Social media overtake porn, says IPR report

“Those aware of the social media research landscape know that several studies have indicated social media has overtaken pornography as the number one use of the internet,” is a headline from the fourth annual study on the impact of social media on the practice of public relations by Prof Don Wright of Boston University and Michelle Hinson for the Institute for Public Relations.

 

When presenting this finding at the IPRRC in Miami, the audience collapsed into laughter but it got the essential message that social media is here to stay and of rapidly increasing importance. The study researches opinions of PR practitioners, mostly in the US and Canada, but also from four other continents.

 

Other headlines were:

 

§  Traditional news media receive higher scores from PR pracitioners than blogs and social media in terms of accuracy, credibility, telling the truth and being ethical

§  73% of practitioners believe blogs and social media have changed the way their organisations or clients communicate

§  85% believe social media complement traditional news media

§  92% think blogs and social media influence coverage in traditional news media.

§  88% believe blogs and social media have made communications more instantaneous

§  93% of this year’s respondents spent part of their average workdays with some aspects of social media.

 

All these results are increases from last year’s report.

 

For a longer discussion of the paper and the full report, go to: http://www.instituteforpr.org/digest_entry/hinson_wright_social_media_overtakes_porn/

 

CSR – New online database

More news from IPRRC Miami – Prof Mary Ann Ferguson of the University of Florida is a well known researcher on corporate social responsibility (CSR). She and colleagues have built up a database of all the awards – national and international – that are given for best practice in CSR.

 

In a beta form, it can be found at www.csrpedia.com and is fully searchable.

 

One research outcome from their review of awards is that companies which have received at least one award for CSR have profits that are on average $1 billion a year greater than those which have not. The winner’s revenues are $13 billion greater than those without. Does this mean that CSR really is “business effective” or a factor of the size and management performance of the companies? A correlation is implied but CSR is only one factor in a corporation’s performance.

 

Companies winning most awards are PepsiCo, Marriott International, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Kraft Foods, Nike, Cisco Systems, Novartis, Principal Finance and Citigroup (!). Nike, in particular is under constant activist criticism for its behaviour and Citigroup is a financial basket case at present.

 

Sectors most likely to win CSR awards are accommodation and food, electronics, professional and scientific, information and manufacturing. The laggards are construction, utilities, management of companies and transportation.

Social media – Miami IPRRC headlines

This blog started life after the 2007 International Public Relations Research Conference in Miami, so it’s about to celebrate its 2^nd birthday. It’s a really enjoyable conference and this year, around 40% of presentations were from non-US academics and practitioners (but only two from the UK).

 

This year, there has been increasing emphasis on social media and its relationship with public relations and interpersonal communications. Tina McCorkindale reported on a survey of Facebook pages run by or linked to major US corporations.

 

Of 100 Fortune 100 companies, there were 55 Facebook sites, of which 52 could be regarded as ‘positive’ in their content (The ‘anti’ sites were for Wal-Mart, Verizon and ExxonMobil).

 

The ‘fan’ numbers for some sites were quite spectacular with the retail giant Target scoring 191,000 as No.1, followed by Verizon’s own site at 150,000 and Microsoft at 68,000.

 

Some sites were employee run, others by corporate communications staff. The retailer Lowes’s employees have an embarrassing ‘Lowes Hos’ area (with female and male staff identified). Ford and Microsoft look to be heavily managed. The carmaker was described by Tina as “positive heavy” while Microsoft has many deletions of postings on it, possibly taking out negative comments.

 

The Dell site, perhaps scarred by the “Dell Hell” controversy of several years ago, had rapid responses to questions with ‘Janet’ offering solutions to problems, including phone numbers to call.

 

Other phenomena observed included headhunters posting job information on corporate sites to attract staff from them; a low level of information on corporate social responsibility activity; and many sites without recent news on them.

 

Overall, Tina observed that there was “a lot of lack of engagement” which may indicate that corporate comms people see Facebook as another type of corporate website and not an opportunity to engage with customers, enquirers and staff.

 

Mihaela Vorvoreanu of Clemson University has also made an initial investigation into the inter-relationship between Facebook culture and PR efforts, and what is appropriate and inappropriate engagement between corporations and ‘Facebook natives’.

 

Using focus groups with PR students, she found:

 

§        Students didn’t like the loss of exclusivity when Facebook moved away from its original student base and allow access to everyone (including corporations).

 

§        The initial attraction of Facebook was to ‘digitally hang-out’ in which you can keep up with friends, but corporates “are just trying to sell and they have other motives”.

 

§        Facebook natives like to recognise things they like and become fans – “it can be a way to show off what you are”.

 

§        There was a strong belief that Facebook was ‘personal’ and that you should be able to post pictures without fear of potential employers using the site to vet applications. [It appears that many students tidy up sites before they enter the workforce, which they resent.]

 

§        Facebookers don’t mind supporting small businesses and hearing from them as “they have a face” but they don’t want to hear from Sony or “something big and obnoxious like Microsoft”.

 

Mihaela ended her presentation with the rhetorical question – Can relationships (between organisations and stakeholders) be protected by staying out of the conversation? That is, leave the Facebookers alone in their own space for fear of annoying them? It’s a relevant question and links with Tina’s view that the corporates’ own Facebook presences lacks engagement.

 

 

Best practice in charity communications

It was hot and sticky in Miami when I presented the results of a study on best practices in communication by charities and NGOs at the International Public Relations Research conference. Based on the hard work of my co-author Anna-Marie White, the paper was delivered in the very first session of the three-day conference. Talk about ‘first night nerves’ at 8.30 in the morning!

 

We had a really good turnout with lots of big names coming to our session. They liked what they heard and made great suggestions for further research. Even Vince Hazleton said the model we proposed “made sense”. That’s a real accolade from a leading PR theorist.

 

The study looked at how charities manage their reputation for ‘good works’ while undertaking commercial activities. It was based on research into a charity in the UK through document analysis and interviews with supporters. Our main findings were:

 

1)    Donors are overwhelmingly supportive of commercial activities, and communication about them, which are aligned with the charity’s mission.

2)    What donors perceived to be the charity’s intentions greatly impacts how they interpret the messages received from its communications

3)    Neither commercial activities nor revenue generation of any kind should distract from mission attainment.

4)    Communications on commercial activities should emphasise the ‘service’ that will result from rather than ‘marketing’ benefits of the products.

5)    Donors are annoyed with over-communication from the charitable sector as a whole. But they invite communication from charities they care about.

6)    The ‘giving paradox’ (you make yourself poorer in order to benefit others) complicates the exchange process within the donor-charity-beneficiary relationship.

 

The feedback we had was that these findings, with further testing, can be a real contribution to the under-researched area of communications by charities and NGOs. With extra advice from renowned PR academic Prof Doug Newsom, we’ll be pressing on with further investigations and revisions to our paper.

Traditional media brands strongest in the UK

Working with Ketchum on the very first UK version of its highly-respected Media Myths & Realities survey has been an eye-opener for me. We have started to roll out the report’s findings and I’ll be addressing them in this blog and others to follow.

For all who have been discussing the impact of social media and online news services, the MMR report has two very relevant findings for the UK. The first is that there is both high consumption of traditional media (print and broadcast) and high levels of credibility given to it. Information from social media sources (including blogs) has half or lower credibility than the big media brands. (MPs’ blogs have the lowest consumption of all).

The second outcome of the survey’s results is that media consumers (whether general population or ‘influencers’) do not appear to differentiate between print, online or broadcast versions of the traditional media’s output. They see it as a continuum, which leads to the interpretation that there is both great loyalty to a person’s existing media (print or broadcast) choice and great trust in it.

For example, someone who buys the Guardian in the morning on the way to work will most likely look at the paper’s online news site (something which that paper promotes om the print version). Similarly, those who listen to BBC Radio 4’s agenda setting Today programme will look at its website and the main news.bbc.co.uk site. It’s a continuous loop of contact that shows the trust given to traditional journalism and news-gathering.

That’s just a first snapshot of the MMR UK. More to follow.

PR Education – time for change?

One of the early speeches at IPRA Congress in Beijing was from industry doyen, Harold Burson, President of Burson Marsteller, who called for changes in PR education, away from a highly industry focused model to a more generalised education. Here are some of key paragraphs from his call for a deeper and more focused educational preparation for young people entering careers in public relations.

 

“My starting point would be to recognize public relations as an applied social science with a vast body of behavioural, cultural and motivational knowledge on which to draw. The curriculum should include basic courses in behavioural psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, economics and politics. There should be greater emphasis on writing than is now the case. Graduates should have a sense of the role of public relations in society and some historical underpinning on the evolution of public relations as a management function.

 

“In addition to adding courses in social sciences, I would devote a full year to one of four to five years of employment specialisation. In fact, one large American university has done just that for 10 years or more. Students choose among business, technology, health care and government (public affairs) as part of their public relations curriculum, devoting a full school year to that one area of specialisation.

 

“Increasingly, I find that employers (including our own company) are seeking from job applicants a knowledge base that is in addition to public relations experience. Increasingly corporate employers want its public relations people to know what business is all about. Information technology employers and agencies want their public relations people to know what’s in the back box. Health care companies seek employees with hospital experience or who know how pharmaceuticals are marketed or what the regulatory agencies which oversee their business are all about.”

 

What Harold Burson says is at variance from industry feedback in the UK which has a strong emphasis on employability skills. Indeed, I have had at least one international consultancy CEO (from one of BM’s main competitors) say to me that PR graduates need ‘de-programming’ on theory and ethics when they start their first jobs. There are also important differences between the structure of US programmes and PR degrees in other countries. In the US, students study for four years with a predominantly liberal arts framework at the outset of their studies with PR coming later. In the UK (and many other countries), PR degree programmes are usually of three year duration with PR taught from the first weeks, although business and political units accompany them.

 

I’d be interested in your comments.

PR Evaluation – IPRA Beijing feedback

One of the best attended panels at IPRA World Congress at Beijing was on PR evaluation, with the star speakers being Prof Don Stacks of University of Miami and Peter Verrengia of Fleishman Hillard

 

Measurement of social media was one of the main discussion points. Don Stacks said that data on social media output, such as traffic and click-throughs, was easy to collect but the penetration of messages was much more difficult and mathematically complex. His view was that social network analysis was the way forward with methods, such as Marcovian chain analysis, coming from sociological research.

 

To understand how messages are being processed and passed along in social media, we need to track bloggers, code the content of their text and work out who is talking to whom. “It’s a highly complex analysis”, he told a packed house.

 

[Since Beijing, I have seen an example of the use of network analysis tools to track movements of messages between websites and bloggers. I hope to report soon]

 

Peter Verrengia said that social media is difficult to measure but it is so important to the future of PR and communication that we must develop more sophisticated methods to track it. There is great (and growing) volume of internet traffic to track and the volume of analysis grows geometrically when more than one language is being monitored. Peter says that there are opportunities to monitor some message content by computer but human analysis is needed on tone and context.

 

Fact: China has 200 million ‘netizens’ in a population of 1.3 billion (and growing)

PR Education – Time for industry to invest long-term

Earlier this year, I blogged about the value of placements and internships in supporting excellent public relations education. I took this message to the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Congress in Beijing, where I spoke on a panel on public relations education and training, alongside colleagues from New Zealand, Peru, China and the United States.

 

Universities welcome the public relations industry’s partnership with academia on placements and by giving guest lectures and providing students with ‘real life’ scenarios to work on.

 

But the PR industry needs to commit itself more deeply to public relations education and research. Apart from the United States which has exemplary philanthropy for education, there is a lack of financial support. From my experience in several countries, the PR industry welcomes our job-ready graduates but is very reluctant to fund research or to support faculty appointments.

 

Industry can become more deeply engaged with PR education and research in three ways. The first is to seek appointments on university PR programmes’ advisory boards and so provide industry perspectives when they are designed or reviewed.

 

The second is to make the appointment of graduates from accredited PR programmes a top priority. Too often, industry leaders pay lip service to PR education but choose not to recruit students who are job-ready in favour of those from non-vocational universities.

 

Thirdly, and most importantly, it’s time that this industry actively funds university education and research as a long-term investment in its future. Endowing a professorial chair, offering funding for research related to your organisation’s interests, giving staff time for secondments to universities as ‘practice fellows’ and engaging with universities on joint funding bids to national research bodies are all actions to consider. Governments everywhere are looking for research bids that demonstrably benefit industry.

 

In summary, if the industry wants to derive advantage from academic education and research in public relations, it has to increase its active engagement and to start funding it in a much larger and longer-term manner.

PR in China – extraordinary growth is normal

I have just been attending the International Public Relations Association’s (IPRA) conference in Beijing and have witnessed the extraordinary growth of public relations in China.

 

For most of the past decade there has been 30-35% annual growth in the public relations sector in this vast country. Annual expenditure on PR is estimated to be 11bn RMB (c.£1.1 billion). And this is taking place in a country which sees itself as backward in media and communication, compared with developed countries.

 

Other dimensions of the Chinese PR industry are that there are 10 million companies and organisations engaged in public relations and that there are more than 30,000 PR providers with turnover greater than 10m RMB (£1m) – and that’s historic data. The real situation continues at a fast pace.

 

Speaking at IPRA Congress, Zhao (Oscar) Wenquan, boss of China’s biggest PR consultancy Blue Focus told us, “the whole picture is very encouraging. We are at the tip of the iceberg on which to explore.”

 

Government public relations has shown great expansion, too, perhaps emerging from its strong control on information and entering a new form of democratic engagement (Although I could not access this blog whilst in Beijing nor could other colleagues).

 

The growth and expansion of the Chinese PR industry has come in a remarkably short period. Its leaders date its from 1984 when China was beginning its policy of greater openness and the transition to the “socialist market economy”. Its first undergraduate PR studies started soon after.

 

It’s notable that although all the major international PR consultancy groups have been represented in China for two decades, it is the regional and national PR industry that is growing fastest. Another example of industry growth is that there are more than 150 PR associations across the country, all acting as centres of training and industry promotion.

 

The industry growth may be hit by the downturn in the western economies but it is most likely to dampen the rate of growth rather than stop it. The next step will be the expansion of Chinese PR and marcoms organisations on to world markets. If this is not evident already, it will take place soon. 

 

Warning signs for PR agencies

A survey of 78 corporate communications directors published in PR Week (UK edition) on 31 October 2008 had warning signs for PR agency bosses. It showed that the use of agencies/consultancies was likely to fall in the coming year. As the survey was undertaken before or during the recent financial shake-up, the results may only be a partial indicator of tough times to come.

 

Here are headlines from the PRWeek/Brands2Life survey:

 

Has your comms planning been affected by the credit crunch?

 

Credit crunch has affected communications planning – 72%

Cut use of agencies in 2009 – 19%

Asked to cut head count – 11%

Under a third said plans had already been ‘adjusted in light of financial conditions’

 

Do you rely on agencies more or less than five years ago?

 

More – 23% (mainly from big corps with > £1bn turnover)

Same – 53%

Less – 18%

 

The plans to cut the use of agencies in 2009 indicated by answers to the first question may have a correlation with the 18% of corpcomms directors who rely on them less than five years ago (second question). When added to the cut of 10% in handling overflow work for these clients shown in the third question below, there is a clear indication of tough times ahead.

 

What is PR agency/ies main contribution?

 

Proactive media relations – 51%

Creative input – 50% (same as 2007)

Handling overflow work – 43% (down by 10%)

Strategic input – c.33%

 

So start planning for tighter belts!