What is in a 'LinkedIn' brand

The news that LinkedIn is opening its doors to 14 year olds is odd.

Techcrunch has made fun of it, but I wonder if that applies to us all?

Over the last few years, I have found this service useful. It has the advantage of allowing users to be selective and to manage contacts easily.

The thought of hoards of teens wanting to build networks with a business community is daunting but the critical issue is whether such a facility devalues the LinkedIn brand.

I think it does and the Techcrunch imagery shows why.

For sure, LinkedIn will now need to have the equivalent of Google Circles to allow those of us who use the service to coral our stakeholders - or perhaps we will just have to migrate to G+

Meantime, as the BBC is suggesting, there are other issues that will make life tough for the web service. It is one thing curating a web site and communications network for adults and mostly business people but, as Ask.fm has found out, it is another dimention of management again to curate for the whole population.

Some of us are working on automated curation for such services but we are some way off a perfected capability.

The value of a 'Like'

The apple tree outside my office
in full bloom and depending on
collaboration to prosper

In setting out the PR strategy for an organisation, the practitioner will want to be sure that the dominant coalition is fully cognisant of the commercial value of community and internal as well as external interactivity. Internal and external social networks make money and make organisations more efficient.

Recent research by McKinsey showed that levels of collaboration predict commercial success and outcomes.

The evidence came, not from business, but the US intelligence services.

The research team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.

Then they identified what they thought was a comprehensive list of factors that drive a unit’s effectiveness—only to discover, that the most important factor wasn’t on their list.

The critical factor wasn’t having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn’t having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.

Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues. These contributions helped analysts question their own assumptions, fill gaps in their knowledge, gain access to novel perspectives, and recognize patterns in seemingly disconnected threads of information. The converse was true. Low interaction gave low yields.  Just knowing the amount of help-giving that occurred allowed the Harvard researchers to predict the effectiveness rank of nearly every unit accurately.

Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.
Across these diverse contexts, organizations benefit when employees freely contribute their knowledge and skills to others[i].

In attempting to find what was so efficacious in social media, a huge number of people have analysed massive amounts of data to discover what the value of a Facebook Like, a re-Tweet  or re pinned Pinterest photo was worth. What is staring us in the face is that it is the interaction that is the value not the action.

When people invest extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their online community, they presage a higher value constellation than communities that are shy and retiring. It would seem that in such active communities that there is a greater propensity to be part of the winning social group.

One of the greatest wealth creators through history is the internet. It was, and is, hugely collaborative.

In his book The future of Internet Jonathan Zittrain  makes these points:

“The design of the Internet reflected not only the financial constraints of its creators, but also their motives. They had little concern for controlling the network or its users’ behaviour(page 33)

“The network’s design was publicly available and freely shared from the earliest moments of its development.” (page. 28)[ii]

Being social and sharing, seems to be a great way to stimulate wealth creation and by taking such ideas to the dominant coalition, the practitioner underpins proposals that include the use of organisational collaboration across constituencies (internal and external), embracing Big Data and the Internet of Things (which spook most managers), adoption of social media and dynamic communication in the big bag of PR tactics that will be used from time to time.

Taking the organisation along such a path offers greater long term rewards for all.

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[i] Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture. McKinsey Quarterly April 2013 http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/givers_take_all_the_hidden_dimension_of_corporate_culture May 2013

[ii] Johnathan L. Zittrain 2008 The Future of Internet USA: Caravan Books, 2008 (e-book downloadable from jz.com) http://adam-hazdra.webz.cz/download/zittrain_future.pdf

People cluster round values - is this 'Publics'?

I used the MIT analysis engine on one of my email accounts to test the Lisbon Theory in the medium of email.

Such fun!

As you can see there are six distinct clusters of people who contact me and who I contact.

In addition, we can see that they are also connected to each other (by including each other in CC and BCC mail services and because I do the same.

Here we see the Lisbon Theory at work in a real live and replicable process that anyone can use.

The result for every example is one that shows networks being formed as part of the process of relationship building through the exchange of values.

This shows how we can use Big Data for effective relationship (and yes - yawn - reputation) building.

It is a further validation of the work of Bruno Amaral published at Bled in 2009 and the conceptual process published in 2006.

I guess, Philip Young and I will have to find space for this in the next edition of Online Public Relations 

It is not that such thinking is new. There are other examples which could benefit from some PR academic rigour, should PR academia want to take an interest in network relationships.

The BBC discovers Transparency, Porosity and Agency

Gordon Corera has a article on cyber attacks on BBC and a programme  tonight. He will show a small part of the effects of Transparency, Pourosity and Agency, the long held mantra of good online PR strategists.

For 15 years the PR industry has known about these core elements for modern management. He has just discovered them (but not for tonight's programme). 

For the benefits of top journalists these are the five key elements:

1. Organisations have to become more transparent to compete.
2. Organisation are more porous and leak more information as the internet matures.
3. The internet acts and an agent and, as both a facilitator for humans to do stuff and as technologies in its own right can change information and understanding of information.
4. The internet delivers rich and progressively richer content.
5. The internet has huge reach and is gaining more reach all the time (not just people but things too).

I have expressed this in three (soon to be four) books; as part of the (published) PR industry Internet Commission 1999/2001 With Prof Anne Gregory  Mark Adams etc; in dozens of lectures and academic papers.

And, now, Shock Horror, the BBC has found out and, Shock Horror in spades, at GCHQ! Worse than that, Gordon Corera has a distinguished career and has dealt with security since 2004.

I welcome the fact that the BBC is raising some of the issues that organisations face now that the internet has such reach. It is a pity that it has taken senior journalists in the business such a long time to find out what has been evident to the leading internet thinkers for the last decade-and-a-half and it has to be regretted that he is being so dramatic about it.

The fact is that the principles laid down by the Public Relations industry 15 years ago, were and are profound. Most senior practitioners who keep up to date will already have informed senior management of the threats as well as the opportunities.

Those that have not can catch up quite quickly by reading Online Public Relations. In the next edition due next year, Philip Young and I describe in some detail what happens next and suggest that, strategically, it is by no means all about Social Media.

Evident from what we learn from the BBC and from Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT and president of the CBI that "These threats are real, they're sophisticated, they do financial and reputational damage."  This is not an issue PR can lay aside. 

Of course, research is suggesting that there is a generation of public relations managers who have a problem. A big problem!

In PR, we knew that in the last century. The key is what has been done about it.

Reflecting on the evolution of Public Relations

A deer in the garden
helps one reflect on the
important things in life.

The Public Relation profession encompasses many spheres of activity. 

For the most part they have in common elements associated with relationships between organizations and people. PR is a discipline encompassing semiotics applied to attitudinal and behavioral changes. 

In internet applications it has to extend beyond semiosis because the practitioner can use a range of platforms and channels as well as the internet of Things and Big Data to make internet technologies do things.

There is now a big element of PR surrounding the concept of who or what is initiating and delivering content and activity in a communications web.  A word spoken or a sentence written by a practitioner can have the effect of making a machine start on the other side of the world without any other human intervention.

Knowing how this can be achieved is part of the range of practices that the profession has to consider for its members.

In this regards, Public Relations becomes more like medical practice with specialists supporting general practice or facilities supporting specialists.

Where once there could be elements of specialization which did not much need to heed the overarching  principles of the profession, the progress of the internet is changing that. In addition, the strategies and tactics of all the elements, and the nature of modern communication (for example its fast changing nature) now require an evolved profession.

Thus, in addition to the other overarching requirements of this profession (for example ethics, informed multi-culturalism, multi-ethnic  competencies  etc), there is a need to have a broad knowledge of internet influences and the probability of knowledge in specialist areas (such as social media, search,  SEO etc.) to be professionally competent in 2013.

This was not the case at the turn of the century. Today it is essential and indicates the fast changing nature of practice.

This means that Public Relations practitioners have to be flexible in their approach and the capabilities needed to be effective. 

Defining Public Relations

It is amazing what clarity your mind has when walking through woodland above the Vale of Pewsey, where this photograph was taken.

Business and Marketing have rolls that are well described by Peter Drucker. He wrote: "Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only these two – basis functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs”. “ Marketing,” he says “ is the distinguishing, unique function of the business. A business is set apart from all other human organisations by the fact that it markets a product or service...”[i]

This neatly places public relations as a cost. It is an essential cost of doing business and an essential cost that we learned from the evolution of the semantic web. Of course, public relations extends to many other areas of life beyond business and yet its role remains constant.

With our new knowledge about semantic concepts and their synergy as values, (and here we use values in way described by Phillips^[ii] (2006) Amaral and Phillips^[iii] (2009) where values of the individual, group, organisation or representation of an intelectual property are percived in terms of a grouping of values into tokens that are specific and  are recognisable by people) the Public Relations practitioner can now use semantics to identify an approximation to organisational and constituent values.  

Public Relations is the care taker of corporate, product, brand and organisational tokens being the nexus of values recognisable by constituents. The relationship between the dominant coalition and all other constituents is wholly dependent on public relations as the guardian of organisational values, interpretation of tokens and their role in building, sustaining and maintaining (in the culture of many PR practitioners ‘managing reputation’) relationships.

This capability extends beyond business to every form of organisation and social construct.

Because Public Relations has the concern for internal and external constituencies, it is public relations, and only public relations, that has this essential role as an organisational discipline.

Without public relations, we are discovering from research we can conduct using the internet, there can be no organisations without public relations.

Extract from ‘Towards Relationship Management’ JCM 2006

”For example, you recognise a rose as a plant, and flower and also recognise it as a social token associated with romance etc. The rose is the token, its description and associations are values.

“We know that people associate different values with tokens. A rose grower may have a completely different set of values for a rose compared to a love-lorn student.

“Where two people recognise tokens and also have the same or similar values for the token, they are attracted to each other and, as for people so too for organisations and people and organisations.”

http://leverwealth.blogspot.co.uk/2006/06/thought-on-values-and-relationships.html

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[i] Druker, P. 1999 Management pp 57 Routledge.

[ii] David Phillips, (2006) "Relationships are the core value for organisations: A practitioner perspective", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 11 Iss: 1, pp.34 - 42

[iii] Amaral, B and Phillips, D. 2009 A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of  relationship building in blogs http://www.bledcom.com/_files/169/A-proof-of-concept-for-automated-discourse-analysis-in-support-of-identification-of-relationship-building-in-blogs.pdf accessed May 2013.

Time to Make the Universities Honest

I have been noticing courses being advertised by universities claiming to offer 'Public Relations' when it is obvious that they can offer nothing of the sort.

For example:

Marketing, Advertising and Communications
This programme is designed to equip you for a career as a marketing communications specialist in a creative agency or client firm. You’ll gain an indepth understanding of how marketing communications influence society and individuals, developing your talents in areas such as persuasive advertising, e-marketing and public relations.

This description was taken from a four years Honours degree and with the best will in the world, the ability to learn about Marketing, Advertising, Communication, Creativity, Agency Practices, Persuasion, e-marketing (whatever that encompases) and Public Relations is just impossible. It is too much to learn in the time available.

For example, where in this syllabus is the student to learn about the cultural, political, economic and social relevance of reputation? Is this going to include a study of the literature of cultures in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society; psyphology, representation of the people and government including local, regional, national and supra national representative politics; macro and micro economics including the corporate finance and investor relations and the nature of society and social interaction? When it comes to e-commerce, which part of the 20% of retailing will the student learn as it grows to be 34% by the time they graduate?

While I personally disagree with this as of any real substance, the Darren Lilleker mantra that political campaigning now comprises informing, mobilizing  harvesting data and interacting would not figure in the majority of courses advertised.  After all, what is the worth of PR as part of the most expensive national election ever?

That part of the Marketing course will also have to be integrated with theory and PR skills education together with a similar amount of work for the other subjects. many of them are part of PR anyway, for example the psychology of persuasion from George and Alfred Tack to social cognitive and affective neuroscience is pretty heavy too.

Of course “Business has only two functions: Marketing and Innovation”  according to Peter Drucker. He had no concept of business Public Relations but a lot of so called public relations is marketed as being part of marketing. Remind me again, how much did BP pay in compensation for the Gulf oil spill? Or, perhaps, how long will the Jimmy Saville slime take to wash off the BBC?

Would marketing courses automatically introduce this paper in a lecture on Corporate Social Responsibility. It says 'Bankers beware - the human brain is unforgiving'. How then, one would ask a student, should the in-house practitioner advise her Board? ).

Of course, these so called graduate courses are full of University Bull Shit.

Not just one University - many of them.

They are designed to deceive vulnerable teenagers. They are not going to teach much about PR.

After all, would you want to employ such a graduate after she has got past her sell by date as Cheap Tweet Labour? What would she know of the world that an ordinary English graduate would not?

Then there is the question as to what a Chartered organisation purporting to represent the practice of Public Relations do about bringing these universities to a realisation of their misrepresentation?

Crowdsourcing a PhD to make it effective for PR

Crowdsourcing is a description of how people cluster round an idea or subject and contribute to its development or encourage others to make a contribution.

Wiki’s are an example of crowdsourceing. Much software is developed as open-source software which can be used by anyone but is developed by enthusiasts for no pay.

InWikipedia, it is described thus: according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Crowdsourcng is by no means new. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing.   In the early 19th century, volunteer readers were assigned books and copied passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips and thus began to index all words in the English. The authors received over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years. It would seem there is a rich seem of potential help in such volunteer communities both on and off line.

Listening to the people who use an organisations' products and services can be invaluable. The responses can produce information that would otherwise be hard to find, and it can also open up topics that the organisation itself might never have considered. 

Taking this a stage further, it is possible, and not uncommon, that the individual responses themselves feed off each other to create new perspectives and insights.

Sometimes crowdsourcing can be instigated by the organisation itself, simply asking a question or soliciting views, but just as importantly, the sentiment can coalesce without direct organisational input, or can be created by an agency with different objectives perhaps even an opponent.

In 2009, Jan Marco Leimeister and fellow researchers published a paper in Journal of Management Information Systems showing that ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing and open innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies. Such collaboration is part of relationship management and thus part of the discipline of Public Relations.

Understanding the crowdsourcing phenomenon from a PR perspective would be a valuable contribution to the practice of PR.

The Cloud - Home of the PR gods

god of thunder by ~zzjimzz

Social Media is a manifestation of Cloud computing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Now for the leap from technicality to Public Relations.

You can create relationships online too?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Semantic Web and PR

Semantic Web Explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resulting in faster and more accurate check-out.

Back to the Web

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

The SemanticWeb is like bar codes for the web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR's Internet of Things

From http://popupcity.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

The anatomy of the internet

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

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

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

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

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

Mind bending Public Relations

You are what you search.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CIPR Presidential Election Debate

Is this the CIPR's view of the internet? 

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

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

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

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

Cloud computing - Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

The Grateful Dead

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

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

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

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

Neuroplasticity

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

The Public Relations Future (tomorrow) is Very Very Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Are we aware?
Are we ready?

A robust internet - your future, is it safe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Solar activity (Not unusual. Sometimes not benign)

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

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

• Physical attacks on infrastructure such as data cable.

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

Centralised services are vulnerable ‘pinch points’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

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