The value of hyperlinks

It seems odd to imagine a Hyperlink as being the basis of relationship ... but then, on second thoughts, it seems pretty obvious. But, it would be mere spin to make the claim without proper grounded research.

Bruno Amaral is examining how relationships are formed in some very interesting research for his Masters thesis.

We have been using some powerful new software designed for purpose by my friend Girish in Delhi involving word clustering, latent sematic analysis and web site network analysis and visualisation and it was the latter approach that prompted thinking about the nature of the hyperlink in the development of relationships.

The theoretical precept is that relationships are formed by exchange of tokens which have common values explicated by the participants.

My analogy is that of a rose and I use it a lot in lectures.

Being a man of certain years I take a full red rose to the lecture and after a preamble take the rose, admire its deep red colour and beautiful perfume and then walk to a pretty young student high in the auditorium and present it to her with a broad smile.

Mostly the students blush. No one has yet refused it.

You see, a rose has a number of values that are associated with it. Regard, romance, love, passion and a mutual exchange.

I can then explain that we all attribute values to a rose. Not everyone associates a rose with exactly the same values but where there are common values them the message is the basis for creating a relationship.

In PR that is what we do all the time. We interpret tokens such as products and services in such a way that their values will build relationships with publics.

Of course, people observe the exchange of tokens and interpret such actions from their own  perspective and their own set of 'rose values'. 

In a lecture, one can make such a point with a not much more than a raised eyebrow but make it clear that the audience' observation of the present is also part of relationship building.....

And then comes the let down.

Reaching into my pocket I produce a £20 note and offer it to another girl. No one has ever accepted it!

So the values of a rose is higher than the value of a £20 note?

The point is made.

We give different values to different tokens at different times......... after all a rose is only a dead stick.

Now, if we translate this to a hyperlink, we begin to get a view of how important a hyperlink really is.

It can be of great value because of the values expressed once the link is clicked on. Sometimes this is a great way of building relationships and sometimes its a disappointment and sometimes we just don't go there.

Even more important, we might click on a link one day and on another will think it is inappropriate.

Using hyperlinks in PR is a skill.

How you will spend your time and attention

Andrew Lark spotted this quotation from Pew Research:

The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

I cannt falt it either.

Sorry is a word

John Varley The Chief executive of Barclays Bank says that the banking industry is going through what he calls a public relations crisis, that it must apologise for what went wrong - because banks will not regain the vital trust of customers unless and until they own up to the sins of the past and say sorry.

Apart from pointing the finger at the failures of the banking industry (see my last post), one can ask what he really means by sorry.

He has a long way to go.

People confer trust on organisations. To do that they need some form of relationship. Progressively such relationships can become a trusted relationship based on experience of behaviours.

Banking behavious in all manner of relationships has a track record. It is diverse. It is networked between different publics and stakeholders. Relationships are not always two way and many relationships are formed beyond the control or wit of organisation.

For example, of the 42 new web pages about Barclays Bank today, only two were directly under the control of the bank perhaps a further ten included content mediated by the bank and all the rest were prompted by a community commenting in various ways about the bank.

At this stage, one might ask if John Varley means the banking industry is sorry for corrupting relationships because by looking at the range of people and institutions commenting about just one bank, close scruteny suggests that there is a long way to go before effective working relationhips (two way semetrical?) have been established and even further to go to identify trusting relationships.

The sinners of the past whose practices created toxic relatiohips are still in post and will have to change a lot if they are going to have any impact on relationships (first) and trust.

Perhaps they could start with transparent engagement.

One thing that they are going to have to come to terms with is the nature of wealth. John Varley made me wince when he said that:

"As soon as asset prices stabilise, then we will see the financial economy recover. And when will that occur? That will occur some time over the course of the next 18 months."

One can only wonder what he means by asset price.

An asset price is the measure of the value of an exchange between a willing seller and willing buyer.

There are lots of stable asset prices like the price of photo assets on Facebook. The price is measured in the enhanced value of relationships brought about by the photo.

A hyperlink in Delicious is an asset and such assets have a value and a price. The asset price, once again based on relationships has not changed much this month - or even this year and so there is asset price stability.

Looking at the asset price of a steel works or houses also depends on relationhip networks.

So is John Varley suggesting that he is really looking for stable relationships?

Good man!

Who is his relationships manager?

The relationship management model may also be of some help too.

Picture: The William Heath Robinson Trust http://www.heathrobinson.org/

Individual Social Responsibility - A Driver for PR

In September I made it quite clear that I though that the banking crisis was above all a crisis for public relations. My thesis is now underpinned by comments by the chief executive of Barclays, John Varley.

In an interview with the BBC's Robert Peston for last Monday's Panorama (8.30pm on BBC1) John Varley said that the banking industry is going through " a public relations crisis, that it must apologise for what went wrong - because banks will not regain the vital trust of customers unless and until they own up to the sins of the past and say sorry."

How did the industry get to the point where it has a public relations crisis?

Was it because it had good public relations? Obviously not. Here we are, sixteen months after the the toxic nature of the banking failure came to light, being given lessons in PR by a chief executive.

Were the practices of the banks so well served by the PR industry that they lost trust, not just between banks but between banks, business, retail customers and government? We have now seen that relationships served by poor PR is, in itself toxic.

Was the industry served by good public relations advice that put the industry into a circumstance that "will take between one and two years for lending to stop shrinking"?

Lets look at what was involved.

PR managers need to know about the products and services provided by their organisations. After all they have a responsibility for explaining what the organisation does to its publics. Failure to understand the product is high risk. PR practice without individual social responsibility of the nature of understanding the organisation dangerous.

PR managers have a responsibility for identifying threats to relationships and reputation and have a duty to inform the organisations of the threats and their consequences. It is a matter of individual social responsibility to both identify such threats and to engage internal publics through their own individual social responsibility to remove such threats.

The role of PR as watchdog and advisor in the management of relationships goes beyond the description of our trade, it is a matter of corporate financial prudence. It is extraordinary that Varley was not told that relationships are a corporate asset. After all, the evidence, as I pointed out in 2006, is robust. Individual social responsibility to internal and external publics includes a need to understand the financial implications of actions that will undermine relationships and reputation. Failure to do so is, of its nature more toxic than the reasons for the credit crunch.

PR managers have a responsibility for advising organisations about the ethics of practice. Ethical practice is about values and has to be part of individual social responsibility.

It is a matter of corporate social responsibility and, more important, individual social responsibility.

Now we have a senior manager in the banking sector pointing his finger at the practice of public relations.

It is an accusation that the industry has to take seriously.

Is it down to a chief executive of a bank to point out these failures or is it the individual social responsibility of practitioners and corporate social responsibility of the profession and its institutions to examine practice?

The track record of chief executives is, at a personal level, quite good but in practice they need robust professional capability in execution. Chief executives also need to be managed and, in this case not by the marketers, accounts department or non-executive board but by the PR manager.

In the month that the credit crunch struck (August 2007) I made exactly this point an so it was not exactly that we in PR (and Sir John Sutherland no less) were not aware of the need and consequences of poor social responsibility.

I am a Fellow of the CIPR and it is, I believe the dusty of Fellows to make the point and to call on the CIPR to be serious about the role of PR in guiding, advising and helping management of our clients.

A long time ago, I gave notice of the ethical, individual social responsibility, issue and asked:

Is the ethical practice then to expose the values or to change them?

A purist practitioner would expose the values and be damned and would allow the organisation to be damned by its constituencies. It is a form of practice that can stand back from the consequences of foolhardy management.

On the other hand the PR manager (a person who attempts to manage the relationships between an organisation and its constituencies) would attempt to change the organisation.

If the values that drive the public relations of an organisation are toxic, as in the now admitted case for banks, we have to re-visit the role of PR.

Two-way symmetry is no longer enough.

I have moved on. It is not enough just to stand fast and change the nature of the organisation such that its ethic will match that of its publics (the Grunigian view). It is a matter for being proactive both internally and with publics and, additionally, to be proactive in the eco-system of the client environment such that the environment can sustain the organisation.

We have to act.

There are amazing things happening at a very domestic level that give us a clue about what is happening online.

A very special lady in my life is my side of 60 years old and, yes explores products and services before buying in shops, buys and banks online but this story offers a slightly different angle. It is real as opposed to some investigation researched findings.

She was getting very fed up with spray window cleaners. Apparently they are not as good as old fashioned pink Windowlene.

For weeks she scanned supermarket shelves with no luck and eventually decided to use the internet.

Result!

Not only did she find that Windowlene is still available but that a small local shop stocks it.

What a brave local shop and what a result!

This is not some 24 year old geek or a major supermarket or even some magic next generation search - it is good old fashioned Web 1.0 working well.

When, I wonder will she price check in-store? The power of the internet in the hands of this demographic and the increased time spent by them online important not just for retailers but many other organisations. 

This story would be a straw-in-the-wind but is backed up a raft of research.

How much more can we achieve with all the new opportunities developing channels offer?

Watch the growth and growth of online retail

This weeks news from IMRG Capgemini was a real problem for the news media agenda. Far from a slump in retail sales, economic Armageddon and the end of markets as we know them, retailing is fine and, especially online, is doing better than ever.

Growth in online spending for November surged 26% on October and was up 16% on last year.

But I think there is a now a good case for following the rate of growth of online retailing as a major economic indicator.

What is happening online does not suite the doom-sayers and the media agenda which is a bit of a problem for them. The bloggers and people with an interest in what is really happening in retailing have a different agenda.

The propostion that retailing is dead is not helpful or true. There is a adjustment and the markets are uncertain but this downturn like many before it is now over-hyped.

Unemployment levels will continue to grow and others will join Woolworths. The news media will have a bleak agenda and market will adjust but these are symptoms of what was happening in the real economy months ago.

What we are seeing online is the real economy. This week we have see a change in the growth curve and it is up.

I think that this curve will be the one to watch this year if we want to understand what is happening in the real economy.

TrackThisNow - news service

I am delighted to be able to host this application by Gauri on the netrep server.

Please feel free to try it out at http://www.trackthisnow.com

Its Beta but good.

Watching the PR v Marketing presence in Twitter

I thought this would be a good way of watching the most dynamic of comparisons. Watching the trends in conversations in Twitter is pretty dynamic I think.

If I was the President of CIPR - this would be a worry

Following on from where PR is in the Gartner Hype Cycle, I had a look at the trends for online PR.

Its not all that comfortable when you look at how marketing has been doing recently using BlogPulse.



Watching how the industry is competing online might be one of the things that the CIPR statistical people might be reporting to its members.

I think it might be a good idea.

Online PR Hypecycle - where are we?

I have been wondering where online PR has got to in the Gartner Hype Cycle.
It would be nice to believe that it has already arrived in mainstream practice in the UK.

But, I don't think so.




The tale begins with the 1995 CIPR annual conference in, I think, Warwick when Jon White, Reggie Watts and I expressed opinions about the future of PR. We were sked to look ten year out. Reggie and Jon were about right with CSR and the role of PR in management. I, on the other hand was about five years to ambitious.


The CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission did brilliant work only to be sidelined by the year 2000 internet bubble crash and it was only when the 'Web 2.0' hype began to bite that the PR industry began to look at online PR again.

Now, with to research published by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) showing that 25-34 year olds spend 13.9 hours per week online (up from 13 in 2007), 36% are heavy daily users and almost two thirds are online daily there is considerable incentive for companies to shed Web 1.0 and take part.

Even more compelling is the latest AOP research, released this week which shows business websites emerging as a highly valued and indispensable source of information for business decision makers. The survey, conducted in association with IPSOS Mori, revealed:

* B2B websites are ubiquitous among business decision makers, 97% stated that this is the media most used for work
* 60% ranked business websites as an essential source of information in their work
* 60% consider business websites as providing information that they couldn’t get elsewhere

Of course, there is a lot more similar data showing how important online selling, marketing and opinion forming has become. The evidence is now overwhelming and inside many companies is the uncomfortable feeling that they are now very wrong footed.

But we are not there yet. The demand is building but not compelling.

The focus is on how the economy will survive the 'Festive Season' and then the cold reality of January will make people look much harder at where their future lies and that is when there will be the big change.

PR Facing $10 billion plunge?

There is a hush about the impact of the Crunch on PR.

We have to face up to it.

Yes there are opportunities but if you take out a quarter of the revenue that supports any industry sector, it has an effect all round.

In February 2009, the number of advertising pages in print publications will be reduced. The pre-Christmas advertising will have gone and sales advertising will have vanished.

It is hard to guess by how much the decline will be but let’s be optimistic (as I think this week’s media reports have been) – print media ad spend will decline 50% across Europe in 2009.

When will the recovery come? April? June? September? Or, as media report in the UK has it, perhaps 2012 (http://xrl.in/12n8).

And if by then, the newspapers and magazines have not found a new way of engaging readers they will be dead or next to it?

While we are imagining this Armageddon, let’s call it 50% fewer editorial pages.
Perhaps 50% of PR activity is predicated on contributing to editorial pages.

As the blood spreads on the editorial carpets so too does it spread to the miltch cow 25% of the PR industry. That is 25% of Press Relations PR jobs, revenues, support and so forth.

In the UK this represents a loss of PR sector revenues amounting to about £0.3 billion (for the Global Alliance lets imagine perhaps $10 billion worldwide).

This is a big issue for the industry and its associations. We do need to start talking about it.

The Nature of an Organisations

As many will know, I have a problem with the theory that most people still to describe an organisation.

In the light of the exchanges on Toni's Blog, it seems a good time to re-phrase where I am coming from.

Coarse' concept of a nexus of contracts is now stretched to the point that it is no longer practical (and Sonsino's idea of a nexus of conversations is too lightweight).

At every level and in every department, organisations have become porous. They lease the office, factory, computer and machine tool, Like Procter and Gamble, Lego, or IBM they use open source Intellectual Property to compete with products. Manufacture is shipped to another company/country and even the means for payment and distribution belongs beyond the institutional structure. It is not that this is some cyberspace phenomena. It is not a virtual phenomena. This is about hard bricks and mortar, real machines and products you find in every home.

The organisation as it could have been described in 1958 no longer exists. In 50 years it has become an institution held together by relationships. So when we in PR talk of public relations being between an organisation and its public's, we need to have a better idea of what we mean by organisation.

But the changed nature of an organisation does not stop there.

In the past, we recognised the militaristic nature of corporate structures. There were managerial divisions such as R&D, Manufacturing, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Transport. There were ranks such as labourer, clerk, foreman, supervisor, manager, department head and director. Contact between organisational division was discouraged. They were kept in separate locations and often had to make a journey or (expensive) telephone call via an operator to make inter departmental contact.
A clerk would never talk to a manager because the manager knew everything and past on the information that a supervisor needed to know, who in turn told the clerk what to do. You can see it laid out in its perfect symmetry in the Swindon Railway Museum. In 1958, just 50 years ago, that is how it was.

Today the newest, youngest employee can communicate to anyone of any rank in any division or department at will. With a really bright idea, that person can also create a small group of enthusiasts for something that will be just great to make them all rich and the company prosper. The old idea of an organisation is now different. Communications inside the company has changed that.

But hang on.... the organisation outsources lots of stuff.

So this new, junior person and his group of enthusiasts may well be dealing with an external institution (who might also work with competitors).

The nature of this group is that they have built relationships, are able to act independently and within and beyond the boundaries of the organisation. They have wrested control from the organisational 'dominant coalition' and the structure of organisations is changed.

Great theory.... is there any evidence?

Three months ago people who lent money to banks had almost no say in how those banks should be run. Then tax payers money was leant to banks. Now the editor of every newspaper, every Parliamentarian and, it seems, every bar room bore is affecting how banks are run. Outsourcing access to capital to taxpayers changed the way banks are run. The rise and rise of Management Buyouts (still an active market worldwide despite the credit crunch) is a manifestation of control moving inside organisations.
So far, I have avoided including the impact of ICT. But lurking in the background are things like email, low cost telephony and fast data transfer that made all this happen.

For many organisations, there is every appearance that they are monolithic until you look at the bottom of their website, look at the extent of off-balance sheet financing, examine the services they outsource such as recruitment, competitor research (most people don’t realise that Google is the most used form of competitor research in the world) and now we can see just how much control organisations have ceded to institutions beyond their control.

You see, this disintermediation of the 'organisation' comes at us a many ways.

Yahoo and its attention study

One of the advantages of consulting with an agency with Yahoo! as a client is that you can easily get at the inside story.

The Yahoo! "Return on Attention" research is really interesting.

The survey of 1015 adult UK internet users between the 21stJuly and 25thJuly 2008 showed that people thought they were busier and working longer and 80% think they are living in an age of information overload.
Well, that’s not hard to believe!

There are some serious issues associated with the findings when
• 51% of respondents suffer from three or more symptoms of Information Fatigue Syndrome.
• 54% say that information overload makes it more difficult to concentrate
So it is not surprising to find that 92% of respondents value their time now more than they used to and the gap between information available and information consumption is growing.
Yahoo! quotes research that shows overload creates attention poverty and this has economic consequences and competition for attention becomes a crucial element of business strategy (Sullivan 2006; Burns 2007; Brown and Davis 2006; Goldhaber 1997 and Hagel 2001.
The research also looked at motivations for use of online content and found that:
• 79% want something of value in return for paying attention to advertising, even if it just makes them smile or tells them something new
• 67% think that advertising can be really innovative and engaging
• 88% consciously screen out information and advertising that they think won’t be worth their time
• 66% wish that there were tools that could help organise the information in their lives
• 88% think that technology will continue to improve and will develop in new ways to help accomplish tasks --or do them outright
This brings to mind Kevin Kellys thoughts on the next 5000 days of the internet (http://xrl.in/11tt) which may offer a solution and some of the thoughts I have been expressing of the future of the internet (http://leverwealth.blogspot.com/2008/09/role-of-emotion-in-immersive-web.html).

In the busy lives of people (including the ever growing amount of time they spend online – or feel they have to spend online 68% feel it is getting more difficult to balance life and work.



As a result, people are making increasing use of search engines, tagging or bookmarking of favourites, and sites which allow them to amalgamate content (good for Yahoo! which owns Delicious – of course). Secondly, people are, in general, more likely to return to sites which enable them to do this effectively (and it’s really interesting to see how most online newspapers have now added such facilities at the end of most news and comment.

Yahoo! says that business models that can profit from these trends are the ones that will succeed in the attention economy and certainly we have seen enhanced reach for publications that do.

The pressure. The pressure. It seems to be getting to everyone! We are spending more time with PowerPoint than in the pub.



The data on information overload also gives us some useful indicators.

80% of respondents believe we are living in an age of information overload.
63% of respondents feel information overload affects them.
54% of respondents find overload makes it more difficult to concentrate

I was also interested in the 63% that admit that they feel like they would miss out on something if they “switched off”.

The Facebook generation is over faced.

The data confirms other research showing that while we are addicted to being constantly connected, ‘we are kidding ourselves if we believe we can multitask effectively’ (Lohr 2007); people are increasingly contactable and even on holiday, over half of British adults check their email, (Fried 2005).

Amongst those who feel information overload affects them, 62% are concerned about its effect.

And the numbers who feel they are always-on is considerable.

But nearly two thirds admit that they feel like they would miss out on something if they “switched off” and ‘escaping’ is a word being used.

The causes and consequences of information overload goes beyond the simple 68% of respondents who feel overloaded with tasks and information. 51% of respondents suffer from three or more symptoms of Information Fatigue Syndrome

Research suggests that office workers are distracted every three minutes, yet it can take 15 minutes to regain full concentration on a task, leading to a drain on economic productivity that is partially the result of information overload. This loss of attention has been estimated in the US at a loss of about $650 billion per year.

But on an individual level, the affects of overload are considerable. People, the Yahoo! report says, view themselves as unable to cope with the supply of information. This perception often causes feelings of dependence and frustration that can lead to various symptoms: anxiety, stress, sleep disorders, digestive problems, etc. This leads to more severely divided attention –and a greater need for a return on the attention captured.

These problems have been grouped under the general term Information Fatigue Syndrome. As well as being the cause of a range of biological problems, Information Fatigue Syndrome has been identified as a potential cause for larger and more severe attention disorders.

(see also : Fried (2005); Lohr(2007a); Lohr(2007b); Holstein (2006); Epplerand Mengis(2003); Nellis(2001); Guardian (2005); Chritakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, McCarthy (2004)

I guess most of us are guilty of ‘wasting time’. That great thing about the internet that satisfies our curiosity, the serendipity behind that hyperlink that is not relevant but is irresistible and that has to be balanced against work and domestic distractions.



Pretty serious stuff here and I wonder how much more work these findings will are going to entail to get to the bottom of all the causes?

On a lighter note: Loss of appetite! Wow! Does this mean that using the internet is as good as a diet?

The research also showed how people try to mitigate these problems and ignoring them seems to work quite well and most of them seem to fail.

It is useful to get this information and to be able to see the original research.


I confess that I am a bit surprised at the levels of stress associated with being online.

PR - Is it about relationship management?

Tomorrow, thanks to Mafalda Eiró-Gomes (who is always so charming), I will be giving a lecture on the role of Public Relations as a relationship management discipline at the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal. My chairman is Nadim Habib, Managing Director of Hill and Knowlton Portugal who I am looking forward to meeting.

I shall begin with a hypothesis about what happens if an organisation loses its relationships with its publics, how much would it cost?

I thought that I would quote Sir William Rees-Mogg's article in the Times today where he recalls the story of the Clydesdale Bank many years ago and the first Mr McAlpine. He writes: “When asked for security for a loan to develop his building company, Mr McAlpine turned up at the bank with a group of his sons. The bank lent on the security of the character and potential of those young men. This turned out to be very good business for the bank and made possible the success of the McAlpine business.”

He continues: “Where relationship banking still survives, there have been relatively few problems of bad debts. The problems have arisen in transactional and unsecured credit card banking with one-off or completely unknown customers. Of course the customers have often behaved badly; if a bank does not know its customers, who are only blips on a computer screen, some of them will behave badly. The bank only has itself to blame.”

The loss of relationships has serious consequences.

The loss of relationships between banks and their depositors and between banks is casting a long and very black shadow across the world and thus, I shall explore the nature of public relations as a relationship management discipline.

Perhaps now we should accept that relationships both personal and corporate are precious assets but where does such wealth come from, what is its nature of the relationship asset and how extensive is this value?

Furthermore, in organisations, who has the role of relationship understanding and management?

For much of its history, public relations in one guise or another has claimed this space and now there is evidence that economist, accountants, marketers, knowledge managers and, all of a sudden, bankers, also seek to understand and deploy relationship value in the organisational context. But the idea of ‘relationships with publics’ is inherent in public relations theory and practice. Its management is sought by many practitioners.

Now, more than at any time since the Great Depression, we need to reflect on the nature of relationship management and who has the corporate responsibly for its governance.

In extending the concepts in Ledingham (Ledingham et al 2000), the paper embeds the practice of public relations deeper into management. As such, it becomes the function for wealth creation and, with misuse, for its loss. In this respect one examines relationships beyond Grunig's and Huang's view that “Public relations makes organizations more effective by building relationships with strategic publics (Grunig and Huang in Ledingham 2000) and views relationship management in a more potent role within the organisation by acting upon its wider intangible and tangible assets to meet corporate value protection and value enhancing objectives.

In the tradition of public relations as relationship management process exposing organisational assets to affective publics to affect wealth, I argue that we need a re-definition of organisations in an era where they are becoming more porous, to an extent more transparent, and with high levels of contracted out services and global partners.

In turn, this points to a practice that accepts relationships as both valuable in their own right and pivotal to wealth generation.

From this postulate, the concept opens up the practice of public relations to offer solutions to the new forms of management in the creation of wealth.

Accompanying the lecture is a 7000 word paper re-worked from the one I gave at the Alan Rawl conference in 2006. It is now even more pertinent and explored the economic value of relationships from a number of perspectives.

Image from Farsight http://www.farsightglobal.co.nz

Experimenting with web monitoring

In this era of social media management, we are often asked to monitor everything online.

The drawback is normally that we have to monitor the world to find out stuff that really only applies to a few counties or even just one. In addition, there are now so many different channels for communication, that we end up with some pretty complicated RSS fees and searches that it has become very time consuming and especially so when monitoring for multiple issues, brands or names.

There is another way. We can monitor everything that is newly indexed by search engines.

They limit what can be found by area, number of citations and a whole host of other limitations or simply do not index enough of the web each day to offer reliable data and, worse still the volumes can be very high.


Over the next few days, I will be doing tests on the pre-alpha edition of new software that, I hope will resolve most of these problems.

It is a programme that, theoretically finds new pages about a search term each day in individual countries.

The returns will, of course, include new entries in all manner of web pages but the experience we are gaining is helpful for future development.

There is a case for monitoring all new citations to provide comprehensive intelligence about a brand which can then be drawn into the online conversation.

Here are the first few returns for a test I did today for Yahoo and they give some idea as to where we have reached so far.

NKorea off US blacklist after nuke inspection deal - Yahoo! News After North Korea relented on nuclear inspection demands, the US on Saturday erased from a terrorism blacklist the communist country President Bush once ...
Yahoo Launches Analytics : ISEdb.COM As its latest attack to Google's supremacy in the search engine business, Yahoo! recently launched its own Web Analytics tool, a Web application enabling ...
Icahn Once Again Trying To Throw Yahoo's Yang Out On Ear? A reader insists that Carl Icahn is polling Yahoo's institutional investors to gauge support for another go at a palace coup (specifically, throwing Jerry ...
YouTube offers full-length CBS shows : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech We've told you about Joost, Hulu, and Veoh, but all these sites may soon be forgotten now that YouTube has signed a deal with CBS and will start offering ...
Yahoo Developer Network at Future of Web Apps London (Yahoo ... This is an account from the perspective of us as exhibitors - there'll be coverage of the talks attended by Yahoos - Rajat Pandit to be exact - later on. ...
Yahoo seen as declining, while Microsoft looms : Technology ... SEATTLE - When Yahoo Inc. co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang spurned Microsoft Corp.' s rich buyout offer this spring, he promised that brighter days in Sunnyvale ...
Gamble fuels Burton's victory - NASCAR - Yahoo! Sports Opting to take fuel only on his final pit stop helped Jeff Burton win the Bank of America 500 and put himself back in title contention. - NASCAR news.


We can refine this quite a lot already but are the findings comprehensive.

I hope to find out over the next few hours.

Helpful ideas and suggestions will be welcome.

The financial realities

I have been through this presentation and it is pretty depressing.

But there is a difference this time which is the fleetness of foot of the online community. I am not sure (yet how its will pan out but there are different dynamics at work).

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

The social network for PR students, faculty and practitioners worldwide, PROpenMic is run by one of the world leading Online PR teachers Robert French at Auburn University in the United States.

Today, he celebrates six months of PROpenMic by looking at how the site has done compared to other PR education sites (subscription). The results are very impressive. It has a huge following.



The commitment and dedication of this one academic is inspiring. Compared with the relatively highly staffed and resourced competition, this site is a real competitor.

The traffic rank is exceeded only by ODwyerPR.com and SNCR.org which means that two of the yop three are academic in thier thrust.

But just below the surface of these data is another story.

It is the story of the extent to which practitioners are involved in these centres for knowledge and other web sites. There are not many more than 8000 PR folk who normally frequent any of these sites each month.

Using comparative data we can see how many visit other PR practice sites.

Twenty five thousand practitioners go to the PRCA site (the USA's PR profession site). One in eight PR practitioners in the UK goes to the CIPR site.

It would not take long to build a pretty good profile of web site use by practitioners.

A good dissertation for a student huh!

The past and the present

Dave Chaffey has a really good case study about easyJet on his site. It plots the success of e-commerce for an icon of the e-commerce age.

The numbers, as you would expect are huge and the capability of the company is impressive.

By sheer chance, I have another study about the company. It is an audit by eFootprint, a company I am involved in with Robin Gurney at Altex.

What we have is a take of two parts. The first is a study of Web 1.0 and the second is beginning to show the impact of Web 2.0.

There are some interesting things we can begin to take away from such studies.

Some are obvious like making web sites mobile phone friendly. Others are interesting like the sudden growth of web pages being indexed by search engines over the period of huge Web 2.0 growth (from an already high level) and, of course, the content now being contributed by social media users.

Here we can see a company in transition. Is it moving with the times? Has it begun to move from a web strategy to an internet strategy?

It would be fascinating to see hear what the company is proposing - and even more fun to be involved.

The role of emotion in the immersive web

Some time back I began work on the future of the internet. I wanted to have a view of where PR would fit into the web over the next decade.

I could see how a range of platforms such as PC's, laptops, cell phones, computer games and domestic multiple screen as well as digital wall paper could produce new environments that would change the way we use the internet.

It is no longer a great leap of faith to see how different channels for communication can be mashed to provide rich experiences that our big brains so crave.

In addition, it was obvious that these developments would increase the emotional connection between people, avatars and the hybrid person avatar (such as the Wii opponent represented as an tennis partner on a screen).

One of the elements that makes this kind of immersive web sticky is emotion. Today, browsing through the New Scientist's YouTube site can across Peter Molyneux's video where he shows how this can evolve. Peter is the wizard behind Lionhead Studios (worth a visit just for the graphics) and explains the concept very well.

Emotional Internet is on its way!

The Value of Relationships – a PR opportunity?

The wise men comment on the financial tsunami that has broken over the financial world in the last few months on the BBC.

They are worrying over the future of capitalism which is a sideshow compared to the other changes happening around them.

As readers here know, I have been talking about such shock waves for some time and I have been yelling into the void that we have to come to terms with intangibles and notably the value of relationships. When relationships break down the commercial consequences are, as we can see, dire. But history also tells us that when relationships fail between peoples the consequences are far worse.

It seems to me that too many people are too aloof to see the present danger.

In an era of internet driven transparency, the lack of it un-nerves many and so it is to be expected that bundles of "special investment vehicles" would eventually un-nerve people. In this case the people are bankers.

But this is insignificant compared to the next shock wave and the ones after that.

In business the practice of 'off balance sheet' finance from lease and lease back at one extreme for companies large and small to cloud computing for mostly small organisations, there is a similar shock waiting just round the corner. The question about assets that underscore the value of the company is a very real one and is not measured in the flights of fancy or terror at the LSE. It is measured in the cloud and the relationship value of the relationship networks on and off line..

Financial reporting has to change and it has to recognise the intangible assets that are the basis of most enterprise. There is plenty of evidence that the intangible values in and of organisations is both in-house and beyond. There are many case studies showing that beyond the corporate firewall there is greater value. The examples are not 'high tech' or special and they cut across sectors as diverse as gold prospecting (Goldcorp), education (MITOpenCourseWare), pharma (Procter & Gamble) and computing (IBM). No form of human endeavour is exempt. Each of the above examples are deriving huge value and enhanced assets through community and 'open source' interactivity with huge numbers of none-payroll people involved.

These relationships assets need to be represented in the financial and management reporting conventions on across the world. They need to be reported in company accounts. At best such value is expressed on the stock markets of the world and yet, as we are seeing today, this is a poor measure.

In politics too, we see how relationship assets are exposed to transparency and, driven by the internet, can have far reaching effects. The US presidential election may seem to be an exemplar but compared to the DDoS attacks on NATO countries like Estonia and Georgia there is more than elections at stake. Garry Warner notes some of the motives and user mobilisation techniques available. This is cyberwar between peoples and not necessarily governments or politicians. Our economies, society and polity are now dependant on the internet and yet, unless we can reach out to all communities on a global scale, we will soon be fighting another war with a very different, if just as effective Blitzkrieg taking conflict to the people.

The rise and rise of user created value and wealth through collaboration seems to be passing sensible people by. It may seem that the content of MySpace or Bebo or even blogs is of little consequence and at first sight that is understandable. But every post is of consequence to at least one person if not a huge crowd. It has value. This stuff is being generated at the rate of millions of (over 1.5 million blog posts, over 3 million Twitter Tweets perday, 50,000 Facebook transactions per second) items a day. Each has value (at least to one person), value that cannot be ignored and has to be counted as part of the world economy.

Whether capitalist or not, it's there. The capitalism debate needs to be put back in its 20^th century box. It is no longer relevant.

Meantime, what is a relevant lands in the lap of relationship management. This could be public relations 2.0 and 3.0 but right now is well beyond the scope of most PR research and practice.

Who will take up the challenge?