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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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 and an average near 5000 visits per month and I believe that in time it would continue to grow. But times change and I began to regret the language barrier for a number of reasons.

So I decided to take on a new domain name, and start over. With a new blog, a new strategy and new challenges. Aggregating the dialogue being one of those challenges. (Hopefully, as soon as I have the time, you will see a good mix of blogging and microblogging.)

At the same time, I could not simply leave the first website un-attended. With a great google rank also comes great responsibility. That means that the pulse for Relações Públicas will still beat, just at a slower pace.

As for this new place of dialogue, I will try to focus on research and insights on Public Relations that applies to the discipline and not simply to a new platform for online communication.

Stick around, it will be interesting.