Technology and Strategic Public Relations

Net Neutrality is an important resource for e-Government

by brunoamaral on August 25, 2010

Right now we live in a world where Net Neutrality is a given. This means that you can open any website or webservice just as fast as anyone else on the network, subject only to network congestion or issues of bad reception. The proposition against Net Neutrality would allow your ISP to segment the services and websites you use, giving you faster access to google or any other major player. This would of course mean that you would be paying your ISP for both access to the internet and for faster access to premium websites.

Read Write Web as a pretty good info-graphic explaining in greater detail what Net Neutrality is, and the wikipedia page is also quite useful to understand its implications.

Recently, a leaked document revealed that France may be ready to put an end to Net Neutrality.

I don’t know a thing about the French legislation, however I do believe that there is a correlation between access to information and development. More so, the European Union encourages its member states to have a wide range of online services.

Under the motto, “better online than in line”, more than 90% of all providers of public services across the European Union are now online. The goal is to provide easy electronic access to 20 basic public services (filing income tax or VAT returns, registering new cars or changing car ownership, and so on).

Source: Europa.eu

To this we had the development of the Citizen Card and the European Commission’s intent to foster e-authentication. All this keeping in mind that there is a need for faster internet access.

Europe needs widely available and competitively-priced fast and ultra fast internet access. The EU aims to bring basic broadband to all Europeans by 2013 and to ensure that, by 2020, (i) all Europeans have access to much higher internet speeds of above 30 Mbps and (ii) 50% or more of European households subscribe to internet access above 100 Mbps.

Source: Europa.eu Press Release

If a European country wishes to follow the guidelines set by the EC and at the same time foster e-Government initiatives, then it must protect Net Neutrality or risk increasing the percentage of citizens with little or no access to information. And given that the trend for more and more e-Government initiatives, the access to information will be akin to the access to the Government.

I fear that if we lose the battle for Net Neutrality we may one day lose any hope of a Participatory Government.

{ 2 reactions Tagged as: Europe, European Union, France, government, net neutrality Image copyright: Europe - A Year Of Edits, by Peter Ito}

The 3 Areas of Search Engine Optimization

by brunoamaral on July 4, 2010

in Blog Updates

When managing a website, one of the goals is to be listed as high as possible on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Working towards this goal is what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In Public Relations we need to divide the practice into three areas, Programming, Content and Relationships.

Programming

I do not mean that we as communication professionals should take charge of programming a website, or even optimizing the software on our own.

I do however mean to say that it is important to have a small grasp of the technology which powers a website, how it works and what alternatives are available. There are also several features of a website that make it more accessible to search engines, such as readable URLs, sitemaps and a careful semantic structure.

Content

Most of the time, PR practitioners will focus on building good Content. In fact, great content is still of the utmost importance. We can divide this area into two main concerns, one is providing Content with a good structure and organization, in which case Matt Cutt’s videos on SEO are a great help in understanding how content must be written for the web.

Another concern is in building relevant content. This means first and foremost to be aware of the publics that surround us and what their interests are. The next step is in finding common ground, and if it doesn’t exist we must take charge in building it.

Only we know to whom we are reaching out can we look into ways of building relevant content and becoming relevant to them.

Relationships

We build relationships of all forms and sizes, some positive, others neutral or negative. And the truth of the matter is that the Web was built to allow relationships to form, specially those relationships that lead to collaboration and cooperation.

When we create a website and publicize it, it ripples through the web resonating to a greater or lesser extent with its constituents. If the content is actually useful and valuable, it will be linked too, and while it is being linked to, in an underlying and sometimes unconscious process it is being given a set of psycho-sociological values.

We can reinforce this effect with advertising, relevant link exchanges, sponsored links in SERP, or any other artificial means. However, these tactics will prove less successful if our online discourse lacks relevance to a number of publics and to a certain context.

A SEO plan will only prove effective if it includes these three areas, focusing on just one of them or simply not taking the time to coordinate efforts between the PR department and the Webdesign team will result in erratic results.

{ 2 reactions Tagged as: Content, programming, publics, relationships, seo, serp Image copyright: Wallpeople, By Mário Pires}

Stakeholder Mapping at the Spring Barcamp in Porto

June 14, 2010

Attending a barcamp means that you should do your best to share an idea, projects you are working on, or knowledge that may be useful to others. That alone is good enough reason to attend, another one would be the opportunity to discuss these ideas with people with different backgrounds. The Spring Barcamp was June [...]

The future of communication platforms

May 9, 2010

My last post was about how I see the web, as being made of platforms, channels/instruments, contexts and content. A few days after I pressed publish, Steve Jobs sent out an announcement stating that Apple would not be supporting Flash on the iPad or the iPhone. First, what is Flash? It’s Adobe’s answer to our need [...]

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

April 27, 2010

If we would ask David Phillips or Philip Young what the web is made of, they would tell us about Platforms, Channels and Context. When we talk about the Internet we are talking about a series of technologies that indeed communicate among themselves, things like satellites, routers, servers and other infrastructures. Information can travel across [...]

Euprera Spring Symposium and the Values School of Thought

March 7, 2010

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

Grunig on the Digitalisation of Public Relations

December 29, 2009

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

Online Publics, Values and Values Systems

December 14, 2009

Online Public Relations, Publics and Values Systems; This was the title of the dissertation that I presented this last friday. It was a work that had the invaluable assistance of David Phillips as my supervisor and that focuses on what can be a new arena for public relations: mapping and identifying publics based on the [...]

A clean slate

September 25, 2009

Some of you may remember a different blog, Relações Públicas. Written in Portuguese, It is still the blog that ranks second for google searches on the portuguese translation of Public Relations. Positioned as the best place for dialogue on PR, it stands as the result of three years of work. It reached 550 RSS Subscribers [...]