What our web sites say about us

Over the weekend, Brono Amaral have been showing off some of our latest research into network effects for PR management at the Bledcom conference.

It has been fun.

One of the things we have comparing is the difference between word counts about web sites and the semantic (important concepts) in a web site.

To show what I mean the next two extracts are a word count and a concept count of what I have said about research and evaluation on this blog.

This is a word count:

able advertising applications ave blog comments company content conversation david editorial ethics evaluation google identify internet labels links management measure media news number obama online organisation pages people per phillips pm post pr practice public relations relationship research results search semantic significant site social twitter value view web work yahoo

created at TagCrowd.com

and this is the semantic view:

conversations deadlines dimension edited evaluation geography journalists label media morals morphs newsletter opinion page philip platforms posts pr priorities professionals public relations research showing tools version young

created at TagCrowd.com

The difference is huge.

The word count shows words that are common in the discourse while the semantic view is about meaning and the drivers of my posts.

Of course, there is a role for both forms of analysis but by far an away the most informative is the semantic analysis.

In bigger corpora my experience is that word counts become ever less helpful and semantic analysis offers real insights.

At Blecom, Bruno and I showed this form of analysis as a proof of concept for some pretty big networks (in real time too) and the results were very interesting.

Crisis? Prevention is better than cure

A huge amount of time is devoted to managing issues and crisis and their Public Relations impacts. Crisis is a huge waste of time and the costs are astronomic.

Today, the internet is making reputation risk management a much more significant area in need of attention. It is an area of practice that is developing fast.

Managing reputation risk is neither hard nor rocket science (but rocketeers do use risk management techniques). One issue avoided has two immediate benefits. It saves cost and expensive management time and it helps sustain reputation, goodwill and brand equity. Not a bad return for a few hours work.

This is not something to give to a fresher PR executive. It is a job for senior mangers and is at its best when undertaken with a professional external advisor (and I know a few who are good at it).

In past posts, I have covered the management discipline of risk management here and here.
There is a chapter in 'Online Public Relations' about it.

The methodology I have adopted comes straight out of the risk management models use in many other industries.

What I have not done is to provide a copy of a simple spreadsheet that can be used in risk management assessment and am happy to provide it to anyone who asks.

Essentially, a focus group convened to look at risk is invited to come up with thoughts about risks that may befall an organisation in a number of categories (see below). The process evaluates percived risk to help prioretise the deployment of budget and resources.

Each percived risk is assessed for likelihood and impact typically on a scale of 1 to 5. The result is multiplied and provides a risk factor. The higher the factor, the more likely the risk.

The PR team then come up with methods for mitigating the risk and then the focus group re-assess the risk to see how much risks can be mitigated and where the greatest effort (and risk avoidance budget) goes.

Of course who should do what, when and how to mitigate risk is integral to all risk management and it is helpful to have good data to support investment and activity.

Reputation, and importantly online reputation can and should be managed.

The types of risk that might be considered by a practitioner concerned with blogs, Twitter, discussion boards and all that stuff out there and online that is just about to come as a surprise:


Legislative change
local
regional
national
European
Global
law
regulation
Corporate change of direction
Change in requirement
Change in objectives
Change of output, outtake, outcome requirement
Change in publics/stakeholders
Added publics
Removed publics
Publics change
Implementation impact
Technology change
Content not available
New/changed opportunity
Unexpected change in team
Managment team
Technical team
Operations team
Competitor action
Merger/acquisition,
Competitors me-too actions
Management Directive
Budget
Delivery schedule
monitor, measurement, evaluation requirement
other
Corporate re-organisation
At board level
Departmental re-organisation
Merger/acquisition
Problem not anticipated
Reputation/ethical issue
Corporate, brand, personnel crisis
Server down/overload
System attack/bug
Change in available resources
Budget
Vendor availability

Twitter hath murdered time

This post is not just for Online Public Relations professionals. It is for every practitioner.

The dynamic of public relations has changed. In an short article that Philip Young and I contributed to Kogan Page newsletter recently we examined how, inevitably, Twitter has changed actual practice. I offer an edited version of the content we provided.

Public relations is moving into a new dimension, a scary and thrilling future in which reputation is instant and responses’ times are evaporating.

For pro-active PR professionals, it is not just what you say, or how you say it, but how quickly you can say it too, and ever more dominant social media platforms are bringing challenges of time and geography into ever sharper focus.

Not long ago the news and comment agenda was set by media deadlines. Newspapers published daily and most magazines monthly so PR worked to their publishing cycle.

Today, everything has changed. An hour is a luxury.

New tools, such as Twitter, means the window has almost vanished. We are now seeing real time conversations about organisations, people, brands, events and issues. We discover, subjects that are interesting journalists before they write them. We see public opinion as it changes and morphs in real time. Organisations’ priorities and individuals’ foremost thoughts are on very public view. A Twitter search using tools like Twitterfall or Tweetdeck can be very effective to learn people’s thoughts and reactions immediately.

These nuggets of opinion come together to form reputation and shape relationships. They are public, linked, aggregated and searchable. They matter.

Responding to real time and very public conversations is now becoming one of the biggest challenges facing public relations practice.

Take the experience of one transnational giant I was working with just a few days ago. The organisation, a household name known to all computer users, wanted to promote an event. As is customary, the agency issued news releases to the media and reached out to carefully targeted bloggers. They then began monitoring online conversations. What they saw was a fast-growing discourse on Twitter.

It was clear from the online profiles of Twitterers that a new and significant public was emerging – a group of people, including bloggers, who were unknown to the organisation until very close to the event.

At the same time a number of new issues began to emerge until the event was in the top ten most popular in the ‘Twittersphere’. Over 3000 individual ‘Tweets’ in the space of a week-end was pretty good going and Twitter was setting the communications agenda.

To ensure that it was part of this conversation, the multinational in question had to increase its contribution to the debate in real time and respond to comments (which also involved some criticism) without delay.

The extent to which the Twitter community was engaged with the conversation was very evident. At one stage the ranking of Twitter comment about the event fell to sixth. An appeal via Twitter to the people who had been involved in this speedy conversation created a huge response pushing the ranking of the event in the ‘Twittersphere’ to third within minutes.

Learning to adapt to this rate of operational change is but one example of how quickly management has to respond to new pressures in a digital age.

Next time you issue a press release - even if only to the traditional media, watch Twitter. Did your copy change the agenda? Can you respond?

Public Relations is changing fast.

Ad Fab, the BBC and Public Relations

Today, the PR industry seemed to celebrate a PR campaign and managed to get the BBC to talk about PR without using words like stunt or 'cheap and easy' and mixing publicity with PR in its usual way.

Its story says that "the campaign to secure settlement rights for Gurkhas undoubtedly owes much of its success to the fact it had a household name in Joanna Lumley to champion its cause."

So the barb was there.

They then found an expert who blew the gaff:

However, according to public relations experts, it was thanks to a unique set of circumstances that it won such a remarkable victory.

Prof Anne Gregory, director of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, said celebrity "ambassadors" have been used to good effect by charities such as Unicef.

But she said Lumley's close ties to the Gurkhas - her father fought alongside the Nepalese warriors during World War II - were crucial.

"She was the perfect figurehead," said Prof Gregory.

"She has that real personal connection. She's not doing it for the money or self-promotion and people feel she has the right to speak on the Gurkhas' behalf."

Public perceptions of the soldiers as "noble, brave, altruistic and loyal to the Queen without necessity" made the Gurkha Justice Campaign stand out from other causes, said the professor.

"People feel we should be generous to them in return for their loyalty," she said.

Even so, without Lumley's backing, Prof Gregory said the campaign may have waited much longer to achieve its goals, as leaders struggled to make their views heard.

In other words, the public relations campaign would win with or without Ad Fab glitter.

I think that Lumley did an excellent job. But it was a good (not great) public relations job and not an exercise, stunt, 'cheap and easy', or publicity.

Liberal Democrat Peter Carroll who was the power behind much of the strategy said: "There was pretty ruthless planning that went on to ensure that Joanna Lumley chose her moment well."

A planned and sustained effort.

Well done to them...

I wonder, as Nick Robinson might say, if they have learned the lesson.

After all, the BBC is a mighty publicity machine but will need some hard public relations to sustain its reputation as it exposed expenses to public scrutiny and ups the licence fee in the midst of recession.

The Publicasity press release about our book

Public relations professionals who want to do business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading. The online world had has changed since Online Public Relations’ first edition in 2001, and this new edition is a comprehensive study into online communication and interaction. For public relations practice the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again; the advent of an online world means almost every aspect of the discipline needs to be rethought.

“It’s not just the practice that is changing, it seems, but its role and purpose. After a short section on the basic toolkit, this book deals in concepts: transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach.”

Richard Bailey – review in Behind the Spin

“The internet brings public relations closer to the heart of corporate re-engineering, corporate governance, corporate and brand relationships, reputation promotion and issues management.”

The book “...provides clear pointers for organising public relations professionally now and indicates a vision of the future. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct his or her business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as a must.”

Professor Anne Gregory

“In the past, a PR person might have been judged by the volume of coverage generated for a client. The key today is not volume but influence: that is, how deeply into the networks did the story reach and for how long did it actively set the agenda in the online ‘conversations’?”

The internet is revolutionising the practice of public relations. This revolution has not only affected the way PR professionals communicate but has changed the nature of communication itself. This thoroughly revised second edition of Online Public Relations shows you how you can use this potent and energizing change intelligently and effectively.

This second edition is a timely and authoritative review of the new world of online public relations, supported by numerous online resources. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading.

About the authors: David Phillips is an online public relations pioneer. He has written three books about online public relations, lectures at Gloucester University and Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal. He is also the Head of Digital

Consultancy at Publicasity. Philip Young is a senior lecturer in public relations at the University of Sunderland, specializing in social media and media ethics. He is a lead researcher on the European Public Relations Education and Research Association’s EuroBlog project and has run the Mediations weblog (http://publicsphere.typepad.com) since April 2004.