Sunday, March 26, 2017

Does AI have a future in charge of people?


Toni Muzi Falconi Invited us to review the opinion of Luciano Floridi in Facebook professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His perspective is outlined in an essay "Should we be afraid of AI".

My response was as follows:


  • Singularity is a red herring. "Because it worked no better than kitchen paper, absorbing and being shaped by the nasty messages sent to it." is a key phrase (by Floridi) because capable and powerful AI will be aggressively used against humanity. It will be a weapon of man against man. It will absorb and be shaped by nasty people as much as nice ones. It could be a radical sect, or a nation state using it but it is certain that it will be used or corrupted as an act of war. Man's aggression to man is by far the most common threat to humanity (and much else besides). This is one of the reasons I believe that the PR industry must learn about it and be part of an axis to deny such threatening foes. Singularity in this context becomes irrelevant as an argument. We will be at war long before then and will be taming AI as a weapon of defence. Thus 'there can be no absolute AI". "We share the infosphere with digital technologies. These are ordinary artefacts that outperform us in ever more tasks, despite being no cleverer than a toaster. Their abilities are humbling and make us reevaluate human exceptionality and our special role in the Universe, which remains unique. " So, I am in Luciano Floridi's camp but for quite frightening reasons. Offer Daesh, the power of AI and it will use it for harm long before it could be sentient. Thus I suggest we prepare for the reality and not the fanciful which so many grand names suggest sentient AI might be.


I had hardly finished writing when the UK Prime Minister ordered Google, Twitter and Facebook to launch a fresh crackdown against online radicalisation in the wake of the attack on people and the Palace of Westminster in London last week. 

The PM’s spokesman said internet search and firms “must do more” to stop extremist material being posted online. Mrs May’s warning came amid a growing backlash against the world’s biggest digital firms which make billions while allegedly al­­­l­­­­owing would-be-at­tackers easy access to terror instruction man­­uals and hate videos. The reputation of such online organisation is now on the line.

There are commercial pressures too. Many companies are withdrawing advertising so not to be associated with such content.

Google, Facebook and others need sophisticated weapons to achieve this.

What then will the PR industry deploy to recover the reputational damage and the commercial disadvantage.

The answer is Artificial Intelligence. Its capability to identify the awful content is already being deployed.

AI is already being used as armament in this battle. But it can be used by unsavoury.

The soldiers in this effort will come from institutions like Bletchley Park. Many of them will be recruited into crisis management teams in PR consultancies and departments. 

In this way, the PR industry is inevitably dragged into the use and application of such Transformative Technologies.

AI will as varied and diverse as the competing factions attempting to use it. It cannot be marshalled into one amorphous capability to control humanity and the embryonic battles for the reputation of Google Twitter and Facebook show us how.


Tuesday, February 28, 2017

What is PR?


There is a huge debate going on in Facebook as to the nature of Public Relations. Every student and practitioner in the field should take a look. It shows that there is a great deal of research and thought that has gone into the subject. This is not a passing fashion and anyone wanting to re-define PR has to be pretty brave.

I tried in a paper some years ago and have been rewarded in the fact that my perspective is now able to move forward with the development of social and communication technologies.

The paper posits that material value is released through a process of relationship change and a public relations practice of relationship management is put forward as a management discipline that can create value when the process of relationship management acting on material tokens is deployed.

The basic requirement of PR is to deploy a capability in relationship development that will optimise the mission statement.

The mission statement will identify the organisation as a historic and present day entity and will explicate its capabilities to implement desired outcomes short and long term. Long term ambitions are required as a surety for ethical behaviours.

In future PR will be the means by which an environment is created in which the mission is delivered.

This requires that Public Relations practice has a need to identify entities and their relationship with other entities relevant to the interests of the organisation.

PR practice has a requirement to identify the drivers of relationships between the organisation and its relevant third party entities and as between such entities.

The practitioner will then need to identify the means by which entity relationships can be influenced in relationship development that will optimise the mission statement. 

That is as dry as it comes when describing what we do.

As can be envisaged, this is pretty complicated. It always was but now is more complicated because of the evolution of relationship technologies from the aeroplane to Facebook.


The National Institute of Standards and Technology is already working in areas that can be used in further development of relationship management PR.

"The project aims to develop and evaluate a coherent set of methods to understand behaviour in complex information systems, such as the Internet, computational grids and computing clouds. Such large distributed systems exhibit global behaviour arising from independent decisions made by many simultaneous actors, which adapt their behaviour based on local measurements of system state. Actor adaptations shift the global system state, influencing subsequent measurements, leading to further adaptations. This continuous cycle of measurement and adaptation drives a time-varying global behaviour. For this reason, proposed changes in actor decision algorithms must be examined at large spatiotemporal scale in order to predict system behaviour. This presents a challenging problem."
This helps us to take the idea of relationship PR much further and also shows that there is technological disciple that will be at the core of the debate over the nature of public relations, of which, more later.



Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Artificial Intelligence Public Relations



In wandering through the Suffolk countryside, it struck me that there is very little by way of a Public Relations perspective of  Artificial Intelligence (AI). We need a simple introduction to the subject. As one does, I took out my phone and dictated a ten-minute introductory lecture. I have embedded it into this blog post.  It is only ten minutes long to be easy to listen to rather than reading a long boring blogpost. There are other explainations, you may like to explore as well.

Listen to "Artificial Intelligence - a ten minute lecture for PR folk" on Spreaker.

Basically, I took as a simple example the application of AI in the analysis of Twitter in its reportage of Brexit. Initially, the issue is one of the collection of data. This can be done in a variety of ways. Twitter has an API  (IBM has a good resource for API beginners here) and this gives access to Twitter  content (there are some services you can use too).
You may have to make decision at the start  would data be collected by the minute, hour day, would one collect the names of the people posting content and what words do they use is the first part of this exercise. Of course, this quickly becomes a lot of information. It is "Big Data". This can be presented in list form. For example how many citations per hour, who are the top contributors, what are the subjects being discussed etc.
We already have services that can do this for us. The media analysis agencies do this. NodeXL  is a useful tool for all of us. Examples show Twitter profiles with tens, even hundreds of thousands of followers.
But we may want to look for hidden perspectives such as a perspective of the expression 'Hard Brexit' or Remain centric content. We might want to work on predicting content and who will drive it (using this open source programme from Google). All such considerations are hard enough for us to assemble and reconfigure the data to provide the answers. But, what if the computer programme was to find similar perspectives for you to consider? These findings are already available using (open source) software like Watson and gain valuable insights from social trends in real time with the solutions integrating natural language classifiers.
What if it was also able to additionally predict the coverage of such perspectives and tell you the level of confidence it had in its predictions.
It will be important to be able to represent such findings in an understandable way. There are examples such as this one.
That would be pretty awesome. But what if we were to collect the data from other media such as Facebook, LinkedIn (with permission, of course), newspapers and other media. Additionally one can add sentiment analysis for even deeper understanding. That too would be very interesting and helpful.
Now, what if one were to combine all these findings. It could, for example, tell us which media leads opinion and excites social media or journalistic activity. Building such capabilities are available to everyone and produce amazing results.
This then describes a scenario for the application of Artificial Intelligence. It is a capability that will be available in months, not years. In the meantime, have a look at Big Data analysis using NodeXL.
All this information is very interesting but so what! It's just lists. How does it become useful?Using such findings, you will be able to inform the Board about where the debate and interest in the media, both traditional and social, has come from and is going to. It can identify the key influencers who can be the target for your views and perspectives. It could suggest what the key words and ideas are for sections of society in various media.
So much for Brexit, but in using Artificial Intelligence in this way, we can examine other subjects and interest in organisations, products, services, employees and other key publics (what really drives politicians?).

The PR industry should be prompted by Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, to make AI in the PR industry more relevant. She said: "I want the UK to lead the way. We are already pioneers in this exciting technology. We have some of the best minds in the world, working in some of the world’s best universities. We have earned a reputation for brilliance in AI.'

Perhaps we can now look forward to AI integrated into the work of public relations. Can it, for example, propose content for traditional and social media (yes, the actual words and pictures). Can it be used to seek out the relationships between content and PR activities? For example online content and sales? Is it a tool for developing the relationship management tasks in public relations? Such activities will be useful too, but there is much more by way of AI opportunities.

We have to note that there is a lot of copyright and patent application being implemented now.

However, analysis of various factors such as media coverage might identify the nature of the differences between one organisation and its competitors (stability, profitability, progress, people, products, services, and vendor relations, etc.).
There are other areas for the application of AI from defining the nature of organisations (for better mission statement development) to methodologies for enhancing relationship's between organisations and 'publics', but that is for another day.
Suffice to say, that the practitioner armed with what is outlined here, is the person with both the intelligence data and capability to be one of the most powerful people in the organisation and beyond.


Here is a short history of AI. Thank you Albert Puig.




For more about AI this is a slideshow to have a look at.



There are slides for the technicians - like marketing.





Picture: Wintery sunshine over the river Deben.




Friday, February 17, 2017

Internet of Things Public Relations


Most of us have heard of the Internet of Things, but few have considered the role of IoT in PR.

In 2013 the Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Things defined IoT as "the infrastructure of the information society. The IoT allows objects to be sensed and/or controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in 'improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention.'

When IoT is augmented with sensors and actuators, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyber-physical systems, which also encompasses technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation and smart cities. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure.


Experts estimate that the IoT will consist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020.

We recognise IoT in simple devices like Alexa or Google Home and Virtual Reality Headsets. A simple credit card sized device like Trackr turns your phone into a detective to find your car or handbag.

Padma Warrior is the CTO and Chief Strategist of Cisco, quoted a Cisco study placing the value of IoT as a $19 trillion opportunity for her company. It struck me that the PR industry should be investing some of its thinking about the future into IoE too.

So how can we have such a thing as IoT PR?

Really it's simple. We have to think about IoT devices as media. For Example, it is possible to offer information or services that can be integrated into Alexa or Google Home and they can be delivered with cloud-based infrastructure.

My Android phone has the 'OK Google' facility provided by Chrome. In an instant, my phone is a powerful computer that can book appointments and phone my wife. It sets up alarms and tracks my car (no more hunting around in big car parks).  The service has a wide range of capabilities. The exciting thing is that you can design services for mobile phones that can sit on a phone or intelligent companion as an app or service.

Messages, lists of products, pictures and video can all become an instant service on a mobile or computer.

Other IoT devices

The health of elderly relatives can be difficult to track, but it’s even more difficult when they live on their own. Fortunately, you can now rely on IoT devices like Lively to help. It is just the sort of device a Pharma company might like to sponsor. Where you are and what you are doing can be monitored by the clothes you wear or can be offered to help busy mum's track their children and the dog  (what a great way to deliver safety messages). When you start looking there are all sorts of opportunities

It comes down to thinking of IoT devices as media in their own right. Seeing what IoT devices are out there and then working on how they can deliver enhanced relationships with the client requires a creative mind but the impact can be huge. 

The evolution of the Internet of Things into more advanced application in the Internet of Everything is the next step. But more of that later.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Secure Online - A PR issue



The NCSC - part of intelligence agency GCHQ - says the UK is facing about 60 serious cyber-attacks a month. There were 188 attacks classed by the NCSC as Category Two or Three during the last three months.

We are under attack. This is a PR industry issue as well.

Let me explain...

Here is an example, attacks on the NHS quadrupled in the last four years!

In the digital era, new points of entry are opening up for most business from email to cloud environments, from mobility to applications, from the payment gateway to the data centre and much more.

UK organisations are putting their reputation, customer trust and competitive advantage at greater risk by failing to provide their staff with adequate security training. The law is taking an interest which is a potential reputation issue as Ardi Kolah explains in a paper to Academia.

In response, the UK government’s latest National Cyber Security Strategy requires businesses to have a detailed understanding of the risks to their information systems and raise standards to mitigate them.

This is not just the nation and business, it's PR practitioners and their clients as well. The CIPR and other PR institutions, as well as the recognised undergraduate courses, should be considering their response. We 'must be prepared'. A cyber attack is a reputation issue like Marley's Ghost waiting for every organisation that is not prepared.

Cybersecurity teams are losing the fight against cyber crime and the user education approach has failed, according to According to Ian Pratt, co-founder and president of Bromium. We have to up our game.

We need some PR focused responses.

The launch of NCSC coincided with the Financial Conduct Authority, (a regulatory body of the UK government), granting London-based Blockchain startup Tramonex (a Small Electronic Money Institution) registration. This effectively opens the door for the launch of a Blockchain-based currency within the UK.

The approval of Tramonex marks the first case of a Blockchain technology company receiving an EMI authorization from the FCA.

At the core of this permission is ONLINE SECURITY.

The security is made possible because of the use of Blockchain. Blockchain security can be applied in many ways. Not least, it is a technology to secure the ownership of digital content (described in detail here)

For the PR person, this means there is potential for online security for content such as images, podcasts and other sounds, word content including press releases and, really important, contact reports and briefing.

It is important, for example, to secure email exchanges and Blockchain technologies offer such capability.

This suggests that #CIPR could consider getting a similar licence to Tramonex for Blockchain secured communication by members and recognised by authorities such as the FCA. It would be possible to secure the identity of members.

Working with the leaders in the field, CIPR could register a broad range of secure communications tools. Examples that come to mind are Accenture. But there are many more organisations offering services.

The capability can even extend to Internet of Things PR (more later). IoT consultant, John Soldatos, has written at length about this. He argues that since “The 100.000.000 units of the Bitcoin are programmable and can be linked to digital properties other than currencies such as credits or digital votes. This gives rise to the use of the Blockchain for supporting IoT applications. Instead of auditing the exchange of units of a digital currency, the Blockchain could audit the validity of digital transactions between machines and things."

This form of security is attracting added security from organisations such as BT.

Now is the time for the PR industry to consider digital security.

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Enter the Virtual PR Studio


Perhaps I need to explain what I think public relations will look like in the near future, a few months away.

It will be heavily mediated by Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and will use Augmented Reality to aid evaluation, decision making and relationship management.

Perhaps it's I should speculate on what I anticipate in a PR office of a very busy organisation.

My imagining looks at the office set up to manage the Government's PR around Brexit. It is a very busy office.

I take you to the morning conference between the press officer and the Prime Minister.

As the PM arrives she puts on a VR headset and is immediately transported into a huge room. It is a virtual studio as big as a Warehouse. It is a complete transformation from the slightly chaotic PR office. As she puts her hand out, she can see it and can point with it. Alongside her is the press officer.

They both begin to look round them

They can see flocks of things moving like a murmuration of starlings. These are clusters of spots in the Augmented Reality sky. Are yes… here is another murmuration. It is a different colour and the shapes of each dot is different. There are more. A timeline shows the time scale being considered. 


Four hours reflects the 60,000 citations (that the rate of citation observed by Google at present) in the clusters that include items in newspapers, radio, television, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and dozens more online media Brexit citations.

As the briefing begins the practitioner offers different perspectives. The flocks swirling round the virtual studio include changes in colour and represent other factors such as the nature of the content, pictures, words, emotions and place. The swirling movements offer a view of what images, words and emotions are driving content; uptake in different media and over what timescales.

The complexities of modern communication are presented in a way that the mind can comprehend. 

Off to the right, high up, is a cluster showing the outputs of the Media Office. It interacts with the practitioner. 

In a second the practitioner and Prime Minister are transported to a command centre with a number of experts. 

Here, she can add content and will see its impact in almost the same instant among the other actors in this scenario. Interactive PR is a big part of what happens in this studio. In a virtual workshop, members of the team create content that can be inserted into the Brexit media universe. In addition some of the messaging can be for different interaction. Leaflets are produced with embedded monitors to see if they are read and events and meetings with lapel badges for attendees equally fitted out with Internet of Things sensors. These too can be displayed in the VR studio. As can the information apps offered by the PR team to download to phones, watches and other devices.

Of course, the practitioner needs to be sure that the material she provides is not hacked or changed between her office and the medium involved.

Behind her screen is a sentinel, unblinking and making sure that the activity is securely recorded and implemented. This is the PR blockchain solution. Safe, secure and unhackable. Trusted by journalists as well as Twitter and Wikipedia to mention a few.

The Virtual Reality studio is only part of the activity in her office of which more at another time.

What is key here is being able to understand what is happening across the media today. At present we cannot comprehend it in its complexity.

At best we get a feeling for what is being said and felt by the public. In my circles there is a mass view of Donald Trump. I hear almost nothing from his supporters. I need my virtual studio to be able to evaluate and effectively impact the public view.

We need good PR tools and they can be available soon. 

It is not hard, it is not new technology. Everything offered here is already used in other applications.

A brave new media world.


This then is my view of PR at the end of the dec.ade

Friday, October 07, 2016

The Future Is Almost Here


It is almost too easy to imagine a progressive evolution of technologies for public relations.

The evolution from noticeboard to Facebook was all too simple. From newsletter to Blog or community gossip to Twitter, the evolution of communications used by the PR professional has change slowly if dramatically and has been reasonably manageable.

But this rate of change and range of technologies that are about to influence the practice of PR is about to have a massive impact on practitioners.

This is an introductory lecture touching on a revolution in PR practice. It examines communication.

I shall explore other areas of practice in this series of lectures.

The communication and content security, audited relationships and associated relationship and reputation changes and much more are now part of PR in a shape never before explored. Such developments now affect capabilities through applications of communication technologies, big data, blockchain,  the Internet of Things and relationships and more.

These are now part of the PR scene. They are the engines of PR practice. They are the elements of PR practice we all need to understand and deploy such capabilities for our clients large and small (even small clients can have big data).

They are part of the syllabus to be learned and the activities being part of good good practice that the PR associations need to observe.

We can expect a lot of practitioners to be caught out through ignorance of these developments but that is no worse than discovering that reputation busting tweets can rampage all over the world. Frightening!


So now it is time to look at some examples. We will begin with Ink on our fingers, or “who writes the press release?

What a failiure

Walking the dogs this morning, my wife and I have a greed that I can go back to work.
I will start with more Blog posts because what I have to offer is controversial.
It will be a demonstration of what I think is key for big organisations.
Meantime, I shall start with some elements of automated PR.

Fun stuff

David

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Retirement - or something like it

This is a very hard post to write.

I have to withdraw from PR and most of my other activities.

It will  be hard to do.

For 18 months I have suffered from severe depression followed by Nocturnal Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

The pills make me very tired ... albeit the side effects are fun.

The work on Automated Public Relations has been sporadic and I hope, one day, to return to this area of research and to teaching, which I enjoy.

Meanwhile, listening to the racing results formulaic announcement of the winners of horse races is an interesting activity.

The racing authorities have to provide accurate and timely results (it's a PR job) and from it gambling practitioners pay out winnings and journalists develop stories ready to publish. This is the data used by betting offices world-wide. It is the sort of information that automated editorial can use instead of the journalist and PR practitioner. It can be used for automated payments and many other applications.  If the data is late or inaccurate, the effect is dramatic and has a ripple effect.

In the past one might have had time to correct an error. No more. The computers are faster that people.

This has has a huge impact on PR. The need to be ethical in the delivery of such data is critical. The information has to be timely and precise. If not, the value of PR is as nothing.

The same could be said of many other, if not most PR activities. This affects wealth in many directions.

PR has to be timely, precise and ethical.

The role of PR organisations such as CIPR has changed. Now, it has a policing role and to become a member may be a much harder in the future.

I shall, of course, watch, even if it is from the sidelines.



Thursday, December 31, 2015

Google makes its Cloud Services Safe

They Say:

In October, we sent you a message following the invalidation of the US-EU Safe Harbor framework to let you know that we were working on alternatives to enable Google Cloud Platform customers to meet EU data privacy requirements.
We are pleased to share that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) now offers Model Contract Clauses (MCCs), which will help customers who operate within the EU meet the requirements of the European Union’s Data Protection Directive. Starting today, you can review and accept our updated Data Processing and Security Terms and Model Contract Clauses in the Cloud console. Detailed instructions on how to take this action can be found here:  https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6329727
Please consult your legal team on any applicable additional requirements for your jurisdiction. 
In connection with offering MCCs, we have also updated our Cloud Platform Terms of ServiceData Processing and Security Terms, and Service Specific Terms. For your convenience, you can review a summary of the main changes to the Cloud Platform Terms of ServiceData Processing and Security Terms, and Service Specific Terms, as well as the prior version of the former two documents linked out from the current terms, for the next 30 days. 
We appreciate you placing your trust in us, as there is nothing more important to us than your trust, privacy and security.
The Google Cloud Platform team
© 2015 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

Monday, October 19, 2015

Internet of Everything Public Relations

Introduction


Padma Warrior is the CTO and Chief Strategist of Cisco, she is brilliant and visionary and one of the most important technology leaders of this decade.

Recently, she quoted a Cisco study placing the value of IoE as a $19 trillion opportunity for her company. It struck me that the PR industry should be investing some of its thinking time to the future into IoE too.

IoE will affect all aspects of business and, like all other sectors,  the PR profession has to find out the key things it will need to consider in this transition.

This paper examines The Internet of everything from a PR perspective and identifies where, in the short term, it will offer significant advantages to the PR sector.

We will discover that, with a new and developing set of professional skills and tools, practitioners will find new opportunities and the downside of underemployment will be avoided as a result.

We will also note that without developing such skills, there will be an opportunity for a significant deleterious effect.


What is the Internet of Everything?


IoE expands on the concept of the “Internet of Things” because it connects physical devices and everything else by getting them all on the network. It moves beyond being a buzzword and technology trend by connecting devices to one another and the Internet and offers higher computing power. This connection goes beyond basic Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, and it is the interconnection of devices that leads to automation and advanced “smart” applications.



(picture: http://bit.ly/1RtPNFt).

IoE works to connect more things onto the network, stretching out the edges of the network and expanding the roster of what can be connected. IoE has a major play in all industries, from retail to telecommunications to banking and Public Relations.

There is a view that IoE will also include intangibles such as values, cultures and art and artistic interpretation. Also, it will encompass descriptions of features and benefits of products and services implied by the words and actions of the client and her many cultural constituencies.

http://paristech.com/blog/
By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines (even Larry Dignan could not pick many holes in this Gartner predictions).

Technologies with the ability to proactively assemble and deliver information through automated composition engines are fostering a movement from human-to-machine-generated business content. Data-based and analytical information is already being turned into natural language writing using these emerging tools (AP-Dow is an example).

Such automation should be a feature of Public Relations development. Should they want to, PR consultancies can offer these services now.

Business content, such as shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases, articles and white papers, are all candidates for automated writing tools.

These outputs can include code to make it even more attractive to IoT devices.

For the past 100 years or so financial reporting has been paper based. Only in the last 25-30 years have reports been created electronically in a word processor and then printed or saved to an electronic format such as PDF or HTML.

But the information contained in PDF and HTML is not easily scraped by computers. Digital financial reporting, by contrast, makes much of this information readable by computers, vastly expanding the potential for automating creation, distribution and analysis of financial reports.

Such help from machines can reduce the time and, therefore, the costs of creating and consuming financial report information and improve its quality.

With machine readability of financial reports, computers can read the reported financial information, "understand" it, and help make sure mathematical computations are correct and intact throughout the report. They can compare reported information to mandated disclosure rules and make sure the report's creator complied with them. This is somewhat similar to how manually created disclosure checklists are used as memory joggers.



There are many benefits:

Reported information can be easily reconfigured, reformatted and otherwise repurposed without rekeying to suit the specific needs of an analyst or regulator.
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/iot-report
Ambiguity is reduced because for a computer to make use of the information, that information cannot be ambiguous. This makes the information easy for a computer to understand also makes it easier for humans to communicate more effectively.




Processes can be reliably automated because computers can reliably move information through the workflow. Linking digital financial information together based on the meaning of the information can be much more reliable than trying to link physical locations within spreadsheets, which commonly change.

The software can easily adapt itself to specific reporting scenarios and user preferences because it understands the information it is working with.

No "magic" is involved here. Instead, digital financial reporting relies on well-understood IT practices, agreement on standard technical syntaxes and careful and clear articulation of already agreed-upon financial reporting rules in a form that computers can effectively understand.

Progress towards IoE will also mean that a salesperson's mobile will also provide details travel, meetings, and conversations. Such data will be matched to travel, phone conversations, perhaps even mood measurements and, of course, sales closures.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/BarneyAndFriends 


Sooner or later, there will be robots that train your children and help them with their homework. That "might seem a little strange to us, but is it really stranger than being trained by a purple dinosaur named Barney?" said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst.









Why should PR be involved?


In short - money.

If PR is at the centre of much of this development, it stands to make a lot of money through implementation and use.

Also, much of this evolution will disenfranchise the practitioner.  Part of what is on offer will make practitioners redundant.

Much of PR that is not automated will be very mundane.

Being part of the new forms of PR will be very interesting, if not exciting!

When will it happen?

You can get an impression of the range of sensors already available from Intel (http://intel.ly/1GP8Unb). I like the ADIS16448 Accelerometer which I could put on my Ski's to prove I was jumping more than 5 metres.

Imagine the world in which everything is connected and packed with sensors.

50+ billion connected devices, loaded with a dozen or more sensors, will create a trillion-sensor ecosystem.

These devices will create what one might call a state of neo-perfect knowledge, where we'll be able to know what we want, where we want, when we want.

Combined with the power of data mining and machine learning, the value that you can create and the capabilities you will have as an individual and as a business will be extraordinary.

Over the next few months I will return to this theme but it gives a tiny insight into what happens on the way to PR Automation.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Digital Changes People and Habits


There are indicators of behavioural change showing a need for attention to the significance of online, including mobile, effects on people.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), and data consultants Springboard reported high street footfall was down -2.8% in June 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Shopping centres also suffered, seeing a decline of -2.4% year-on-year.

Out-of-town retail parks fared reasonably well, Retail Bulletin reported. They are attracting more "click and collect" shoppers and reported a +2.8% rise in footfall, the 18th successive month in which the sector's footfall has increased.

Meanwhile 'click and deliver' services are booming.

Modern creatives must embody a "new way of looking at the world" that involves fusing data and the latest tech with big ideas according to Lynn Power and Eric Weisberg, of JWT New York. "Today requires a new breed of thinkers - a new way of looking at the world," Power said.

New cultures are emerging.

For example in managing an election campaign it is possible to identify the users 'n shakers in the campiagn and thier relationships with other opinion formers online. Below is a view of tweets for candidate in the CIPR presidential election 2015.




This kind of information changes the way campaigns are run and the way people engage in the election process.

Jaime Settle analysis of over 100 million Facebook updates in the US, discovered that 1.3 per cent more users in battleground states posted status updates about politics, and that this increased their likelihood of voting by nearly 40 per cent reports the London School of Economics.

For those working with technology in museums the catch-all “digital” has largely replaced “online” and even “web” as a description of what they do. From wearables to virtual reality, a plethora of new technology is emerging that challenges the primacy of the screen at the heart of digital experiences. At this year’s annual Museums Computer Group conference, Museums Beyond the Web, th agenda asked "what comes after the web for museums?"

The use of apps is a new PR dimention with examples ready to inspire the practitioner in the most obvious places. Apps change the way PR people behave and a lot of them can influence the way organisations operate as well. They also empower others who would, for example, want to spy on the paper that is still part of the professional's desk.  Withe CamScanner, your phone or tablet is your scanner. Take photos of documents and edit, store and sync them on-the-go!

The many apps are reported across the online media but come with a health warning. You do need to ensure that they do what they say on the tin and they don't steal too much infornation about you or your clients.

Dick Penny, director of Watershed, a cross-artform venue and producer based in Bristol, says: “technology allows people to choose between a more traditional, passive experience and a more active, participatory interaction … it’s amazing how regimented we have become in our cultural habits. Take theatre for example: you buy your ticket, have a drink, find your seat, sit, the lights go down, you know it’s time to be silent. Companies such as [immersive theatre pioneers] Punchdrunk and Watershed have turned those conceits on their head. Rather than devaluing the traditional approach, it just shows there is another way of doing it.”

Often written off as passing fads for teenagers, social media now have billions of users – not only with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Instagram and MySpace in the West, but with hugely popular sites like Tencent Weibo, Vkontakt and Orkut in the rest of the world, says Ciarán Mc Mahon. From the point of view of peer-reviewed psychological research, what do we know about what makes these websites popular, he asks and to a large extent answers.

Which brings us neatly to some other research: Eight in ten Brits get more exasperated online than in real life and experts reveal social skills can be hindered by social media.

Have you ever sent a tweet in anger? So many Britons have admitted to social media "road rage" that some experts are now classing it as a syndrome. BT have done some reserach and finds out that this behavioural change is significant and part of what we want to know in this new environment.

Research into the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being is now being published. Greater use of the Internet is associated with declines in participants communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for PR, research, for public policy, and for the design of technology.

This post was created to provide evidence across many aspects of modern relationship evolution to show just how far PR practice has to re-adjust in the new world.

There is a good case for much more detailed and structured research.

















Monday, October 12, 2015

Why are we certain that much PR will be automated?

Now to consider the very thought of ‘Automating’ PR.

It is a big subject for quite a lot of us. Automation is coming.

The thought of automating Public Relations is crossed between a joke, a possibility and a certain fearful prospect for most practitioners.

Long in the tooth consultants and senior practitioners are well aware of the range and creative capabilities needed in PR practice day-to-day.

They have the creative and professional capability in campaigns and issues management as well as an ability to bring calm and insights to top managers and interest groups such as journalists.


“You can’t automate it! It's creative!” They cry.



A majority of respondents to the 2015 CIPR survey (76%) revealed that they spend some or most of their time working on media relations. Also, digital knowledge and skills were the weakest competencies among survey respondents – particularly among in-house and senior practitioners.

The reality is, advertising, SEO and social media marketing agencies are combining their ‘paid for’ strengths in with the ‘earned’ capabilities traditionally considered the unique domain of the PR sector. Progressively, more technologies are usurping press relations activities. As we will see, a lot of press relations is being usurped by computers.


US economist Tyler Cowen puts it, machines aren’t only replacing human brawn - as they become more advanced, they’re increasingly replacing human brains. Or to put it another way: if the most precarious place to be working in the British economy in the 1970s and 80s was as a blue collar worker in a factory, today it’s the kind of white collar job occupied by the middle classes.

This is not all. Some social media activities can be automated and are strangely programmable and are not a long-term saviour for the PR profession.

Here we aim to introduce readers to a wide range of capabilities that are wholly or in part automated or automatable.

They go far beyond Facebook, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Search Engine Optimisation.

Automated PR is very close. Lots of people use some of its advantages already. The new users of these capabilities are emerging and are by-passing existing practitioners and agencies.

Automation creeps up on us.

It begins with a capability to assemble resources. It structures or re-structures the resources and then produces the result all without human hand.

I don’t claim that all PR is to be fully automated any time soon. But it is here that I begin to explore the many intrusions now taking over which, in time, will progressively automate most of the practices we now undertake and more.


The machines are far too clever to be left out!



For those who hang their hat on the uniquely creative nature of PR will be disappointed to discover that, progressively, technologies are beginning to automate many of the most creative of aspects of modern civilisation. PR will not be exempt.

Perhaps, over the next few days we can look further and see what is really happening. But here is a taster.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

A Definition of Public Relations

As industries are automated some or some parts of the activity are subsumed into a more robust realm of activity.

For this reason, it is very important that we know what we are talking about when we examine PR Automation.

Perhaps it is now time to be very sure about what PR is and can achieve.

There is a number of definitions flying about:

Public Relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public Relations is the discipline that 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.

Says the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

Lots of people try to define PR. In the digital environment, it is important to be precise and not to drift into other realms of management or to confine the practice to a future of obscurity.

The nature of PR being used in this blog recognises that:


Public Relations requires:

Knowledge and understanding of cultures, (namely “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”) in society;
Knowledge and capability to identify those values that contribute to and define cultures and groups.

The ethically sound ability to align values in a process of refining cultures to the benefit of cultural groups and the client.

Perhaps we need some evidence to give credibility to this for of thinking.

Her I offer some examples including analysis of employees in a company as evidenced in LinkedIn.



(Picture: The skills (values) of Nationwide employees as expressed by them in LinkedIn)

This approach is consistent for consumer PR, Industry and sector PR, Corporate Affairs and HR development and all other forms of PR.

Our ability to identify, for example: cultural icons in Twitter exchanges; semantic themes in social media discourse, locations of participants, and much more through the use and application of online actions (including social media, location mapping, etc) means we can examine such evidence as values that attach to an individual or group. 

It is then possible to look for common values as between a cultural group, many cultural groups and an organisation (lets call it a client) and identify where there is a mismatch and seek to change the values of the organisation and or the cultural group.



(Picture: Where my Twitter followers live - to the nearest city - showing location values) 

The is a much that has evolved for Public Relations. 

The developing technologies offers much more accurate, much more grounded, much more effective and much better value for money PR.




(Picture: Semantically derived values expressed through Twitter about The Bank of England. Snapshot taken in early 2014)

The idea that values defined cultures is a way forward for Public Relations and  is quite a broad remit, but it also has boundaries.


Being bounded by the effects of culture is useful and prevents us being drawn into the debate about advertising or marketing in that if the activity is not to affect culture, it has no place in PR. Thus, hits on a website are not necessarily an indication of cultural change but events, actions or reactions driven by such hits are cultural effects and thereby are a PR issue.

Online PR is is much more definitive than the Grunig and Hunt (1984), proposition 30 years ago but has some common elements:


“The management of communication between an organisation and its publics.”

Or the description provided by search engines:

"The professional maintenance of a favourable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person (is this ethical?)

"public relations is often looked down on by the media." (from what great height, one might ask).

"The state of the relationship between a company or other organisation or a famous person and the public."

There is a need to be more precise because the range of influences on any individual through communication and other drivers is extensive (no WiFi is an example where equanimity in message reception might be missing).

The range of media and mechanisms and means to influence cultures available to public relations practitioners is extensive, growing and powerful. 

Automation is one such development and adds to the power of the profession and its practices.

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

The Press Officer's New Hats

When the President of the CIPR wore a cap to school, there were people employed in big organisations called Press Officers. 

It seemed to me that this is a great time to review the many tasks that now (or will soon) drop on his or her desk.

The Press Officer now needs many hats, it would seem.



It's budget time. She is looking ahead. A future in which she will identify the nature of the sector (culture) and in which her client operates. 

OH!

It has also changed!

The professional in this arena now has to:

  • Identify the sector (culture)
  • Identify the key descriptors (concepts/values) common to, and unique to the sector (culture)
  • Identity changes and the rate of change
  • Identify the media of most significance to the culture e.g. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, digitally enabled channels (from Netflix to Twitter), Internet of Things, Stories and intelligence drawn from Big Data.
  • Develop capability to affect cultures.
  • Deliver
  • Evaluate/extract intelligence




Combined, More news is read - boosted by online

The extent to which people have withdrawn from reading print media is now well versed. The trend is continuing. The Newspaper Readership Survey shows the total newspaper and magazine readership on and off-line covers most of the population of the UK.

In 2015, Digital delivered (year on year):


  • +12.3%  incremental increase in printing readership across newsbrands & magazine brands,
  •  +27.3% incremental increase to print readership across newsbrands and 
  • +18.5% incremental increase to print readership across magazine brands.




By mid-2015, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and The Independent had a larger online readership than print according to the National Readership Survey.
Overall, the readership figures tell a story of traditional print titles not only losing circulation but also losing their relevance online and offline as, for example, women turn to alternative authorities – new blogs, online and tablet brands – for their fashion and lifestyle advice.


Time Online


Ofcom’s Media Use and Attitudes 2015 report, now in its tenth year, shows that internet users aged 16 and above claimed to spend nearly 10 hours (9 hours and 54 minutes) online each week in 2005. By 2014 it had climbed to over 20 hours and 30 minutes.


The biggest increase in internet use is cited among 16-24-year-olds, almost tripling from 10 hours and 24 minutes each week in 2005 to 27 hours and 36 minutes by the end of 2014.


Media Changes


For traditional PR people, this is an issue. For half a century, PR turned used communication to negotiate with groups of people. It remains a  robust if narrow, form of communication and PR as we move towards seeking influence over cultures.


  • The revenues of news channels are disappearing.
  • In the USA, Advertising Age said that measured-media spending fell by 1.8% over the year to June 2015.
  • In July 2015 both the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found that Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics were increasingly using the social networks as news sources. They are however seeking out different types of news content on each platform.
  • There are commercial drivers too. Jon Moeller, chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble, said at an investor conference in 2015: "In general, digital media delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print."
  • In 2015, the UK became the first country in the world where half of all advertising spend went on digital media.
  • Just over £16.2bn will be spent on all forms of advertising in the UK. Digital advertising is expected to grow by 12% in 2015 to £8.1bn to overtake TV and become the largest medium for advertising in 2016.
  • Meanwhile, A fifth (19%) of consumer-facing brands and a quarter (27%) of ad agencies worldwide say mobile advertising is a top priority for their business, yet concerns linger over measurement and privacy. xAd polled 574 ad agency across 11 countries in North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
  • Mobile is a manifestation of the Internet of Things. Our press officer will, of course, now want to master communication using the IoT. 
  • The reason advertising revenue has moved from traditional media to digital media is because it is effective. As for advertising, so too for all other forms of cultural influence.

The net effect, says Moeller, ‘has been to decrease the demand for low-skilled information workers while increasing the demand for highly skilled ones.’ 


Creatives Bow to Technologies


As we shall discover, much of what the PR industry thought was creative and skilled has already been usurped by technologies and only awaits mass implementation.

This trend in the labour markets has been documented in dozens of studies by economists: Author, Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, and Daron Acemoğlu, Tim Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and others have documented it. 

Economists call it skill-biased technical change. By definition, it favours people with more education, training, or experience.


This puts pressure on PR now, and it is evident there is a need to look to the future in some detail.

An example of the significance of the above trends would suggest that half of all the Press Relations practitioners in 2005 should now be fully trained and equipped digital media experts.

Another group of practitioners might be more active with mobile capabilities because eApp stores and tablets helped drive 157% year-on-year growth in 2011, according to an IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers report.


Twits for Journos


Meanwhile, the nature of traditional channels is changing fast as well. There is a much wider range of communication platform.

A survey in the UK by Cision in 2014 showed 54% of journalists who responded couldn't carry out their work without social media (up from 43% in 2013 and 28% in 2012). Fifty-eight percent also say social media has improved their productivity (up from 54% in 2013 and 39% in 2012).

If the survey is representative, this means a majority of UK journalists are open to a form of communication that is very different to the traditional press release. It is a change that took less than a decade to emerge.

But these developments are but drops in the ocean. There are examples, case studies, if you like, That show how powerful the internet and notably social media, and the application of technologies can be.

So far we have seen publications, broadcasters, journalists and some PR practitioners, together with advertising agencies gently move into the digital arena. 

Meanwhile, the general population is tearing into this new digital environment.


Political leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, can point to successful election campaigns driven by Twitter and Facebook.


Picture: Jeremy Corbyn as James Bond. Photograph: @sexyjezzacorbyn.

The dynamism of the Corbyn social media presence is described by Stuart Heritage in the Guardian In which he describes the elements that add up to internet gold. 


'All of a sudden, you can’t move for Corbyn parodies and memes. Want to see a Photoshopped picture of Corbyn as Obi-Wan Kenobi promising a new hope? Check the internet. Want to scroll through endless pictures of his face pasted onto the bodies of rippling vest models? Check the internet. Want to read a weird stream of mothers declaring their berserk lust for Corbyn, based on the fact that he reminds them of a “salty sea dog”? Check the internet, and then go and scrub your face, hands and brain with Swarfega.'
At one point, the hashtag #JezWeCan was being used once every 25 seconds on Twitter. Over on Facebook, a tentative Jeremy Corbyn victory party was being planned for the evening of 12 September in Trafalgar Square, London.

Many, many personalities, not to mention brands would like to replicate such a movement.

There are other indicators of behavioural change showing a need for attention to the significance of online, including mobile, effects on people.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), and data consultants Springboard, reported high street footfall was down -2.8% in June 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Shopping centres also suffered, seeing a decline of -2.4% year-on-year.
Out-of-town retail parks fared reasonably well, Retail Bulletin reported. 

They are attracting more "click and collect" shoppers and reported a +2.8% rise in footfall, the 18th successive month in which the sector's footfall has increased. Meanwhile click and deliver services are booming.

There are behavioral changes to take into account too.

New cultures are emerging.