The segmentation rules for Public Relations

Has the internet made public relations too complicated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a form of segmentation this is a powerful capability.

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

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

We used:

uk black leather cheap for sale red large ladies womens designer

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measuring Reputation - a day in the life of Starbucks

In a post in Google+ I have made a point that the internet (not just social media) shows how, in an age of wider transparency and at a time when mining Big Data is getting easier, corporate governance is coming under closer scrutiny.

Here, I show measurable effects on reputation, SEO, social media budgets and financial PR.

Today, Starbucks is in the news for its tax avoidance policies which have collected opprobrium in social media the press and, today, from a Parliamentarians.

Sky reported it thus:

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee criticised the companies for the "unconvincing and, in some cases, evasive" evidence they gave on why their corporation tax payments are so low.

Starbucks told the committee it had made a loss for 14 of the 15 years it has operated in the UK, a claim the committee said it found "difficult to believe".

In my G+ post, I noted

The new rules of corporate governance have arrived.The ability of the public and politicians to both look closely at organisations (both have transparency tools at their disposal) means that ethical judgements are made by both groups to question corporate governance......

This is an example of Big Data analysis (search numbers) in action. We shall see much more of this as the norm going forward.

The tiny bump in Google search today is interesting. It shows search for the Starbucks tax issue of the order of 5%.

When interest in a subject is this big, it has an impact elsewhere on the organisation too.

Starbucks has a big internet presence in the UK, much more than most organisations. In search terms it sits between Pepsi and Waitrose. The work done in SEO and social media is a significant marketing investment which is being blown off course by this issue.

Indeed, semantically (using Google's Keyword Tool) , Starbucks is now associated with these semantic concepts: "tax, avoidance and green".

This semantic association affects search results.

In addition these impacts feed into Big Data analysis among a number of financial trading houses.

This means that these is now a lot of work that needs to be done on the NY stock exchange.

What we see here is the fallout from a corporate governance issues.

Here then is the dilemma. Ethically, the company has to satisfy the demands of shareholders. At the same time it is under pressure to compromise with constituents online, in the press and among parliamentarians.

Is this a case of the ethical imperative being the long term interest of the shareholder? This may mean, the company does not need such agressive tax avoidance policies and can thus protect reputation.  If so, where lies automated trading and a long history of tax management.

Do organisation now have to look at optimal management to ballance the many interests of so many well informed constituencies?

The Lisbon Theory ... more

There is an urgent need for a strategic analysis of what is really needed across all the PR disciplines. The threat is significant and most practitioner are blithely unaware they are under fire as the PR institutions play the fiddle.

Now we can describe the nature of public relations  it gets much easier to do a wide range of things like predict the future of PR.

The great value of the Lisbon Theory is that it can be evaluated in so many ways. We can identify perspectives, they are a set of values. We can find values evident in people's use of the internet through the application of search data and semantics.

We can identify relationships by seeking out common values between people and discover that people with common values create groups, form relationships and motivate each other. Better than that we can quickly and easily find the proof we need to show how precise our research is.

The struggle to be able to evaluate PR is now part of its Lisbon Theory description and it is not hard.

PR Practitioners

• Observe  events from the value perspective of many constituencies, organisations and cultures
• Undertake activity that compliment the value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Identify future, present or past extent of effects of activity on value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Measure objectives or objects from value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures
• This is how they establish change or variance in the significance of values.

With this capability, it is going to be interesting to look at the future of PR. It is quite disturbing.

In particular and using the Lisbon Theory, I will consider three areas of practice:

• Media relations
• Corporate affairs
• Public affairs

Media relations

From the perspective (v) of marketing directors (n) to what extent (e) is a 50% cut in newspaper readership (o) significant (s)?

The chart in the middle is the one to watch. It shows consumption of the raw material of newspapers, newsprint.

The trend is down.

It is easy to imagine this is because of the internet but this is not exclusively the case. Advertising drift and other factors have also contributed.

In the meantime we note that the internet is a distraction because people use the internet when they consume other media output and they use internet platforms to access content, and in particular, news.

The internet, has become pervasive in the news business. Online news has escaped the PC and Laptop and is now read on tablets and mobiles. It is now common to watch iPlayer and similar channels to follow TV output and there are now a number of new 'TV' competitors emerging. Google+ is begining to look more like news TV than many expected and YouTube channels are becoming ever more popular (the BBC has half a million viewers). The White House Channel is a 'TV news station' in  its own right. We can expect many more such News Channels. TV is strong but...

Newspapers have some really good radio stations and there are many ways that online radio is bundled. Not threatened yet but soon we will see TV and radio dependant on third party internet delivered content.

When we come to print, the story is not so good.

British newspaper circulations are among the worst performers in Europe, according to industry analyst and consultant Jim Chisholm.

They have plunged by 20% over the last five years, compared with a European average of 12%. During the past five years UK nationals declined by 16% against a European norm of 13%, while regionals declined by 29% against a norm of 12%.

It is important to note from this Guardian analysis that there are MORE THAN  50% of readers coming from the internet. Newspapers and magazines now depend on the interest for more than half of their readership.

In France, but Brazil was way ahead, there is a move to prevent Google from indexing news sites and or preventing Google adding content on its Google News service unless the search Giant pays. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of the traffic on French news sites comes from Google’s links (much less than in the UK). There are murmurings of a European wide ban.

In the UK that would just about halve the number of people seeing the news in newspapers and magazines.

What has to be the PR media relations response?

• Traditional content is also published online. It is therefor importnat to offer content for the online editions.

• The traditional media is fighting a rear-guard action. This means PR needs new ways to get to value partners.

• There are alternatives to the old model in every case – the tipping point is getting very close (TV, Radio, Print).

• If linking to newspaper content by Google is prohibited, the media relations part of the PR industry will need a new model very fast because the reach of print alone is far too small for the investment needed to get coverage. PR needs to prepare for some quite alarming scenarios. At present much of the industry is predicated on a very sickly one trick pony.

• It is possible for the PR industry to create its own hybrid media concoction but one suspects there will be other entities in this space soon as well.

• The bottom line – the traditional media relations model is broken and we need a new one.

The future of media relations is pretty poor. Without online initiatives (and that means much more than just Facebook and Twitter), there will be severe financial pressure on the agencies. It could be less then a year if the French prevail but a continuing 20% attrition as in the last ten years, straight line decline will kill off media relations as we know it by 2030.

Corporate Affairs

From the perspective (v) of Board Directors (n) to what extent (e) are corporate values (o) recognised assets (s)?

For a very long time, the corporate affairs practitioners were pretty sure that this 'internet thing' would not affects their realm of cosy one on one relationships.

As it turns out there is a lot going on that affects corporate affairs.

Of course we start with the watchers of corporate activities. Almost anyone can take a view of almost any company based on its online presence.

It is the nature of internet transparency, and porosity, which makes almost all corporate activity accessible to the networked digital community. In addition, such opacity is served by third parties from Corporate Watch to Safe Call. There are videos and stories a plenty.

As more online monitoring migrates to semantic driven indexing, organisations become more vulnerable because it is easy to look for content relating to obscure subjects in semantic relationship with an organisation. 

Much of this affects corporate brand.

An analysis of 50,000 US consumers has found that when positive brand equity and positive corporate reputation were combined the effects are even more positive than the individual power of each. It seems that there is a multiplier effect as the nexus of corporate and brand values complement each other. 

After the Sandy storm, even Apple is giving to the Big Apple. The tech giant is giving generously to New York City. It helps deliver corporate brand values to consumers who are able, in a networked society, to  cross-over from consumer to corporate values and identify with or reject them. The same was found, if not expressed in such terms by the Cambridge Forum 2012 Reputation in and Age of Protest.  No more has to be said about BBC Newsnight amateurism,  the relevance and cross-over between corporate deeds and miss-deeds, corporate brand and consumer brand values is evident to the networked world and people react .

The simple truth is that Corporate Affairs now has a role explicating the organisation's values where the network carries its values across what once would have been stakeholders or publics but which now are networked people with common semantic interests in the organisation which are also reflected in their personal values.

What does PR have to do?

• PR has to understated how to discover and  manage the  value of corporate reputation and brand values.
• It has to be able to make the case to the dominant coalition and invest in both protection as well as promotion.
• Progressively, the PR industry has to learn to manage issues and crisis. Practitioners have to read the chapter in Online Public Relations and then implement it.
• Monitoring has to be much more aggressive and competent.

Public Affairs

From the perspective (v) of politicians (n) to what extent (e) are ill briefed lobbyists (o) of interest (s)?

The public affairs part of the PR industry is now facing its biggest change since 1945.

Ordinary citizens are now as well briefed as Ministers of State, the nature of internet transparency and porosity has blown the whistle on relationships between organisations and politicians that are too cosy and there is no shortage of material for briefing and counter briefing politicians and their staff.

Internet aided briefing is now commonly available. News of battles in far off places is instantly at the disposal of Hilary Clinton and Clinton Hilary. Street by street flooding reports, electricity supply and emergency food stations are available to the world in the middle of a hurricane. Where public tenders are available and even deeply hidden is now there for you to see now. You can even watch the rockets landing in real time in the Middle East by satellite and from your own home. For politician, the role of social media in their future career is patently obvious.

To imagine that a lobbyist can attempt to change the view of a politician without a profound capability to seek out the latest and best online knowledge is not realistic. For the political campaigner to under-rate social media, is suicide.

From every perspective, Public Relations has to embrace the internet.

It is not just 'Social Media' but everything that the internet has to offer.

Its professional bodies have some training available. Few universities contribute and all the time the future of the old forms of PR practice get close to the precipice of irrelevance. 

There is an urgent need for a strategic analysis of what is really needed across all the PR disciplines. The threat is significant and most practitioner are blithely unaware they are under fire as the PR institutions play the fiddle.

From the perspective (v) of PR practitioners (n) to what extent (e)are the professional associations (o) protecting their interests (s)?

Well, this is it:

Online Trends and the Lisbon Theory

This post is about the Lisbon Theory.


It provides the basis for next generation public relations.

It is a form of PR predicated on the perspective of a person or (online) community perspective.
Its basic building block, values, are evident in the semantic web at all its intersections and it forms the basis for all public relations subject to digitally networked communication.

This is the background to it and its application.


For a very long time, I have been struggling with a concept of PR that would bring PR theory into line with what I know of the internet. For publications about online PR such as Share This Too there is a need for a theoretical framework to hold so much apparently new practice together. It needs a coherent structure because it seems to challenge everything that PR stood for in the 20th century.

In three books, I too have challenged the orthodoxy of academia and PR teaching. Some has stuck (Transparency, Porosity, Agency, Richness and Reach is now commonly taught) but much has not.

About three weeks ago I had one of those moments when a lot of thinking came together.

It goes back to some work I did on tokens and values in which we identify people and organisation as the nexus of values; the work of Bruno Amaral who showed that people cluster round commonly held values (an empirical study); Thoughts about wealth being based on relationships; my contribution to the Global Alliance Melbourne Mandate to help define organisational character and much more.

In each case, I have been looking at the values that people subscribe to at a moment in time. For the most part, we are looking at values that are established from the perspective of the individual.

In an era of mass-media dilution, communication has a higher and growing dependency on network communication as a mechanism to introduce individuals to the story of the hour. It is this development that is the evolving and critical element that PR theory has to address most urgently. We need to see why and how values (some of them being no more than a hyperlink) spread in networks and how this is different to mass media 'communication'.

Mass media messages go in one direction. Network media is all over the place. We need to be able to track where the messages are coming from and going to.

From this need for perspectives drawn from individuals we can sum up the new form of PR practice more precisely.

PR Practitioners

• Observe  events from the value perspective of many constituencies, organisations and cultures
• Undertake activity that compliment the value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Identify future, present or past extent of effects of activity on value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures 
• Measure objectives or objects from value perspectives of constituencies, organisations and cultures
• This is how they establish change or variance in the significance of values.

We could reduce this to an explanation as simple as:

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

  In application, one might evaluate PR activities thus

• From the perspective of the citizen, to what extent is democracy valuable?
• From the perspective of the organisation, to what extent is the threat of new competition significant to its future?
• From the perspective of the marketing director, to what extent is public relations a contributor to sales?

In fact, we can use this concept to evaluate almost everything in PR and, and, more boldly, management.

Now, I guess, its time to test the theory and especially look for that secret ingredient the values of the constituency.

We need a method for identifying the perspective of constituents. Fortunately one is ready to hand. It is the application of semantics as practiced by Google. 

Perspective are a nexus of values. To find the nexus of values, it is possible to use a practice that will also reveal a lot more that is useful to PR practitioners. 

Perhaps its time to do a simple thing. The sort of thing any practitioner might need to do.

Identify the platforms and channels one might seek for a client who makes designer handbags! 

Well, someone does.









Yes, people will look for images of handbags.

Pinterest (and this is where it is possible to get basic 'reach' data from Alexa) and Google Images are both going to be key media.

Both have a presence before more readers than one might expect from a double page spread in a popular magazine. In addition, they provide a service for the consumer at the time most relevant to the consumer interest. Against this competition, the press is not going to do well unless, of course, it gets its content and its pictures online and circulating.

In fact, a quick scan of the media landscape shows that there is a huge readership seeking more information and interaction concerning designer handbags.



Not much in traditional media but we can easily see one Facebook commentator has a following of 36,000.

Perhaps that is the place to go to share our enthusiasm for designer handbags.

But what we really need to do is to find out where there is an on-line 'Community Perspective'

We can do this by looking for the values people associate with 'Handbags'.

People tell us what values are important to them by using such words when they search using Google, Bing or Yahoo and in the pages they look at online where we can extract the semantic concepts most evident on the page.

One way of doing this is to use the latent semantic indexing which forms the core of Google's Adwords.

Here are the results of an experiment I did  last week:

I went to Google Adwords and searched for the term 'designer handbag'.

Associated with the word 'handbag' Google found just what we were looking for. The keyword concept values most important to UK citizens in November 2012.



At the time I did this experiment a number of handbag retailers came up as concept words and, of course the word  handbag. I eliminated them and was left with the following words:

"organiser, hooks, designer, black, patent, charms and navy".

One would not expect any such words to be much help in finding designer handbag web sites. What in the world would 'navy, add to the search.

Well, it is what some people associate with handbags. In fact, if you were to try the experiment now sometime after the initial experiment, you will find that Google will take you to handbag sites as if it was reading your mind (gradually this ability will decay as people favour other values associated with handbags). The key words evident in the search terms used by people take them to the semantic construct which means 'handbag'. We have tapped into the values that people associate with handbags.


Using this idea, we can use it to do what a lot of people in PR find really hard to do.
We can make online lists of the web sites that are most relevant to the interests of our key constituents.

We can explore top social media sites such as Wordpress, Blogger, Twitter and even Facebook to find key opinion formers and enthusiasts.

(Try using the search syntax organiser hooks designer black patent charms navy site:facebook.com and you will get to the media you really want to get to - you can dilute it a but by adding 'handbag' in your search)



What is evident is that the technologies we are deploying (based on semantics) provides us with this new type of constituency segment:  ‘community perspective’ segment. 

It is sensitive to the values of the people who are engaging at the time and it is sensitive to the values in on-line and offline conversations of the minute.

Not publics, not stakeholders, not socio-economic and cultural demographics but people with a community perspective expressed in some words they have in common.

This constituency does not have to be very engaged but does have similar values:

• The big issue is often remote from the values common between the individual and audience

• There is no segmentation in messaging ‘everyone can see everything’

• 'Publics' of one, and in this instant only, is now common.

• A 'public' of millions is meaningless. It is no longer an realistic PR, advertising, or marketing promotion option.

Now for another experiment.

The practitioner needs to be able to find the semantic concepts in corporate content. The tools are available and more keep coming.

In this experiment, I parsed the content of a Stuart Bruce posting on his blog to see what proper noun semantic concepts emerged. The post was about Share This Too. Semantically, four people figured strongly.

The result was and entity map for this web page

(as an aside and for Philip Sheldrake and similar enthusiasts for semantic data analysis, this form of semantic analysis - which I built last year and is available here - gives you RDF triples)



Delving into what people contribute online (and because there is so much of it, it is called Big Data) means we can get very helpful insights into the intentions of constituents. Indeed, this is what GCHQ does and so too can PR practitioners.

From the foregoing, it is possible to claim that a theory based on perspectives in Public Relations are key.

As we will see in my next post, the days described by Will McInnes in  Culture Shock  and brought to us by Stephen Waddington,  are not just being pushed aside, the very nature of PR under severe threat.

For the big consultancies it is not business as usual but with 'digital attached'. It is now possible to discover what is really motivating people even when your organisation is tiny and in a very niche market. The most humble PR agency can now compete with the biggest and brashest.

Practitioners now have keys that take them to the big time. It is driven by social media and understood with semantics and most people call that 'Google'.

All those years of work proving the validity of opinion research are being swept to one side.

For example, one can ask communities questions as part of research into values and views.



Online polling has been a great success and now can claim to be among the best available. Google Surveys, came out top during the US Presidential election.

What is really significant here is that the average practitioner has mass polling available at a cost that would have been the preserve of the big research organisations only two years ago.

Now we need to look at the other part of the communication story.

The Platforms.

Mass media thinking and theories are now challenged. The range of media is considerable. Content is distributed by databases and algorithms aided in a big way by people recommending content to friends, family and colleagues. This means that the 'network effect', the multi path route to your Twitter account, Facebook or G+ page and into the email inbox now reigns over the printing press and even the TV station.

Mass-media theory now has to content with this growing dependency on network communication.

Throwing away newspapers as a channel is not (yet) sensible but it is important to examine the new platforms.

For a number of years the internet has been trying to escape from the PD and laptop. It's done it!



From Newspapers to running shoes, data is being used to create messages which is distributed on and offline with nothing in between.

Games consoles, TV sets used to play YouTube videos and touch screens that we all take to bed and call 'phones'!



Dresses that display Tweets and glasses that provide virtual reality not so novel any-more. In fact Monmouthpedia is just a PR application of the Internet of Things.

In the next post we will look at what the future really looks like but here and now I have shown that the old models and old theories of PR practice are under pressure.

I posit that all the historical theoretical concepts that affect PR have been shaken if not stirred in the last few yeas.

A new theory is emerging based on the idea that the perspectives of people evident in their values. These are evident in what they are interested in and look for and are made available to the practitioner by application of Big Data semantic applications.

Historic segmentation theories such as Grunig and Hunt's publics, Freedman's stakeholders and the marketing approach of social and economic demographic segmentation models need to be re-cast to accommodate the new reality.


This new theory based round the 'perspectives of people' has been through a mincer of thinking and research  at Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon including academics running the Online PR Masters,  Nuno da Silva Jorge and Bruno Amaral and a host of enthusiastic Masters students. We called it the Lisbon Theory. 
It  is very new and had to be developed because so much of the 20th century theorising was showing signs of stress.


Most notably, we now have considerable evidence of people commenting about organisations and brands with little of no reference to the organisation or brand (often no experience at all). They are part of an eco system of brand values that are not much influenced by organisations but are (often if only by sheer numbers) influential. 

Organisations, in many instances have lost control of the brand. It is owned by what can be regarded as the community perspective.

The Lisbon Theory also gives us a really clear view into how PR will have to develop in the coming months.





References
David Phillips, (2006) "Towards relationship management: Public relations at the core of organisational development", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 10 Iss: 2, pp.211 - 226
Amaral, B. (2009) "A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs." Bledcom http://www.bledcom.com/about_bledcom/research/2009.

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.