Crowdsourcing a PhD to make it effective for PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cloud - Home of the PR gods

god of thunder by ~zzjimzz

Social Media is a manifestation of Cloud computing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Now for the leap from technicality to Public Relations.

You can create relationships online too?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Semantic Web and PR

Semantic Web Explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resulting in faster and more accurate check-out.

Back to the Web

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

The SemanticWeb is like bar codes for the web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR's Internet of Things

From http://popupcity.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

The anatomy of the internet

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

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

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

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

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

Mind bending Public Relations

You are what you search.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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