Category Archives: Online 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.

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.