Dis-intermediating Public Relations

We are distracted by the tactical approach to the internet that goes under the catch-all heading Social Media.

Tiny dots of information such as a tweet or blog post may affect the sentiment expressed about an organisation and the ripple effect on volume or price of a shareholding transaction may be slight but significant. Garnered by algorithmically-driven high-frequency trading (HFT) and aggregated,  they have a big effect and generate high returns for the institutions that use them. Over eighty percent of market volume is traded in microseconds this way. Your Tweet is important.

This effect has huge implications for public relations as practised.

Although all the causes of the 2010 Flash Crash have not been identified conclusively, HFT was identified as the primary contributor. Such algorithms carry very real economic, not to mention social, risks. For the corporate affairs manager and financial PR practitioner, the financial world is changed. It was once dominated by gossip, speculation, research and strategically-timed trades – by people, for people

This unprecedented socio-economic Flash Crash episode, as Executive Director of the Bank of England Andrew Haldane observed at the time, exposed the precarious frontiers of algorithmically- and digitally-driven financial ‘innovation’: “Trading in securities generated trading insecurities,” he remarked, adding that “the impatient world was found, under stress, to be an uncertain and fragile one.”

If we then step back and look at the digitally driven news coming from countries under stress (but already much more effectively that during the Arab spring) we see it too is having a profound effect. No serious government is dependant on gossipy political advisers to put the East Coast hurricane, US election, Iranian bomb and Syrian shoot outs into a perspective to secure the present and future of the nation. There are computer algorithms to help. No one can gainsay how good the Google crisis map is http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy-nyc .  But look what it has done. It has created an environment to provide real time news, link to real time reporting (including cameras where no sensible journalist would tread). Furthermore it has been done in such a way that anyone can feed or add content. The Red Cross was in early and has a significant presence on the map.

For the PR man the ability to re-act is paramount (do I see the dog rescue charities in there yet? Can I use the map to find a purveyor of generator sets?).

We already have a similar Google map of Syria and Iran? This can be extended to oil fields in Nigeria; new land owners in Africa? Or lots of other politically, commercially or personal issues. A lot of the content can and will be provided using automated functions. Its a far cry from gossipy political or corporate advisers offering research 24 hours later. This is real and real time.

But this is small beer. I will announce a new semantic engine for PR academic PR's in the next few months. It will allow students to create semantic website clusters to show where relationships exist between organisations and people. The software can update every hour if needed.

Now we will have ordinary PR students able to automatically monitor relationships as they evolve! It is a PR applications that has only ever been taught in two universities worldwide. It will also take more than gossipy political or corporate advisers and publicists to affect the direction of relationship travel (if you would like to join in and play, let me know).

Once again we see those pesky algorithms at play.

But lets get in even deeper.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has exposed its hand in reporting automated, deep natural-language understanding as a solution for more efficiently processing of text information. When processed at its most basic level without ingrained cultural filters, language it offers the key to understanding connections in text that might not be readily apparent to humans. DARPA created the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program to harness the power of language. Sophisticated artificial intelligence of this nature has the potential to enable analysts to efficiently investigate a huge corpus and discover implicitly expressed, actionable information contained therein. If you read the slide show it is evident that the same approach is just as good for organisations as much as governments.

What then is the role of the gossipy political or corporate adviser and publicist?

What is more this is not at internet speed, it is much faster than that. This year BGI demonstrated data transfer at nearly 10 gigabits per second between US and China in which data transferred in 30 seconds is compared to the public internet which took over a day.

PR is now as much under threat as the high street. This is not about the Social Media tactic, important though that may be. This is about using the internet to deliver strategies but faster than the speed of thought.

The Absence of Social Media Case Studies

This week in the CIPR 'Friday Roundup' Andrew Bruce Smith bewails the the lack of good case studies and the significant use of anecdote in the realm of Social Media PR.

 Of course the top end of practice across Europe and leading academics in the field do have access to such knowledge.

He can be forgiven for not noticing The Digital Communication Awards run by the Quadriga University Berlin because it did not happen in London, but it is the sort of activity that our institutions are wont to let slip through their fingers.

This is a European wide event and is rigourous in its selection and judging of the best campaigns/programmes  across the continent.

All the DCA awards are selected by panels of leading experts, practitioners and academics (no less than 11 professors sit on the Juries).

All the contributions include both written details and vivas and the winning entries include a very wide range of communications techniques (this year I particularly liked the Red Cross First Aid app which now has a million downloads).

It is not that British best practice is not well represented. As well as the Red Cross, the BBC took home awards this year which deserves recognition from all communicators and notably, the contributors to best practice thinking in the CIPR.

A short history of online retailing

In the 1970’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) gave corporate life to the internet.

In 1979, long before the advent of the World Wide Web (1990), Margaret Thatcher’s IT advisor, Michael Aldrich, invented online shopping by connecting a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line. E-Commerce had arrived and Thompsons Holidays B2B (1981) and Tesco B2C (1984) gave the internet new avenues of commercial power.

 Fast forward three decades to the year of the London Olympics and the proportion of online retail sales excluding automotive fuel is 8.5 per cent; Deloitte highlighted how the boundaries between physical and virtual space are becoming blurred with four in ten shops predicted to close in five years (Deloitte 2012); collection of Amazon parcells from The Co-operative stores is a reality with Waitrose to follow the same model.

In the UK, independent traders selling through online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon were turning over £10bn or close to £1 for every £70 spent online. Then there are the 4% of UK customers who bought stuff through Facebook according to a TNS survey.

Meanwhile there are predictions that one in four (25%) people will regularly use interactive TV to shop by the end of 2014.

These are new types of retailing business and management across British retailing has to be very aware of the power of the internet.

 Thank you Michael Aldrich.


 Thanks for the image go to http://entrance-exam.net/

Where would you keep your Blekko search engine

This on has the same list as the Google engine below.

/topukpapers search

Where would you keep your UK newspaper search engine

Well, here, of course, This is just the nationals:

A sign of how aggregation is moving. I built this today.

Health Service News from Wales

The history of PR, anti feminism and Aristotle

Some 1300BC there was a lot of very public correspondence between the rulers of Gaza and Egypt.

It looks to a modern eye very much like lobbying.  These are real (Handcock translated) words held in a number of museums and brought to us by the Internet Archive. They come as part of a big and ancient resource known as the Amarna letters.

I can imagine a number of PR colleagues, and not a few diplomats, paraphrasing this text even today:

Let the king know that all lands have leagued 

in hostility against me j let the king therefore care for 

his land. Behold, the territory of Gazri, the territory of 

Ashkelon, and the city of La[chish], have given them oil, 

food, and all their necessaries. Let the king therefore 

care for the troops ! Let him send troops against the 

people who have committed a crime against the king, my 

lord ! If in this year there are troops here, then will the 

land and the local ruler[s] remain to the king, my lord ; 

but if there are no troops here, then there will remain no 

lands and no local rulers to the king. 

Behold this land of Jerusalem neither my father nor 

my mother gave it to me ; the mighty hand of the king 

gave it to me. Behold, this deed is the deed of Milkilu, 

and the deed of the sons of Labaya, who have given the 

land of the king to the Habirii. Behold, king, my lord, 

I am innocent as regards the Kashi.

My question is: How old is the practice of public relations in thousands of years before  Edward Bernays? Many believe was the first public relations person and probably because he was a man and the Duchess of Devonshire (1757 – 1806) was a woman.

The Bournemouth historical initiative refuses to look at the (evidence of ancient) practice and is very focused on the words 'Public Relations'.

The nature of relationships in public and with publics is as old as the hills.

The history of public relations is very much tied up in this anti feminist and 20th century thinking  (think of examples such as 'Torches of Liberty' and 'September Morn' as opposed to the longer view.

After all it was Aristotle who wrote that it is:-

... not merely unnecessary for a king to be a philosopher, but even a disadvantage. Rather a king should take the advice of true philosophers. Then he would fill his reign with good deeds, not with good words.

(in On Kingship)

I hope that someone is preparing to go to Bournemouth with a paper that looks past a form of practice that used women to a form of practice that is more about philosophy and, thus, relationships.

Using vertical search engines and search for research

I have been experimenting with vertical search engines as a means of using online opinion for opinion research.

Using Blekko I have been looking at share of voice of PR institution among the 81 leading UK PR bloggers.

The organisations I looked at were CIPR, PRCA and AMEC.

I looked for the number of citations (blog posts) mentioning these three organisations.

The results are:

But of course, this is only part of the story.

Less than half of these PR bloggers have mentioned any of these three organisations in the last five years.

It would seem to indicate that there is a need for an outreach programme by these organisations if they  want to take advantage of the major opinion formers and brand promotion facilities online.

But we can also look to see how many times the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is publicly visible in Facebook which is about 35,800 and in Linkedin about 70,900 compared to the Public Relations Consultants Association - about 296 but in Linkedin its just 1,990.

Of course the CIPR competition is the Chartered Institute of Marketing  with mentions in Facebook of 15,700 and Linkedin about 255,000.

It is not hard to imagine what the institutions would do if such results were noted for newspapers and magazines. I am not sure why online is so different.

Of course, many companies are much, much worse in their use of online brand development and opinion leadership but the institutions do need come up to the mark if they are going to be part of the action.

Communications Data Bill

I do realise that it is hard to change the mind of the Home Secretary.

Somehow, there has to be a way of making it clear to her that the Internet is not like a news channel and tinkering at the edges will only bring her more grief than the problems it solves, is economically damaging and panders to vested interests. The draft Communications Data Bill is bad law for a number of reasons.

Her proposals can be avoided by real criminals. Her proposals will present opportunities for drip drip drip criticism of the security services. There will be a regular occurrence of high profile mistakes as innocent people are caught in this complex concept. Most of these issues will haunt the The Secretary of State and will bring government into disrepute for little good outcome. It is bad law.

These latest proposal are weak and cannot be effectively implemented to achieve the stated goal.

Most significantly her proposals are economically damaging.

She probably does not realise that the internet is contributing nearly as much as the financial services sector to the UK economy. The A T Kearney report is a recent example in a long line that reveal such data.

Important points are: 

• Total U.K. Internet traffic is expected to increase by an average of 37 percent every year between 2010 and 2015.  
• The U.K. Internet ecosystem is worth £82 billion a year.  
• Every £1 spent on Internet connectivity—mobile and fixed broadband networks—currently supports £5 in wider revenue for the U.K. ecosystem. 
• Of the total £82 billion U.K. Internet economy, £37 billion is in the Internet value chain and £45 billion in the e-commerce it supports. 
• The value chain is 2.6 percent of the country's GDP, while e-commerce is a further 3.1 percent a total of 5.7% of the British economy and unlike most others is growing at a double digit rate.,

Double digit growth is very important for the economy which elsewhere continues in recession and especially a part of the economy that is this big.

The Home Secretary is presenting proposals that will be a burden for this sector.

Of course, there is every reason why some sectors would want to be able to invite the security services to identify people using the internet to, for example, download protected intellectual property such as music, films and newspaper stories protected by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (i.e. nearly every national newspaper whose news story URL's are protected as well as the story content - and should not be used by MP's either!). Some of the pressures, advice and lobby affecting the Home Office will be from such vested interest.

There are many issues involved here and most notably the democratic, social, cultural and economic advantage of development of IP for the economy. This is not a matter for the Home Office but it is being brought into this debate through the proposed legislation.

The Home Secretary is, I am sure aware of such pressures and the prospect of related vested interests and their third party supporters.

I am sure that the emotive headlines grabbing  story about protecting young people and the the vulnerable will, no doubt be headlines in newspapers who count among the vested interests and that they pose yet another threat at a time when the Media is desperate to 'get its own back'. I have no doubt that the Home Secretary is capable of weighing such influences in the national interest and can examine more effective means to protect society.

How the internet permeates all things PR

Mark Page, a partner at the management consultants A T Kearney, said: "Total U.K. Internet traffic is expected to increase by an average of 37 percent every year between 2010 and 2015."

Against a backdrop of shrinking economies, this sounded pretty impressive.

He also said: "Traffic on mobile networks is growing 84 percent year over year and is expected to account for 11 percent of total traffic by 2015."

Impressed?

This would indicate that a lot of people and organisations use the internet a lot. Indeed, according to Page, the U.K. Internet ecosystem was worth £82 billion a year in 2012, with mobile connections accounting for 16 percent. If this is true, a very large part of the economy is dependent on the internet.

Every £1 spent on Internet connectivity—mobile and fixed broadband networks—currently supports £5 in wider revenue for the U.K. economy. The value chain is 2.6 percent of the country's GDP, while e-commerce is a further 3.1 percent. In addition, the United Kingdom has a much stronger business-to-consumer e-commerce sector than other countries. The numbers escalate so fast that you would need to look them up to be current on the fist day this book was printed.

In the year of the Olympiad, the internet value chain was 2.6 percent of the UK's GDP, while e-commerce was a further 3.1 percent. 

To put this into some kind of perspective travel and tourism, communication and financial services' contribution to GDP in the UK was about £100 billion in 2011, or 6.7% each. This compares 2.3% for automotive manufacturing, 1.9% for mining and 4.1% for chemicals.

The internet is one of the big hitters in the UK economy and is growing fast.

Ericsson's second Traffic and Market Report predicts data traffic – as opposed to voice calls – will grow 15 times over by 2017, by which time 85% of humanity will live within range of a mobile broadband signal and there will be more mobile devices than people.

This means that the internet part of the economy will outpace tourism and banking any day now.

For real digital specialists, total U.K. internet traffic is forecast to grow from a monthly volume of 621 petabytes (PB) in 2010 (equivalent to roughly 41 million music albums downloaded each day) to 3,000 PB in 2015.

AT Kearney note that U.K. Internet value chain makes up a significantly larger proportion of GDP than the global norm, while the value added by e-commerce also constitutes a larger share of GDP, especially for business-to-consumer (B2C) activity.

The data also suggests that the UK is good at creating content and poor at providing services.

In the midst of all of this is Public Relations. A career almost completely mediated by what is happening online. 

A major shift happened in 2009 when, for the first time, people globally were using their mobile devices more for data transfer than they were for voice communication. Chetan Sharma Consulting showed that the mobile had become the most personal  internet enabled computer.

In personal terms the internet is having considerable impact.


In 2011, 19 million households (77%)  in Great Britain had an Internet connection.  There were still 5.7 million households without an Internet connection. Half of those without a household Internet connection said they didn't have one because they “don’t need the Internet”.

Broadband has now almost entirely replaced dial-up Internet in the UK, with 93 per cent of households using broadband. (Office of National Statistics 2012 http://www.ons.gov.uk). Half the population uses Facebook and the UK represents over 10% of all internet users in Europe (http://www.internetworldstats.com)

Internet sales values  in March 2012 increased by 15.2 per cent compared with March 2011 and are estimated to account for 8.5 per cent of all retail sales values excluding automotive fuel.

PR activity online is now charged with helping organisation reach out to get a bigger slice of the growing environment.

Childnet International report that the internet and mobile technology are increasingly important to the educational and social lives of children, and are becoming a part of children’s identity. As one young person said to Childnet at one of its recent focus group meetings, “Take away my mobile phone and you take away a part of me!”

The internet is also changing how people's brains work. Sparrow et al (2011) report on findings showing that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves. In other words 'don't remember it, Google it!'

The power of audiovisual expression in video games took a dramatic leap forward with the arrival of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Gamers are being treated to gaming experiences with unprecedented realism and power (Square Enics web site http://www.square-enix.com/na/careers/getech/) . Video game visuals already equal or surpass the quality of those in feature films, requiring even more advanced game development pipelines.
For PR practice, this means that there is a need for a profession to adapt and adopt practices that are not as old fashioned as Facebook, even Pinterest but of a semantic web challenged by Googles Knowledge Graph.

Some people find the incusion of the internet into the daily lives of such a high proportion of the population dangerous.

Nicholas Carr (Carr 2012) sums it up like this "People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, updates and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are often less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time." 

Practitioners need to be aware of such research too.











....

Page, M 2012 The Internet Economy in the United Kingdom http://www.atkearney.com/index.php/Publications/the-internet-economy-in-the-united-kingdom.html accessed May 2012

Global Mobile Data Market Update 2009, Chetan Sharma Consulting. Available online: http://chetansharma.com/globalmarketupdate2009.htm (accessed on 6 May 2012).

Components of the UK internet value chain.  http://www.atkearney.com/images/global/articles/FG-The-Internet-Economy-in-the-United-Kingdom-8.png  accessed June 2012
Ericsson Traffic and Market Report June 2012 http://www.ericsson.com/traffic-market-report accessed June 2012

Childnet International Intenet Addiction http://www.childnet-int.org/downloads/factsheet_addiction.pdf accessed May 2012.

Betsy Sparrow, B. Liu, J. Wegner, D. M. 2011 Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips Science August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 776-778

(Carr, N, 2012 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains W. W. Norton & Company)

The Knowledge Graph is here. Beware.

Yesterday, Google published a video to describe its Knowledge Graph.

This is very important for public relations practice and we have only a few months to deal with it.

The revelation showed how the use and application of semantics and decision making algorithms like Bayesian logic, and Neural Nets will replace much of the work of the PR practitioner, journalist and that whole infrastructure organisations have created to give issues and brands space in the conciousness of publics/stakeholders/consumers/constituents.


Perhaps to get a feeling for what I am talking about, you may like to  watch the video:

Now, if we begin to see what such a capability can  do, we can understand how significant these developments have become.

Imagine, in a few weeks time  being a press officer wanting to write about the big event of today in which Monmouth became the first Wikipedia Town. Up to today, you would explore what has been written and published by Wikipedia and in Wikipedia, you may have accessed its blog. In addition you will have looked at what Monmouth and Glamorgan local authorities have been saying and you will have followed up some stories in the press from vox pop interviews. You will need 'new' news too and then you can begin to write the press release.

Of course, Google's new Knowledge Graph will have all but the last element already and, in addition a lot of other special elements to the story to keep the journalist interested. Furthermore, your 'new' news will have elements that are already part of the social graph.

In fact, just by extracting the Knowledge Graph, your publics/stakeholders/consumers/constituents will not need you, as a press agent, or the journalist or the newspaper, TV news reporter. Such news can be discovered and presented using a John Humphries voice synthesiser for the BBC Today Programme. Imagine the savings the Corporation will make!

Now, lets dig a little deeper. Google says:

• Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean
• We can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing.
• The Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. 

This means that the ever more porous organisation, will have a Google bot crawling around making sense out of all those company acronyms at the same time.

The bot will get information, summarise it and make assumptions all on its own for all the world to see.

Finally this clever capability is creating new facts.

Does that sound like a journalist to you?

It is very easy to make assumptions that this will not really be what happens. Who will go the bother of finding this stuff out?

Only the very interested, nerd, competitor or mischief maker and thy are already in play.

How wrong can we be.

When this year's PR students started doing 'A level's, six years ago, it was impossible to use a search engine to find copies of lectures to be delivered in the degree they would eventually read. Today, Slideshare.net gets 60 million visitors every month! We all have lectures on Slideshare.

Search engines will change beyond their wildest dreams before they draw the first pay cheque.

Imagine how such capability will inform us as we start the day, journey to work, interact with colleagues and organisation stakeholders. What will it be like playing with children, whose toys have intelligence to understand what they are saying long before they can speak in a language that can be understood by their parents.

These capabilities, embedded in furniture, cars, trains, desks, vending machines and toys will be far away from what we think about now - and will creep up on us.

We already know about some of these advances. The Kinect which provides a 3D body–motion interface for the Xbox 360 uses algorithms that emerged from lengthy Artificial Intelligence research. It is a toy, with serious applications in medicine and marketing. It too can use the Google Knowledge Graph. The Kinnect, will soon 'know' exactly who you are - and your clients!

the iPad was launched in April 2010. Now Tablets are ubiquitous and can also play the Google game. The technology creeps up on us and this why it is important for the PR industry to prepare to be overtaken.

If newspapers, shops and CD's can be threatened with trivialisation if not extinction in ten years, who would bet on the PR industry making it unscathed in this decade.

I trust the CIPR has in mind to do something, like ensure there is industry research in hand, when so many of its members face this exciting and perilous future.

The Knowledge Graph is here. Beware.

Developing PR practice - before the Knowledge Graph eats our breakfast

This is a further posts about Public Relations as the practice which finds and synthesis information and disseminates it to relevant constituents to inform their decision making and actions.

There is a further one to come.

In the last post I  looked at how PR can use technologies to manage Big Data. With deep analysis of each citation, all the information for intelligence gathering, measurement, evaluation as well as trend analysis and looking for insights is available to the practitioner.

As my next post will show, we will soon need to have skills beyond curating information, adding a view point or corporate angle and publishing. The role of the press agent will be a function of the Google Knowledge Graph (of which more later).

This is not some future perfect this is of the here and now.

It needs to be. Our universe is changing rather fast and PR has to offer its constituencies information in digestible form to empower them when making decisions. We know that the novum tempus of PR practitice will offer the context with one hand and the detail, when needed, with the other.

In addition the PR constituency is broad. Because of social media, PR is catapulted into involvement with the citizen, constituent, consumer, journalist, employee, vendor and corporate decision maker and anyone else with an interest the matrix of global relationships.

To be part of a successful industry the practitioner has to be innovative in the development of PR practice in addition to creative execution of PR programmes. One can only concur with Stanford's Nathan Rosenberg (Rosenberg 2004)  that innovative activity is the single, most important. component of long-term economic growth in all forms of economic activity. This means that as the environment by which an organisation 

Finally, it needs to be innovative to access good ROI (profitability). This means fostering technology diffusion and innovation (based on Rogers (2003) ;  enhancing the quality of decision-making; and  increasing demand and reducing production costs.

..................

Rosenberg, N. 2004 Innovation and Economic Growth http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/55/49/34267902.pdf

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press.

Big Data Public Relations

Until recently it was considered that the amount of information available for any major discipline was reasonably finite.

In addition, there was a belief that optimising output from production plant and people contributed to growth.

These are, we now know, myths. 

Information is not finite. We are growing information at an amazing rate. 

1. Klint Finley (2010) reported 1.2 zettabytes of digital information would be created or replicated in 2010. That's 1,228.8 exabytes, or about 6.7 exabytes every two days. Or, in PR speak, a lot.
2. Growth, Duponts et al (2011) revealed, has a lot to do with creativity. 

They noted that economic decline is associated with slowdown in innovation. They also showed that innovation itself could trigger a sustainable recovery in productivity.

This tells us that for Public Relations to thrive it needs to be creative. In today's environment this means PR has to understand Big Data.

The reason is simple. We need to understand what we can do with information and today, information is wrapped up in Big data. This means that our profession has to understand the technologies that allow practitioners to find and synthesis information and disseminate it to relevant constituents to inform their decision making and actions.

In addition, with this thing called Big Data, PR has to be innovative in its development of PR practice in addition to creative execution of PR programmes. If the profession is lazy in its approach to these technologies it cannot innovate, grow or even survive.

Finally, PR needs to be innovative to access good ROI (profitability). This means fostering technology diffusion and innovation (based on Rogers (2003) ;  enhancing the quality of decision-making; and  increasing demand and reducing production costs for providing data to our constituencies.

In this post, I am going to explore how practitioners can get to grips with Big Data. I will use an existing technology and will only focus on the simple stuff of media coverage and social media commentary. In fact, the principle remains the same for all Big Data.

We can inform the basics of what has to be achieved with the aid of Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer

Chief Scientist, IBM Entity Analytics. He has a great way of explaining how come we create so much data. 

For example our systems create, at minimum, 144 copies of just about everything we create (Jonas 2011).  When we make so many copies it becomes easier for computers to narrow down what or who an article, or content refers to - exactly. And growing Big Data improves the accuracy at an astonishing rate. Copies of content point to the source.

Jonas suggests that this leads to more leaks (aka Wikileaks in public), leaks that are not public, loss of information ownership and the potential for onerous legislation that would, in the end, reduce transparency.

Perhaps it is a good idea to put this into a PR context.

To be able to make sense of our Big Data environment is good.

We need to start by aggregating the news.

This includes media that would have been common at the turn of the century, the booming social networks and microblogs as well as photo sharing sites plus all the content we receive each day like email newsletters, specification sheets, White papers,  discussion lists, LinkedIn group discussions and much more. We can add academic journals, PowerPoint presentations, films and music al of which is common fare. We need to be able to find all this stuff.

But so much information is time consuming. We need to get computers to help.

Today, the PR industry is able to gather all of this content. There are a number of services that can and do achieve this and very cheaply. 

It is a lot of content and comes in a range of formats. From PDF's to web sites with advertisements, links and forms in and around the useful content. There are solutions to make these websites readable by computers some really good ones are free and open source software like 'BeautifulSoup'  http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/. There are many ways computers can then read the text for sentence detection, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, chunking and parsing, named-entity detection, and co-reference analysis and much more. Being able to find and identify links in, meta data and all those SEO attributes and more is all part of the technology deal.

Computers can be taught to sort articles into subjects. If a group of managers are responsible for different markets your computer can be taught to sort out the content into specific subject areas for managers  and, at the same time using Bayesian logic, they can teach the software to grade citations from being very relevant to completely useless and to be discarded.

Sometimes we don’t want to see the same old same old cropping up a dozen time a day on computers and Tablets. On other occasions, we need to know that our brochures have been copied by bloggers, verbatim.

Managing Big Data, means you need to be able to choose how you deal with duplicates.

For computers as well as people, understanding what a text means is sometimes something of a challenge. The new generation of PR software looks at citations using semantic analysis. This identifies the concepts that explain what each sentence, in every citation, means in relation to  the subject in question.

It is something of a party trick to ask a group of people to explain a text and see how differently they interpret the content. Some software uses curators to teach the software which citations are important to the CEO or the FD and then again for the Chief Marketing Officer, customers, competitors and suppliers. All monitoring, measurement and evaluation has to reflect the culture of constituents. Without such sophisication the information and its interpretation is profoundlyflawed. Fortunately, these days computer programmes can be taught to reflect the culture of the user.

Here is where we sort out the competent from the charlatan. All sorts of software claims to offer computerised ability to determine whether a citation is favourable or not. The simple test the practitioner can make is to ask 'from whose perspective'.

Such perspectives are also developed for attributes such as influential, helpful, favourable and unfavourable, influence and  many other values.

Of course, the recipient can also be the curator. A CEO can teach the software to reflect his or her specific and personal interest.

Soon the software learns to reflect the views of the reader and reports its findings.

The computer now has a record of Big Data and a description of it. It has created an ontology, a description of the content.

The key now is what information might a practitioner want to find, analyse and report on.

This is data mining, digging into the resource to find, for example,  the important articles, tweets, post, 'Likes' or emails.

From a mass of data, the CEO can see just the five articles that are critical before the day begins and the FD can see what exactly is going to affect share price before anyone else. The practitioner will offer the context with one hand and the necessary detail with the other.

Perhaps it will be helpful to look further at how practitioners can acquire and  synthesis information and disseminate it to relevant constituents to inform their decision making and actions.

This then is how we offer our constituencies information in digestible form to empower them when making decisions.

Practitioners and thier suppliers can come to grips with Big Data. We can even go beyond texts, images and into a much wider range of content.

What is important here is that PR can, indeed must, be part of the Big Data revolution.

......................

Dupont, J et al (2011) OECD Productivity Growth in the 2000s: A Descriptive Analysis of the Impact of Sectoral Effects and Innovation OECD Journal: Economic Studies http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-productivity-growth-in-the-2000s-a-descriptive-analysis-of-the-impact-of-effects-and-innovation_eco_studies-2011-5kgf3281fmtc accessed May 2011

Jonas, J 2010 Big Data Flows  http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/33/46944407.pdf accessed May 2012

Finley, K (2010) Was Eric Schmidt Wrong About the Historical Scale of the Internet? http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/02/are-we-really-creating-as-much.php accessed May 2012


Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press.

The Great Professions Part Two

Life in PR is moving towards using a thing called Big Data. It is inevitable.

In Big data: The next frontier, for innovation, competition, and productivity, McKinsey & Company describe it like 'large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed ...  now part of every sector and function of the global economy,'  (Manyika et al 2011).

Big data has all the facts not just the headlines chosen by an biased editor. As a result it works like a caustic cleaner, working its way through all the obfuscation to the true state of affairs.

Unfeeling radical transparency about constituents, and their things and doings, is becoming evident  by commission and omission.

Some organisation already have embraced the idea and revealed even more data and others have tried to hide their inner working, created an absence of information and as a result pointed to their deepest darkest secrets as mysterious black holes taking (traceable) stuff in and (selectively) letting none out.

How can organisations hide as every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data? There is a hope that no one can go hunting in this indicium nationis. To imagine that science and technology will not want to go exploring a huge and new information nation is a vane hope.

The movement to take this idea forward for the communications industries is by no means new. It has been a progressive development of idea born of the debates that raged round the 2006 post by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine (Anderson 2006). It was described in a Big Data context by Clive Thompson in Wired half a decade ago (Thompson 2007). It was also the subjects of the PR approach by David Phillips (Phillips 2007) in the context of the internet acting as an agent, offering greater corporate porosity as well as richness of content and global reach in The New PR Wiki.

Let us not be overawed by the mass of data. Lets look at why it is significant to public relations practitioners.

Let us make an assumption that the PR profession knows how to acquire news and information for constituents.  OK call it press clips circulated to the Board, research presented as a white paper to marketing or the brief from a product manager used to brief the social media team.

Practitioners in an almost reflex response re-write and re-cast  information in a range of formats for a host of other constituencies. From press clip into the CEO morning brief. From product manager spec sheet to journalist' release. From academic tract to White Paper. Try stopping a practitioner from using Twitter. Its part of the DNA of being a PR practitioner.

What public relations does is to find and synthesis information and disseminate it to relevant constituents to inform their decision making and actions. We offer our constituencies information in digestible form to empower them when  making decisions.The practitioner will offer the context with one hand and the detail with the other.

The citizen, constituent, consumer, journalist, employee, vendor and corporate decision maker have traditionally all benefited from this capability.

But there is the sea change. There is Google. Search Google and make better decisions. Dis-intermediate the PR person. There is Facebook. Post to Facebook and cut out the PR middleman. Use a blog. Post to a blog and go round the newspaper.

But it is not quite as easy as that.

In my next post on this subject I shall explain why.


-----------------

Thompson, C, (2005) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/wired40_ceo.html accessed may 2012
Anderson, C (2006) http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/12/what_would_radi_1.html  Accessed May 2012
Phillips, D (2007) http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=DefiningTransparency.NatureofTransparency  Accessed May 2012
 Manyika et al (2011) Big data: The next frontier, for innovation, competition, and productivity. http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation Accessed May 2012

The growing industry

The dynamic internet

The internet, and most notably its applications, are, by most measures, growing faster than any other part of the UK economy. In general, there is 10% growth but among some activities growth is bigger by factors. The reality is that the internet is a new, fast growing and, currently much under estimated new form of economy.

In this post I will bring evidence to bear that suggests a PR industry of £20 billion. This is a sector that will grow by factors in the next decade. Already, we are seeing the evidence. Interpublic "continues to see the benefits of our digital strategy in which the primary pillar is embedding digital talent at all of our agencies," The market for the PR industry to exploit is already in place.

For example:
 

• In August 2011 there were 3.4 billion hours spent online by the UK Internet population#. The average home broadband user downloads 17 gigabytes of data each month, equivalent to streaming 12 hours of high-definition content from the BBC's iPlayer#.
• 77 per cent of households have Internet access#.
• Social media is a major activity for a majority of the population from the age of 8 years old#.
• It is an area of activity that appeals to over 60% of the UK population#.

• The UK leads Europe in smartphone adoption with 70% growth  this year#.
• Over a quarter of adults and nearly half of all teens now own a smartphone and 37 per cent of adults and 60 per cent of teens are ‘highly addicted’ to them#.
• Smart phones already drive 5% of online traffic#.
• The use of wireless hotspots almost doubled to 4.9 million users
• 21 per cent of Internet users did not believe their skills were sufficient to protect their personal data and
• More than three quarters (76%) of TV viewers now surf the internet, use mobile phones, iPads or instant message while watching TV. http://bit.ly/rUzUHp.

The reasons are clear.

Of the total internet economy, 60% is driven by consumption (the rest is in infrastructure etc).
At the same time other sectors such as the financial sector (10% of GDP) are stagnant or in decline.

• Online retail in the UK will grow at a ten percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years#.
• Forrester projects that online retail across 17 of the largest EU markets in Western Europe will hit €114 billion by 2014
• UK Internet use will be up by a factor of 3 in 5 years. Set against Ernst & Young ITEM Club's forecast for GDP to grow just 0.9% this year and 1.5% next year#, this would seem to be close to magic.
• 190 million Europeans will shop online by 2014 (up from 141 million today).

Consumer activity from desire to purchase is well understood and documented.

One third of Facebook and Twitter users in the UK are followers of brands. Online is clearly the place to be. The majority of marketers (58%) are using social media for 6 hours or more each week, and more than a third (34%) invest 11 or more hours weekly.

90% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

Online retail in Western Europe will grow at about 11 percent a year, slightly ahead of the UK and the US, two mature markets.

Online banking the most popular way to manage money with 79% of people feeling confident in making online banking transaction A number that rises to 90% for 25 to 34-year-olds.

Meanwhile, the UK banking sector employing 4% of the labour force will expand at a relatively subdued pace during 2011-15, with growth averaging around 3% per annum.

Companies have found out that web sites deliver sales. Sometimes visitors buy from the site at other times their visits are an immediate precursor of sales.

Companies have also discovered that websites offer other benefits in delivering suitable vendors, prospective employees and others stakeholder benefits.

Along this journey, organisations have discovered that interventions in online social discourse lead to increased brand awareness and enhanced stakeholder engagement.

It is not as though the dynamic of the last five years is about to change.

By any and every measure, the internet is dynamic. It is exciting and is delivering very real economic as well as social benefits.

Online retail sales in Europe will increase by a third over the next 4 years. Tablet computers will see an explosion in sales over the next four years, selling 60% as many units as PCs by 2015#. Activism is expected to rise. The majority of both corporate and activist respondents predict an increase in shareholder activism#. Online activity at work is said to be costing £14 billion a year# leading to growth in Online HR services. 70% of companies have yet to launch a mobile site#. More than half (54 percent) of UK businesses with fewer than 50 employees do not have a website#.

Internet marketing budgets in the autumn of 2011 are up 16% and search marketing is up 9% four times more than all other marketing activity.

We are beginning to see PR firms growing faster than the economy would traditionally suggest is appropriate.

In addition to maintaining the existing internet based infrastructure the PR and associated industries have to be able to deliver a minimum of 10% incremental activity for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, there is a skills shortage. Microsoft warned of it#, Major Players says the talent pool is leaving PR for the digital world if PR agencies fail to integrate social media into their traditional offering#. An inability to retain cyber skills at GCHQ is causing the Prime Minister a headache#.  Finally, 60 of IT chiefs have difficulty in finding candidates with digital commerce, social media and web architecture skills. 

It is reasonable to suggest that between 5 and 10% (in some cases much more) will be spent in online marketing activities with compound growth in excess of 10%. In total this represents £6.7billion in 2011 rising to £12.7 billion by 2017.

Can we now expect to see a £20 billion PR industry by the end of the decade? The numbers say - yes!

The Social Media Handbook for Public Relations Professionals - from the CIPR

Today, the The Social Media Handbook for Public Relations Professionals is published by Willey.

It is a crowdsourced book by the CIPR .

In her foreword, Jane Wilson, CEO of the Institute writes:

"The media through which humans communicate are constantly evolving, reflecting changes in technology and preferences in content and consumption. In public relations, communicating messages through a variety media is the primary means by which we engage audiences in dialogue to develop mutual understanding and deliver against organisational objectives. As the media we use change, so must the practice of public relations.
Currently, a rapid evolution in media is taking place. Through the choices, made by millions every second of each day, to share and curate content and to talk, individuals the world over are engaging with each other on a scale unimaginable to most people just a decade ago.
Previous modes of media allowed for the transmission of information, filling a human desire for knowledge, but could not cater for the human impulse to interact. This is changing our profession for the better.

 Who could disagree.

The book is done and in the month or so between the 30 authors' (yes, I am one) contribution and publication, the world of communication has changed yet again.

Pinterest went from linear growth to exponential growth.

Another social network that is having a major effect on communication.

Interestingly, it is a move from the written word towards semiotics.

The reason this is so important is that the PR profession knows very little and semiotic communication.

The Daniel Chandler web site 'Semiotics for Beginners' is a good place to begin and it soon becomes clear that practitioners have a steep learning curve to be able to grasp what opportunities are now presenting themselves.

The amazing developments in video and now the use of Kinect to create real 3D images on a traditional flat screen gives a hint as to a next generation of communication.

This can also be part of augmented reality or a a pop-up store that visitors could shop and win prizes from using a specially created app for their Smartphone or tablet:

The ability to use such capabilities creatively and for much more than consumer marketing has to be part of the PR professional's portfolio of usable communication channels.

The Great Professions

It was dishonest of me to criticise the efforts of others who are attempting to explain what we, in PR, do without at least making the contribution to their thinking.

I offer up my view and an explanation:

Public Relations is the discipline that optimises relationships between managed entities and citizens. It encompasses a range of primary disciplines of cultural, social, behavioural, communication and ethical interactions.

 From roles as diverse as the better governance of nations to social events management, the scope of practice is huge.

 It has, as its foundation, intellectual and practical capabilities taken to professional perfection that may range from the managed use of social media to the perfectly timed, delicately honed and inspiring speech of the statesman but always executed to develop excellence in its primary disciplines.

Public relations is an important part of human culture. Public Relations is among the great professions.

It is not spin, it is not propaganda and it is not publicity. As I shall explain, it cannot be. The late 20th century definitions (notably evident in Wikipedia) are as dated and unreliable (and as costly) as the invention of Cold Fusion.

Equally, as we shall discover it is also not some form of fluffy, goody, all-things-to-all-men activity. It is hard and uncompromising as a discipline, profession and practice.

In defining public relations I am attracted to Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the 19th Century anthropologist. His words, slightly modified, head this blog. He is considered by many to be a founding figure of the science of social anthropology, and his scholarly works are seen as important and lasting contributions.

Culture

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
 http://bit.ly/AvGKtX

In 1874, he described culture as: 

"Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

We are well aware of the ideas of culture in politics, religion, economics and much more and Smircich suggests that that 'culture is something an organization has', rather than 'something an organization is'. I argue that it is the nature of the organisation's relationships that offer its cultural credentials, a Public Relations responsibility.

Here we also have a sense of a person or citizen as being essential to the idea of culture and organisational culture.

In Public Relations we seek the elements of a public or citizen collectively and, with the advent of Big Data management, ever more evolving towards the individual having relationships with organisations.

Organisations are slippery things. Is a group of people spontaneously dancing or rioting in a street 'an organisation'? At what point do they coalesce into an organisation? There is, never-the-less an element of organisation which we all recognise. Organisations are all 'managed' to a greater or lesser degree. Public Relations acts for organisations in a management role and, as in the case of the street paryy or riot, as a very early stage in its nascent development. Organisations need PR before most other disciplines.

In 2006, I defined the nature of relationships and a definition of organisations as the nexus of relationships. It concerned the significance of shared values being the nature of relationships. Values are held and, significantly, are expressed in semiotics (artefact) and language.

Hodder's view is of artefacts not as objectifications of culture but as culture itself. It is, he proposed 'a fluid semiotic version (sign) of the traditional culture concept in which material items, artefacts, are full participants in the creation, deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic complexes'. The work of the practitioner in the form of outputs is, thereby of the organisations culture in its own right. 

Long before the advent of the internet and social media, there was a framework to aid our modern understanding of society. What we write in a blog or press release, Hodder suggests, is the culture of as well as being a manifestation of a corporate culture. The practice of Public Relations is cultural.

Behaviour  

Of course, artefacts  (ancient shard or Pinterest image are artefacts too) are a manifestation of human behaviour. As an animal, humans have behaviours that are common to the genre. There are compelling drivers such as the need to sustain the species. Humans evaluate the acceptability of behavior using social norms and regulate behavior by means of social control. 

The behaviours of organisations including the manifestation of the intellectual properties associated with objects such as product, service, activity, and management offer signs. The offering of signs is a behaviour explicating culture. 

The act of presenting an organisation, its objects and its social norms, its behaviour, is a Public Relations activity.

Communication

This introduces the elements of objects, writing and means of expression as wide as Twitter and ancient tablets. Communication, from the tablet with beer allocations – a good 5,000 years old, the development of alphabets, Gutenberg press and the introduction of the World Wide Web, the fourth communication revolution,  offer the expert practitioner the tools by which an organisation can express its behaviours.

We call it communication. 

In PR, there is a wealth (over abundance?) of literature concerning the use and application of communication in PR practice. I need not take it further here.

Optimise v Maximise

The connection between culture and language has been noted as far back as the classical period. The ancient Greeks, for example, distinguished between civilized peoples and bárbaros "those who babble", i.e. those who speak unintelligible languages.

Much is made of the fundamental rules that govern the act of agentry. The office, duties or activities of an agent is to be authorised to enact or exert power to produce an effect. Like many other roles, agentry is important in public relations but is different to many other areas of management. In, for example, marketing, there is an impulsion to maximise effect. In banking it may be to maximise profit. In Public Relations there is a different role. It is to optimise effect. In maximisation there is a compulsion to achieve at any cost and for many roles such impulsion is critical. For survival and to create environments in which roles can focus on maximisation, there is a need to optimise effect. To make optimal and get the most out of any situation also gives hope and succour for the future. Thus, public relations is empowered to create an environment in which a marketer might maximise sales, and employee might enhance productivity or a finance director might increase shareholder value or yield.

Optimisation is, of its nature more complex that maximisation. For example, to find the way to drive the car so as to minimize its fuel consumption, given that it must complete a given course in a time not exceeding some amount (optimise fuel consumption), is much more complicated that driving as fast as possible to reach a destination. Public Relations is complicated.

Ethics

Jeremy Bentham
 -http://bit.ly/z6BH7u

Optimisation of relationships in cultural, behavioural, communication and social interaction brings with it a need to understand cultural rules. The rules which are known to us in the form of ethics. Ethical interaction is not as easy as many would make out.

Is the practitioner the moral agent and driving force for ethical behaviour? Does Public Relations set out to make people happy? If so whom? Is it possible to be so wise as to bring virtue and thereby happines to all citizens as Aristotle might wish? Is an approach to ethics that which determines goodness or rightness from examining acts, or intentions in adherence to rules? Is keeping to the rules ethical as Kant would have it? Is the moral worth of an action determined only by its resulting outcome or by its delivery of the greatest good for the largest number as Jeremy Benthham proposed?  Ethics is not easy but is something which is at the core of Public Relations.

Interaction

"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is
either beneath our notice or more than human.”

 Aristotle would be amazed to know that mankind keeps confirming his view.


Neuroscientists have identified brain structures, called mirror neurons, that seem to have no other goal
than improving our awareness of others, whether this means to share their feelings or to learn through
imitation.

http://bit.ly/xq6Wzl

Humans crave interaction.


Biologists and physiologists have shown that our ears are tuned to human voices more than to any other sound, that the only facial muscles present in every human being (the others can be absent) are those we use to communicate the six basic emotions and, more generally, that evolution has shaped our body and senses around social contacts. Furthermore, human sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) have shown how social interactions dominate our perception of the world and shape our daily behaviour by attaching social meaning to acts as simple and spontaneous as
gestures, facial expressions, intonations, etc.

Interaction is a critical part of optimising relationships. Corporate interaction is a manifestation of Public Relations.

Conclusion

Public Relations is not a nice and simple end career for worn out journalists or politician  chucked out at the last election. It is not the career answer for a degree in communications studies or philosophy. It even goes beyond the latest forms communication. 

It is all of those careers and studies and is then much more complex.

Public Relations practice is the act of an agent authorised to enact or exert power to produce a Public Relations effect.

These are the compelling ideas behind my definition and which is why "Public Relations is among the great professions".

References:


Hodder, I. 1986 Reading the past: current approaches to interpretation in archaeology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Phillips, D. 2006 Towards relationship management: Public relations at the core of organisational development Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 10 Iss: 2, pp.211 - 226
Smircich, L. 1983. 'Concepts of culture and organizational analysis' Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (3): 339-58.
Tylor, E.B. 1874. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. Available from Gordon Press (1974) ISBN-10: 0879680911
G. Rizzolatti and L. Craighero, “The mirror-neuron system,”Annual Reviews of Neuroscience, vol. 27, pp. 169–192, 2004.
M. Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. Picador, 2009.
C. Frith and U. Frith, “Social cognition in humans,” Current Biology, vol. 17, no. 16, pp. 724–732, 2007Tablet with Beer allocations http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/TnAQ0B8bQkSJzKZFWo6F-g

Alessandro Vinciarelli, Maja Pantic, Dirk Heylen, Catherine Pelachaud, Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico and Marc Schroder  "Bridging the Gap Between Social Animal and Unsocial Machine: A Survey of Social Signal Processing"  IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AFFECTIVE COMPUTING http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~vincia/papers/taffc-survey.pdf accessed March 2012

Investor Relations takes an age

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

IR Web report made this comment last month

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

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

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

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

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

Financial sector summary

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

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

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

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

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