Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:22:13 +0000

Last week Lisbon and specifically the School of Communication and Media Studies, was the stage for the EUPRERA/Euroblog Spring Symposium. I had the pleasure of playing a small role in the organizing team, with Mafalda Eiró-Gomes, David Phillips and Philip Young.

The conference focused on how Public Relations is responding to the challenges of the Internet, and with invited speakers such as Philip Sheldrake and Anne Gregory it was indeed a valuable discussion.

My take is that we have not changed much on the way we practice Public Relations, even though there is indeed quite a lot of opportunities and new tools just waiting to be developed and put to use. This does not refer to blogs, twitter or facebook but to the possibility to rethink a whole organization’s structure, to try new ways to communicate and ultimately to change society.

It was also a special pleasure to see the Spring Symposium in Lisbon, as it was the conference that in 2008 had a huge impact on how I think and see PR. For that my gratitude goes to EUPRERA and everyone who makes it the great association it is.

Last but not least, a huge thank you goes to the team at Nüwa Studio who came up with the amazing website design we used.

Part of the conference also meant a few changes for the Euroblog Study, but more on that later this week.

There is no such thing as a Web 2.0

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:37:34 +0000

“In less than five years, a movement has taken hold that is having a profound effect on public relations. Called Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media in 2003, it heralds the evolution of the web from a repository of information and communication technologies into a space for symmetrical communication; a platform which aids the transfer of knowledge and conversations and a place where people can easily mix and match both.”

David Phillips e Philip Young em “Online Public Relations — A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media”

The idea of a Web 2.0 was widely adopted after O’Reilly made it evident that there were changes that could not be ignored and that allowed for more people to use the internet to communicate and to collaborate. These changes were in fact the result of a tipping point in usability, in a growing concern to make the web more accessible to those without programming skills. We can’t even determine what caused this tipping point, as it appears to have been a set of factors: Companies became more aware of usability requirements, the number of internet users was growing more and more each day, publishing online content became easier thanks to blogging services and software developers saw great improvements in both programming languages and web servers.

When we talk about web 2.0 we are simply mentioning a point of evolution, characterized by real time communication and a growing interaction between people, groups and organizations. It is in no way “a new internet”, and by it’s own it is not a paradigm shift.

As if this wasn’t enough, in an interview for an IBM podcast, Tim Berners-Lee showed an interesting perspective regarding the hype surrounding Web 2.0.

Sometimes we even refer to it as the “social web”, which leads us to another fallacy. The web as always been social in nature, it was always meant to assist cooperation between people, to spread information and to allow for low cost and high efficiency tools of communication to be developed. Before 2003, when Web 2.0 was proclaimed, groups were already forming through mailing lists, online forums, Chat Rooms and Instant Messaging services.

Web 2.0 is bandied about by a lot of people as being new. It is really an evolution.

David Phillips e Philip Young

Fighting the Hype, first steps

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:07:23 +0000

The last few posts make up an introduction to online communication. In very broad strokes they attempt to give you an idea on how I think about the Internet.

Despite the lack of references, I feel it is easy to see it is influenced by the Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody”, David Phillips, Philip Young as well as a number of friends and bloggers whose work I follow.

Next up, we prove that Web 2.0 does not exist.

What the web is made of (and what that means for PR Strategy)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:36:50 +0000

If we would ask David Phillips or Philip Young what the web is made of, they would tell us about Platforms, Channels and Context.

When we talk about the Internet we are talking about a series of technologies that indeed communicate among themselves, things like satellites, routers, servers and other infrastructures. Information can travel across the Internet in a number of ways, and to access it we refer to communication Platforms such as computers, mobile phones and tablet computers.

But Platforms are simply the objects we use to access information. We can access the same file through an Hypertext Transfer Protocol using a computer or a mobile phone, and we can do the exact same thing using a File Transfer Protocol that will in addition allow us to edit the file. We can also exchange messages through a number of ways, from Instant Messaging to email and twitter, using facebook or any other social network. These are Channels or as I prefer, online communication instruments.

Depending on the circumstances, we use different combinations of platforms and channels. Search engines offer maps that adapt to mobile devices because we look for directions and places to stay while traveling and companies look for ways to access updated information at any time. These are Contexts in which we use the Internet.

To the elements proposed by David Phillips and Philip Young I add Content, which can be seen as the sum of data to obtain information that will be applied to a Context. This post is content because it contains a number of data (ideas and concepts), organized to become information (given a logical line of thought) and given context to become content (Thus a post on Online Public Relations is born).

But what does it all mean?

Nowadays we use information and content in a number of ways and we want it to travel across platforms and channels as best as possible. That is why we have things like XML and Open Document Formats, mobile phones and laptops. We don’t just use these things because we want to work and collaborate in a more efficient and effective way, they are also a means to reach out to friends and relatives.

Building relationships is part of our nature and is one of the reasons that led us to spend so much time and effort developing Communication Technologies. And to communicate we share information and content with those that for some reason are close to us.

Thanks to the Internet we have produced more information and content that we can ever hope to be able to organize, that is why we are slowly moving to a Semantic Web. Simply put, we are finding ways for computers to understand that 9 digits form a phone number and that an address is composed of a street name, house number, region and country. In short, the semantic web is a way of telling a computer what that data you just entered is.

Before you let yourself be dragged by the current hype of the Semantic Web, take the time to read this article from December 2000 describing how Tim Berners Lee himself explained the concept.

So, we now live in a world where a wide variety of communication platforms allow us to use a number of channels to access and share information and content in a number of different contexts (at work, while traveling, at home…). The semantic web will allow us to use that information with even greater ease, but that is a subject for a future post.

Where does Public Relations fit?

We can use these four elements that make up the Internet and the Web to understand the changes in our way to communicate and to relate with one another. In the past we had access to a telephone and a fax machine, today we have a computer and a mobile phone and a number of other platforms to communicate. And if before we used these platforms in a work context, today we can use them in greater number of daily contexts.

When building a strategy we need to take into account which platforms and channels will our publics use to communicate and in what context. Each of them will impose challenges. Intranets may be used on-the-go and therefore require a mobile-friendly version; corporate websites need to be indexed by search engines and therefore must not use flash; our publics demand quick updates so we must opt for a microblogging platform; etc.

These questions will impact our budget, the way we measure and evaluate success as well as the procedures we apply to manage the different communication instruments at our disposal. But it does not end here.

Different communication instruments imply their own set of constraints, both in the way they work and in regards to the social contracts that we must adhere to in order to use them effectively. A clear example would be twitter and facebook, while twitter asks us to limit our updates to 140 characters, facebook asks that we respect the privacy of others.

The content shared across these instruments is also somewhat different, while twitter allows for text and links, facebook gives us the possibility of posting videos, photos, notes and even to play games. One can argue that twitter can also be used to share the exact same content as facebook, but it will always require an additional communication instrument such as posterous, a blog, or a youtube/vimeo account.

Even if we do not outline the scenario which is composed of platforms, channels/instruments, context and content, it is good to keep these concepts in mind as they will surely be useful to identify changes and to adapt our strategy.

Euprera Spring Symposium and the Values School of Thought

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:16:46 +0000

Saying it was a pleasure to be in Gent for the Euprera Spring Symposium 2010 is nothing short than an understatement as it is the kind of event that can give you enough energy and insight for the whole year. I was sorry to have missed the first day, but the second day and the presentations that I had the chance to attend were more than enough.

There are a few things I would like to highlight given that I was part of them. One is the Euprera Euroblog Social Media Awards, led by Philip Young this project meant to recognise the best student and research PR blogs across Europe. Being part of the Jury was an honour that Philip described well by saying: “we were happy that it was such a hard decision”.

Winners of the Euprera Social Media Awards

Best Student blogger: Laura Fischer, for New Media in Practice
Best practitioner/ researcher: Ben Cotton, for SocialWebThing
Best group blog: Bergitte Lowzow and Mette-Lise Kjellberg, for Komma

I was happy to see so many students participating, and especially thrilled to see a Portuguese blog make it to the short list.

Part of Euroblog is also a daring research project. The intent is to know how social media is taught in Public Relations courses across Europe and even to build a generic teaching model. During the spring symposium we presented how the project progressed so far and managed to get very good insights from a small team work session.

There is a lot to do for Euroblog, and now we have quite a diverse team to help us do it. Feel free to follow the Euroblog Wiki and this blog for more news on that later this week.

The Spring Symposium is indeed the best setting for a dialog on Public Relations and social media and fortunately all of the presentations and papers presented are made available on Euprera’s website.

My contribution this year was a small part of my MA Dissertation on values and values systems, of which I already talked about in a previous post. It began as a small review of the main concepts of Values used in a series of disciplines, specifically concepts presented by Rokeach, Schwartz, Hofstede and others.

But the concept of Values as changed.

Concepts of Values for Public Relations

Recent work on Values and Values Systems points Public Relations to a Values Systems School of Thought to which David Phillips as contributed a great deal, both in previous work and in the paper he prepared for the conference. The paper details Toyota’s recent crisis and the extent to which an online landscape can be identified and monitored. But more than that, it challenges Public Relations professionals to be more than technicians and to take charge in looking after Values that are sometimes outside of the organization’s sphere.

Jon Iwata’s work with IBM is also a new perspective on Values and Values Systems, proposing a framework of values that goes from what it means to look like IBM to actually being IBM. Although I do not fully agree with models of Values Systems (or corporate identity) that originate solely from within the organization, Iwata’s perspective appears to be flexible enough to be used in more negotiated approaches.

From a different area comes a model of Values Systems in Collaborative Networks, by Camarinha-Matos and Macedo. If we put together this model for values system with work done in both psychology and neurobiology by Harry Reis and by Quartz and Sejnowski, we find a model that details the process by which relationships are formed around values. It also provides us with a number of important concepts to study how relationships are built around Values.

Not only does the the Values System School of Thought help explain Social Media, it is reinforced by our use of technology to communicate. It does this by creating a more permanent record of our demonstration of personal and group values that we can use to conduct research. This demonstration of Values can be the way we build Public Profiles, the editorial line followed in blog posts, the images and colors we opt to use and a number of other types (or tokens as David Phillips would say) and their respective occurrences.

The recent work by Jeong-Nam Kim and James Grunig promises to make this area even more interesting, by proposing a set of tools to understand our communicative behaviour in problem solving. It may very well be that our Values and Values System play a part in both our identification of problems, as well as in the choice of solutions.

It would appear that 2010 is to become a very interesting year for the Public Relations discipline.

With all this said, I would like to thank everyone who made the Spring Symposium possible with a special note to the Artevelde students who made me feel welcomed simply by reaching out on Twitter.

Grunig on the Digitalisation of Public Relations

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:07:26 +0000

Philip Young’s blog, Mediations, is one that I follow for quite some time now. Yesterday, it mentioned an article on PRism by Jim Grunig titled Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation. Among other subjects, Grunig comments on the book written by Phillip Young and David Phillips, Online Public Relations 2nd Edition.

Both the article and the book qualify as important readings, but for this post we will focus on a few key ideias that I believe are interesting to explore.

Internet Penetration and Use

The first issue that I find interesting is in regards to the use and implementation of the Internet:

“As of June 30, 2009, there were 1,668,870,408 internet users in the world— 24% of the world’s population of nearly 6.8 billion (Internet World Stats, 2009).”

If less than a quarter of the world’s population uses the Internet and already it is something of great importance, we can only expect it to become even more relevant.

But Internet users are one thing, penetration is something completely different. If we plot a map with data from the Internet World Stats website, we can compare these two metrics in a per country basis.

Internet Penetration

Internet Users

Original Source for Both Maps

Both maps substantiate Grunig’s claim that

“Internet usage is higher in developed regions of the world (50.1% in Europe and 60.1% in Oceania/Australia) than in developing regions (23.7% in the Middle East and 30.0% in the Latin American/Caribbean region). Although only 18.5% of the Asian population uses the internet, 42.2% of all internet users in the world are in Asia”.

Grunig then states that “digital media have made most public relations global and force organisations to think globally about their public relations practice.” Although I do like the idea, in a world of computer mediated communication there is still a language and an access barrier to be overcome. There is another aspect pertinent to the way we communicate online, which is that even though we are able to communicate with someone across the globe chances are that we will communicate most with the ones closer to us.

This means that even if it is true that organizations can think globally, it is also truer that the internet allows for a precise communication with certain publics based on location, hobbies, and other characteristics. A clear example of this possibility is in twitter’s geotagging feature, which allows for mobile devices and twitter clients to broadcast their geographic location. In regards to access and use, we need to ask ourselves who is in fact using the Internet and how. China’s large number of users and low index of penetration leaves me specially curious.

At the same time, we still do not know what to expect in regards to the evolution of digital communication in the different countries. Will all countries follow a path as linear as a railway? Does that railway with all its forks and branches lead to the same destination? To be on the safe side, PR should concentrate on understanding the evolution of digital communication in each country.

We can look to the UK and Portugal as examples, while in the United Kingdom, blogs became a widely used form of communication that is now changing. In Portugal blogs did not manage to gain the same size and relevance as in the United Kingdom, Social Networks on the other hand seem to be more relevant each day.

Online Publics

On the subject of online publics and the loss of control, so recurrent when talking about social media, the article states that Publics have always had control over the message substantiating that claim with studies that go back to the 1960’s. But the Internet does force us to re-think PR theory, in particular the Situational Theory of Publics. Indeed publics have always had control over the message and they do in fact create themselves, but what guides their collective behaviour and an individual’s choice between two identical groups/publics?

In this article and in the Situational Theory Grunig puts the emphasis on problems and issues. The concept of Issues alone does not seem sufficient to explain or actions as individuals or as groups, and in our social contexts not everything is an issue, problem or conflict that needs to be resolved. It is my belief that values and values systems of both individuals and groups play an important role in guiding our behaviour and the forming of groups and publics, particularly online. This does not mean that we should abandon the concept of issues entirely, but that the situational theory as it stands now does not help Public Relations practice in an online context.

Further on, Grunig states that “The digital media are ideal for environmental scanning research, and there are many tools available for scanning cyberspace for problems, publics, and issues.“. The two-way symmetrical model mentioned earlier in the article does present itself as the one to apply in Online Public Relations, with this in mind I feel we should focus on areas that go beyond research and scanning. Specifically this would mean using that research and an identification of online publics to create response mechanisms aligned with the need for a quick reply and for a coherent corporate voice.

On the issue of evaluation, the article reads:

A number of analytical schemes have been developed to evaluate the effects of digital media programmes (see Jeffries-Fox, 2004; Paine 2007a, 2007b; Phillips & Young, 2009). These range from simple measures of hits on a website to measures of cognitions, attitudes, and behaviours, as well as indicators of the types and quality of relationships. In many cases, these measures can be applied directly to online content. In other cases, additional survey or experimental research will be required.

In my view, the information made available by the Internet (giving us access to the visible part of the communication between and within publics) can go much further than the research and monitoring stages. It can be used to evaluate corporate communication in a series of new ways and in real time, and the behavioural aspect mentioned by Grunig will no doubt be a key component to understand our online activities as individuals, groups and publics.

For organization’s, the Web can provide valuable information and even help answer a few key questions, such as “who are our publics? what do they talk about?” and even “what do they think of us?”

Last Remarks

Although long, this post reflects only a few ideas and opinions that I believe to be specially important on the article and I may return to it in the future. I am sure that Dr. Grunig would be able to counter-argument my view on most (if not all) of the questions described here and even (hopefully) prove me wrong.

If you made it this far down the page, please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Online Publics, Values and Values Systems

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:28:58 +0000

Online Public Relations, Publics and Values Systems; This was the title of the dissertation that I presented this last friday. It was a work that had the invaluable assistance of David Phillips as my supervisor and that focuses on what can be a new arena for public relations: mapping and identifying publics based on the demonstration of values. I was also lucky to have Anne Gregory accept the invitation to participate in the formal discussion, with whom it was a pleasure to exchange ideas.

The reason why I put a stop to my blogging hiatus with this information is quite simple, it is a subject that will be somewhat recurrent in this blog. Not only when it comes to presenting my findings, also in regards to pursuing the theme a bit further.

However, the perspective on this blog will not be limited to the values that guide corporate communication, instead it will include both economical (a utilitarian definition of values) and psycho-sociological values as well as the relationships formed as a result of these values. PR’s approach to values and values systems tends to focus on the psycho-sociological definition, as a means to assure that corporate communication is coherent and credible. Recently, a post on the blog PR Conversations discussed the issue of values applied to PR while reviewing Jon Iwata’s plan for IBM which is a great example on psycho-sociological values applied to corporate communication.

The dissertation on Publics and Values systems takes the whole concept of values a bit further, supporting that values and values systems can be used to map and identify publics while at the same time providing a way to measure communication efforts in a quantifiable way across any number of communication instruments.

Bledcom, Last day and final thoughts

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:15:16 +0000

Following the bar set high by the first day of the conference, the second and last part of the event lived up to expectations.

New Zealand contributed with an interesting perspective and explanation of the Maori Party’s campaign. Other presentations focused more on cultural aspects as well as in the analysis of discourse.

This is where David Phillips and I had a chance to participate.

We presented our paper on the analysis of online discourse and at the last minute thought about analysing the hyperlink network around BledCom.com.

And so we did.

Both the network analysis and the semantic analysis showed to be in tune with the spirit of the conference. As David Phillips explains, it’s not about the words we use the most, but the concepts present along the discourse.

This example of real time analysis allows for an up to the minute monitoring of a public relations strategy as well as an initial assessment on publics’ values. And we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg.

last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who took a part in organizing the conference. Your effort did not go unnoticed.

Bledcom 2009

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:59:12 +0000

In a few hours I will be travelling to Venice, so I can then reach Bled in Slovenia by train.

The occasion, Bledcom 2009 where I am presenting a paper with Professor David Phillips. We will be talking about A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building online.

What this means is that due to the way we now communicate it is possible to identify relationships and networks of relationships. Thus placing Public Relations in a new light.

But more on that later, I will try to post on the blog and on twitter as much as possible using #bledcom as a tag.

Photo Copyright: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trentstrohm/130077084/