Category Archives: Public Relations

Euroblog Study, new tools for research

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

2010 was the year I had the chance to become part of the Euroblog Study together with Philip Young and Derek Hodge. Simply put, it is an effort to understand how Public Relations are taught across Europe, and specially how Social Media channels are made part of curricula.

It can sound like a simple project, even taking into account that Europe as more than 50 countries it can be done if you have the support of an organization like EUPRERA. But the biggest obstacle is not the size of the study, It is being able to know which courses are in fact a part of the Public Relations discipline, for starters, and being able to categorize them into a framework that allows us to better understand how Online PR and Social Media are taught.

We came to this conclusion during the preliminary study, where we gathered as much information from Portugal and the UK as possible and presented at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2010.

Nowadays, projects such as these require a new approach and even a new methodology, not just to gather information in a more manageable way, but also to deliver results fast enough so they can be put to practical use. And this cannot be the usual survey with Google Docs or SurveyMonkey.

My attempt at solving this puzzle came while trying to learn to use Django and Ruby on Rails, these are frameworks for fast web development. They allowed me to build a form to gather a very broad amount of data.You can see the result by visiting http://euroblogstudy.heroku.com.

At first glance it will look like a rudimental tool, mostly because I took little care on the design aspect. On the other hand, once that database is populated it is possible to run as many different queries as we want and even use frequency analysis to uploaded files, descriptions of courses and other details with any cross-reference we wish to apply.

We don’t know what will be the next steps for the Study, and I do not know what time and effort I will be able to put towards it. Not wanting my work to go to waste, I opted to make the full source code of the software I put together available to anyone. You can find it hosted at GitHub.com/brunoamaral. There are still a few bugs to work out, but any web developer with knowledge on Ruby on Rails will be able to sort everything out and replicate the website.

EUPRERA Spring Symposium 2011

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Data team reveals research on Values Systems

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

Carla, a very good friend, was kind enough to point me towards the new Facebook Data article “What’s on your mind“.

The study and its findings come with no surprise to me and I am guessing David will feel the same way.

Simply put, the Facebook Data team revealed evidence that there is a correlation between the choice of words and the number of facebook friends, a correlation between age and choice of words and that we talk about different things depending on the hour of the day. Also, there is a link between what we write about and what our friends write about.

Back in 2009 I was in Cape Verde, sitting in front of the computer and crunching numbers and words “by hand”, these were taken from hundreds of blogs and eventually turned into a proof of concept presented at Bledcom. Later this research became the dissertation for my MA Degree.

The main difference is that the Facebook team used a technique called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, while I used a Latent Semantic Analysis tool. But in their essence the findings are the same, we form relationships based on a match of Values Systems, either at a personal or a group level, and we express these Values through our actions.

What is missing from the article on the Facebook Data page is Context. We use different channels of communications with different purposes and objectives in mind. This was pointed out by Edward Moyer on cnet when he wrote:

according to the data team’s results, the Facebookers with many friends tend to use fewer “emotional words” than do members with less friends. I’m not sure this means that people flock to those who are unemotional; it could just as easily mean that people who tend to form deeper, more-emotional relationships use Facebook in a different way (or not at all)–i.e., that “popular” Facebookers, with more “friends,” form shallow connections, or indeed, that the Facebook platform itself, as Zadie Smith recently suggested in The New York Review of Books, encourages shallowness

Article on cnet

What does this mean for business? Less marketing and more PR.

How to prove the value of PR in a time of crisis

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

Richard Bailey posted a very pertinent question on PR Studies, how can we prove the value of PR?

The conversation drifted a bit towards what is in fact PR, but another way to answer the question is to look at what PR does, more than what it is.

First off, one of our daily tasks is to develop and manage communication instruments. This means making sure that a newsletter or any other instrument is both effective and efficient, in a time of Crisis, it is also important to make sure there isn’t any waste (as publishing a newsletter that no one reads). Sometimes this means forgetting one instrument altogether and focus on a completely different approach.

But our job is also to manage relationships. In a time of crisis this means we have to make sure that we do not lose the tangible and intangible values and relationships that power the business model. Knowing which ones really matter is a first step into making them stronger, and as machiavellian as this may sound it also helps to identify which relationships to break in order to be more agile.

Times of crisis are also times of change, of changing corporate culture, procedures and even build entirely new business models. Internal communication plays a big role in this change and its management, it is important to keep people motivated and informed of the overall progress and most of all it is important to have monitoring mechanisms in place to make sure everything is going smoothly.

There are probably several other aspects that don’t occur to me, but it seems to me that the communication department should list its routine tasks and how they impact the organization in a positive way. Think about it as a personal audit, and if our audit proves that we are lacking there is nothing stoping us from expanding the focus, this time trying to find opportunities to help the company in a time of crisis.

The Current State of PR in Portugal

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

Last week I wrote a rant on how Public Relations is seen in Portugal. To sum everything up,

  • We are seen as party-goers, guest relations or hosts at night clubs;
  • There are several Blogs from PR Professionals, some of which have a great deal of influence in the market. These blogs focus more on soap-opera discussions, exchanges of personal remarks that don’t belong in this public sphere;
  • When we saw the Stockholm Accords come to light, I couldn’t find one mentioning it and the importance they have for our profession;
  • The few PR associations around have not shown any action towards building a professional association or simply building awareness towards what the profession in fact is.

This rant began after yet another comment on a post titled “to be a PR professional in Portugal“, which was written in my old blog back in 2007 and keeps gathering new comments. The last of those comments is an “ad” for a job opening at a Night Club. Discouraging to say the least.

To top it off, over 1500 pageviews later, my initial rant does not seem to have made a dent. Not a single comment, not a single mention.

I believe that in the current state of things, Public Relations in Portugal may face its demise but I am not willing to go out without a fight.

Net Neutrality is an important resource for e-Government

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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.

The future of communication platforms

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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 for rich and interactive websites that, however, poses a number of obstacles. When we use a computer as a platform and access a website built using flash we are asked to install a plugin that simply put downloads the flash file and presents it on the browser. Sounds simple enough and there are several examples of good websites built on Flash.

But it is not so simple. Google as problems indexing flash websites, even though they have put a great deal of effort into it. And if you want to use a mobile phone, chances are that you will find that the website does not fit a tiny screen or worse, does not show up at all. When at work you may not be able to access the website if the IT department did not install the flash plugin on Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome, and if you are visually impaired the text browser and your screen reader won’t find a trace of information 90% of the time, unless there is a text version of the website.

This means that if a flash website is not built properly it can prove itself to be a huge communication obstacle. Apple’s response to this was to clearly state that it will not support Adobe’s effort to use Flash on mobile devices.

Adobe and Apple

Faced with Steve Job’s announcement, Adobe replied as soon as it could. To sum it up, the response states that Adobe was already looking into other mobile platforms and that they look forward to show Flash 10.1 in Google’s Android Smartphones.

During this time, Google posted on the Google Code Blog, directing developers to HTML5 as part of a New Era for Mobile Phones.

What we have here is a company that provides users with platforms (Apple) and another that provides developers with a tool to build communication channels/instruments (Adobe) together with a clear miss match of intentions and strategy. Google’s post on how HTML5 is important to mobile phones goes together with Apple’s intent to abandon Flash, thus weakening Adobe’s position even further.

What this means for Public Relations

There are several variables that come into play when building a corporate website of any sort, usability, accessibility and user experience are just three of them. Even though a flash website can score very high on user experience, it scores very low on access through different platforms and, sometimes, even on ease of use.

For a corporate website to be a true investment, it must be built with a clear strategy in mind where we take into account what information we wish to make available, in what contexts and keeping in mind which platforms our visitors use. As far as technology is concerned, it does not matter if it is closed or open source as long as it is secure and stable while at the same time allowing us to adapt to current trends.

With Apple’s announcement it became obvious that websites built using flash in the last two years are obsolete when faced with the iPad’s launch, and thus a great deal of the communication budget may have to be directed into moving towards HTML5 or mobile apps.

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

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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

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

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

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

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

But what does it all mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Where does Public Relations fit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Euprera Spring Symposium and the Values School of Thought

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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

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

Winners of the Euprera Social Media Awards

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

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

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

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

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

But the concept of Values as changed.

Concepts of Values for Public Relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grunig on the Digitalisation of Public Relations

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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

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

Internet Penetration and Use

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

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

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

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

Internet Penetration

Internet Users


Original Source for Both Maps

Both maps substantiate Grunig’s claim that

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

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

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

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

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

Online Publics

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

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

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

On the issue of evaluation, the article reads:

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

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

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

Last Remarks

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

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