graphical representation of conversations (above).

As graphics go its no great shakes but its significance is huge.

What it represents is evidence that we can see what is driving the news agenda. The findings reveal that we can see concepts that change and morph in near real time.

The research shows that we can also add a predictive element too and so if there is a variance we can build in an alert mechanism that shows that the news agenda is changing abnormally.

It is an approach anyone can use to find out lots of things such as: What values are driving product/issue/brand acceptance.

It has a range of practical applications: What (and who) are the 'conversation drivers' so we know not only who is contributing to the news agenda but what are values and conversation triggers. The research shows how we can find evidence of how well are our messages are reflected in the media (it works for blogs just as well as news posts) and what is driving competition and the views (in the case of blogs) of consumers.

This is not about messages put out by organisations, these are the concepts that are being driven by people (news rooms, blogs, Usenet, email etc).

With such intelligence, practitioners can then look at how they can engage in conversations to create, build and develop relationships for our clients.

One has to remember that these are laboratory findings. This is not a ready made solution but in just a few months we can envisage a range of commercial products being made available for general use and practice.


Public Relations
relationship management
news agenda
news concepts
blogs
Network Economy
predict
Leverwealth

Cultural Economy

• We have moved from a hunter gatherer economy (about 60,000 years of it)
• We have moved from an agrarian economy (about 6000 years of it)
• We have moved from an industrial economy (about 200 years of it)
• We have moved from an information economy (about 40 years of it)
• We are in the networked economy (for about 7 years)
• We are now moving towards a cultural economy.

This is not to say that all the old economies have gone away, They have not. What is important is that, as each economic era is superseded the new entrant offers increased wealth for the participants. It may seem that the horrid conditions of industrial workers in the 1850's was retrograde but, by the standards of the time, there were benefits for most people.

The newest of our economy's is at an early stage but is quite evident. Under the old regime of the information economy people were empowered to select a range of places and means by which they could achieve self actualisation. This meant that they could choose to but products in the high street or on-line. They could disintermendiate the supply chain. The retail part of the chain could be avoided. Enter Dell and Amazon. Customer experience became all the rage.

In the networked economy, people were able to find out much more about the things they believed would lead to self actailisation. They could ask questions and observe comments of people on-line to help seek alternatives and make decisions. They were able to choose between products and services pick 'n mix.

For example, they could choose to by a 'package holiday', a manufactured product, or could choose to buy or select elements that could make up a holiday and so they performed the role of the package holiday 'manufacturer'. What is important here is that the 'manufacturer may or may not be a 'co-producer' because it is the person who decides what, where, when and the price of the components.

Now we are seeing the cultural economy emerge. This economy drives the producer. It is where people are well informed and can contribute to knowledge and can make linkages between ideas and information.

Here we see people 'telling' producers what to make. In the UK there is a big row over cancer drugs.

In this case they are not licensed but consumers are insisting through the courts that they should be made available. What these people are doing is changing the marketing policies and plans of organisations. To succeed, these consumers deploy whole cultures including knowledge about product development, production, marketing, distribution, public opinion, the legal system and political structures to make products available.

As the key elements of the Internet make organisations more transparent and porous, the impact is cultural and organisations have to respond to cultural drivers to find the competitive edge,

Connected

With Elizabeth Albryght at the New Communications Forum, I will be examining strategies and tactics we need to focus on building, extending and nurturing the entire universe of connections (people) possible for an organization. But how do we do this? We will postulate that relationship management strategies will play a key role.

But first there are some givens.

The first is that the Internet is capable of reaching the majority of the population. By this I do not mean that everyone has to be connected. They do, however, need access and this can come in a variety of ways. However, we have to recognise that 70% of the population has some form of Internet connection and even more have a cell phone connection.

The second is that there are many forms of communication. Some are traditional and social, some are mediated and many are on-line of which a lot are un-mediated. In addition many of these media are conversational (e.g. Chat, SMS, IM, Usenet, Blogs, Wiki's).

Finally we have to recognise that not all communication can be monitored effectively but that there is enough that can be to give us some effective intelligence about what is going on in cyberspace.

We will also have to take into account that corporate users of the Internet are pretty poor at using interactive technologies.

With the exception of email and cell phones, the use of the Internet by senior management in most organisations is pretty well limited to searching using Google. Most corporate managers are too busy to do many of the things that 'ordinary folk' seem to have time for.

While some people surf for fun people turn to the Internet to maintain social networks. “people’s communities are transforming:

The traditional human orientation to neighborhood - and village-based groups is moving towards communities that are oriented around geographically dispersed social networks.... People’s networks continue to have substantial numbers of relatives and neighbors — the traditional bases of community — as well as friends and workmates.”

For many practitioners there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the interactive communities and corporate managers who are being discussed on-line and their organisations which makes the role of the New Communications practitioner hard.

I will post more on where all this is going over the next few days.

Picture: The Connected Project

Public Relations
New Communications Forum
Elizabeth Albryght
connected
Network Society
Network Economy
PR
Leverwealth

China and the Internet

This week, I received my copies of 'On-line Public Relations' translated into Chinese this week.

It seems odd that this book should now have a market in China. When I wrote it, the Internet was much frowned upon across the Republic. Even now, issues like the limitations placed upon Google mean that much of the Internet is different for the Chinese than for other parts of the world.

But the Chinese now have to face the the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet.

The change in organisations caused by Internet Transparency, Porosity and Agency does not go away because the Internet is in China. The rules remain the same and the lecture one might offer here in the UK would be just as significant in China.

The idea of social communication among a population as big theirs is an interesting thought.

Picture: Wades Stuff

Global - Snowball

We have been seduced into believing that we live in a 'Global Economy'.

This is not true. We certainly have a capability to trade internationally but there is nothing new in that.

What has happened is the information economy, which emerged in the middle of the last century from the manufacturing economy of the previous 200 years, allowed companies and people to buy direct from suppliers. Examples of Amazon and Dell are often quoted.

Certainly, this digital rip tide capability was not bounded by geography and it washed away many regulations and rules put up as protectionist barriers by governments and companies.

But the basis for the exchange of ideas and good was bounded by cultures and use and application of technologies. These boundaries exist and remain and will not go away quickly.

Internet communities are created when conditions are optimised rather like a snowball. The culture (snow) has to be right, the momentum has to be right and the effort has to be made and, its quite easy for the snowball to fall apart and fom into althernative communities.

What this means is that we need to understand cultures and networks to be effective and to generate real shareholder return.

Marketing RIP

The theory of The Supply Chain is well established and are described thus: The entities of a supply chain typically consist of manufacturers, service providers, distributors, and retail outlets. Supply chain activities transform raw materials and components into a finished product (Wikipedia).

This worked well for the first two waves of economic change as we progressed through 8000 years from an agrarian economy, then for 200 years as an industrial economy and, from about the 1960's, to an information economy. From about 2000 we have been in a new, networked, economy.

The information economy caused the supply chain to begin to break down. The late professor Peter Doyle called this the disintermediation of supply chain which was observed at the turn of the century (also reported by Evans and Wurster in their book Blown to Bits) . This effectively allowed organisations and consumers to go direct to the manufacturer and circumvented the traditional distribution channels. In effect, we were able to go online and buy products direct. Examples of successes in this new form of economy include companies like Amazon and Dell.

The Networked economy is now disintermadiating manufacture.

We now see a model where the customer seeks a solution and the customer becomes the manufacturer. An example might be seen in the 'package' holiday. Once this was a product offered as a complete package but now is changed such that the customer will assemble the components of the holiday by going direct to the supplier for the flight, hotel, hire car, insurance etc. to create or 'manufacture' their own 'package'.

Another example of the networked economy is where the consumer takes control of management functions such as Marketing.

The competitive advantage is not found by creating a product, service or network that can be copied but in providing an organisation that can respond to customer's ability to create their own 'product', develop a market or to be involved in product evolution.

Analysis of the case of Herceptin, a drug for cancer sufferers indicates how this works. Heceptin may be sought as a palliative for which it is not proven to be efficacious but 'in the mind of the consumer' offers a solution to their need and so the consumer usurped the role of marketing.

In the case of Herceptin, a woman embarked on a legal battle to be prescribed this breast cancer drug free through the UK National Health Service.

Ms Rogers and her clinician believed Herceptin offered her the best chance of survival. There was said to be no evidence from any specialist in the field which did not support the use of this treatment for women who fit the eligibility criteria.

However, the drug was not licence for this particular treatment even though three-quarters of cancer doctors were allowed to proscribe the drug for early stage breast cancer.

This is a case where the consumer has taken control of the National Health Service' and Roche marketing and was demanding that it changes its marketing policy. The 'consumer' was acting as product managers and was driving the 'marketing plan' and, in this case, was using the courts to force her marketing plan upon the organisation.

The values that she ascribed to the drug were her values which were not the same values as the organisation.

In this case the value dissonance between the consumer and organisation are played out in a court but in other circumstances that are played out in the market or on the streets.

For example a musician may achieving stardom by approaching a market through free downloads of music to iPods and optimises the shareholder return from sell out gigs. This approach to market is culturally outside the common understanding of the traditional music industry to the extent than Emap announced that after 28 years, it was closing its one time iconic magazine Smash Hits, the pop music magazine. At a time when consumer magazines, and particularly celebrity magazines, was the best performing print genre, the dissonance is considerable.

The networked economy heralds the death of Marketing as networked consumers become the manufacturer and create their own markets.

Pictuure: Webclip Art

Public Relations
Value Based Marketing
Peter Doyle
disintermediation
Network Society
Network Economy
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Blogs Jumped too

Issues become important when they 'jump' from one communication channel to another. Blogs have jumped in a big way and the traditional media is busy adding value to the blog brand. The growth of comment about Blogs in the traditional media has spiked. It has now hit 500 per day on Google News.

So the reason Blogs are important is that they are cheap says Business Week.

Max Kalehoff, vice-president of marketing at BuzzMetrics, says that companies want to gauge the seriousness of bad news says The Economist.

Blogs are there to to aid consumer choice says Toshiba. It has developed mobile phone technology that searches for product reviews on up to 100 web journals, or blogs, in 10 seconds. Just use the phone's digital camera to snap a photo of the barcode of a product you're thinking about buying.

Blogs are for TV buffs. Veoh software, installed on a PC or Mac, creates a virtual television network that allows video bloggers and independent producers, as well as film studios and TV networks, to distribute TV-quality, full-screen video to users with broadband connections.

At The Winter Olympics there are blogs dedicated to individual athletes, random comments from people hanging out in Turin and thousands of links to news stories and pictures. At this year's Games, the polished performances of seasoned commentators are in competition themselves - against the new media world of blogs.

Blogs are bad for kids (of course)

Blogs and wikis have moved past the flashy tech bling phase and are now settling in as core elements of the enterprise collaboration infrastructure.

"Companies increasingly recognize the business value wikis and blogs can generate and are looking for ways to bring these technologies into the enterprise," said Lou Latham, research analyst for Gartner, Inc. "However, there is high concern among organizations regarding how wikis and blogs can be securely managed and monitored to protect confidential or proprietary information and mitigate risk.” which is a problem for the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance watchers.

You can use a press release to get better blog ranking. But most journalists would not cover the story so this is yes another use for the good 'ol press release.

Hey 'Truckers News' has just got a blog.

One would have thought they would have created a podcast for all those drivers who don't want to surf 'n drive at the same time.

Public Relations
Sarbanes-Oxley
blogs
The Winter Olympics
PR
Leverwealth

BuzzAgent a load of Dicks

This from Katie Paine “According to Ad Age: "Turning WOM into a medium -- as opposed to just a marketing discipline or tactic -- could do wonders for its stature, allowing agencies to buy buzz alongside traditional media buys. There’s even a rate card forthcoming this week. ....BzzAgent campaigns work like this: Volunteer agents choose a campaign to work on and receive information about the product. After forming an opinion, the agents spread it to people they know and then produce a report on the activity. The reports are then analyzed for the client. Agents receive points in exchange for reports that they can redeem for rewards."

You would need to be a very special agent to make this work. This is pretty hard to do and keep up consistently. The power curve militates against artificial WOM.

There is also another element which is very well known. It works in the same way that advatorial does. People just don't believe plugs, spin, advertising and all the rest of the garbage you hear from the marketing and advertising industry based on OTS.

Circulation is not king, readership is.

And by that I mean engaged readers. Is an engaged reader going to believe a BuzzAgent? The person who is intruding and getting in the way of what 'I' want to find out. In the networked community, this is a receipt for market oblivion. Its really just another ploy from the advertising industry and WOM will find a way round it.

Remember what we did with 'pop-up' ads and all that jazz.....

Picture: Whirlygig TV