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.

Evaluation of PR leads to the value of a CEO

Jim Macnamara  has offered an evolved way to evaluate some PR activities. It is very timid.

He can go much further and it can turn from a cost into a high yielding investment.

It seems simple to measure but is much more daunting than most will believe.

Audit

There is a need to maintain an audit of the organisational constituencies and the environment in which they interact.  Without such knowledge it is very hard to identify the nature of the tangible, but much more important, intangible value of corporate activity.

The need to consider intangibles is as relevant as being able to measure the value of a printed £10 bill. This is the ultimate manifestation of trust and reputation and is adopted by every citizen and corporate leader every day. The ten pound note is worth nothing. It is backed by nothing it is the epitome of paper having a value which is disproportionately valued by citizens.

So too the press clip and tweet.

Here then is the basic mind-shift for most corporate managers and especially the AVE led marketer.

There is a need to audit what is evidently in the public domain and to examine its intangible value.

The Barclays Bank Twitter stream shows exactly why the bank is so weak in global terms despite holding so many assets. Trust and the Bank are not great bedfellows at present and neither is reputation. Perhaps this is why it performs so badly and is the target for every regulator and financial ambulance chaser across the world.

Monitor

The next part of this process is monitoring. What is the norm? What is the norm among competitors and what is the norm for organisations with similar constituents. That is simple. Next up is what are the variations. Monitoring variation is a very good way of evaluating an organisation and its competition.

Measure

There is so much to measure and it is here that we can begin to see where the real intangible value lies.

Oddly enough the marketers got some of it right when they tried to use AVE's. 

There is a measurable relationship between good, extensive, independent and timely coverage and the ops and experiences of people using Facebook or Google+ to express their view of the organisation and its products or services.

The extent to which Anthony Jenkins reputation is better than Barclays Bank reputation is noticeable and the same can be said of other Banks and their leaders. They are also different as between Twitter and LinkedIn. There is a form of market, an exchange rate, between reputation quotients. What would it cost the Barclays PR people to buy the Jenkins Twitter reputation and sell it to the Daily Mail? Who might be the auctioneer?

Could it be Google? Could it be that one can use Google's findings to show the relative relationships between various media and their coverage of the client? Who then is going to explore such exchanges?

Value

Across all this media, how does trust and reputation compare between different corporate leaders? Is this an intangible market place that offers a view of the value of CEO's

But wait, we know how much they are paid... there is a cross over between the intangible reputation and the intangible we call money.

So it would seem there is a theoretical way we can evaluate trust and reputation, and the intangible value of public relations which is as robust as the value of the CEO's salary.

Without such a measurement is is very hard to gauge the value of the management team or even a ten pound note.

So, Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC, Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney it may be time to put your PhD's to work to explore the value of PR as tightly as you would an Australian Dollar.

Return On Investment

Return On Investment (ROI) is an accounting valuation method.

In PR we use it a lot. I am not sure we realise what we are talking about.

But it is not very robust.

Because the numerator (Net Income) is an unreliable corporate performance measurement, the outcome of the formula for ROI must also be unreliable to determine success or corporate value.
However the ROI formula still keeps showing up in
many annual reports...

The degree to which Return On Investment (ROI) overstates the
economic value depends on at least 5 factors:
1. length of project life (the longer, the bigger the overstatement)
2. capitalization policy (the smaller the fraction of total investment capitalized in the books, the greater will be the overstatement)
3. The rate at which depreciation is taken on the books (depreciation rates faster than straight-line basis will result in a higher ROI)
4. The lag between investment outlays and the recoupment of these outlays from cash inflows (the greater the time lag, the greater the degree of overstatement)
5. the growth rate of new investment (faster growing companies will have lower Return On Investment )

Formula: 

Net Income / Book Value of Assets = ROI

(Better) alternative:

Net Income+Interest (1-Tax Rate) / Book value of Assets = Return On Investment

You may find more information like this from Steven M. Bragg in his book  Business Ratios and Formulas : A Comprehensive
Guide  and Ciaran Walsh - Key Management Ratios 

Mobile revenues 10% of Newspapers is a threat to... democracy?

The future of traditional PR is now in serious doubt.

If there are no newspapers, journals or magazines and when academic publishing is seriously threatened, there will be little by way of independent media for the media relations model.

We see the scenarios with Tom Foremski when he discusses the effect of mobile on news publishing and Dylan Tweney as he talks about academic publishing.

At worst, the PR industry has to put a range of added skills, capabilities and strategic abilities within the grasp of the practitioner.

This is not as simple as being technically competent in Facebook and Twitter applications. We have seen reports of declines in the use of both. The whole area of defending relationships between clients and their constituencies is now a much bigger business than anyone would have imagined ten years ago. PR is re-defined.

As for publishing, there are other societal issues.

For centuries, we have depended on newspaper publishing to lubricate the role of government and social interaction. We have used newspapers as mainline defence against threat to democracy. Today, this is no longer possible and we do not have any idea of the emerging model other than it is evolving and is not called Facebook.

Formeski's point is well made and needs some further consideration: A solution has to be found on an industry-wide scale in order to halt the media's crumbling business model and to begin to reverse the trend and rebuild its fortunes. Individual media ventures, no matter how well funded, or how much high quality content they produce, will not succeed as self-sustaining businesses unless there is a new media business model available to all.

We don't have it. And it's the biggest failure of our digital age because media informs and educates all citizens and governments, and influences the many complex decisions that have to be made."

Managing risk - a crisis in PR

Some years ago, I commented on FIR how we can manage uncertainty.

Risk Management is a methodology to reduce exposure to risk and is a well known and established discipline in high risk environments. Today, social media has exposed most companies to high risk.

It is time to plan for such occasions

The methods that have been refined over the years can be applied to all forms of activity and where the cost of risk is likely to be significant, prudent companies use it.

Reputation risk is, for most organisations, a crisis. It escalates very fast and for most entities has disproportionate ill-effect on the organisation and people involved.

Most people try to behave honestly and justly and are deeply affected when issues arise or crisis hits. The actual cost to organisation in terms of lost confidence throughout the organisation is immense.

With the writable web, organisation have begun to discover that there is the potential for immense harm to come swiftly.

I have been reviewing my approach in the last few weeks and have come up with some added content:

The nature of risk and crisis

In developing a policy, it has to be noted that social media is very volatile and needs a very responsive capability to manage risk.

The nature of risk and crisis is well documented and often characterised as four steps towards danger:

Variation 

All plans/activities have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning. Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. This is normal day to day management. We all do it. In social media it is manifest in day to day chatter; planned outputs; anticipated message devolvement and community building and supportive commitment. This is part of the daily norm and planned activity that typically has modest variation to the anticipated result.

Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the management team cannot be sure will occur or when. They can be planned for and are part of management.  Like coping with unexpected staff illness – managers cope. Such issues can be identified from past experience and brought into this category with a developed mechanism to reduce impact or turn disadvantage into advantage. An ability to monitor the the organisation, its competitors, working environment and people commenting on them is a method for seeing evolution at an early stage. There are other such issues such as evolving consumer offerings; mobile phone effects; not to mention the implications for, and responses of the organisation and its competition at home and abroad as potential to create issues. It is not unreasonable to use scenario planning to manage foreseen circumstances even to the extent of imaging new forms of product/service management derived from digital evolution, criminality and radical religious and political threat.

Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B. Good management has crisis management planning in place to mitigate effects.  The ability to implement capabilities that mitigate such events have to be developed. For example, a capability to monitor volume and semantic focus of conversations will help identify an issue gaining pace. A capability to do this dynamically with an alarm trip for incidents that seem to be different from the norm is a good start (variance alarms). Having a capability to reach experts, spokespeople and management quickly is another. Scenario planning and ‘war games’ also offers a capability to develop expertise.

Unknown unknowns 

Sometimes referred to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. It is possible to push unk unks further away with good crisis management tools in place. Developing capability  to manage Unknown Unknowns is also part of the work of the PR practitioner. With a trained management team is becomes possible to identify an unknown risk and alert the organisation  and its constituents to the environment. It is, thereby possible to 'plan' for Unk Unk's.

The elements of a plan

The elements of a plan need to be in place at an early stage and include the following:

• Broad and well versed issues and crisis team to develop plans and maintain capability
• Comprehensive and regular audits
• Integration with wider BoE issues and crisis systems
• Comprehensive monitoring and alarm systems
• Development of responses to different (known, projected) forms of issues and crisis.
• Escalation/de-escalation policies/practices/planning. 
• Regular reporting

Steps to be taken

There is a need to create a formal response to issues and crisis. 

This will form a formal plan to progressively identify the nature of issues and crisis across a range of social media (YouTube, Twitter, etc) and eventually covering the majority of such media.

There is some crossover between media and other operations, these need to be explored and planning developed to optimise monitoring, reporting and response.

The extent to which issues can be significantly dangerous and mitigation can be developed needs exploring and formal policy developed and implemented.

The continued evolution of policy and activity needs to be developed to mitigate less helpful public contributions:

There is a strong strategic case for the organisation to develop alternative forms of communication. For example the some organisations are very dependant on the leading reporters in their field and the views of  a small journalistic elite. They have a particular view of events. 

There is a case for developing alternative channels to the wider population using social media. 


Equally, there is a cadre of  writers in academia and the management consultants shaping opinions and strategic application of social media can offer the means to address their audience without dependence on their outputs.

Because we can identify a large part of their audience, it is possible to use social media to go direct to a wide and interested audience and still avoid the traditional opinion formers.

There is much we can do in planning for issues and crisis management

Traits of the Modern PR Professional - Prezly blog

An interesting view



Traits of the Modern PR Professional - Prezly blog

Eight in ten CEO's don't 'Get It'

In a blistering indictment of Public Relations Managers, research firm Forrester found only 21% of CEOs in firms with more than 250 employees have set a clear vision for digital.


This fell further to 17% among CEOs in charge of companies with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees.


Not being able to see, or worse, not being able to convince management that digital and social interaction is critical to corporate mission is a complete failure of in public relations management.


It is not that there has not been enough warning or even consideration of the matter. In 1999, the CIPR held and internet Commission into the significance of the internet to PR practice.


The findings were uncompromising.


Today, with 700 social media management jobs currently being advertised by organisation like Nationwide, Sky, L'Oreal and National Trust in LinkedIn, there seems to be serious demand to capability but it looks like same old same old. They are reporting to marketing managers who, it would seem, are tarred with the same brush.


They too have been caught out and so the blind lead the blind and Boards of Directors blithely lead their companies along the same path.


When it comes to strategic contributions to corporates it seems that PR is, at best, batting a bad third.

Digital PR up 47% or missing the target by half?

The UK has the highest share of total media spending on digital channels worldwide. It is estimated to grow by 47.5% this year. 

Is this reflected in the development of the PR industry?

For example, is the PR industry able to generate 300 Social Media Managers (see my post on the recruitment bubble).  Have the Universities created the courses to feed the need? Are the PR institutions investing in education of members at this sort of rate? Have senior managers in industry and commerce invested in in-house training to develop the necessary skills base and strategic capability?

For example, would one imagine the need extends to: 'how we might expand our digital and social media activity – and which platforms are the most appropriate for us to use.'  It is the CIPR answer to the need. Perhaps, a more strategic approach might be helpful.

Amazingly half of the PR consultants knew a year ago that they had a skills shortage. Now that number has grown by half if they want to compete. A quarter of agencies are not even going to increase marketing budgets for digital services.

To get some idea of the under ambitions of the PR industry, many agencies are expecting to grow their digital revenues to 21-30% this year says the Public Relations Consultants Association.


Is this an industry working hard to flop?

See report: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736#sthash.h7ZC0juH.dpuf

Frantic recruitment bubble for Social Media Managers

I was a little taken aback to be presented with requests to respond to advertisements for the job of social media manager.

I am, as they say, a little older than most!

So I looked up LinkedIn to see how many vacancies there are. It is a vindication of the online PR courses I have been teaching over the last eight years.

Please feel free to select your next job.

Radical Porosity - a vendor example

Today, I received notification about the journey of a small parcel of goods ordered yesterday, in the UK made in the Netherlands and shipped via Germany to my home.

I did not know that the product originated in Holland.

In order to deliver the product, UPS disclosed to me the location of the manufacture and it took me  a few seconds to locate the company using Google.

This is an unintended consequence of USP's transparency system but is evidence of how a vendor can contribute to Radical Internet Porosity.

Is this a PR issue?

Does the manufacturer want such third party systems to affect them? Of course, UPS is very aware of the dangers of intercepts and has ways of limiting exposure (here is the system) but others are no so well organised.

Is such disclose a good thing ?

How do we prepare management understand about the significance of Internet Porosity? Is it inevitable? How can it affect reputation and what can we do to prepare for the big Nobel Award leak which one day will happen?

1Z06694R0411139292

• Updated: 29/01/2014 7:06 Eastern Time

On Vehicle for Delivery Today

 

 

 

 

Scheduled Delivery:

Wednesday, 29/01/2014, By End of Day

Last Location:

Bristol, United Kingdom, Wednesday, 29/01/2014

Additional Information

Shipped/Billed On:

28/01/2014

Type:

Package

Weight:

1.10 lbs

Shipment Progress

• What's this?

Location	Date	Local Time	Activity
Bristol, United Kingdom	29/01/2014	7:25	Out for Delivery
	29/01/2014	7:15	Arrival Scan
Castle Donnington, United Kingdom	29/01/2014	4:45	Departure Scan
	29/01/2014	3:02	Arrival Scan
Koeln, Germany	29/01/2014	2:40	Departure Scan
Koeln, Germany	28/01/2014	23:46	Arrival Scan
Eindhoven, Netherlands	28/01/2014	21:15	Departure Scan
	28/01/2014	17:45	Origin Scan
Netherlands	28/01/2014	11:55	Order Processed: Ready for UPS

Chaos theory and radical transparency and organisations

 

In a chaotic world organisms try to create order. This is true from the basic amoeba to the sentient human. In the case of the human we developed the idea that organisations are the preferred form of organisations. Tribes, governments, companies, associations, regulators... all are organisations to help provide order.
 Organisations have boundaries They built the intellectual property wall.

Then came the internet. A form of competition evolved when radical transparency was used as a weapon. Declaring the price of a product online was good for selling products to customers but also told competitors the complete list of inventory retail prices, bargains and even slow moving stock discounts.

As transparency developed it became more extreme and there was more overt, covert and accidental transparency.

Today, it is possible to identify a high percentage of employees by name in LinkedIn and the relationship between a person's Twitter account, Facebook comments and friends across most of the nation. With such intelligence big data analysis shows up all the employees and their interests, friends, fears, motivations and much more. The organisation is thus radically transparent. It is no longer an organisation. At best it is a coalition.

The order that the living organism, the human being, sought is now subject to a myriad of variations.

Organisations are now chaotic and subject to more variables than at any time in the existence of mankind.

The internet profiles of organisation are sensitive to the actions of its employees; the actions of employees can be in any form online and affect offline as a matter of course and the range of effects of actions is very dense.

Organisations are now facing a future that is chaotic.

Such thoughts are significant for PR theory.

Spying or gaining commercial intelligence

The Edward Snowden fallout over what the intelligence services can or can't do with our content is an issue for PR.

You see, the PR industry is already at it. We are collecting information from newspapers (clippings) and processing them. Of course, we have done this for a very long time. Interpreting the news has been part of the PR job forever. But now, its not quite so civil and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has to come to grips with the new environment.

Interpreting content

We can dig much deeper and, we are digging quite deep already.

Very gently, we are sliding into an area where ethics and best practice will collide.

The programme shown on the left is a nice representation of numbers of citations, pretty pictures of the community, some graphs and a word map.

Pretty innocent huh!

But hang on a minute. The pretty pictures are of people. Did they give anyone permission to have their photo in a business report?

Then there is the information about location. Who said I wanted to have my home address included?

So far pretty innocent. But now we come to the intelligence bit. I see that a number of people I know are associated with other people I know in the circle. Did these people  really want to make it that obvious?



The  graph on the right represents my contacts in LinkedIn. It shows clusters of people who are active in different spheres and I have highlighted one person who has links across a number of areas of my life. This graph is about me. LinkedIn do not allow you to create a network about, for example an organisation or several organisations. But... yes you guessed it, this is not hard to do. Within four hours I can have people from locations as far away as the Philippines and Bolivia who have  all the software available to do it and they cost so little it's embarrassing.

Yes, again, did the actors in this graph realise that they could be used as pawns in such representation. Is it good?

This is only the first step. I have tested a number of companies to find out what proportion of employees have a LinkedIn profile. 88% is not unusual.

Using the same capability it is possible to build up a picture of the departments inside a company and compare that with other companies. We can identify the comparative levels of expertise between organisations. It is possible to find out the skills base of Basingstoke and Brighton, Birmingham and Bristol (OK, anywhere you like - even, if you are a lobbyist, Grangemouth and all of the major employers in the area).

But now lets have a look at a picture of the people who tweet about a company and especially those who re-tweeted a report published by the BBC's Robert Peston (the cluster near the middle).

They are now a PR target. A PR person would know that these people are opinion formers and will know the precise subjects that interest them.

That sounds cool huh! Is it ethical?

But what if these data was about  a supermarket and drawn from tweets about the six competitors. Then the PR person can target the top most opinion formers, the really active customers or the people who continuously complain.

Does this mean that there is room here for some bullyboy tactics? Yes it does. Is that ethical. How is it to be managed?

But this is really not BigData analysis, this is SmallData analysis.

Imagine you wanted to finger the most potent political advisor's in the world? That would be big data and on issues like slavery, the environment, international trade and even war. Is it worth it?

It is absolutely possible to identify the build-up of skills being recruited and developed by organisations, industry sectors and much more. Is this how we can measure how the PR industry is gearing up to meet the demands of its client base? You see, this is a many sided debate.

So far, I have not mentioned photos and videos, location analysis or semantic inference capabilities (which Google uses all the time - but do you - can you?)

Neither the CIPR nor GCHQ are going to stop people putting stuff online and neither of them are going to stop people mining and manipulating this content and the data that is being extracted to gain political and commercial advantage.

The genie is out of the bottle.

What we have to do is know it is happening, create rules of engagement and certainly work towards an accord that will not disadvantage ethical practitioner or advantage those who would take advantage of the innocent.

I call on the CIPR to take a lead and at worst have a Commission to examine where it stands.

RTB Public Relations

We are used to automated bidding on the Stock Markets of the world.

Enter the same thing for advertising:

According to MAGNA GLOBAL research, programmatic buying of digital media inventory will reach $7.4 billion this year in the US, of which $3.9bn will be transacted through Real-Time Bidding (RTB), and another $3.5bn will be transacted through other programmatic/automated platforms (including social media).

This is obviously not something to worry the PR person is it?

Well, um.... yes it is. The gene is now out of the bottle. There was a time when there seemed to be a lot of trivia online and it did not count for much. Then two things happened. People like PR people started to churn out deep, rich and worthy content providing opportunities to create computerised semantic understanding and, almost at the same time, we discovered that using BigData techniques, even trivial posts had a shape and structure that gave us considerable insights into the authors when taken together (guess what, they start chatting at work stuff at 0800 on their way to work).

So, all of a sudden the content that is about conversations and interaction and, and this one is for Jim Grunig, issues becomes part of the digital landscape.

Now, we have content that can be used through a range of outlets just like advertising.

This is an area of PR that is around the corner but will be really valuable once we have worked out how.

Do I approve?

Yes!