mediations

Social Media Guidelines: A must-watch video

Thank you, Neville Hobson for highlighting this excellent video which explains the social media guidelines drawn up by the department of Justice in Victoria, Australia. It gives sound advice and very well made presentation. It is hard to think of an organisation that wouldn't benefit from watching this.

Reflections on Euprera 2011 #euprera2011

Maybe 'reflection' is putting a bit strongly, but here are a few comments/links to things I found interesting at the Euprera Leeds Congress (@euprera2011)....

It was good to have a few tweeters (the tag was #euprera2011), including @miriamzwaan, @aleksikoski, and @GraceAkagwu - follow them!

Creating and Destroying Relationships on Facebook slideshare presentation by @jahapaula

Investor Relations 2.0 slideshare presentation by Kristin Koehler

(Although I don't think the title works in English), German site Communication Controlling looks a useful resource - certainly there was much to think about in the presentation by Duhring and Linke (@AnneLinke).

Today Stefan Fink (@stephanfink) kindly sent me a link to his Social Governance 2011 report.

I will be interested in reading Jeanette Gusko's full paper on The Image of German Corporations on Wikipedia - reputation as crystalised by Wikipedia is an under explored topic.

I tended to listen to the social media presentations, but also particularly enjoyed Adela Rogojinaru on The Fall of Narcissist Societies and the Rise of PR (corporate storytelling as self-celebration, Grunigian Excellence as showing off!), Liz Yeoman's insights into Gendered Experience of Client Relations in UK PR and Johanna Fawkes on PR and Hermeneutic Ethics.

Jo was actually talking about something slightly different but I found myself grappling with why so-called ethical PR promotes positive third party endorsement but is rather coy about encouraging third party criticism. OK, smearing is wrong (if smear implies a false allegation or association) but surely pointing to the weaknesses of a competitor position is a legitimate characteristic of reasoned debate? 

Yeoman's drew on Arlie Russell Hochschild's work on emotional labour to explore some of the implications of the perception of PR as a "feminised" profession (including an amusing but true comment about CIPR website advice "going the extra mile for to prove you understand their business" that Liz noted was pretty much love, honour and obey...). 

Andrea Catellani was good on Pro-Nucelar European Discourses: Socio-Semiotic Observations. I was intrigued by his references to "flux texts" will try and read something by JM Floch - French and complicated so I doubt I will understand it, but it sounds like it could give useful insights into social media narratives.

All in all a splendid couple of days. Now I need to start thinking about the Spring Symposium February 17-18, 2012) at the MHMK University for Media Communication in Berlin, organised by EuroBlog stalwart Holger Sievart.

PRCA offers free course in spin

Most PR practitioners hate it when what they do is presented as 'spin'.

Not surprisingly, they like to think they provide honest and accurate information and would recoil in horror if someone were to suggest they were peddling part truths for organisational gain. Indeed, tackling the dubious reputation of public relations is quite an important part of what professional organisations such as, say, the Public Relations Consultants Association, set out to do.

They know that effective communication is based on trust, and that transparency is an integral part of the process of building that trust. Often, this means being open and clear about how a decision has been reached. Then, those affected might not agree with the conclusion but at least they know how the call was made.

It works like this. You may, for example, want to promote a new arrangement between a professional organisation and universities offering PR degrees. Fine. You might select, say, eleven universities which meet your exacting standards. Fine.

You might then, as chief executive, write a blog post entitled "Because there are universitites (sic). And then there are universities." Fine.

You might characterise this as "the latest stage in the PRCA's leadership of our industry."

You might explain that you have chosen to negotiate partnerships with a limited number of universities, and stress the word 'limited'.

You might say: "This is not some across-the-board endorsement of each and every PR degree out there, regardless of its quality or rigour. And that is deliberate. Because the plain truth is that many PR degrees are an utter and complete waste of time and money..."

You might say this creates a 'new quality distinction.'

You might add a classic weasel words phrase, such as "We are not saying that every single university that we have not affiliated with provides degrees without value. Far from it...."

And you might completely forget to mention how the selection was made.

By now you may have guessed that the University of Sunderland is not one of the select few deemed wonderful by the PRCA. And you might well think that this post is a splendid example of sour grapes.

OK.

But you will certainly have concluded that some chief executives of PR professional organisations are skilled in the telling of selective truths to further organisational objectives, and are quite happy to give readers a distorted and unhelpful view of PR education.

As the chief exec might say: "Win-win. Elite. That's how we like to spin."

Ray Hiebert: History of PR keynote

30:26   "However ... symmetry does not describe 90percent of what those who call their work public relations do. Our field might be evolving slowly towards Excellence, in a dialectic kind of way, but successful practitioners are still practicing press agentry and publicity, and spin doctoring is the characteristic characterisation of our field in the media. You can get a full dose of this from another recent [1996] history, Stuart Ewen's PR! A Social History of Spin, an account many PR academics do not use but it should not be ignored because it is about that other 90pc....

31:50 "If we wanted our curriculums to match the practices reported by the media we should have to teach courses in spin doctoring, ghost writing, image making and propaganda. Such courses wouldn't be accepted by most of our univerities and probably not by the public relations profession either, which likes the mantle of academic respectability while it either delines to hire our graduates or gives them jobs doing publicity or press agentry.

"A more honest term for our field, frankly, would be communication management, or strategic communication, or persuasive communication, or simply persuasion, any of which would be a better characterisation of what happens in practice."  

Review: The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser

The thesis at the heart of The Filter Bubble is simple: We are what we search for.

It seems obvious that the more able a search engine is to deliver results that most closely match our own personal needs the better it must be. Speed and relevance are the two factors that the searcher will most appreciate, but these attributes come at a price: they are enhanced because the search engine is using a whole range of dataset and filters drawn from our previous activity to customise and limit results for speedier delivery.

The downside is that as we express ourselves in terms of Facebook 'likes' or, more subtly, reveal ourselves through Google searches, we are presenting data gold dust to marketeers. 

The Filter Bubble goes beyond privacy concerns arising from internet click trails, and the enormous amount of data routinely being collected and traded by online businesses, to explore more sophisticated scenarios which suggests our very view of the world is being manipulate by those who are trying to sell products and services. From this rich mosaic of potentially highly personal information it is possible to perform what Facebook adviser Dean Eckles calls persuasion profiling; someone who likes this and this, and is friends with that sort of person, is likely to be more susceptible to that framing of a selling message.

Pariser takes these ideas still further. As search becomes yet more identified with the individual it is, for example, possible to see a personalised search based on, say, perceived IQ. In a sentence that might appeal to Edward Bernays, Pariser suggests: "In the wrong hands persuasion profiling gives companies the ability to circumvent your rational decision-making, tap into your psychology, and draw out your compulsions."

At the same time, personalised search can also narrowly focus the breadth of our inquiry and restrict the range of new ideas to which we are exposed. The implications for democracy and pluralism are worrying, with Pariser going so far as to claim: "We are now on the verge of of self-fulfilling identities in which the Internet's distorted picture of us becomes who we really are."

So at the heart of The Filter Bubble there is an interesting paradox. The very urges that that make us want to be promote our individuality though social networks at the same time locate us into ever more tightly drawn market demographics.

As Pariser observes, the conditions that promote 'personalised search' wouldn't be as appealing if it "didn't play to our post-material desire to maximise self-expression."

The more we try to create an individual persona, the more we become integrated into a marketing niche, that is designed to constrain and direct choice: "Algorithmic induction can lead to a level of information determinism in which our past clickstreams entirely determine our future."

The Filter Bubble is a highly readable book which, although stretching some of its main concerns almost to breaking point, raises some very important issues for those concerned with online communication and ethics.

If you are the sort of person who might tap Shirky, Gillmor or Zittrain into Google, don't be surprised to find personalised searching pointing you to Eli Pariser...

• The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser, 294pp, Penguin,  £12.99 (Review copy)

First Thoughts on The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser

If you are reading this, you are probably a lot like me - interested in (online) PR and cycling. Maybe you follow me on Twitter or use RSS, we might be Facebook friends, or perhaps you just Googled for something like coffee filters or bubble bath.

Whatever the case, it is still a fair bet you you are more likely to be interested in cycling than most other people.

This is partly because we gravitate to people who broadly share our world view, and partly because of the way that Google works.

Most of us would naturally assume that if they search on Google they will get the same results as everyone else.

Not true. December 2009 saw the launch of Google Search which used 57 signals to guess who you are and what you'd like, then tailors results accordingly.

For Eli Pariser, this ushered in "the era of personalisation." Increasingly, we find out about the world through search engines, and increasingly, the view we see is shaped by what computer algorithms think we want to see.

Fears that the internet narrows as well as widens choice are not new, but what Pariser does to great effect is lay bare the technological infrastructure that brings this about. 

And it is all rather scary.

I like buying books, and buy too many of them. One of the reasons I buy too many is that I am quite succumb to buying titles that Amazon recommends based on my previous purchases and the buying habits of people with similar purchases. This is rather good in that I have discovered dozens of books I may well not have read without this function; it is bad in that I am voluntarily surrendering some of my freedom of exploration to a marketing niche occupied by middleaged men with a certain education and view of the world, with a guessable disposable income etc.

I also read the Guardian, not least because it shares my political orientation. But by doing so, I necessarily exclude a lot of framings that don't coincide with my world view. I get around this by looking at other news portals, too, but by personalising my search Google narrows my viewpoint. I still buy a physical newspaper so I flick through the pages and see and read stories that are not directly linked to my interests; it is quite hard to do this online, especially if I am reading news on a my phone.

Scanning stories that I wouldn't normally read helps me break out of the filter bubble that prediction engines have created around me.

The filter bubble is Pariser's term for the unseen lens through which personalised search distorts my online exploration. He claims I am completely alone in my invisible bubble, in that it only surrounds me in a unique way, and there is no way in which I can burst out.

The filter bubble does other things, beyong reducing my opportunity for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning: "Search for 'depression' on Dictionary.com and the site installs 233 tracking cookies so other web sites can target you with anti-depressants."

This information is very valuable. "You behaviour is now a commodity, a tiny piece of market that provides a platform for the personalisation of the whole internet."

Companies like Axciom and Blue Kai track such information in incredible detail. Whereas Google Search used 57 signals, the Axciom data factory apparently uses 1,500 and has a detailed profile of 96 percent of American households, information it interprets for credit card companies and brands from Microsoft to Blockbuster. 

The filter bubble has many far-reaching effects, for media literacy and democracy, for individual privacy and business ethics, and for understanding the changing nature of interpersonal and communication.

Although I am not sure The Filter Bubble has the best of titles but I am sure that it puts Eli Pariser up with Clay Shirky and Jonathan Zittrain as must-read authors in this field.

Full review to follow... (which Axciom no doubt already knew...).

 

 

 

A chaotic challenge to Grunig

Marking does odd things to you, so it is no surprise that Richard Bailey is reacting to reading another slew of essays that reflect the view that Grunigian Excellence theory is the only way of understanding public relations.

In a typically thoughtful piece he suggests that Chaos Theory might help those of us who want to look beyond Grunig but are, quite frankly, floundering in our attempts to construct an alternative. (Actually, that is part of the problem - Grunig isn't wrong, just insufficient...).

I only have the vaguest understanding of chaos theory but I suspect that it's value for PR is in helping explain the implications of fragmentation. Grunig is essentially linear - communication is between an organisation and its publics, and the framing of publics coalescing around issues is a helpful construction for aggregating (stakeholder) sentiment.

In Online Public Relations David Phillips and I suggest that social media has helped shift the vector of communication through 90 degress, putting yet more importance on the conversation surrounding an organisation. It was ever thus, but our claim is that social media gives shape and substance to a myriad of comments, reflections and opinions, bringing them together into something akin to reputation.

I think we are right... but as I was quite possibly the worst candidate ever to attempt A-level Physics, I might struggle to marshall chaos theory to this worthy cause.

 

 

What did B-M do wrong in Google 'smear' campaign?

The glib answer to "What did Burson-Marsteller do wrong" in accepting money from Facebook to pitch stories that reflected badly on Google is that they got caught. (See Neville Hobson's background/comment)

In most areas of life drawing attention to the weaknesses, even the wrong doings of competitors is seen as legitimate debating practice.

We should not accept things on face value, and we should take care to weigh all the facts. If we are to be persuaded to take a positive view about products and services, policy or behaviour, we need to consider the negatives. Journalists are taught to investigate both sides of a story, and academics believe that one of their prime roles is to promote 'critical thinking.'

Unfortunately, public relations as presented by the 'professional project' has long had a problem with persuasion. Some strands of (academic) thinking have tried to argue that PR's role is to present information, and have tried to suggest that this can somehow be done in an objective way. Although this has been a hard line to sell, there is wide agreement that PR needs to focus its activities closer to this end of a spectrum of partiality than to propaganda and spin.

The underpinning for such a position is that people don't trust organisations that tell lies. Trust and legitimacy are seen as essential to organisational success, and there is a belief that in recent years PR has cleaned up its act, that practices common in the long ago 1990s are no longer seen as acceptable.

In what is almost an apology, Burson-Marsteller said:

The client (Facebook) requested that its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media. Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources.

Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle."

The key phrase highlights the 'need to adhere to strict standards of transparency.'

The admission is that while highlighting weaknesses in a competitor's position is legitimate, approaching journalists with a story pitch without saying who the client is, is not.

Few people have thought more carefully about PR ethics than Johanna Fawkes. In a series of papers she draws on the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung to argue that those trying to understand PR need to acknowledge its dark side.

Her approach uses Jung's notion of the shadow, those elements of the personal unconscious which are not considered acceptable to the conscious self, to suggest examination of PR ethics would benefit from a similar approach: "How can one have professional ethics if they are based on denial of large swathes of practice?"

As Kevin Moloney argues in Rethinking Public Relations the "Grunigian paradigm takes teaching and writing by the PR academy into a neverland of perfection."

Perhaps when those arch critics of PR David Miller and William Dinan have a point when they write in A Century of Spin:

"Many academics specialising in PR attend to the often apolitical technicalities of PR practice. The broader issues of what evasion, deception and manipulative communications are doing to democratic structures are ignored."

Fawkes' has refined her position since publishing Integrating the shadow: A Jungian approach to professional ethics in public relations in Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, Vol 6, No 2 in 2009 but her paper is well worth reading.

The PRoblem with PR

Here is how the Chartered Institute of Public Relations describes public relations:

Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

Here is what one of the world's largest PR firms, Burson Marseller, claims to do on behalf of its clients...

Burson-Marsteller is a leading global public relations and communications firm. Our strategic insights and innovative programming build and sustain strong corporate and brand reputations. We provide our clients with counsel and program development across the spectrum of public relations, public affairs, digital media, advertising, and other communications services. Our clients are global companies, industry associations, professional services firms, governments, and other large organizations.

Here is how B-M does it: Facebook exposed in Google smear campaign

 

PRism: referees and CfP

Thanks to everyone who has helped to publicise the Call for Papers for the special edition of PRism I am co-editing with David Phillips. The deadline for abstracts is July 3.

We have now agreed a distinguished panel of referees. Abstracts for Beyond Online Public Relations will be considered by:

• Elizabeth Albrycht: Paris School of Business and Institut Supérieur de Communication (ISCOM ), France 
• Magnus Fredriksson: Göteborgs Universitet, Institutionen för journalistik, medier och kommunikation, Sweden  
• Derek Hodge: University of Stirling, UK
• Karen Russell:  University of Georgia, Editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research, USA