What is PR in 2015? Industry elites offer a view

The road ahead for PR

A number of questions are being asked about Public Relations.
one of them is 'What is the future of Public Relations?"

To be able to answer such a question, we need to know where practice is today.

The Measurement Standard invited a number of people to offer their view of what would be key in 2015.

They talked of the new and developing areas of practice. We have looked at what they said and then used the new PR tools of semantics to identify what they believe as a group. This is what the leaders in the field said:

“Whilst 2014 saw a continued rise in content, 2015 will see more brands embracing different types of content – beyond the written word or static images – that engages and adds value to their audiences.  We will see a growth in multiple forms of content from far shorter and punchier blog posts through to animated videos and even interactive infographics.  Furthermore, there will be much more emphasis on mobile content – brands are starting to see the value of creating content specifically aimed towards mobile users, especially as mobile marketing is growing at a staggering rate with more and more of us reading content on our mobile devices.  Indeed, taking all this further, tailoring content to be unique and specific to different social networks as well as to specific devices should also become a reality too.”

Lilach Bullock

Co Founder, Comms Axis

“Big brands will truly embrace the scale of digital in 2015, with its ability to match or often beat traditional media reach. In realising digital channels can play this big broadcast role they’ll then start exploring what still makes them different & unique – the ability to carefully target different content at subtly different audiences to ensure maximum impact will be chief amongst the answers. For consumers it should mean far more interesting & relevant adverts that build personal connections with brands at scale.”

Jerry Daykin

Global Digital Director at Carat

“The over-arching trend for digital in 2015 will be about ‘joining the dots’. There has been a lot of activity and investment in people, technology, data, tools, content and so on in the last few years. But it needs to work together better. Be that better channel integration, more joined up processes and capabilities, data and systems that work together more intelligently etc. 2015 will be about getting the digital engine firing on all cylinders.”

Ashley Friedlein

President, Centaur Marketing

Founder, Econsultancy

“What I believe will be big in 2015 is the rise of the internal social network.  For years now brands have been developing a presence on external social media, but have been missing the opportunity to allow their own staff to collaborate with each other, breaking down departmental silos and crossing geographies.  The gold in developing a collaborative culture is unlocking the brilliant minds we sit next to every day, along with the network drives and local files of information just waiting to be shared.

In the future, your value to an organisation won’t be what you know, it will be what you share.”

Andrew Grill

Global Partner, Social Business – IBM

Getting smarter about which parts of the ‘grand vision’ digital brands can land as early birds, which customers notice and will appreciate. Value exchange around customer data is a prime example. Brands collect and hoard. Customers complain about low value for the effort. This is a mind-set challenge of thinking outside-in. Not a question of ‘must have’ tech. “You already know tons about me. Use to empathise around my key situations and personalise your responses. Just needs imagination.”

Thus a hot trend for 2015 will be ‘situational empathy’.”

Martin Hill-Wilson

Digital Strategist

Content marketing will be increasingly used by companies that need to intensify their efforts to produce quality, creative, educational, targeted content on a constant basis. More brands will run social ads to amplify and broadcast their content in their attempts to go viral and to reach new audiences. Furthermore, advertising campaigns will become more micro-segmented thanks to broader targeting options. The end of the Facebook Like Gate has sounded the death knell for massive fan recruitment campaigns, which is a very good thing as it will help to build more qualitative communities and to better collect user data. 2015 will also see some brands experiment with social commerce as new features are developed by social platforms. And finally, brands and individuals alike will continue to adapt their websites for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).”

Isabelle Mathieu

Consultant, Trainer, Speaker

Social Media and Web Marketing

“Digital has been a race to innovation and for many marketers that felt late; they have invested madly in Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps and anything, which seems cool and new. In 2014 realisation set it in that this approach wasn’t working effectively – fans are not always really fans.   The sense of purpose and the brand’s values will help marketers to leverage digital as a part of their global strategy.  Data will help them to make better decisions, and understand their customers and audience better.”

Gregory Pouy

“If 2014 has been the year of content creation, 2015 will be the year of content ROI. Continue to build content, but be smart about it. It’s hard to produce quality content in quantity, so think about how anything created can be leveraged and re-purposed. Ditch thinking about social as a free-place market. As with any form of advertising, inventory on social is limited and will go to the highest bidder. Measure the effectiveness of your investment by how your work affects your sales, not just your likes and followers.”

Mobbie Minister

Chief Strategy Officer at We Are Social.

“The biggest theme for me next year is data. More specifically how to harness data-driven insight and marry that with brilliant creativity.

We must ensure that our creative output is enriched by the possibilities of data-driven digital marketing, rather than being diminished by the purely rational, data-only approach.

Success in modern digital marketing requires a blend of data-driven insight and creative flair that produces ideas that are bigger than the sum of their parts.

There will always be room for pure creativity and pure data science, but the most fertile ground for brands in 2015 will likely be in the places they overlap.”

Christian Purser

Chief Digital Officer at M&C Saatchi Group

“2015 will be the year of the creation of value through ‘member engagement’ (brands should drop quantitative KPI to focus on more relevant content and qualitative KPI). It will also be a year of transition as the new rule will be «mobile first, web second» both in terms of content visibility and content accessibility (Facebook apps, etc.).”

Christophe Ramel

Social Media Manager (acti agency)

“Even though a number of channels have changed over the past few years and will continue to change, It does not mean ‘to be everywhere at any time’ but to follow a clear target. This applies to the social media giants such as Facebook or Twitter as well as many new channels like Yik Yak or Snapchat that change the communication in social networks annually. It is only possible to keep the orientation in the new channels when one defines clearly which audience should be reached.”

Ira Reckenthaler

Wildcard Communications

“If we consider Snapchat and what it represents – the notion of impermanence – how would our thinking of knowledge management change?

The knowledge base has become the keeper of information. When something resides there, it becomes powerful, unquestioned. But the reality is that it results in complacency, it becomes a dumping ground.

But how would we think about the knowledge base if it was somehow impermanent. Impermanence would force us to make decisions, to decide what was important, what was not, what should be in, what should not.

Once we free the knowledge base, we can truly start to free the way we think. This, together with Don Tapscott’s ‘shared canvas’, Clay Shirky’s ‘one another’s infrastructure’, suddenly takes on new significance. And for me, perhaps the biggest shift may be the start of a new type of worker who recognises that knowledge resides in the individual. The question is, how prepared is the organisation for this?”

Guy Stephens

Social Customer Care Consultant

2014 was a watershed year for measurement. There is growing realisation that media measurement should not define your business performance metrics, but that business performance management must determine your approach to measuring media and influence. The easiest trend to predict is one that has begun, and 2015 will witness the continued maturing of all things measurement. (See http://eulr.co/AMEC2014.)”

Philip Sheldrake

Managing Partner, Euler Partners

“Brands will truly become social in 2015. Consumers deluged with inappropriate content will fight back. Much of so-called content marketing is the equivalent of direct mail in the 90s and noughties – too often it’s inappropriate and spam. The difference between what came through your letterbox and what is served on your Facebook or Twitter feed is the volume. Our news feeds are packed with brands trying to hijack a news event or own a moment. They don’t really care about what you think, but in 2015 they’ll have to. The brutal truth is that brands which fail to engage with their audiences on a social level will be ignored.”

Stephen Waddington

European Digital & Social Media Director, Ketchum

President of the CIPR

“I’ve been working with the Managing Director of Social@Ogilvy EAME, Marshall Manson, on our big trend predictions for 2015 and the main one [of the three that we came up with] is that we believe Twitter will move to an algorithmic content serving model at some point in the New Year.

What this means is that, similar to Facebook before it, brands will come under greater pressure to deploy Twitter’s suite of paid products in support of any branded content they create.

We’re calling this ‘Twitter Zero’ and, when it hits, Promoted Tweets will become a necessity.”

James Whatley

Social Media Director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, London

These perspectives were parsed through semantic analysis software which revealed the key interests:

This graphic was created using Wordle (http://www.wordle.net).

Yes, content, brands social Facebook, digital Twitter and mobile are rising up the today agenda very fast. The top of mind practices in 2015 are clear.

Using semantic analysis as a more informative tool a collective view of today's PR emerges. The experts contribution to the Measurement Standard showed specific top of mind practice revealing fast evolving activity in the PR sector viz:

1. social media experts
2. social media management
3. media experts think
4. digital marketing trends
5. social media managers
6. social customer service
7. media managers can’t
8. managers can’t ignore
9. marketing trends social
10. social media trends
11. trends social media
12. use social media
13. data driven insight
14. facebook or twitter
15. social media director
16. content creation will
17. businesses use social
18. change how businesses
19. know about social
20. media and digital
21. year of content

Source: http://www.ranks.nl/.

The focus once may have been on media relations, events, lobbies and the like. No longer. The digital prophet has persuaded leading figures in the PR industry to look at a changed area of practice.

This is information we need to teach students the trade of PR. But is it enough. It shows practitioners what has to be in their portfolio of services too.

It is a subject that can be taken a long way. Defining PR has been an interest of mine for a long time. PR can be a discipline that interferes with culture, It is a practice with many faces that seem to go on forever and ever. It can be a business and wealth driver but today there is this new practice that is significant for the future of PR.

The future for PR

As soon as one begins to look at the future for public relations there are significant straws in the wind to help.

The BBC has a perspective for news.

http://linkis.com/www.bbc.co.uk/news/KovaS

This suggests that automated article creators/journalists will be commonplace between now and 2027.

Huh! The Guardian is reporting automated journalism being used now.


It is pointing to a story about an earthquake last week.

There is a growing pressure on news organizations to produce more inexpensive content for digital platforms, resulting in new models of low-cost or even free content production.

The Associated Press announced that the majority of U.S. corporate earnings stories for its business news report will eventually be produced using automation technology.

‘In AP’s case, Wordsmith will write thousands of earnings stories that would not have otherwise existed. Wordsmith operates at a speed and scale humans cannot match.

What readers make of robot writers is yet to be fully established – most of the automated services’ clients don’t tell them their content is not penned by real people – but a study of a small group earlier this year at Karlstad University in Sweden showed that many cannot tell the difference between bot copy and hack copy.

The investor community is finding this development exciting  and academics are taking a close interest in the subject too.

A special issue of Digital Journalism around the theme “Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts, and Critiques,”  sheds important light on the implications of data and algorithms, computation and quantification, for journalism as practice and profession.

Huffington Post http://goo.gl/Cl6V0t 

The papers address questions such as: What does automated journalism mean for journalistic authority? What kind of social, occupational and epistemological tensions—past and present—are associated with the development of quantitative journalism?  What sorts of critiques and cautionary tales, from within and beyond the newsroom, should give the media pause? Overall, what does big data, as a broad sociotechnical phenomenon, mean for journalism’s ways of knowing (epistemology) and doing (expertise), as well as its negotiation of value (economics) and values (ethics)?

There is more here.

What does this mean for PR?

Does it mean we set the software to create the stories for news publications, blogs, Facebook etc while we sleep?

Are we going to offer stories produced automatically for of the moment briefing for politicians and CEOs facing interrogators armed with similar briefing material?

What is the legal position of automated content?

Will it be ethical for PR people to go to software that will produce unhelpful content about competitors automatically?

How would one police such dark practices.....

More reading.....................

The Robotic Reporter: Automated journalism and the redefinition of labor, compositional forms, and journalistic authority
M Carlson - Digital Journalism, 2014 - Taylor & Francis



Big Data and Journalism: Epistemology, expertise, economics, and ethics
SC Lewis, O Westlund - Digital Journalism, 2014 - Taylor & Francis



Enter the Robot Journalist: Users' perceptions of automated content
C Clerwall - Journalism Practice, 2014 - Taylor & Francis



Place-Based Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century: The creation of spatial journalism
A Schmitz Weiss - Digital Journalism, 2015 - Taylor & Francis


Clarifying Journalism's Quantitative Turn: A typology for evaluating data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting
M Coddington - Digital Journalism, 2014 - Taylor & Francis


Digital Journalism. Clarifying Journalism's Quantitative Turn. A typology for evaluating
data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting.



The Future of Journalism: In an age of digital media and economic uncertainty
B Franklin - Journalism Practice, 2014 - Taylor & Francis


“Enter the Robot Journalist: Users' Perceptions of Automated Content.” Journalism
Practice 8 (5). [Taylor & Francis Online]                              

CIPR to build ethics monitoring software?

Neolithic field patterns at Barbury Castle

This blog came into existence ten years ago. An eternity in social media terms.

It has always been controversial and now has to come back to life to examine the next evolution. 



Now I want to build on that history to argue the next big revolution to face PR. 

I want the CIPR to examine if it can avoid building software to judge and monitor the ethical efficacy of its members actions. 

First we have to look at practice as it will evolve to make such a decision so essential. We have to look at the emerging technologies and the role of PR in this new world.

The evolution of that activity which creates cultural acceptance for an organisation including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society to contribute values through the creation of effective relationships.

It is not going to be easy.

Most will be as uninterested as the practitioner of 2005 was to the evolution of the internet and 'social media'.

Back then, the online PR activists of the day made it quite clear where the new and social media would go. Most people in the PR industry thought them slightly strange. 

It was at a time of some very powerful thinking.

We argued about why the world needed Public Relations. 

Then, most practitioners thought of PR as rather linea. 

Some of us had different views. We thought that news, views and marketing promotion needed to evolve into multiple touch contact with a range of constituencies. The feature of this form of communication was proposed with three types of consumer inter-reactions. These are: a primary touchpoint (TV); plus secondary (iTV, Web and SMS) and tertiary (newspapers, magazines, land and cellular telephony, email, discussion lists, Blogs, Wiki's, events, posters and interpersonal communication). Any of these channels could be primary, secondary or tertiary and in any combination for different forms of communication. The most successful PR and marketing programmes would, we thought, use this breadth of contact points and each offer a different experience. Imagine, in an era of Twitter and Facebook, that this was revolutionary in 2007!

It was a view of some of the functions in setting objectives strategy and tactic in a public relations programme using PR as the management process that creates wealth.

As this post shows, this process is unique in organisations because it is the only management discipline that has all the tools that can be used in the wealth creation process.

We were in a mood to see PR as interfering with culture and economics.

Now we have to see examine where the PR profession has to go.

This is where I intent to set out the associated agendas.

Competence in Public Relations - is it more than experience?

Stephen Waddington is looking to see if the CIPR can develop a PR competency framework.

Such a big subject and one we have to take seriously.

Knowing the value of a great photographer and designer is an asset and working with the best conference organisers, advertising managers and agencies is a skill set all on its own.

Managing staff and managing the ever contesting senior managers requires a deft touch too.

Online PR adds to and changes the traditional assumptions (imagine, once upon a time there were people who really believed in 'market segmentation' and 'publics' - this was life before social media, of course).

Its evolution is near vertical requires a competency that includes social media knowledge, skills and practice. Competency beyond this summer, (when mobile social media and internet engagement will be bigger than desktop work) has yet to be developed and the CIPR initiative will be very important in this regard.






http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics

The power of Grid Computing is so huge that even I blanche at trying to get an idea of its consequences.

In my career, I worked in political PR. A knowledge of constitution, political campaign law and voluntary organisation development were essentials. So to was the nature of building media relations (oh! yes, and writing press briefings, press releases and the associated collateral was part of this activity).

In industrial PR, the relationship between business, investors, banks, suppliers and competitors broadened my experience. Then too, the companies we acquired, and transitional internal HR public relations were critical too. Employment law and best practice requires a lot of reading on airplanes, I recall. Monitoring, measuring and evaluating opinion, action and re-action is part of the job from the six am news to endless minutes and reports and with constant walking through offices and factories to get a feel for what was important before reading and evaluating the top 'share of voice' press 'clips'.

Providing the advisory and collateral are 'always on' activities. Some of us still remember those brick sized mobile phones that were so essential.

Consumer research and campaign development with a close eye on the ethical values at play comes as an added interest and requirement for expertise and then there is the whole subject of issues and crisis management. My career had moved on.

Such capabilities are the realm of public relations; they have to be part of our graduate scheme; they have to form the basis for evaluating the capabilities of and accreditation of our university degrees.

This then is my agenda for 20th century PR competence. Instead of 30 years experience, much of it can be taught. It is the stuff of a first degree in PR.

But now there are bigger skills and capabilities that are needed by the PR profession. As the internet emerged it was imperative to get to grips with it. In my case it was simpler to write a couple of books (before the turn and two after the turn of the millenium) which made me explore this new dimension.

The nature of the new and emerging cyber-social revolution is hard to grasp. So far we have observed and enjoined only the smallest effects. The wearable, nay, nano and mobile-plus semantic form of living is a much bigger revolution which faces the CIPR in the next few years.

The 'love at first sight' embedded chip - a 2020 PR issue

There is a very interesting discussion going on at PR Conversation. I have just added a comment about PR in 2020 and re-present it here.

..... Perhaps we can take a wider look at ethics and social media and some other aspects of the new PR mediated by the Internet of Things.

Seeing, for example, social media from the constituent's perspective one finds some pretty dangerous happenings.

For example in Wired Mat Honan describes an experiment he did by 'liking' everything he say on Facebook. The most worrying aspect of this activity is the impact he had on his followers. They were bombarded with, in effect, his propaganda (and some of it was pretty distasteful http://goo.gl/SdsPlV).

Do we, as practitioners, monitor what our constituents see to identify if they too are targets of propaganda? Do we ensure that our 'marketing' colleagues are not using such tactics? There are some big ethical issues here too.

Meanwhile, www.brightplanet.com and www.torproject.org, two of the Darkweb search engines make password/paywall protected content in the Lightweb visible for all to see - yes, even your academic papers!

It does not stop there, these search engines shine a bright focused spotlight onto a much bigger internet than most would credit. Internet porosity is now a much bigger issue. Is this sort of search and monitoring ethical?

Once again, we might also ask the ethical question of our marketing colleagues and web masters. Information is  'leaking out' faster than we imagine.

And so back to wearable technologies.

By 2020, London will have 5G (http://goo.gl/iBZEUn).

4G offers download speeds that are roughly equivalent to your superfast broadband (around 30-40Mbps) at home. 5G will go well beyond that http://goo.gl/dPsTBx.

You will be able to download a film to your Google Contact Lens in less than a second http://goo.gl/gnfWsc.

Regardless of the technology adopted, it's thought that there will by multiple smaller antennas employed, allowing signals to be emitted in multiple directions and even bounced off off buildings and solid surfaces. New York University, have come up with the idea of utilising millimeter-wave frequencies. The main advantage of using this frequency range is that it's scarcely used by other broadcast technologies http://goo.gl/fiPBNd.

Already there are a range of network technologies that can be deployed that are almost 'invisible' to the onlookers too e.g. http://maidsafe.net. There is no question that such capabilities will evolve to work on the new 5G networks.

Apple is rumoured to be working with Intelligent Energy, a fuel-cell firm that could enable Apple's devices to last "days or even weeks," http://goo.gl/R9BTMz. There are also experiments being run to generate electricity from microwaves. Such technologies remove the need for batteries or other power supply http://goo.gl/t3oz58.

 Not only will it be 20-100 times faster than 4G, it will be a communications technology that can be embedded into almost anything (think light-bulb). It will provide an opportunity for development of a distributed network internet unencumbered by the big ISP's and not needing batteries or other connections to electrical power.

The internet will then be able to reach areas and communities that do not have electricity or a reliable electrical resource.

Embedded and mobile devices. The "Internet of Things" will explode. Such devices are being developed now. Some predictions suggest 50 or more mobile devices per person by 2025 (that is only eleven years away).

Why should this be relevant to PR?

If there is traditional media, social media and a new medium called 'Things' and we have 50 'Thing' media attached to us one way or another, the evolution will be many times more significant than the 4G mobile phone plus the tablet communications device 40% of the population already carry with them wherever they go.

Which of your students will resist the 'love at first sight' embedded chip which tells them that the pheromone count of the the hunk that just walked in the door thinks they are gorgeous? For the proponents of PR as relationship management this chip will be a whole new area of practice and for the PR as a communications discipline will have ever more communications channels/content  to worry about.

So can we imagine such developments in 10-15 years?  Did we envisage Twitter and YouTube as part of the PR discipline in 2004 or 1999?

Perhaps PR needs to begin work on what to do now and not leave it too late.

I am certain that we should be working on development of University courses with such developments in mind.

Old stuff and Bebo

I keep lists of URL's that I can go back to. 
Some of these lists are over a decade old and are fun to look at.
This one is fun:

When researching my post last week on mobile social networking, I canvassed several industry bigwigs to get their views on how well the likes of MySpace and Bebo would translate to mobile. 

Bebo! what's that?

Here are some more that might amuse:

http://www.techdigest.tv/2006/10/when_researchin.html
http://www.out-law.com/page-7371
http://www.webhostdir.com/news/articles/shownews.asp?id=17694
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/sport/2006/10/10/stfede10.xml
http://www.thisisbradford.co.uk/display.var.961625.0.students_see_how_resourceful_they_are.php

The Social Economy

Benkler, von Hippel, Weber, and many others showed us that the Internet has liberated many economies. One economy is the traditional “commercial economy,” an economy regulated by the quid pro quo: I’ll do this (work, write, sing, etc.) in exchange for money (which is a recognised intangible symbol with an international reputation). Another economy is (the names are many) the (a) amateur economy, (b) sharing economy, (c) social production economy, (d) noncommercial economy, or (e) p2p economy. Even the Bitcoin economy. This alternative economies (however you name them, I’m just going to call them the “second economy”) is the economy of Wikipedia, most open source development, the work of amateur astronomers, etc. It has a different, more complicated logic to it than the commercial economy. If you tried to translate all interactions in this second economy into the frame of the commercial economy, you’d kill it.

Having now seen the extraordinary value of this second economy, I think most would agree we need to think lots about how best to encourage it — what techniques are needed to call it into life, how is it sustained, what makes it flourish. I don’t think anyone knows exactly how to do it well. Those living in real second economy communities (such as Wikipedia) have a good intuition about it.

But a second and also extremely difficult problem is how, or whether, the economies can be linked. Is there a way to cross over from the commercial to second economy? Is there a way to manage a hybrid economy — one that tries to manage this link.

Social Media now has a cousin called Social Economy.

Um ..... where did I put that page.

I have been revisiting some sites, blogs and posts this week that I need to keep close to me.

This is meets my eye as I look round my study:

Every student in PR, marketing and economics should have read The Long Tail.
I keep talking about Transparency Porosity and Agency and need to be able to reference this page a lot. Peter Drucker saw what was coming and web 2.0 years before it arrived and is mega relevant today.

Applying Communications Models was an important paper in its day. So was Share This Too and then there is Reputation Economics ... I need to re-read them all.

Blazing Netshine has coloured my thinking for such a long time (and has morphed, I now discover) that I had to look at it again - not too rusty and I still like the title and some of the sentences I user e.g. "The digital riptide flows round historic information gatekeepers" and Prof Anne Gregory's comment "public relations practitioners `will also understand that complex feedbacks within and between systems and environment can create resonances that cannot be controlled and which may diminish or even contradict the desired result of communication.'"

The various versions of Online Public Relations have been interesting experiences too.

But here is a big question. Are the papers and books relevant any more?

So much emerges online and a lot of the real beef is available via mobile, should I be reading books at all.

Take Google Plus as an example.

The top gun is Martin Shervington. He could not possibly be relevant in a book. His subject is too fast moving.

So, I am now going to work on how I can keep up my reading on a mobile phone.

Here is how I can start beginning with Drucker.


Its the way ahead.


Notes:
Phillips D, 2000 Blazing Netshine on the value network: Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000, pp. 189±206
Evans, P. and Wurster, W. S. (1999) `Blown to bits', Harvard Business School Press.
Drucker, P. F. (1994) `The age of social transformation', The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 274, No. 5, pp. 53±80.

Rebooting PR - Radical Poroity

In this series of, posts we have already seen how the internet is now making organizations porous.

For a long time people have discussed their employers, friends, acquaintances and    a myriad of other relationships.
I do so, they expose torganizationsons and people to a wide constituency. Information in this way, inadvertently leaks  out.
The work I did on analysis of LinkedIn profiles also shows how people expose their employers to a low deep analysis (see Rebooting PR).

What is happening now is that a lot of data (Big data) available for such analysis. We can automate such proceses and then re-work the findings.

Radical porosity now allows us to identify the common and unique unique skills, capabilities of individual banks in relation to competitors - automatically. We can also use similar capabilities to match LnkedIn profiles with Twitter accounts and get near real time intelligence.

There are many more examples of how apparently innocent activities make oorganizationsmore porous.

Such is the extent of content provided by individuals that if an organization wants to have no presence it creates a hole in the Internet environment which points in the organisation.

From here we learn a lot. There is no hiding place.

We also learn there is a critical need for public relations to manage the effect of constituent's porosity.

Rebooting PR - Internet Agency

The internet can act as an agent.

For example, people can take a message output by an organisation and propagate it with great ease. They are acting as an agent. Re-Tweet, blog post and everything else in between allows this to happen. We have known about this phenomenon for twenty years and it is in the PR literature.

We have known that this form of agency is not limited to people. Technologies do this too. They can monitor websites and alert and broadcast content easily. All the news media monitoring services do this. CyberAlert.com has been offering this automated service for more than a decade and a half.

But now we are moving into an era when internet agency reprocesses information and prompts action; acquires new intelligence and identifies new knowledge and then provokes action in its own right and without human interference. At the same time, such capability offers a new, different, and for some, threatening future.

It would not surprise anyone to find an exchange that would provide data on the relative value of Avious Points, Tesco Clubcard points and Bitcoin. This would be a new form of financial exchange based on new forms of wealth and currency.

What we would see is an internet capability to buy things that stepped round existing currencies. 

What is more important is that it would have crossed national and currency boundaries as well. 

True international currencies with global exchange rate could be a reality. Such ideas go much further than just the crypto currencies. Such an activity can take place without any recourse to existing currencies, governments, cenral banks or regulators. Their success is completely dependent on international trust, goodwill and reputation.

With such benefits they can also also interact with the existing currencies.

It may be worth having a look at: http://www.topcashback.co.uk. The idea already exists. We have already entered into such an economy. The idea of radical agency is with us already.


For traditional PR people this is something of a problem. Interactions with the Wikipedia world is beginning to have some sensible resonance with the profession (and less so for the cowboys). This is a good thing because and automated system of creating corporate presence in Facebook based on the Wikipedia profile is happening now. A lot of companies did not lift a finger and yet find themselves with a Facebook presence in their name. These forms of radical internet agency are becoming ever more sophisticated.

The intermediaries of a bygone day no longer have exclusive rights.

The idea that 'publics' form round issues or that there are groups of people who own a 'stake' in organisation even if they are not shareholders is now of a distant age. The 'organisation' is now a number of value added, if intangible, content assets that it may not have had a hand in creating. If you like, computer generated assets.

Radical internet agency is an interesting area for PR practice. It is part of reputation management and management of intellectual assets that even the organisation may not be aware of.

Rebooting PR - Radical Transparency

Transparency

Once, it was cool to propose that organisations be transparent and that secrecy was commercial and political suicide. It was an idea that caught on. 


Greater transparency led to higher profits for those who had access to the information about the relevant tax rate; transparency in Government, democracy an politics has many advantages and made governance accountable to the electorate. Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or open government. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making.

Bennis points out why and how digital business strategy is an important transformational issue for leadership. He argues that information driven transparency will forever change the way that power it derived by top leaders and that leaders need to embrace this new transparency.

Making information available to help inform, enthrall and educate people who are customers and prospective customers also informs competitors, vendors and employees. They too can see the product and its pricing online.

Until recently agency was easy to understand:

• Had email for fast delivery of information  - That could be circulated easily to anyone.
• Created websites which showed off: products, services, Director’s names, locations and much more - To everyone!
• Then came discussion lists, blogs and Social Media - The constituency read added value content and could interact.

So far so good but now we can see new developments. People tell each other about the products and prices, they rank, rate and review about all these products and services and add intangible values. 

Alongside these people are technologies that help spread the word and aggregate the information. They compare several competitors and seldom miss ones out (despite the claims of the advertisers).

Today there is:

• Competitive pressure to make more information available to develop competitive advantage
• Competitors see the nature of competition and respond to remain competitive (example - supermarket pricing - PwC publish research papers for free and so all competitors have to do it).
• Transparency via multi media including ‘social media’ words, pictures, video. Lots of automation to spread messages etc etc
• Content available across many devices from PC to mobile to digital window displays
• Content provided by many actors - e.g. social media authors as well as many other company ‘faces’.
• The network effect means the information available and provided by the organisation constituency potentially reaches many generations from the first view and crosses from one medium to the next and the next and also jumps platforms (PC, Tablet, Mobile phone, game machine and even down to the fridge). Transparency is now also a matter of multimedia distribution.

Radical transparency requires the PR practitioner to develop content for many media, devices and outputs, to monitor the reach and identify the extent of the added intangible value.


Sophisticated computer algorithms help automatically understand human-generated text. A growing field within NLP is semantic analysis and its application to social media content is just starting to mature beyond labs and classrooms. Semantic analysis is capable of providing valuable insight into the meaning behind social media content.

Its like finding that your content has been located to where you wrote it! This is added value and more of the intangible value being developed online. To understand it we need universities able to teach this as part of a PR curse and the profession to include in continuous development programes.



The rate at which the move to online content is being used is not hard to see (see Unilever below) but being adept at optimising transparency is harder than just being seen in Facebook and the machines now have a strong hand in all of this too.

Unilever is a classic example:

References
Leadership in a Digital World: Embracing Transparency and Adaptive Capacity
Warren Bennis. MIS Quarterly Volume 37, Number 2 — June 2013

Rebooting PR - Part 2

Public Relations is changing and has to change and the theory behind it has to change too.
The change is radical. 

This week  CIPR South West heard from Adam Lewis of Immediate Future, one of the leading figures in the online PR space. Practitioners were very mindful of the significance of 'social media'. 

The BledCom, this week is about "Digital Publics: New Generation, New Media, New Rules" is a festival of internet mediated public relations research from round the world.

To Reboot PR we have to watch our language.

We use expressions like 'social groups', 'stakeholders' and 'Publics' and in order to recognise people and technologies that might slip through the net of terminology, I would like to use a catch-all expression 'constituent'. This will mean I can include constituents that may otherwise be defines in exclusive groups such as voters, employees, customers, prospective customers, audiences and so forth. All of them are constituents of some kind. 

The nomenclature of 'the media' has to change as well. Once it was a descriptor for, mostly, the press. In a time when one's mobile presents you with emails, websites, sms messages (or G+ messages), Facebook comments, essays by or shared through your acquaintances in a variety of digital resources via LinkedIn and  synced appointments via Google Calendar which mirrors your office one. All these media and almost none of them have a print or even broadcast counterpart.

Media to me is the means for distribution. Each has unique attributes as much as the newspapers and magazines of old. Today the prospective reach is, by comparison huge; the content can morph and can explode on the hurricane of Twitter or amble through email.


The tenets of online public relations are focused on transparency, Internet agency, organisational porosity, richness and reach of content. They were laid down in 2001 by the UK PR industry internet commission and have not changed a jot - until now.


To reboot PR we have to recognise the huge influence of the internet. Very little PR is undertaken without it being mediated by the internet.

It is a space where some long held and much loved ideas have to be massively modified.
Before we go further, I would like to morph some of the icons of PR language into a form of words that can work on line.

Today, we have to consider the evolution of such ideas.

These tenets have morphed. Today we have radical transparency, porosity, agency,  richness, reach.

Over the next few weeks, I shall look at each in turn to see how much work we have to do with each in order to Reboot PR.

Rebooting PR - part one

The value of public relations mediated by the capabilities of the internet is huge. But to access this value, the industry has to change.

The extent to which we are beginning to understand the contribution intangible capabilities make in the creation of wealth is growing every day.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO)  put it this way: 

"Whereas, in the not too distant past, the majority of business investment was in people or physical things like premises and machinery, today the majority of business investment is in intangible goods, in ideas and creativity. Making sure that our entrepreneurs, innovators and creators can translate their investment in the creation of intellectual property assets into value is key to the UK’s long term growth prospects. In the last 12 months, the Intellectual Property Office has done much to increase the likelihood that British businesses understand the importance of managing their IP effectively."

The IPO showed that it needed  strong PR to allow the UK to get at the real value of IP.

Inngot and Valuation Consulting Limited reported that:

The role of intellectual property and intangible assets in facilitating business finance” found that knowledge assets were not appreciated in mainstream UK lending and that IP was therefore a missed opportunity with millions of pounds worth of business assets whose value was not being leveraged at all, or only being leveraged inadvertently

It seems that a very large part of the worth of the nation is in dire need of some good PR.

We can begin to see why such strong PR is needed so that, for example we so can use our currency. The Bank of England put it this way:

The words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five [ten/twenty/fifty] pounds" date from long ago when our notes represented deposits of gold. At that time, a member of the public could exchange one of our banknotes for gold to the same value. For example, a £5 note could be exchanged for five gold coins, called sovereigns. But the value of the pound has not been linked to gold for many years, so the meaning of the promise to pay has changed. Exchange into gold is no longer possible and Bank of England notes can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes of the same face value. Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy, the objective of which is price stability.

The value of your pay packet comes down to 'trust'.

It also comes down to reputation:

The Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has said he doesn't see any reason why the Government should inject more cash into the economy, in comments which have given a big boost to the value of the pound.

Is that all? Is the intangible value of what we earn down to the comments of the Governor of the Bank of England?

What about advertising and marketing... they much have a role in this debate.

In advertising Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown struggles but begins to show what is at stake. He writes:

My attempt to explain that advertising could add intangible value to a product experience was met (by friends at a dinner party)  with blank incomprehension at best. Creating intangible value seemed to be equated with duplicity. Advertisers cheated people by creating erroneous beliefs about the quality, efficacy or value of a product. It was unethical. So maybe you can help me come up with a better and more compelling argument?

First, let me state that I am all in favor of developing products that deliver a tangible and positive experience for their users. This is the first step of creating a strong brand. Advertising can serve a useful role simply by informing people of the existence of a product that might serve their needs better. But that does not preclude creating an even better experience through the creation of intangible benefits. Just as placebos can produce a positive response in patients, so too brands can create a more positive experience for their consumers.

What he was saying is that adverting can add value but after the event and is limited in what it can deliver.

But something does add value and a lot of it.

The added value of a brand to an engineered product like a motor car is an example. But there is a lot more going on.

If we go beyond advertising to 'brand' values we see big numbers emerging.

In 2012 Brand Finance published a study on the Monarchy as a ‘brand’ to coincide with the 

Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. They valued the Monarchy from an economic perspective and as a brand with an impact of £44 billion on the UK Economy as well as assessing the emotional, political and constitutional arguments for The Royal Family. 
The Monarchy’s contribution to the UK economy is considerable and  Brand Finance estimated the revenue uplift to the UK economy was £2.4 billion offset by costs of £1.4 billion giving a net uplift of £1 billion to GDP. 

UK businesses also benefit from Royal Warrants and Brand Finance valued the scheme at £4 billion and there is also a significant reputational benefit to individual UK businesses from the Monarchy once they have been granted a Coat of Arms which Brand Finance valued at £400 million. 

The question one may ask is, which management discipline is charged with defending and exploiting and developing the tangible benefits from intangible (reputation, trust, employment, social development, profit, etc) an idea which in itself is as intangible as the Monarchy?  This goes beyond brand management because it needs the ethical and social engagement of a broad constituency.

Investing in this asset has such a high return that we need to know who can deliver the required servicing.


 Perhaps we can see how the intangible converts to money to gain a view of the new intangible economy according to an recent article in the Economist:

FACEBOOK, Amazon, Twitter and a host of other big companies in today’s “data-driven economy” share one thing in common: they make a living from harvesting personal data. Some of this data is freely given, perhaps too freely. More than 1.3 billion people have donated some of their most valuable personal information to Facebook in return for the ability to “like” and “share” cat photos. Amazon knows almost as much about its customers as they do. Twitter knows what you think and when you think it.

The article follows the adventures of Jennifer Lyn Morone  (JLM), who is collecting the growing amount of online data JLM is amassing and which will be visible on her website—although as Ms Morone gains more control over her data she aims to transform this transparency into opacity; only she will collect the data, and only JLM will decide how and where it can be viewed, used, sold, bartered or donated. This may be challenging: some of JLM’s most valuable data, such as financial transactions and health records, are by definition controlled by other organisations (such as banks), although Ms Morone will be able to re-package and resell them (data can be sold many times without losing their value). 

Turning something as intangible as a Facebook 'Like' into money is an interesting idea. Turning the data aura surrounding and individual or a group of individuals into assets seems like alchemy.

The significance of transparency is now coming home to roost. There is a big economy out there where intangibles visible from transparency are becoming very valuable in many directions.

It extends beyond the individual.

I looked at the big data that is LinkedIn. Here I saw how porous organisations have become. This porosity also has value and is also a resource for many disciplines.

It is possible to view about 60% of the UK banking industry employees in LinkedIn. This means we can see how long they have been employed in the industry and how long with a specific bank. We know the skills that they bring to banking and the skills the banking industry needs to run its businesses. In addition we can view if there are more of fewer people being employees and what is the employment employment churn rate between competitors, what are the skill (service) differences as between banking competitors over time. We can plot this over time and much more. This is an organic map of an industry with data not provided by the organisation or the traditional media but by its employees using social media. This is, as the CIPR Internet Commission put it 15 years ago, internet porosity.

This is a picture I created of the skills, and especially, the intangible human resource of 14% of Nationwide Building Society employees:

From this you can see how much of the bank is driven by intangibles and, indeed, the word map is, itself is an intangible asset.

From this one data set, it is possible to monitor and view whole industries and LinkedIn ".... will eventually become an "economic graph" that "maps the global underpinnings of the global economy." Says its CEO Jeff Weiner. 


We are seeing elements in this mix that include trust, reputation, assets of functions, assets encapsulated in features and assets available through the activities people and every time we look at intangible assets, they are bigger than anticipated and depend more on public relations than any other management discipline.

My thesis is that the PR industry now needs to play to its strength.

It has the capability to lever value and to enhance the value of that part of the economy which is bigger than any other - intangibles.

It is mandated to be ethical and to be open about how the client can develop trust and a reputation for trust worthy dealings and it has the power to and place to say to the Marketing Director and the CEO what has to be done to access value.

It is by no means a low cost activity and it has issues and crisis management to add to its activities online.

We even have a map to take us from here.