DummySpit

When I sought views on research priorities for research into public relations via DummySpit earlier in the year, the leading topic was “the impact of technology on public relations”. Quite fortuitously, Prof John Pavlik of Rutgers University in the US has written a paper on this topic, ‘Mapping the Consequences of Technology on Public Relations’ which has just been published by the Institute for Public Relations at www.instituteforpr.org/research. Prof Pavlik, who some 20 years ago wrote the excellent “Public relations: What research tells” demonstrates his renowned clarity in writing for both academic and practitioner audiences in this very readable paper.

In it, he reviews four areas of impact and implications of technology:

1) How PR practitioners do their work

2) The content or messages developed and delivered in PR

3) Organisational structure, culture and management

4) Relationships between or among organisations and their publics

The paper looks at current research outcomes, case studies, anecdotal evidence and interviews. He also recommends a research agenda for further investigation. It’s important to note that the paper’s view is far wider than media relations which often dominates discussion of online PR. 

I’d recommend the paper to all those interested in the future of public relations and will be using it with my PR students at Bournemouth University.

One of the claims being made for new media is that it gives greater access for ordinary folks to express their views and debate politics. The current US election prologue is being put forward as the first real “Internet Election”, although this claim was made for the 2004 campaign.

In his ‘Read Me First’ column in the Guardian this week, Seth Finkelstein, takes a swipe at the limited access to citizens in the recent CNN YouTube debates with a column headed, New media is just another way to pull the same old tricks. Finkelstein argues that “new media bring new media manipulation and new media exploitation” and that the method of selecting YouTube postings by a gatekeeper was the same as “contests where the winner gets a cameo appearance on a TV show”.

He goes on criticise the process further with, “ss is typical of user-generated content, despite all the hype about empowering citizens, the individual is utterly powerless, except to try to please and serve the interests of the gatekeeper and thereby obtain some attention (but not remuneration).”

There is a raft of issues that arise from this critique: would the candidates have participated in an open-access debate where they didn’t know what issues were likely to be? That’s highly unlikely, although it might make edgy broadcasting. Would broadcasters, like CNN which staged this cross-media event, give up their control and their standards of presentation? Again, highly unlikely.

So Finkelstein’s hope that a true shift in power could have occurred was forlorn before the start of the process because the broadcaster as gatekeeper has too much to defend and he recognises this in his sign-off comment: “… we should never mistake a change in media style for any advance of citizens’ power in politics”.

New media has also brought unforeseen problems for two of the UK best known brands - Vodafone (mobule phones) and First Direct (online banking) which bought packages of online advertising space on Facebook and ended up on a page giving information about the far-right British National Party (BNP). As the Guardian reports, “the move may affect other advertisers on Facebook by highlighting a current lack of control over where the multimillion page network places their bookings”. The report highlights the problem that there is little control over where where advertisements appear.

Ironically, The Guardian’s online version of the report includes a Vodafone click-through advertisement across the top of the story (or it did when this blog was being written) which again shows the problems that advertisers have when seeking associative coverage of their organisation.

Perhaps these two instances of new media problems - lack of access to a range of voices and damaging associations - make a collateral case for well-researched, targeted public relations activity. The public relations practitioner as an intermediary can have a valuable and ethical role to play in promoting genuine debate.

After three months of discussion, the Study of the Priorities for Public Relations Research (PR Priorities Study - final report) has been completed. The initial piloting was undertaken on DummySpit in April and led to the setting of 26 public relations topics. These were sent to a Delphi study panel (of experts) in five continents covering top academics, leading practitioners and the CEOs of PR industry bodies. After three rounds of intensive email debate, the Top Ten PR research topics are:

1) Public relations’ role in contributing to strategic decision-making, strategy development and realisation, and organisational functioning

2) The value that public relations creates for organisations through building social capital, managing key relationships and realising organisational advantage

3) The measurement and evaluation of public relations, both offline and online

4) Public relations as a fundamental management function

5) Professional skills in public relations; analysis of the industry’s need for education

6) Research into standards of performance among PR professionals; the licensing of practitioners

7) Management of corporate reputation; measurement of reputation

Ethics in public relations

9) Integration of public relations with other communication functions; the scope of public relations practice; discipline boundaries

10) Management of relationships

Just outside the top ranked priorities are:

11) Client/employer understanding of public relations

12) The impact of technology on public relations practice and theory.

This report is the first completed international study on public relations research priorities (using a Delphi panel) since the mid-1990s and gives valuable insight into the ‘front and centre’ public relations research areas around the world.

The results will allow academics and practitioners to work closely together to improve understanding of public relations and its most effective and ethical use. It is a benchmark that all research plans and funding can be judged by for relevance and importance.

David Phillips has just posted a podcast on his site about ROI and the measurement of online PR. It follows on from earlier discussion on DummySpit about “pullability” as a measurement of the associative referencing of online communication. From this discussion, the concept of “out-pull” as a measure was proposed. It has received a very positive reception from practitioners and academics.

Is ROI a relevant measure? Listen to David’s views. As he says, analysis shows that the measurement of online PR and communications is not an easy task and not given to financially-based measures.

Writing negative comments about your organisation on a personal blog is seen as ‘ethical’ by almost 50% of PR people. That’s one of the results of an international survey by Prof Don Wright and Michelle Hinson reported in the proceedings of the International Public Relations Research Conference, which have just been posted online.

The survey of PR practitioners found that 45% the respondents are aware that employees of their company or a client’s organization have communicated on weblogs, and that the outcomes have been mostly positive. As to whether it is ethical to monitor employee postings and to discipline staff, there was a strongly positive view. Some 79% said that monitoring staff was “ethical” and 59% backed discipline for staff who write negative statements, unless the staff were representing a labor organisation or trade union.

Despite these strongly held views, only 3% actually undertook research or measured “information their employees are blogging”, although 46% expect to do so in the future. Wright and Hinson also point out there is little research into the impact of blogs and other social media on the theory and best practice of communication. Obviously, there is a debate to be had on the ethics and legal issues that surround employee blogging.

Following on from my posting of March 23 (Online PR Evaluation – do we need new models?), there has been a wide range of comments. Some agreed with my point that Walter Lindenmann’s “out-take” descriptor was the most likely zone of measurement that could be achieved in measuring online public relations activity. Others said that was all wrong as the online community didn’t want to be “messaged” and that organisations had to lay in wait to be discovered by searches (i.e., it is a passive presence). Katie Paine illustrates this in her posting on May 9, “you need to be there when people are trying to find you …”

Going back to Lindenmann, it’s worth reviewing what he wrote about out-takes, even if it was conceived in the pre-online era (that is, about 15 years ago). To quote from Watson & Noble (2005: 83), out-take measures “judge whether or not the target audience actually received the messages and so evaluates retention, comprehension and awareness.” In the online era, the problem is that it is difficult to know whether the audience is reached because it is amorphous and ever-changing. The point I was making was that we may only be able to measure the manner in which the audience uses the “messages”, information or resources in blog, news media or corporate form to pass it on to others. This is equivalent to the out-take judgements.

In an email to me, David Phillips argues that “pullability” is key factor to measure. His draft definition is, “it is the result of activity by the online community combined with technologies to aid a process of pulling information that is “out there” for use by an actor.” He adds that evaluating and assessing the reach of an organisation’s online presence isn’t possible because there’s no way of identifying the total readership of online content. “At best one can monitor a handful of web sites and access research data about online traffic.”

He goes on to argue that “there is evidence that content evokes behaviours online”. And it is by measuring when someone refers to a press release, web page, video, keyword, concept, tag, blog associated with an organisation in an online technology such as a blog¸ podcast, video, wiki or other channel, that evidence can be found that content is being “pulled” by the online community.

Comparing the two notions of “out-take” and “pullability”, I would argue that they are similar but not the same. Out-take is concerned with message recognition and the interim responses before there is any decision to act (or reject). Pullability refers to recognition of information which is found and then passed to others, without action necessarily resulting. Both terms recognise a mid-way stage in handling of messages and/or information.

So my proposal is that “Out-pull” may be the appropriate term to describe the process of handling information and messages. It fits into the Lindenmann model which is a neat and compressed way to explain the stages of PR measurement and evaluation.
 

The recent report - Media Myths and Realities - from the Ketchum public relations consultancy about media trends in the US made for interesting reading, as it sought to allay what it sees are myths. The most interesting of them was the continued importance of local media, which in the US means the major metropolitan dailies and television (and not the dire local freesheets that we suffer from in many other countries).

For me, the most surprising piece of data was that at least half (52.3%) of 18 to 24 year olds read newspapers, especially those reporting on their home patch. The percentage of the population to “take a paper” steadily rises to 83.4% of grey panthers (65 and older), but there must be a major behavioural different in media consumption from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

As a PR educator, I find it difficult to get our ‘communicators of tomorrow’ to get away from the headlines offered online and pick up a newspaper. And my daily commuting on trains and buses in England shows little evidence of young people reading newspapers. Most are permanently plugged into MP3 players.

Other headlines from the research were the importance of family and friends in making decisions. Around 43.7% of Americans rely on word-of-mouth recommendation when making product or service decisions, but only 13.8% take note of celebrity endorsement. Ketchum sees a strong future for “amplified word of mouth” as a marketing communication method.

Part of Ketchum’s aim in conducting the survey was to allay what it sees as a “myth” that media communication was all online now but there are some impressive results in the adoption of social media across all age groups and, specially, amongst influencers. A multi-media online-offline mix is the way forward.

Recently, Weber Shandwick Worldwide (WSW) announced its latest research on reputation loss with the claim that “CEOs receive nearly 60% of the blame when company reputation is damaged”. That seemed to be a useful enough “wow” factor to headline the report and support the marketing of WSW’s reputation management consultancy services. And to make it stronger, there seemed to be almost exactly the same blame quotient whether the respondents were in North America, Europe or Asia which appears to be a strong intercultural trend.

But when you read further, questions about the validity of the research arise. The sample was 950 “global business executives” in 11 countries, which seems solid enough, but it’s not bizexecs who determine an organisation’s reputation, it’s all those “stakeholders” with whom an organisation has relationships. To quote from Charles Fombrun, who is well known to WSW, “better regarded companies build their reputations by developing practices which integrate social and economic considerations into their competitive strategies … They initiate policies that reflect their core values; that consider the joint welfare of investors, customers and employees; that invoke concern for local communities …” (Fombrun 1996, p.8). This approach to reputation management says that the organisation’s reputation is dependent on its behaviour as a corporate citizen, part of the societies in which it operates, and not above or apart from them.

So if WSW had polled 950 ordinary folks in 11 countries, it may have come closer to a realistic figure of blame on CEOs. It’s also worth noting that research by Prof Philip Kitchen of Hull Business School and Andrew Laurence of Hill & Knowlton found in 2003 that the percentage of an organisation’s reputation ascribed to the CEO in different countries was much more varable. In Belgium, it was only 26% but in Italy, it was 83%. Leaving Italy out of the data, the average for five other European countries was 36.2%. In North America, Canadians gave 66% credit to the CEO and the US, 54%. There’s no doubt that in a celebrity conscious world, CEOs are front and central on reputation issues because they are leaders but it is the range of stakeholders who give the organisation its reputation as a result of their engagement with it, not the CEO.

In the WSW research, the response that “online attacks or rumours” was only a 25% factor that can ’significantly damage reputation’ demonstrates either complacency among the bizexecs or misunderstanding of the role that online media and social media can play. WSW comments in a very controlled manner that “companies continue to overlook how damaging threats from online activists and pressure groups can be if they are not prepared to respond quickly and decisively”. The 75% who don’t engage with the online world had better wake up soon!

In his latest white paper* the British media services operator Daryl Willcox offers a scenario 10 years hence in which search marketing has replaced public relations as the major “below-the-line” communication method. As well, he suggests PR spending will be at an all-time low, while companies are spending 50% of marketing budgets on online activity; there will only be three national dailies and tabloid newspapers will have become weekly glossy magazines. But, horror of horrors, the UK’s two leading public relations courses at Bournemouth University and Leeds Metropolitan University will be “considering closing … because of a shortage of applicants”. Willcox admits quickly that this worst case scenario probably won’t happen because public relations will “ultimately adapt to a world where traditional media becomes subordinate to online media” but the speed of adaptation will “dictate whether or not PR becomes a leading element in marketing strategy or a sideline”. He then makes a case for search marketing replacing PR for online media relations through search engine optimisation of press releases and says that this provides the ideal “Return on Investment” metric via click-throughs to client or organisational websites. The online environment is challenging current public relations practice through its speed of change, the increasing influence of social media, and the bypassing of media filters. There is, however, increasing research into theory and best practice which is finding that media audiences are multi-tasking on their consumption of media – they read both print and online version of their daily newspaper, they graze on online news, blogs and discussions and some, but still relatively few, consume via podcasts and internet news on mobile phones. There is also evidence from a recent Ketchum/USC Annenberg study that local media is still very important is most major US cities, despite the availability of global news services 24/7; that word-of-mouth plays a key role in reputation formation and buying decisions; and people still look to “influencers” in their community and interest groups for guidance. In other words, personal relationships are still very important even if some are constructed on the internet. 

And this is where Willcox’s analysis comes unstuck. He sees public relations in a very narrow view – as a marketing support message delivery device in which technician skills of clear writing and message optimisation are paramount. Despite saying that public relations should be “getting the recognition it deserves as a strategic function within organisations”, he assigns it an entirely tactical role. Although media relations is probably the most common tactic in message delivery, public relations has a much wider remit as the recent emphases on management of relationships and reputation management have shown. Public relations is being operated in excellent organisations as a core discipline that supports the whole of the organisation through all of its relationships, not just those with the media. How search marketing will make an impact on stakeholders and publics isn’t discussed by Willcox and it is a notable gap in his analysis. As for the impact of search marketing on public relations and other communication studies, I can report that it is only one of the influences on future course content. In recent times, we have seen IMC rise and fall rapidly despite being told that public relations would be subsumed within it. But that doesn’t leave educators complacent and most courses are already adapting to the online environment including units being taught with new online tools. If public relations courses fail to garner enough students, it will be the result of too many low-quality courses being offered, rather than the students rushing off to be search marketers. The glut of courses is a bigger danger to the public relations industry than the Willcox scenario of bulk media relations being undertaken by search marketers. 

* http://www.dwpub.com/whitepapers.php?int=Public_Relations_Versus_Search_Marketing 

Following on from my post on SimplyCity, it is notable that the latest edition of The Economist reports on buzz marketing which is the close cousin of WOM sites like SimplyCity. In the article “Building buzz” (p.76 of the UK edition), it points to the problems of control and ethics that are implicit in buzz marketing. “The difficulty for marketers is creating the right kind of buzz and learning to control it. Negative views spread just as quickly as positive ones, so if a product has flaws people will soon find out”.

The example of Microsoft sending laptops loaded with Vista to key bloggers was an example of misjudgement that boomeranged on the software company. They (and the blogging community) responded negatively to what could have been seen as a bribe or at least an unduly large gift. But there was no doubt as to which company had sent the laptop and software to the bloggers, whereas buzz marketing in some forms uses so-called “volunteers”, recruited with offers of free product or a loyalty rewards programme, to promote a product or service to friends and relatives.

In this case there may be no disclosure of interest by the “volunteer” who is speaking about product. That is a practised deception and so is, in my view, unethical. It’s bad enough to be ambushed by people selling pyramid schemes like Amway or inviting you to product evenings, but at least you know what their interest is within a few moments. For someone to be either promoting a product (whisper marketing) or getting feedback for product development (buzz marketing) without telling you of their interest is dangerous for the reputation of organisation using this strategy and potentially deceptive.  We all have heard recommendations from friends about products, but you expect them to be based on their genuine experience and not a set of messages that have been sent to them in exchange for reward.

Already, many PR professional bodies have set out policies on ethical communication and I hope that these will be operationalised in public relations and the other below-the-line disciplines. If not, who can we trust?