All PR is Online' [WHITE PAPER]

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All PR is Online

A White Paper from Keene

Communications

July 2013


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Big data, the semantic web and the internet of things are not phrases usually associatedwith public relations. But now they are.

Big data in public relations means we can access every article published by most mediagoing back decades or explore what is being said by every politician in both Houses for aslong as Hansard has been published.

The semantic web allows us to look at the intentof a web page without reading a word. Itallows us to identify mood, enthusiasm and excitement across whole organisations and evenreplicate human logic.

The internet of things means we can view a 48 sheet poster on a telephone or check out thecontents of the fridge at the Wig and Penn Club.

These concepts have profound implications for the PR industry, which stands on thethreshold of an exciting new era. The industry now has the right people with the right skillsneeded to firmly grasp the opportunity to understand our stakeholders better to create moremeaningful relationships. We must not let it slip through our fingers and be seized upon byour colleagues working in other parts of the marketing services spectrum.

I am indebted to my friend, Professor David Phillips, who, together with his colleague PhilipYoung, has provided Keene Communications with this White Paper as an edited abstract

from their forthcoming book. The book, Online Public Relationsis due to be published laterthis year by Kogan Page. This will be its third edition, proof that the book is hugely popular.

David and Philips third edition of Online Public Relations, will be a must read for thoseworking in the PR industry who want to grasp the opportunity that is on offer.

Simon Quarendon

Managing Director

Keene Commu nications

Jul y 2013

FOREWORD


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Introduction

This White Paper is an abstract prepared by Professor David Phillips FCIPR and edited byMichael White from the forthcoming third edition ofOnline Public Relations, written by theleading academic team in this field, David Phillips and Philip Young, to be published laterthis year by Kogan Page.

Once, books about public relations dealt in known processes. Today, we know that theprocess of building relationships with organisational constituents is anything but a known

process. There is a significant revolution taking place.

The internet has escaped from the PC

As digital media escapes the tied down desktop to mobile wifi-enabled devices, thesenew platforms become a media in their own right. Mobile phones and tablets have createdThe Internet of Things, a commodity so useful it is almost invisible.

The mobile phone can give driving directions and monitor health, the mobile credit cardreader can pay for hot dogs at Glastonbury, and mass transit tracking of trains and buses isavailable on every type of screen imaginable. These are everyday examples of changegaining pace all too quickly for many communications practitioners.

The collection of masses of data and the ability to monitor and evaluate it can now providerobust intelligence of the spread of a flu epidemic, create a map showing which streets arebusy, or where power outages have happened. During the 2012 Hurricane Sandy in NewYork, it was possible to remotely locate emergency food stations and first aid servicesthrough mobile devices.

The advent of an online world means almost every aspect of the discipline of PR needs to berethought. Crucially, it is not just a case of devising, adopting and developing new tools andtactics, or restructuring to meet the ever-shrinking timescales for increasingly internationalcampaigns. Far beyond this, what we might call the New PR demands a dramatically

different approach at the level of strategy.

In order to understand this, we firstly need to understand what the internet is, partly as atechnological tool, but more importantly as the enabling mechanism for a communicationsrevolution which is driving significant changes in the dynamics of society.

The Purpose of PR? Reputation Management

Almost all definitions of public relations agree that it is a discipline concerned with anexchange of information. In practice, this usually involves the management of anorganisation trying to convey information to external and internal stakeholders, and, tovarying degrees, trying also to receive information from a range of people.

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Sometimes this is simple factual data, perhaps a council informing local residents about theday of dustbin collection, but more often it is about persuasion. This is where public relationsseeks to change perception or behaviours. Such communications seek to enhance orconsolidate reputation, which can be seen as the basis of trust. Indeed, some regard

reputation management as a useful explanation of the purpose of PR.

We would argue that a more sophisticated definition of public relations goes beyondreputation to be concerned with the broader and more challenging realm of relationshipoptimisation, in which reputation clearly plays a part but which demands an understanding ofa much more complex set of factors.

The point is that at each level the core processes demand the exchange of information, andits outcomes are predicated on responses and reactions to this information. The challengefor the PR practitioner is to understand how this information is exchanged and then work outhow to influence such exchanges in a way that benefits the client.

Mass communications vs. micro communications

In the roughest and crudest terms, lets examine how information is exchanged in modernWestern societies. To get us underway, lets pretend it is 1984, when Grunig and Hunt wroteManaging Public Relations.

In 1984, as for the previous hundred years, it was possible to split information into two areas,that of mass communications and micro communications. There is a significant grey area inbetween the two, but for present purposes these categories are distinguished by aqualitative difference between that which is made available to large numbers of people andinvolves a decidedly asymmetrical relationship between provider and audience, and thatwhich is fundamentally an exchange between individuals with the possibility of symmetry.

Mass communications involves newspapers, magazines, television and radio. For ourpurposes it can include books and directories, and can extend down to organisationalnewsletters and business-to-business publications. All such communications require capitaland labour investment to produce what are, by and large, static texts. Clearly the content ofsuch exchanges is influenced by audience expectation and reaction, but it can be a slow andinefficient process.

Micro communications are infinitely more flexible, in terms of timescale, reach and influence.The most obvious example is a conversation, perhaps between you and a friend: Whereshall we go tonight? I have heard theres a new Italian restaurant on the High Street.Perhaps you go on to discuss a number of restaurants, including information gleaned fromnewspapers and magazines, or friends and colleagues word of mouth, and peerrecommendation. Such exchanges can be replicated by groups, and extended over time,and in 1984, by the (expensive landline) telephone and by slow, time consuming letter.

Telephone conversations usually involve two people, are ephemeral, and their contacts areoverwhelmingly not recorded and not accessible to other people. Letters can be duplicatedand sent to a whole host of people, but each mailing is discrete; only the sender is likely tohave an overview of responses. It is quite difficult even to think of circumstances in which thecontents of these letters or telephone calls could have been made more widely availableexcept by the laborious process of transposition to a mass medium.

Today, we have entered the world of search engines and the writable web. The difference isnot in tools of communication, but in their connectivity. One of the essential factors thatformed the mass communication model was simple economics it was very expensive to


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launch a newspaper or TV station, and the capital investment necessarily precluded the vastmajority of individuals from that entering the market.

A new era of communications

All of that has changed. Today anyone with access to a computer, an internet connectionand basic literacy can make their voice heard to a global audience. Here is where traditionalcorporate culture and the internet clash. Once managers were gatekeepers of information;they had a role and facility for control.

Just as blogs and other social media allow organisations an effective environment in whichto create dialogues and communicate directly with publics and stakeholders, so they allowusers, clients, opponents and competitors to communicate freely with each other, with thepotential to create a discourse that is largely outside the control of the subject.

More importantly, it is becoming easier to track and search this information. Conversations

are becoming increasingly digital, and focused around a myriad of interlinked nodes ofcommunication that are catalogued by search engines and connected people.

In addition, anyone can create a website, they can have it hosted for free, they can adddiscussion lists and chat facilities, and they can include campaigning banners, all at the clickof a mouse.

Because of these developments, the PR industry has to change. On the one handgovernment, the economy and society have changed and will force PR to follow, and on theother, the very practices of PR have already been changed. Some, like press relations, arethreatened with being devalued as press reach shrinks.

As digital interaction commands more attention of individuals and organisations, it needspractitioners to both show the way and implement the tactic. Much of the historic practice ischanging, and will diminish or vanish.

In the UK, the pace of digital development is blistering. We can take a snapshot and know itwill evolve before you read it. People have taken to the internet as almost no othertechnology in history.

Now mobiles take pictures, provide editing capability and wirelessly transmit presentationsand video to projectors. People have communication powers that only an agency of an in-house publicity team could consider five years ago. Among the ranks of common man aremany with such capabilities and yet among common corporations, there are few who canrespond in kind. This power shift is now commonplace.

All aspects of PR are affected

For a very long time, corporate affairs practitioners were pretty sure that this 'internet thing'would not affect their realm of cosy one on one relationships. As it turns out there is a lotgoing on that affects corporate affairs.

Of course we start with the watchers of corporate activities. Almost anyone can take a viewof almost any company based on its online presence. It is the nature of internet transparencyand porosity which makes almost all corporate activity accessible to the networked digital

community. In addition, such accessibility is served by third party organisations fromCorporate Watch to Safe Call. There are videos and stories a plenty.


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There are technologies that examine content and can infer what has been excluded. Theycan second guess what has been redacted. We can show this using a simple example.Imagine that tomorrow the CEO and CFO of a company have no appointments and nextweek is the Annual Report day. Therefore one could say there is a high probability that they

are finalising Annual Report statements. This kind of inference is pretty easy for the savvyCorporate Affairs Manager. This means tomorrow a competitor could announce theappointment of a senior manager poached from the company. With pattern matching suchinferences can be very insightful and communication can be planned for optimum effect.

Developing search technologies make organisations more vulnerable because it is easy tolook for content relating to obscure subjects in semantic relationship with an organisation.Much of this affects corporate brand.

It seems that every area of PR activity is now mediated by the internet. Web based eventmanagement software, press clipping reporting and scanning online is available. From everyperspective public relations has to embrace the internet. It is not just social media, but

everything that the internet has to offer.

Why wait for the future?

The traditional role of PR has already changed with crowd sourcing arming amateurs withglobal audiences and activists and communication tools to exercise great power. Constantlyevolving media capabilities offer great power to the initiated.

Every @tweet on Twitter adds to the richness of data held online about colleagues andcompanies. Semantic algorithms change the ranking of our organisations; the relevance ofmedia stories; the value of PR work and reputation of practitioners. The digital evolution isno longer about how soon it will happen now that it has, almost without comment, happened.

Most people in the FT Top 1000 companies could not find time to read everything that goesonline about them each day. Is it to be ignored or applied in this Big Data era?

Today PR practitioners need to have robust intelligence of the global, often invisible,networks which connect us each day to the public. As for tomorrow, much of the discipline ofPR will need to be rethought. The most important question is this: how are you going toprosper in a world where all PR is online?


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About Keene Communications

Keene has been delivering a broad portfolio of communications services to its clients since1986. These services have been centred on public affairs, public relations and

representation. Increasingly, the consultancy has sought to create bespoke or highly tailoredservices that meet our clients specific requirements. All our services are bespoke anddesigned to achieve results.

One of the few consultancies in the UK to hold quality accreditation (ISO 9001) Keene hasworked across a wide range of industry sectors and for a wide variety of clients. These rangefrom large multinationals, to public sector organisations and from SMEs to charities.

Keene and its staff belong to a wide number of professional bodies, including theAssociation of Professional Political Consultants and in a wide number of industry fora.

This is one in a series of White Papers published by Keene Communications Ltd. To be

alerted to future ones, follow us on Twitter.

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All PR is Online' [WHITE PAPER]