The Path Towards Automated PR

Public Relations is a profession, an art and is safe from automation, some might say. In my forthcoming book, we will see that such ideas are outdated. The machines are far too clever to be left out!

The biggest benefit of automation is that it saves labour and increases productivity. It is also used to save energy and materials and to improve quality, accuracy and precision.

It also replaces the jobs of many. In the past, this has been to the disadvantage of the inadequately educated and lackluster folk in society. No more. New developments will be a challenge to all but the most creative and capable in society.

Many people believe that automation requires human buy-in to succeed. Evidence in this book will suggest that it will often be hard to identify the application of automation in the first place. It is sneaking up on us. Buy-in will be more cultural than emotional or pragmatic.

It has to be said that all PR will NOT be automated.

Many facets and processes of PR will be fully, or partly automated. Some activities will be transferred from human delivery to the processes offered by new and evolving technologies.The profession will be changed by automation and these evolving technologies replacing PR functions, and wider environments will alter the nature of PR.

For those who hang their hat on the uniquely creative nature of PR, there will be a disappointment. They will discover that, progressively, technologies are beginning to automate many of the most creative of aspects of modern civilisation. PR will not be exempt.

The key here is whether, as in the past, external actors provide the products, services, code and Apps. The alternative is for the PR industry takes it unto itself to get involved and encourage relevant design capabilities to address the issues it faces in automating and changing the productivity of the sector.

In this book, we begin with an examination of automation and then look at the ordinary and mundane. We have to look at current capabilities such as such as automating SEO and progress to more advanced forms of activity that will replace many of the humans who work for the PR sector. After that, there is a little blue sky commentary.

An example of ordinary and elementary PR might be an activity — let’s say a new post on your blog. The first step in automation will be that it triggers an action, such as sharing that post on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a simple process. Thus, an event happens in one environment, triggering an event in another place. Such ability can be incredibly powerful when you use it to tie together over 350 apps in this way, which is a service already provided by Zapier (among many others).

The big question for the PR sector is whether developing such capability should be part of PR sector development or third party initiative. In other words, is it possible for the PR industy to create a supporting development infrastructure for practitioners and vendors.

While this might be a PR sector activity, other actors are doing the same sort of thing from their perspective.

For example:

Google’s new ‘Knowledge Graph’ allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that the words describe.

In March 2015, the President of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations discovered that a robot had created a biographical note about her, including a photograph and noting her election to Institute President.  It appeared for all to see in the right-hand column of Google Search. The robot had already visited the PR profession and automatically written up a nice little column. Almost no one noticed, not even Sarah Pinch until it was pointed out to her.

Thus, many PR activities will be modified or usurped by new services or by organisations that have more power and capability than the PR industry can summon up to offer an alternative..

In such circumstances, the profession has to be aware of these many changes;  has to monitor what it is doing and has to be able to manage the events that are beyond the control of the PR sector. The PR industry now has to develop capabilities to identify new technologies that are relevant for the profession and has to ensure its members are fully aware and capable of both recognising such techniques and able to deploy them (whether they like it or not).

Automation goes further. It is affecting the actors that are influencing PR constituencies.

Four in five (82%) people are accessing online news in the UK, access the website or app of a traditional news brand. Of those who access news on their smartphone, half use a single source on their phone. In other words, web technologies collect, collate, re-format and publish news without a single human touching it but from established news brands. Is this automated content distribution legitimate or even ethical? Can it be a revenue source for publishers? How should the PR profession optimise this development?

Despite the benefits of such super technologies, funding them is hard work, Reuters’ did the research and found that the digital audience will not pay. Three-quarters (73%) of UK adults say they are very unlikely to pay for online news.

This is a behavioural change.

Perhaps news distribution will be saved by online advertising.

PageFair reports research with Adobe showing that in 2014 there were about 144 million active adblock users around the world and adblock usage grew by nearly 70% between June 2013 – June 2014. Wark.com reported that only half (52%) want to block all ads, according to more than 2,000 UK adults questioned by YouGov for the Internet Advertising Bureau UK. There is more to this area of development. But the essential truth is that news publishing is being changed by automation. Today, news content of the ‘broadsheets’ has to fit mobile phones and the advertising model is also changed after centuries of success.

For Public Relations, this is evidence of third party change in the PR business environment wrought by the internet and automation in other sectors. The profession needs to know of such changes, the potential effects on practice and a view of what is happening next.

So far, the changes we are experiencing are what we, mostly, see every day. There are activities that are less evident, can affect or be adopted by practitioners and point to a very different future.

We are talking about big, complicated, subtle cognitive tasks which are quickly being affected by digital agents. Some are evident in very practical applications like wikis, others are even more advanced and that’s a sign of things to come.

This is here where the PR industry has to look.

Is there software that can rationalise and describe the product manager's’ monthly statistical analysis? Can it be re-cast into a well written commentary? Can this be re-framed and offered to a wider range of interest groups in the cultural sphere of the organisation?

Take a deep breath. The answer is yes! Better still, it is an automated capability. Can it be re-formatted to serve wider and new audiences in near real time or selected times? Yes it can.

Now we are entering the domain of technologies able to usurp a number of the traditional activities of the PR sector.

This is the area where, for example, some press releases/notices can be created automatically. They can add to the transparency of organisation in addition to removing some of the more tedious work.

A minor earthquake in Los Angeles early morning in March 2014 was relatively unremarkable apart from one thing: the first news report of the event was written by a robot.

The Los Angeles Times was the first media outlet to publish news of the earthquake, putting up a news report on its site only three minutes after the first tremors were felt. The story appeared under the byline of Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer at the LA Times.

But the real author was an algorithm known as Quakebot.

The report said:

“A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.

According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.

This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.”

Everyone agrees, this is not the greatest prose ever written but the computers are still learning.

Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings in January 2014, the Associated Press published (by way of CNBC, Yahoo, and others): "Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts." It is the headline followed by a 200 word financial story written and published by an automated system well-versed in the AP Style Guide. The Yahoo post scripts says “This story was generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on AAPL at http://www.zacks.com/ap/AAPL”

This AP implemented system now publishes 3,000 such stories every quarter — and that number is poised to grow.

Quarterly earnings are a necessity for business reporting — and it can be both monotonous and stressful, demanding a combination of accuracy and speed. That's one of the reasons why last summer the AP partnered with Automated Insights to begin automating quarterly earnings reports using their Wordsmith platform.

According to Automated Insights  public relations manager, James Kotecki, the Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week; other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated. Kotecki estimates the company's system can produce 2,000 articles per second if need be.

To get some idea of the range of organisations being reported by this system, a news search for "This story was generated by Automated Insights" will show how pervasive this form of media relations has already come (over 30,000 reports at time of going to print).

This is now getting close to some day-to-day media relations PR work. It is not very sophisticated and is based on an algorithm and application of semantics. It offers a potential revolution for much work in a Financial PR division of a big company.

Perhaps it is time to introduce ‘Deep Mind’.

DeepMind co founder Mustafa Suleyman gave a rare insight into the work he and his team are doing within Google during a machine learning conference in London in 2015. He leads research at the company.

Google DeepMind is an artificial intelligence division within Google that was created after Google bought Oxford University spinout, DeepMind, in January 2014.

The division, which employs around 140 researchers at its lab in a new building at Kings Cross, London, is on a mission to solve general intelligence and make machines capable of learning things for themselves.

Suleyman explains:

'These are systems that learn automatically. They’re not pre-programmed, they’re not handcrafted features. We try to provide a large-a-set of raw information to our algorithms as possible so that the systems themselves can learn the very best representations in order to use those for action or classification or predictions.'

'The systems we design are inherently general. This means that the very same system should be able to operate across a wide range of tasks.'

'AI has largely been about pre-programming tools for specific tasks: in these kinds of systems, the intelligence of the system lies mostly in the smart human who programmed all of the intelligence into the smart system and subsequently these are of course rigid and brittle and don’t really handle novelty very well or adapt to new settings and our fundamentally very limited as a result.'

'We characterise AGI as systems and tools which are flexible and adaptive and that learn.'  

‘We use the reinforcement learning architecture which is largely a design approach to characterise the way we develop our systems. This begins with an agent which has a goal or policy that governs the way it interacts with some environment. This environment could be a small physics domain, it could be a trading environment, it could be a real world robotics environment or it could be a Aatari environment.The agent says it wants to take actions in this environment and it gets feedback from the environment in the form of observations and it uses these observations to update its policy of behaviour or its model of the world.’

What he is explaining is common among humans. We are programmed to learn and we focus our learning based on a reward system at our mother’s breast.

In PR we did not really notice the application of Deep Mind. We are impressed with the capability of Google to find images from search instructions described in English in ‘Google Images’. It is just one example of the application of Deep Mind automation .

Automation is already at work in helping practitioners. What is not well established is the nature and benefit of these developments in day to day PR work.

Such developments have not been introduced especially for PR practice. It is right we know about such developments and use it and it is important that the PR industry can recognise the real thing and the scams.

In addition, there is a good case for the industry to seek out developments that will enhance practice (and increase productivity and competitive edge).

Furthermore the PR industry also need to be driving and rewarding useful development to aid practitioners.

These considerations are important for the PR sector and if it were to take them further could be a significant exemplar for the UK government trailed plans to publish a ‘Digital Transformation Plan’, in 2015,. It is an initiative which will set out the actions the government will take to support the adoption of digital technologies across the UK economy including, we hope, Public Relations.

Automation of PR - Part 1

I am writing a new book.
It is about the automation of public relations.
I will be publishing some chapters here in the hope of constructive criticism.
There is even a definition of PR here!!!!

Introduction

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, recently predicted that within 20 years most jobs will be automated. PR commentator Tom Foremski explored the idea and came up with some controversial  thoughts.

“Public relations has been pulled into the modern world  (complaining about the extra work of social) but not much has really changed. It’s still very much a hand-crafted, artisanal business, its use of technology is a Twitter hashtag and a dashboard of likes and shares.

But without a significant tech component PR is at a big disadvantage because it can’t scale, it can’t grow without growing more people. Which is also why valuations of PR firms are low compared to their revenues.

And it makes PR firms vulnerable to competitors outside of their field that can figure out and automate technologies of promotion.”

Tom Foremski

Why are PR jobs so special that some of the work won’t be automated?

Well, there is nothing stopping us, we can automate. That is what this book is about. But the warning that if PR does not do it, someone else will is not a hollow statement in Tom’s article. Since he wrote it AP Dow has started to write articles automatically - up to 3000 each quarter!.

When we begin to look more closely, we find that there are other instances of automation. For example anyone can use a wiki to learn how to organise and event (http://www.wikihow.com/Organise-an-Event) and there is software online to help automate the process (e.g. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/l/event-planning-software/, https://www.planningpod.com/ etc) and this means that anyone can run events and automate much of the process.

There are commercial drivers too: Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, who said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print."

In the USA  Advertising Age said that measured-media spending fell by 1.8% over the year while that on other forms of marketing – estimates by the Ad Age Datacenter of spending on other digital advertising formats along with promotions, experiential and direct marketing – increased 6.5%.

This puts pressure on PR now and it would seem there is a need to look to the future as well.

The list is long.

The purpose of this book is to explore existing and developing capabilities to automate what we do. Much as one would like a comprehensive 'How to Automate PR' book, it is impossible to write .... and that is a jolly good job. But a lot of what we do and will do will be part or fully automated in the coming months. New areas of practice, indeed, new and hybrid cultures will emerge. The stick-in-the-mud practitioners will find it harder to achieve the results they should be getting and the clued up will be disappointed because all this automation is not delivering magic margins.

It is not that PR is hard to define. The nature of knowing and understanding the culture (“the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”) of elements of society is the starting point. For example, customers and the benefits they seek, the supply chain, employees and supporting communities that form cultures is a basic requirement for all PR. PR's role is in changing such cultures to benefit the client and is what practitioners do. This is true in consumer PR, Industry and sector PR, Corporate Affairs and HR development and all other forms of PR.

A survey by Cision in 2014 showed 54% of journalists who responded couldn’t carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012) Fifty eight percent also say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).

If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists are open to a form of communication that is very different to the traditional press release.

To be able to interact with various cultures, it has always been important to use the forms for communication of most use and value to the communities involved.

Practitioners from a variety of fields use media, and are progressively using more of what can generally be described as CMC (Computer Mediated Communications). Some take a sociopsychological approach to CMC by examining how humans use "computers" to manage interpersonal interaction, form impressions and form and maintain relationships.

These practices have often focused on the differences between online and offline interactions, though contemporary research is moving towards the view that CMC should be studied as embedded in everyday life .

Furthermore, there is the use of paralinguistic features such as emoticons, pragmatic rules and various styles, or terminology (even slang) specific to these environments. The study of language in these contexts is typically based on text-based forms of CMC, and is sometimes referred to as "computer-mediated discourse analysis"

The way humans communicate in professional, social, and educational settings varies widely, depending upon not only the environment but also the method of communication in which the communication occurs, which in this case is through computers or other information and communication technologies (ICTs).

We shall examine the more popular media and how it is being automated, evolving technologies and evident current trends.

Of course, PR has a lot of new things to work on.It has to examine a range of different and evolving forms of communication.

The significance of visual communication from SnapChat to YouTube is a trend that is now very evident and has some high powered commercial applications.

The use of life size hologrammes for conference presentation has been well received and is now being used in healthcare, biotechnology and big pharma to bring scale to the speakers’ audiences and reach to many locations (national and international) on the big and small screens.

Speaker can be ‘present’, as a HumaGram, in multiple places at once, with the ability to fully interact as a human being would.

In other areas, communication is evolving by using the newer technologies.

The BBC reported that hospitals that have long relied on pagers to alert doctors to an emergency. But that the technology now looks embarrassingly primitive.

So some healthcare establishments are looking at ways to improve how doctors and nurses communicate, care for patients and manage treatments. One vendor is an Irish start-up which has developed a secure messaging app for hospital staff - like a version of group messaging platform WhatsApp (www.whatsapp.com). It is said to save ¾ hour per day - a major productivity enhancement.

The person in most organisations with communication responsibilities is often the PR person. She now has to be informed about opportunities to upgrade communication; can be very creative and change the organisation with technologies in common use today.

Thus, This book examines what is possible and evidently evolving today.

In addition, the second half of this book lifts the curtain to see what is about to be significant in the near future.

One could wish it was comprehensive but that would be a tome and out of date the day it was written. This is a fast moving development.

Where to start is a big problem. I have opted to follow route of the practitioner and begin with that discipline that examines the cultural landscape relevant to the client interests, its opinion formers and their interests and drivers.

Such an approach speaks to our agenda. As we shall see, most of such research can be conducted using internet based resources which are already rich and getting more comprehensive by the hour. As we go through these developments for this very diverse profession, it is obvious, there is work to be done. This is a great opportunity for the reader. Being first in this race offers great riches. The alternative is also true. As with the great industrial revolution, we will need to offer social and economic support to the practitioners who can’t keep up.

As I have assembled content, it has become obvious that I am only scratching the surface of what is now available and that you will find it is controversial enough.

We will see that the big issues of the day are are transient and that there are much bigger issues just over the horizon to be considered. The worries of practitioners on: how to measure the value of social media and online automation investment; integrating the new content and communication environment to the organisation all pales into insignificance as automation optimises culture shifting activities.

Later we will get to the sexy stuff such as Big Data PR with capability to create new dimensions for life and living. How on earth we create a strategy which are now uppermost in practitioners minds will fade as we explore automation further.

Now to consider the very thought of ‘Automating’ PT.

The thought of automating Public Relations is crossed between a joke, a possibility and a certain fearful prospect for most practitioners.

Long in the tooth consultants and senior practitioners are well aware of the range and creative capabilities needed in PR practice day to day.

They have creative and professional capability in campaigns and issues management as well as an ability to bring calm and insights to top managers and interest groups such as journalists.

“You can’t automate it! It’s creative!” They cry.

The majority of respondents to the 2015 CIPR survey (76%) revealed that they spend some or most of their time working on media relations. In addition, digital knowledge and skills were the weakest competencies among survey respondents – particularly among in-house and senior practitioners.

The reality is, advertising, SEO and social media marketing agencies are combining their ‘paid for’ strengths in with the ‘earned’ capabilities traditionally considered the unique domain of the PR sector and, progressively, more technologies are usurping press relations activities. As we will see, a lot of press relations is being usurped by computers.

This is not all.  Some social media activities are strangely programmable and are not a long term saviour for the PR profession.

In this book I aim to introduce readers to a wide range of capabilities that are wholly or in part automated or automatable.

These will be the capabilities that those long in the tooth practitioners will need to out compete and react in a manner to match the emerging lifestyle of people.

They go far beyond Facebook, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Search Engine Optimisation.

Most of what I offer is already working or about to enter the mainstream.

Automated PR is very close. Lots of people use some of its advantages already. The new users of these capabilities are emerging and by-passing existing practitioners and agencies.

This book looks at how far technologies are etching away at past practice and extending it in so many ways. It is a book that presents many developments which will or can transform practice. It is not a ‘How To’ book but points to where the expertise may be found.

I don’t claim that PR is to be fully automated any time soon, but it is here that I begin to explore the many intrusions now taking over which, in time will automate most of the practices we now undertake and more.

It is in this book that I can point to developments and evolution. It is here where the PR institutions, educators and practitioners can start out on the road of change that is gaining so much momentum.

We face change and a growing pace of change. It is a huge opportunity and a dark threat.

Mobile, Internet of Things, Semi Intelligent Pervasive - and a five year challenge for PR

Over the next few weeks, I will be examining the next wave of digital developments. These new Mobile, Internet of Things, Semi Intelligent and Pervasive (MITSIP) technologies are upon us. They are beginning to affect PR but will be even more pivotal than social media. MITSIP PR is a whole new form of PR and is almost upon us.

Forbes.com already uses an artificial intelligence platform provided by the technology company Narrative Science to generate automated news from live data sets and content harvested from previous articles (The Guardian). 

On the 17th March the inhabitants of Los Angeles were woken by a mild tremor. Less than three minutes later the Los Angeles Times website published an initial piece on the subject, at first sight a wire drafted in haste by a press agency: 

“A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles [8km] from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6.25am Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicentre was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past 10 days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centred nearby. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.”

The author in question is on the staff of the Times, doubling up as a journalist and computer programme (The Guardian).

The Associated Press announced in February that it plans to use algorithms to write a number of its sports stories, after already introducing these 'robot journalists' in the newsroom by automating quarterly business reports last summer. So should we expect fully automated newsdesks in the near future? (Journalism.co.uk).

In no time automated journalism interfaces with Social Media: 

Hille van der Kaa, who runs the professorship of media, interaction and narration at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, has been researching robot journalism.

She explained in an email how systems currently being worked on could one day "take over an entire sports desk".

One project currently being worked on by Kaa's students is 'Windcatcher'.

"In this project, we put sensors on cyclists to collect information about their well being, for example heart rate. Further, we install a GoPro on every bike to grasp the view of every cyclist. We collect all the data in a second screen application.

"By doing this, viewers can select one cyclist and automatically receive real time information about the cyclist they like on their tablet."

"To go even further, we can make automated reports for different target groups. Using machine learning technology we can teach our algorithm to write an article with viral elements, using specific words or sentence structure, which will go viral on Facebook."

Could robots be the journalist of the future?

The Internet of Things - the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices. 

Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure. For example, Google maps on a mobile has turned the journalists' phone into a navigation system complete with spoken instructions which you can share with others on the other side of the world . But, of course, a mobile phone is also an instant television camera and TV set. 

Watching anything from a robin's nest to a sales conference remotely is now easy and, because it goes through a computer, a range of editing options are available, including automated responses (e.g. as the model walks past a small - all but invisible to humans - bar code, the computer transitions images from one camara to another from miles away). Such content can be broadcast via social media to a range of publics or to private networks.

With drones, there are options to monitor things a long way off from the sky and then broadcast to the world or an individual! 

As one might say 'an image is worth a 1000 words'.

ABI Research estimates that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things (Internet of Everything) by 2020. 

The Chancellor, Rt Hon George Osborne, posited that the Internet of Things is the next stage of the information revolution and referenced the inter-connectivity of everything from urban transport to medical devices to household appliances.

It has been suggested by Nick Couldry and Joseph Turow that Practitioners in Media approach Big Data as many actionable points of information about millions of individuals. The industry appears to be moving away from the traditional approach of using specific media environments such as newspapers, magazines, or television shows and instead tap into consumers with technologies that reach targeted people at optimal times in optimal locations. The ultimate aim is of course to serve, or convey, a message or content that is (statistically speaking) in line with the consumer's mindset. For example, publishing environments are increasingly tailoring messages (advertisements) and content (articles) to appeal to consumers that have been exclusively gleaned through various data-mining activities.

A view, from the world of the Semantic Web[62] focuses on making all things (not just those electronic, smart, or RFID-enabled) addressable by the existing naming protocols, such as URI. The objects themselves do not converse, but they may now be referred to by other agents, such as powerful centralized servers acting for their human owners.


Using technologies to extend human capabilities is an interesting area of PR potential. The wearable computer is an example. There is a constant interaction between the computer and user, i.e. there is no need to turn the device on or off. Another feature is the ability to multi-task. It is not necessary to stop what you are doing to use the device; it is augmented into all other actions. These devices can be incorporated by the user to act like a prosthetic. It can therefore be an extension of the user’s mind and/or body.

While it may seem that Mobile, Internet of Things, Semi Intelligent and Pervasive (MITSIP) activity is an adjunct to modern PR, we will be mistaken if we do not realise its effect on the practice of PR.

This is an issue for PR courses run by the CIPR, Universities and the training organisations. This is an issue for discussion among the board members of PR consultancies and someone is going to have to explore the evolution of the digital world as it affects PR pretty soon.

There is almost nothing that is being done by a practitioner today that will not have been changed beyond recognition within five years.

International Public Relations affects economic performance.

This study tested a causal relationship between international public relations (PR) expenditure and its economic outcome at the country level by using a time-series analysis. International PR expenditures of four client countries (Japan, Colombia, Belgium, and the Philippines) were collected from the semi-annual reports of the Foreign Agency Registration Act (FARA) from 1996 to 2009. Economic outcome was measured by U.S. imports from the client countries and U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) toward them. This study found that the past PR expenditure holds power in forecasting future economic outcomes for Japan, Belgium, and the Philippines except Colombia.

If newspapers are written by robots what is available for PR's?

I have been showing over the last few weeks the extent to which intelligent automation has reached out and been welcomed by the publishing industry.

Yesterday, I asked what would be exciting for a teen student opting for an 'A' Level that would be relevant to a PR industry with the editorial function largely subsumed by algorithms.

The prospect looked pretty unappealing.

Today I want to cheer us all up.

I offer Google Developer Advocate Laurence Moroney who chats with Google Interaction Designer Scott Jenson about the Physical Web (goo.gl/rN1I8E), one of the approaches for providing effortless, on-demand interactions between smart devices that uses BLE technology to give you access to the information you want, when you want it.

It examines a future that our teen will use every day and it offers the PR industry a lot of openings.






This is the kind of thing that the PR industry needs to be dissecting to identify its role in such a society.

What is the advice CIPR and PRCA giving young students?

When the last Easter egg wrapper is confined to the bin, a lot of young men and women will be thinking about what 'A' levels they should take from next September. They will begin to make such decision based on a perspective of the career option in six or seven years time.

Now that we know that some stories in our newspapers are already generated by computers and not journalists, Is there a future in journalism?

Indeed, computer understanding of language, as Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi makes quite clear, is getting really good. In some applications is is good enough to 'write' newspaper articles and copy for car ads. This is not to be confused with article writing software designed to scam search engines or even mass book writing. 

If computers write, what will a PR person do?

Writing books and plays is also a job for computers. Some automated book writers have tens of thousands of titles to their name. 

Would one imagine a career in writing in six years time? It has come a long way in the last decade. Will there be careers in writing left in the next decade.

Perhaps the idea of developing relationship management seems pretty cool as a job. The meetings, briefings, receptions, events, parties and a list of friends as big as your LinkedIn connections? Ha! LinkedIn will have traveled a long way in ten years.

What of social media. We know that it moves fast:

(Source: MediaVision) 

It is changing very fast. How do I keep up. What will the PR industry in ten years want of me? Is the future of communication so difficult?

What are the experts telling us will happen?

The YouTube engineers were shocked at the first record broken by Gangnam Style (1 billion views mark). It just goes to show how popular it is and, of course, how powerful YouTube is in terms of media consumption. 

Does this mean that communications has a big future but a very different one to today's TV led thinking?

As a young person should there be some idea as to change and preparedness for change in the communications industries?

There is scope for data driven cultures but will that last as a fashion?

What are the professionals saying?

What is the CIPR and PRCA saying. What is the advice they are giving to young students.....

William Ward offers this insight into the demographics of the US population use of social media.

Being as, I am, in that minority to the right but for the UK, it says a lot that most of my US friends are of that extreme right group as well. Knowing for so long so many of the 10% or less suggests that long before social media became so significant, we already sensed a lot about the future of the media a few decades ago.

The post-Social Media economy - and a big role for PR

I admit that I have been remiss in writing blog posts of recent months and it is because I have been thinking about the next evolution and the human process that we are beginning to see already.  It will affect PR as much as social media has done and more.

I am prompted by this article in MIT Sloan Management Review:  

"Social media is now replete with examples of companies enabling knowledge integration outside the confines of traditional organizations. Wikipedia and open source software are perhaps the classic examples, where groups of volunteers come together to create products that directly challenge commercially produced competitors." 

There are examples. Services such as Zen99, which helps workers handle their taxes, services to access accounts from a Mac, PC, tablet or phone with full transparency for accounting professional to manage accounts. There are services that provide valuable real-time advice stand alongside virtual services to check driving records as in Checkr and Task Rabbit,

Online customer-support communities, such as those created by SAP and Dell, allow customers to share knowledge. 

Social media increasingly allows knowledge integration to occur outside and across traditional organizational boundaries, it  is beginning to change fundamental aspects of the firm and how it is managed and professor Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, is happy to promote such ideas. 

Globally, the sharing economy’s size in five key sectors was approximately $15 billion in 2014. It’s projected to reach $335 billion by 2025. The success of Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit isn't a fad -- it’s a new way of doing business, reports Entrepreneur.

The divide between the actual, virtual and digital is diminishing.  CamCard is a way of using your mobile phone to turn  business cards into digital data in your address book. 3D printing goes the other way to print along three axis. In China, a 3.6-metre-long, 1.63-metre-wide car has been printed with low-cost composite materials in five days and then assembled for a test drive. The vehicle is powered by rechargeable batteries and can travel at 25 mph

Britain’s digital economy is booming outside London, with 74pc of digital firms now based beyond the capital, and Bournemouth, Liverpool and Brighton emerging as the industry’s runaway success stories.

In fact,we are on the cusp of something much bigger. The digital economy, digital banking (with the "PayPal Here" invoicing app) is well equipped to work without high street banks.

Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security are big issues and the growing role of the digital economy in daily life has heightened demand for new data and measurement tools.

The UK government is a bit po faced but on board:  "Europe’s electronic communications landscape has transformed into a digital world. A world dominated by internet platforms, constantly altered by new and at times disruptive technologies, and full of opportunities for start-ups that pay no heed to geographical boundaries when creating new products and services."


American Baroness Shields was appointed technology adviser to the Prime Minister last year and now holds dual citizenship.  She has a large role to play in this new form of economy.

“12.4pc of our GDP is attributed to technology and digital business, that’s the highest in the G20,” she told The Telegraph. “We are the most digital nation in the world and it is important that government policy makes the most of this enormous potential.”
The FT reports that  "The transformation of the workforce is rapidly expanding as the UK embraces the digital economy, with about 1.8m people — 6 per cent of workers — now employed in a type of job that did not even exist in 1990.'

In the UK, marketers are plunging more and more resources into bolstering the online profile of their brands via PR says Marketing Profs.

Rather begrudgingly and narrowly they highlight reasons why:

• The Public Relations Consultants Association recently found that 72% of PR agencies are now offering SEO services.
• The most in-demand services were content creation, outreaching/engaging with influencers, and social networking strategy.
• More than 60% of agencies have increased their digital marketing budgets, with a particular focus on monitoring, SEO, content creation, and PPC/online advertising.
• Compared with 12 months earlier, agency revenues from digital sources have increased significantly.
• Businesses in Britain are increasingly devoting resources to social media; though most of them are keeping this activity in-house, a significant portion are splitting responsibility for social with an agency or completely outsourcing altogether.
• In the vast majority of cases, responsibility for content creation and social media is handled in-house by the PR and communications team.
• There's also growing confidence in the ROI gained from social media, with levels nearly matching those of traditional PR activities.

As the economic impact becomes more evident, this activity will draw the PR sector more and more into a new intangible economy and the time look at what this means is now.

What the PR sector thought was its role in social media is now open to question. It now has a much bigger role and I will be exploring it over the coming months.

This is a very useful micro lecture for PR students

I have known Peter Wilson for many years. When he says he has a good service online it is time to take a very close look.

You're doing all the right things. You have a content marketing strategy that's more than a work of fiction. You're putting aside time to produce useful content which you're placing on quality sites as well as your own. Google Analytics tells you that you're getting plenty of traffic and where it's coming from. And you're capturing leads in exchange for valuable extra content. But how do you know which of your leads are most engaged?

Converting leads can be a slow  and time consuming and you could do with some help sifting through all those leads you've been building to know which might be more receptive to your overall proposition.

It turns out that CommsBox gathers quite a lot of information about your leads: when they return to your site (by whatever means), which emails they click through from, which forms they complete, all your contact reports. A lot of data. The trick is to use that mountain of data. Thank you Peter - Here is how:

http://www.commsbox.co.uk/

Monitoring my G+ activity...

I have just come across this site. It gives a record and analysis of my Google Plus site

It keeps a record of My G+ activity.

Transparency and Leaks the Fayre of Today and Tomorrow

Corporate Affairs Managers are in it up to their neck.  

Transparency issues and leaks from the organisation how companies are now as porous as a sieve.  Its a PR Nightmare in the making for you all.

Ever more digital intelligence adding two and two on a big data scale is now swaying corporate stakeholders once so benign and now so demanding. Daniel Newman in Forbes says "Social and PR are integrated, and so are search and content–we can’t and shouldn't think of one without the other." I take that many stages further.

 To add to such ills are corporate directors and senior managers caught wrong footed by the nature of digital impact on their area of expertise and responsibility. Many are not armed with the intellectual tools to rationalise the current and future extent of  change and rate of exchange.

 Perhaps this is the most significant issue for corporate management and then there are the functional aspects. Here I offer insights into all these aspects of current corporate evolution.

 It has to be said right up front: ‘If you are not being affected and  challenged by digital influence take the pension while you can.’

I will also add that the PR industry has to consider the wider ethical issues. What if your organisation's product could be sentient. Would that be a 'good thing' and deserving the vote at the Board meeting?

If you were a car manufacturer these issues are relevant today. "An autonomous car will have to decide between crashing into the person crossing the road with a pram, surely killing the person and the baby but probably not the occupant of the car, or into a wall, surely killing the occupant of the car. These are not easy decisions to make and require ethics to make well," says Professor Toby Walsh.

 Senior managers have always needed to be able to spot the key events of the day from a forest of briefing documentation. This has not changed. What has changed is the extent to which employees at every level are now challenged by the extent of rich and relevant information that is becoming available in rich abundance. They too now use many systems for keeping competently,  if not over informed. The availability of devices that can bring them insights from the office work-station to home PC, tablet, mobile phone and a growing range of public and personal devices offering information.

 These devices attached to capabilities that extract new inferences by processing divers data sets, is, as we shall see,  now becoming common place. Then there is the network structure of digital relationships that include the many interests of many, now connected individuals acting on the data. This is now a multi-dimensional soup of dynamic relationship values and other data values. Many of these values are shared between employers, employees and clients as well as a wide range of other value holders. For many these values are very real assets. No wonder there is a  level of bewilderment among senior managers. 

 Once, the organization had both physical walls and  limited, often local community, exposure through employees. No longer. The nature of sub contracting across all areas of activity is a common reality, furthermore, the information value/asset intersection requires some considerable mental gymnastics to comprehend.

 It is only the naive who pretend that it is possible for an employee to  lock the office door and leave it all behind.

 Much of the information about organisations is made available as part of corporate and government ‘transparency’ activity.

 Each of such actions often seem quite benign. However, they bring great benefits and significant threats as the transparency action of one organisation is combined with the transparency action of another. 

 Forbes.com already uses an artificial intelligence provided by Narrative Science Inc to generate automated news from a range of live public data sets and content harvested from previous articles. What makes it possible is that business news content tends to be formulaic and data-heavy, listing places, stocks and company names. The LA Times, meanwhile, uses robots to report on earthquakes: the organisation relies on an algorithm that pulls in data on magnitude, place and time from a US Geological Survey site and matches it with information from ‘The Cloud’. Studies show that ‘automated journalism’ is quite acceptable in tests with readers.

How soon then will it be before organisations also generate ‘news’ automatically. Such content might be available to employees, local communities, the political audiences or vendors etc as part of a plan to create a corporate information cloud.

There are some people with less exciting views. Microsoft's Eric Horvitz, who recently predicted humanity would never lose control of AI contradicting Stephen Hawking, told Fairfax Media Hollywood has given many people an inflated idea of how close we are to developing a truly sentient system.