mediations

What exactly is 'Curation' anyway?

Curation Nation: How to win in a world where consumers are creators, by Steven Rosenbaum (2011)

Curation has been a buzz word for a while now, a useful weapon in job description territory wars but underexplored by PR academics and lacking robust description.

In his new book, Curation Nation, Steve Rosenbaum discusses curation in many different ways, but never quite pins his colours to the mast with a tight and serviceable definition. Here is one of his efforts: "Curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organised."

The key word appears to be 'human' - as opposed content selected and by automated, algorithmic computer aggregation. For Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of magnify.net, "Curated experiences are by their very nature better than one-off decisions about that to buy or whom to trust."

The basic premise is that there is far too much stuff out there for anyone to deal with without help, and things will only get harder. We will increasingly rely on functions that offer "valid contextual content on topics we can hardly imagine," and this doesn't mean Google.

Indeed Rosenbaum goes so far as claiming: "Search is broken. It's over. Done. Gone."

Really? Can we really accept that "Search is over. Curation has begun."

OK, good curation might facilitate productive access to relevant information, but suggesting one might replace the other seems to highlight tensions within the rather broad definition Rosenbaum brings to curation.

On one level he frames it as gathering and collecting, hence the emphasis on gathering information, which privileges selection, which can be seen as gatekeeping: "Curation has always been the process of discerning quality."

Courting accusations of elitism he argues that in an era of data abundance the thing that is scarce is taste.

When using the example of an entrepreneurial blogger keen on making money out of an enthusiasm for barbecuing, Rosenbaum seems to position the curator as a shopkeeper, selecting goods at the right price, displaying them (the process is also concerned with ordering and display, which requires attractive accessible presentation), thereby engaging the customer, then monetizing (making a sale).

At worst, using curation techniques to develop web presence that has financial value can amount to merely cutting and pasting other people's hard won content and it selling under your own label, a practice he decries as 'scrapbooking'. A more positive model might be the Reader's Digest.

Curation Nation comes alive with chapter based on interviews with PR opinion leaders, Brands: Curating your consumer. Steve Rubel puts it simply, when he says: "Where PR is going involves three things: getting other people to create content, curating what's there both with a client and in a broader environment, and creating your own content - and sometimes those are all connected."

Equally useful are the chapters on Content Strategy and on Finance, Curation and Privacy.

Rosenbaum moves closer to my  preferred framing would put greater emphasis on ordering, presenting and making accessible information generated by and around an organisation when he argues "Creating structure for conversation and contribution gives users clear opportunities for participation and creates a coherent experience for visitors."

This leads to: "Content curation centred on a clear set of content policies, with orderly governance, means using all your enterprise's resources in a holistic way."

If curation is about collection, selection, nurturing and positioning it then describes functions core to caring for reputation and by extension the relationships that might be influenced by that reputation.  

This, in turn, articulates the ways in which strategic content management is fundamental to effective Public Relations.

(Re)Thinking Media Relations

Once upon a time, and like most journalists, I thought public relations was the way organisations fed stories to newspapers. For the seven or eight years I have been studying and teaching PR, I have been developing an ever-widening and deepening view of the discipline in which media relations seems to play an increasingly peripheral role. But now I am delighted to have been asked to write a book chapter on media relations and am trying to rethink its role in today's communications landscape.  

As part of this process, two blog posts have caught my attention. Today, Heather Brooke has launched a scathing attack on the way West Midlands police handled legitimate journalistic inquiries about the decision to set up CCTV cameras in predominantly Muslim areas of Birmingham:

"PR exists for control purposes, to hinder, rather than to inform, and this is a fine example.

"Public officials also often complain about the irresponsibility of the press. Yet here we see a responsible reporter who writes stories based on facts and in the public interest being frozen out of a press conference precisely because of the strength of his journalism, by a police force already accused of misleading the public with false information."

Less dramatically, but perhaps more instructively, The Guardian's Robert McCrum claims to have glimpsed the malaise that lingers at the heart of the bookseller, Waterstone's. An apparently rather clumsy response to an interview request led McCrum to conclude that Waterstone's is held back "by a sclerotic management structure". An organisation that won't let a manager chat to a reporter about a bestseller is revealed as monolithic, crippled by top-down paranoia; interestingly, a counterview swiftly emerges from a very lively comments debate - 54 intelligent contributions in three days. Some bemoan the corporate culture of Waterstone's but many others suggest that as journalists are so untrustworthy, a cautious 'no comment' is completely justified.

What importance do you think media relations should command in the wider PR mix? Looking along my bookshelf, it seems that many PR academics regard the subject as a rather dull, perhaps worth a mention in an overview of 'tactics' but hardly meriting serious study...  

PR lessons from the "Prince of Darkness"

Everybody knows to be a little wary of the blurb on the back of books but the pitch for Peter Mandelson's memoir is still a bit rich. Did I really buy TheThird Man because "Much has been written about the man at the heart of New Labour. Now we hear the unvarnished truth from the man himself"?

Describing Mandelson's account as unvarnished is like presenting a Henry Moore sculpture as a lump of rock; you may or may not like it as a piece of art but you can't claim that no work went into its construction!

The Third Man is an outstanding illustration of the power of selective memory and slipperiness of truth. It is also a chilling reminder of the dangers and unreliability of 'reputation management'; if nothing else it teaches us that once you have started it is very difficult to stop. I have read quite a few accounts of the rise of New Labour but I have to concede that I have no idea what happened at any of the key events in this tragicomedy. At the same time, I am fairly confident that only the self-styled "Sultan of Spin" could begin to believe this is the most objective account.

The tricky bit is that it works quite well as an (accidental) insight into many of the problems inherent in Public Relations. Mandelson succeeds in showing why 1980s Labour needed not only a new direction but a new way of communicating that direction, but at the same time eloquently illustrates the perils of image management.

Just as people often say PR is not very good at it its own PR, Mandelson is constantly the exposed as the spin doctor who couldn't spin his own reputation.      

"For the best part of two decades I had been defined by an increasingly malign media image. I was Machiavelli with a red rose. the Prince of Darkness. I had managed to come to terms with Mandelson the media caricature. I also realised that I had played a part in its creation."

Mandelson suggests he learnt "the three basic rules of spin-doctoring" whilst briefing journalists at the Havana Libre Hotel in Cuba when he was a delegate to the 1978 World Youth and Student Festival, arguing "a pro-freedom, pro-human rights agenda". Although you might think that in The Third Man world, rule one is, however clumsily, be sure to drop in a few words to make sure everyone knows you are one of the good guys, Mandelson claims they are in fact: "Don't overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story."

He may be accused of overclaiming, and of there will be quibbles about about facts, but Mandelson also showed the importance of timing - getting his story out before Blair or Brown weigh in with versions of the same script but with presumably rather fewer of the good lines going to the Third Man.

Anyway, armed with these lessons, the youthful Peter goes on to work for Neil Kinnock.

"It was the the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet 'spinning' does not begin to capture the the difficulty bordering on impossibility I found in securing more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour."

But he does grow into the job.

"I was even enjoying my role as the spokesman - or more often the stage manager, interpreter and spinner - for Labour in the media.

 "Ultimately I saw my role as using any tool at my disposal to ensure that Labour, and Neil, were presented in the best possible light....

... if that meant cold-shouldering those who had made Labour look bad, I saw that too as part of my role."

For whatever reason, Mandelson is coy about the the rougher tools he deployed, going little further than admitting to deliberately tripping over a TV sound lead to end coverage of a particularly disastrous public meeting.

By his third return to government, Mandelson claims to have left spin doctoring far behind, and points to the relatively benign attitude of the media in his spat with George Osborne over the Corfu/ Oleg Deripaska affair: "I was breaking out of of the world of scripted soundbites I had done so much to create."

Repeatedly, Mandeon's career, and his particular telling of his own story, underlines a PR truth that he captures in a comment about the dying days of Gordon Brown's premiership: "Gordon beileved I could 'fix' anything in the press, but as I had learnt at Walworth Road, there comes a point when your product or lack of it outweighs even the most deft presentation."  

Perhaps the most telling insight into Public Relations is the ambition he shared with so many practitioners (and academics) to go beyond the discipline and use his skills to better - and worthier - effect. PR talks endlessly about getting a seat on the board, or joining the dominant coalition; Mandelson is desperate for a role in Cabinet.

"Almost as soon as I arrived at the DTI, I felt that I was able to start redefining what 'being Peter' meant. Instead of giving advice to others and enabling them to make decisions, I was taking my own and setting the agenda for the department." 

Communicators can certainly learn from The Third Man, but when the author teaches you to question the motivation behind almost every sentence, they are unlikely to learn to how to love Peter Mandelson.

Maybe he just isn't very good at his own PR. Or perhaps the flaw is in the product he is trying to promote...     

 

   

    

 

 

 

Credibility and flying BMWs: JPRR Social Media Special

"Social media are giving public relations theory a workout," writes guest editor Tom Kelleher, introducing the "brisk circuit of scholarship" he has brought together for a special edition of the Journal of Public Relations Research, Vol 22:3.

• Media Catching and the Journalist–Public Relations Practitioner Relationship: How Social Media are Changing the Practice of Media Relations, by Richard D. Waters, Natalie T. J. Tindall, and Timothy S. Morton
• Organizational Image Construction in a Fragmented Online Media Environment, by Dawn Gilpin
• A Losing Strategy: The Impact of Nondisclosure in Social Media on Relationships, by Kaye D. Sweetser
• Online Relationship Management in a Presidential Campaign: A Case Study of the Obama Campaign’s Management of Its Internet-Integrated Grassroots Effort, by Abbey Levenshus
• Diffusion of Social Media Among Public Relations Practitioners in Health Departments Across Various Community Population Sizes, by Elizabeth Avery, Ruthann Lariscy, Ellie Amador, Tayna Ickowitz, Charles Primm, and Abbey Taylor

Several of the papers set out to test the rhetoric of social media through grounded anlaysis. As Sweetser rightly points out, "the field finds itself facing more case studies of what not to do with little empirical data to support the anecdotes".

Her study begins from the view that if social media makes the relationships between organisations and publics are indeed little different that between individuals, it would be useful to examine whether the same conditions that damage interpersonal relationships also damage organization–public relationships.

"As Gallicano (2009) pointed out, the majority of public relations scholarship focuses on cultivation strategies and outcomes with regard to relationship theory. Few studies investigate concepts that damage relationships, as this study aims to do.

This leads her to two research questions:

RQ1: To what extent are relationship strategies correlated with the relational outcome of credibility?
RQ2: To what extent is there a difference in the relational outcome ofcredibility based on ethical public relations practice?

And to the hypothesis that "An organization’s failure to disclose in a social media environment will
damage perceptions of relationship strategies". 

Sweetser sets out to test this - commonly held - hypothesis with empirical research, namely an experiment conducted in August 2009, featuring a video used in BMW's ‘‘Rampenfest’ social media campaign. The car-maker created a series of 'mockumentary' videos about a town in Bavaria that was attempting to build a
ramp from which the town would launch a BMW across the Atlantic, and posted them on YouTube.

The video series was presented on what appeared to be the personal YouTube account of the director, with no mention of support or production backing from BMW. 

The researcher showerd the video to 509 students, telling one group it was created by the company, but BMW denied producing it, a second that BMW admitted it was a produced viral video from the beginning, and a control which didn't see the video.

The questions were designed to see whether non-disclosure affected the subjects' perception of BMW as an ethical organisation, and what influence it had on its credibility.

It is a complicated argument, and as always with PR research it is very hard to screen out external/ environmental factors which may heavily influence results, but Sweetser feels confident in asserting that "viewers take a viral video at face value when viewing a piece they know the company made; however, when viewers
discover that an organization lied, it challenges and erodes their opinion of the organization." 

Visualising social media from a Grunigian perspective

David Phillips has put together a thought-provoking graphic to illustrate what he calls a A Grunigian view of modern PR.  

UPDATE: And now James Grunig has added his own comment to David's Post.

Media relations

Link: SMS Text News » Archives » 3UK are on a mission. In other news, I almost beat the crap out of the mainstream media today..

Here's an interesting take on a press launch - blogger praises mobile provider 3's PR team and slates uninformed MSM journalists.

Ewan is not impressed by two 'airhead extreme' writers 'caked in foundation and obviously from a women’s magazine of some sort'. He doubts, presumably rightly, that their technical knowledge matches his own...

"I guarantee you that this girly magazine in question has readers who are ultra keen to know about 3’s products... For today’s young ladies, technology in the form of a hot mobile phone is particularly important.

"Yet I just know that this magazine will do a half page bullshit piece of rubbish featuring 50 words on the Skypephone or the new N96. And that’ll be it."

It would be interesting to know what the 3 PR team would prefer?

Penguin takes flight

Penguin Books are doing a lot of interesting stuff online - I rather like this...

Tagged Penguin from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

The Penguin blog is always readable and the Blog a Classic campaign was a deserved prizewinner.

Reading and writing: ideas please!

I believe that to write well you have to read well. The two skills go hand in hand. It would be surprising to hear a musician say they didn't listen to music but is not unusual for PR students to say they don't read fiction, or any other books that aren't directly related to their course.

This worries me on many levels. First of all, they are missing out on a great deal of fun; the more you read, the more you enjoy reading. Secondly, PR is a discipline that requires creativity and the ability to draw on a wide range of sources and interests is a distinct advantage. Thirdly, good employers tend not to believe that spelling and grammar are optional extras, and the best way to improve written English is to be continually exposed to good written English. (I was delighted that in his excellent talk to Sunderland L1 students, Stephen "PR Blogger" Davies explained that the reason his writing has improved over the past few years is because he read other people's blogs and learnt from them.)

Being able to write is like playing music; there are rules you must learn but you also have to develop an ear for rhythm, cadence, pitch and tone. Yes, some people are naturally better at writing than others, but these things can be learnt, and the way to learn is to immerse yourself in good writing.

To encourage reading I am strongly tempted to introduce a Book Club into my Level 1 PR classes this year. Each session I want someone to tell the class about the book they are reading; it can be fact or fiction - anything as long as it isn't on a module reading list.

I mentioned this before Christmas but was floored by a very sensible question from someone who said she did not read regularly and wanted me to suggest a good novel. My mind went blank.

Help please. Any ideas of novels guaranteed to captivate young people who aren't convinced of the joys of good fiction....?   

Should I review the Cocoon?

Would I normally write a post about getting a new mobile phone? Although I sometimes stray from Mediations' declared content of Journalism + Public Relations + Ethics (with cycling a frequent diversion) the focus hopefully is still reasonably tight and readers (friends?) know what to expect.

So the answer is probably no, I wouldn't. So do I review the Cocoon, just because I was sent one and feel some sort of obligation? If it had come out of the blue, the answer is relatively easy, but I did accept the pitch from Peter Kwong at VCCP, so maybe the obligation becomes rather stronger.

And I am interested in watching how the blogger outreach campaign develops.

The next question is probably "Am I in any way qualified to review a mobile phone?" Well, yes and no.

Yes, because I use one and as I am on perhaps my fourth, I do have experience of choosing and using them.

No, because I have taken little interest in them, and have no real idea as to what a discerning user should expect from a mobile in Autumn 2007; I am quite enjoying setting different songs as ring tonmes from different people, but I don't know whether this is a brilliant new feature unique to the Cocoon or in fact every time I phone a friend their mobile starts playing Rod Stewart's Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? (This is definitely my favourite feature as I have just realised that, by definition, the caller is unlikely ever to hear the song I have chosen for them... mischief beckons).

So does my ignorance matter? Is VCCP being clever in side-stepping 'real' reviewers and targeting naive, impressionable amateurs who will be entranced by the shiny newness (and may also be thinking 'If I play the game this time what comes next?)" If we are talking about technical knowledge I clearly fail the test of competence that should underpin ethical decision-making. But, then again, as a journalist I reviewed and reported on hundred things I knew virtually nothing about... 

The nub of the question seems to be, has VCCP bought publicity on Mediations by giving me a phone? And to a large extent the answer has to be yes. Is this wrong? I am sure some people would say it was. But why? I can see strong arguments against celebrity PR which demands copy approval and have sympathy for newspapers that refuse free travel trips etc (although I took them myself!).

The answer is quite complicated (and that is often not a good sign in ethics!). I am going to suggest that it is OK to fulfill the obligation I made my accepting the pitch on the grounds that I am using it to examine an ethical dilemma in a social media context. What a convenient answer!

But I would go on to say that this is definitely not a pitch for more consumer goods - not least because this is not a consumer goods blog and any more posts about new equipment would alienate my already small readership. (Anyone wanting me to write about long distance cycle rides should not be put off by this...).

As for the Cocoon, I like it because it has a 2GB music player which is sufficient for most journeys and it is smaller than either my existing phone or my Creative Zen mp3 player, never mind both of them. And I like having Marquee Moon as my ringtone. That's cool...    

The Cocoon blog to which I am invited to contribute is here; other PR bloggers taling about the Cocoon campaign include Stuart Bruce, Stephen Davies, Neville Hobson, Heather Yaxley

   

Niall Quinn: Being a nice guy is the best PR

Social media may be changing the way PRs operate but at heart it is a pretty straightforward business; PR is about handling relations with the public, managing reputation and creating dialogue - talking to people. What better illustration than this video from the new look (and hugely improved) Sunderland Echo website.

Quinn rescues stranded fans

"Niall Quinn stepped in to get 80 Sunderland supporters home after their flight was cancelled by airline bosses.  The club chairman was one of the passengers due to travel on the easyJet plane from Bristol to Newcastle last night following the team's 1-0 victory over Cardiff.

"A dozen fans were taken off the aircraft and more than 100 were left waiting on board for more than an hour before the captain announced that it was being cancelled.

"Staff claimed drunk passengers were causing asecurity risk, but fans and the club have said they saw no evidence of trouble.

"The Irishman and his staff took action and called on a fleet of 18 taxis to make the 310 mile journey back to the North East A total fare of £8,000 was run up on the taxis, with Quinn and his party also making sure those who had decided to catch the next flight were safe before they too headed home in one of the cars."