CIPR has a £700k hole

PR Week reveals today that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a financial problem of £700,000.


Its hard to believe. In the name of transparency the Institute had no media statement on its website at time of writing. Its CIPR in the news page made no mention either.

But, we are told by PRW that:

The executive board met last week and agreed a programme of immediate cost savings, along with a three-year strategy that focuses on the needs of the CIPR membership and the profession.

‘Our cash flow position remains positive, and we are committed to turn round the finances in the next year,' said CIPR President Kevin Taylor.

‘We believe our new base at Russell Square, with its improved training, conference and office facilities, will help in that turnaround. Services to our members will remain our priority.'

This is no time for long term members like me to rock the boat but we can make constructive criticisms that may help the Institute develop a three year strategy that is more in keeping with the needs of the public relations profession than has been evident in recent years.

Ethics, modern communication education, dramatically enhanced and modern management theory are desperately needed as bedrock career skills.

But, above all, there is a need for a complete overhaul of PR education and research.

These are changing times.

The Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for non geeks the Real Time Web has become fashionable. It's fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance, a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November noting that

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

Code named Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service that will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media.

Very few services are real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services. Topsy (http://topsy.com) is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month. Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/) offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results.

Meantime, People like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the Real Time Web..

Modern Day PR Monitoring and Evaluation

Practitioners have monitored the environment affecting their clients forever. It’s what we do. Today we have more to monitor and we have to do it faster.

Most know how much of a challenge monitoring this is. Most have their ‘Google Alerts’, their blog and Twitter monitors and the daily updates from Linkedin groups. These are augmented with online media (web based publications) and media online (print publications with online content) and subscriptions to all manner of news services to supplement the daily John Humphreys pre-breakfast fest, newspaper, magazine, radio, TV and press clips.

The internet stream of consciousness seems endlessly oppressive because the practitioner needs to follow all the conversations while the users only follow one or two. It is, all too often, unmanageable and is, mostly, not very comprehensive.

Even with Tweetdeck and Feedreader going full blast, professional communication and relationship advisors are blithely ignorant of all but a fraction of web pages that mention their clients. Does, for example, PR Week see all of the citations that are published about it online at the rate of one every 90 seconds 24/7?

The truth is that after the news, blog, twitter, social networks and discussion list citations, the string of website references, comment in new channels and machine generated content is mostly factors larger. The client’s online web cloud grows every day. It is a competitive asset and creates a footprint for all to follow and affects the algorithms of search engines that make organisations searchable and famous. Klea Labs which is a new interest of mine has interesting capabilities such as its Web to IM service which provides real time monitoring of 'everything'.

For most organisations, more than half of online content appearing each day online is not monitored, measured or evaluated. In addition in an era of Real Time web, Twitter, is the nearest most organisations get to following the movers and shakers of internet reputation in real time.

Too much Too much, I can hear a whole profession cry. Yes, we do have to bring order to all this stuff and this is where there can be a happy marriage between PR and technology. All the content can be sorted into the different generics such that your Facebook content is not confused with your tweets.

Even when some practitioners get this information, is it enough in a digital age?

Far from it. In fact such a view of client publics would probably be misleading. The impression would be, as Colin Farrington once described it “ill-informed, rambling descriptions of the tedious details of life or half-baked comments on political, sporting or professional issues. They read like a mixture of the ramblings of the eponymous Pub Landlord and the first draft of a second rate newspaper column.”

But this is to take and overview of all the conversations of all the Pub Landlords and all columnists. Out of context they do seem banal. But once you are immersed in the community where these comments are made, they make sense and are about real people and the issues in their lives.

This means that monitoring is only part of the story. The content we read needs to be evaluated and evaluated in context.

As long ago as 2007, Read Write Web was discussing the importance of semantics to Google. It is semantics that allows us to make sense of content in context. For ten years I have been involved in semantic developments which provided the technology behind the relationship management research presented at the Bledcom PR conference this year. In PR, semantic analysis is a boon. It provides ways in which computers can mimic human needs. It is not able to completely second guess human understanding but it takes a lot of the hard work out of gaining actionable insights.

We have now come a long way from monitoring online content using tools like Google Alerts and RSS feeds to monitoring all web content in near real time then evaluating for actionable insights in context.

In 1995 it was quite hard to speak to a public relations audience to get understanding that the internet was going to change PR practice. Not many in the industry waited with bated breath for the findings of the CIPR/PRCA internet Commission in 2000. Few practitioners believed the world wide web was more than a fad. Only a minority agreed these developments would change our profession forever. Fourteen years and three online PR books later it still remains challenging.

Asking readers of PRWeek to move to a point where you can begin to believe that technologies will mediate in PR practice is a big ask but that is where I believe we are going.

Handling online issues - PRW keeps running scared

Next week PRW will publish the results of a poll of digital PR people's response to its question: • How would you have advised Neal’s Yard to act when it was faced with a barrage of negative blogger comment on the Guardian’s You Ask They Answer section?

The Neal’s Yard issue highlights how important it is for the PR professional institutions to have modern and relevant training in place for members. After all, it’s their members who should have advised the client in this case and the methods for management have been published by these institutions for years.

‘Managing Your Reputation in Cyberspace’ was quite specific about what practitioners needed to consider to both prevent and manage issues arise like the one facing Neal’s Yard. It was published in 1998. Of recent years PRW has returned to the issue of online risk management and is a complete pussy cat about it. It is time that someone broke ranks and pointed fingers. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR COMPANIES TO GET CAUGHT OUT ON LINE. EXCEPT, OF COURSE PRW IS NOT CALLING CIPR & PRCA AND THE TEACHING UNIVERSITIES TO ACCOUNT for not teaching this subject.

There is every reason that shareholders should sack CEO's that get caught out because they can't employ responsible and capable PR managers who will prevent the company being wrecked by bad mouthing online. Perhaps this is also a subject PRW could return to but it is not really a campaigning publication is it.


Ten years ago, the joint CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission, even explained the motives and methodologies that affect reputation online and Alison Clark even provided a neat diagram which I published in both editions of the CIPR in practice book ‘Online Public Relations’ published by Kogan Page.


If, in ten years, the PR industry magazine is not in a position to point the finger at the CEO of Neal's Yard, it is pretty pathetic.

The public relations sector that knows about these things is not going to be surprised or fazed by these kinds of event.

So, we will not be amazed to see the calm, considered, detailed, factual and comprehensive explication of the products and services offered by the company which be available on their site and an exemplar to all. We will not be taken aback by engagement of online ambassadors or an increase in online activity. Most companies that are well advised get their defense in first.

I admire the way Tesco deals with potential issues. Its corporate site deals with criticism before the event openly and online. It is very hard to criticize a company when the online community tells why a criticism is invalid.

The Next Big Thing Online

PRWeek is going to run a digital supplement next week. They will ask a number of experts what the next big thing will be.
This is my view:

PR is part of the Next Big Internet Thing and evolution characterised as the internet extending beyond the PC and laptop and emerging in eBooks, web enabled cell phones, touch-screen panels at bus stops, RDIF powered interactive messaging and computer games consoles.

The other part of this revolution are the communications channels optimised for social interaction. These are the online place of the brand recommender, critic and conversationalist. Where once stood Usenet, Instant messaging, Blogs, Facebook and Twitter, now stand the newer Real Time and information Augmented Reality channels representing forty years of online communication evolution.

There are some simple rules about what is the next big thing online. It will extent the physiology of humanity. Just as busses allow people to go faster than their legs will carry them; Google enhances the human memory, Facebook makes it easy to be better social animals and Twitter offers faster communication with communities beyond being a Town Crier, each successful development offers a human enhancing capability.

There is a whole chapter about this in the Phillips/Young book. But I guess PRW has not read it yet.

Values have value

I was interested today to see the world's 100 most valuable brands are recovering more quickly from the economic downturn than the companies listed on the S&P 500 as a whole.

One of the significant features of brands is that they are surrounded by conversations that add brand values.

For example, the top brand, Google, is talked about from many perspectives and with many values expressed.

I thought that it would be fun to see an example of value concepts from the first ten news reports about Google as presented by its news search engine today.

What we see from the mini reputation wall (below) are a diversity of concepts that form a small part of the value cloud that has accumulate to create the brand we all know as Google.

What is interesting here is that the values I ascribe to Google's brand are not the same as yours and both of us might agree that the newspapers in the test are not representing the view of the brand either of us have.

But then we are probably not desperate to know that "Google has finally admitted that mysterious doodles on their search engine masthead, which showed a UFO and strange crop circles.....", which was the Daily Mail story or "The Beatles really became bigger than Jesus when more people searched for the band than the son of God on Google over the last month...." according to the Daily Telegraph. These two articles add unusual values to the Google brand which both the Mail and the Telegraph think we might like to add to the values we already have.

We see that brands have a wide range of values and that there is an exchange rate between brand values and, for example, products purchased for cash. This means that brand values can be traded for money.

There are a number of differences as between a market and the purchase of a brand values. The most obvious is that the brand does not have to part with its values in exchange for the sale of the product. Indeed, as long as the product is satisfactory, the brands values will have enhanced value.

The big lesson we learn from all this is that brand values are not created by the brand but are created by a diverse community and that successful brands have a lot of values ascribed to them. These values, when shared help to build a common community of interest - the basic elements for social groups to form. Common and shared values form publics.

abuse blog business circles computer content cornfield court crop data docs doodle engine flying game generator god goods google hg intelligence internet invasion japanese lennon machines management market martian mobile news open phone political poor relative report samuel saucer search service source stamper subscriber technology unexplained users video web wells

created at TagCrowd.com

Tactics v Strategy

Sometimes in this hurried world you nearly miss a gem.

Brian Solis blog is worth following and I try to.

I skimmed a post this week and this sentence caught my eye:

Tactics are nothing, Strategy is everything: No talk would be complete without quoting Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before the defeat.”

It's that silly conversation that comes my way all to often:

"The client wants.....

'A viral....

'A Facebook ....

'A blog ....

'In Twitter....

Absolutely NO! NEVER! EVER!

The client must have Strategy.

Thank you Brian and your guest contributor Dr. Mark Drapeau.

Sarah Hartley at the Guardian - how to write for the web

Sarah Hartley, digital editor at the Guardian revealed all to Journalism.co.uk. There are not many suprises here and it all sounds like wrting for most other media.

Her comments on Search Engine Optimisation are valuable:

"SEO is as much about how you present the words as the words themselves. Make sure the reporter hasn't saved important information until the end of the story - tell your reader everything in the first paragraph. Yes, you are 'ruining' the surprise, but that's exactly what you want to do."

As semantics become more critical in serach, this is great advice.

Both Google and Bing are fed up with SEO gaming and are relying more on semantics for presenting content.

Here is what Bing's Mark Johnson has to say about it:

If you want to see the semantic concepts on a web page, you can play with one of Girish's tools by just adding a url to the box here and it will show them

The year of Mobile PR

E-consultancy has an interesting post this week.

It said:

The mobile market is expected to explode in the coming years thanks to the popularity of smartphones. But for the market to really take off, retailers need to get comfortable selling their wares in the space.

I think that there are lessons here for PR too.

The ability to distribute content (words, images, widgets, game etc) using mobile devices is quite critical and this is the year when we will need to get really competent at doing it.

We have perhaps until the New Year to join the early adopters and after that its going to be a common PR activity.

A number of staws in the wind suggest that time is not on our side.

There are other people talking about Mobile.

ReadWriteWeb commented this week too.

It is bullish except for Mobile Commerce, where it follows US data.

One has to remember that, compared to Europe, the US is a relative newcomer to commercial applications for mobile.

Buying Beer in Estonia or paying you cab fare with your mobile is commonplace. Try it in New York!

How Google selects news

Every media student should know how Google gets and selects the news it distributes.

This is not just for the publishers but for PR people. If you want your story to really caatch hold, it need the promotion power of Google News.

This video helps a lot

This Guardian articlee is very useful too.

Why would Google release this information now? Would it be to do with the moves by lots of publishers to charge for online content?

Public Relations - define

For one minute, I would like all those people who do not believe that PR is about relationship management to suspend belief.

For some time I have been thinking about the role of the practitioner in a bank.

It re-defines Public Relations.

I suppose the role of the PR Manager (Public Affairs Chief, Top wogga with some similar title but responsible for PR, CSR, IR, and other acronyms that really mean Public Relations) is now forever changed.

This person really only has one role.

It is to be able to assure the executive, main Board and the regulators (all organisations bend a knee to one or more regulator)that the relationship in any proposed or actual transaction between actors who can affect the long term productivity of the organisation, is robust enough to survive the transaction.

It is really quite simple.

It is probably too rich for CIPR, PRCA and other such organisations.

It will be usurped by Charles Handy and the management guruship.

It is as good for all types of PR from press relations to so called social media relations and sponsorship of the local soccer club.

I just do not know why it has taken me so long to get it!