Category Archives: Values and Values Systems

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 Technology Impacts PR And How We Can Respond

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

I have been meaning to write this post for a while now. But as all landmarks it needed undivided attention.

A week as passed since I had the great pleasure of speaking at the Annual Conference of the Croatian Public Relations Association.

During my stay I had the opportunity to share a few key notions on the Values Systems School of Thought. The first of which was the idea that technology evolved in such a way that the it is easier to use and easier to adapt to our needs and whose spread is in fact unstoppable.

On a different idea, it is important to understand that the Web does present Public Relations with a new set of challenges, most of which refer to the need for a precise monitoring and evaluation.

Monitoring per se can be seen in two lights. First, it is important to have tools and methods in place that allow for a Bird’s Eye View of what is being said online about:

  • Our Organization
  • Our sector
  • One or more sensitive issues

But campaigns and other projects require a new level of detail. Real time monitoring is a possibility, and we can apply it by summing up the whole online discourse into its most relevant Values, measure sentiment and identify which instruments of communication are being used for that dialogue.

This should of course be coordinate with traditional web metrics, such as pageviews, Click Through Rates, Referal links and concrete actions being performed by Online Publics.

These are exciting times for Public Relations, and I am very thankful for having the opportunity to share these ideas in Zagreb.

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.

Online Publics, Values and Values Systems

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

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 demonstration of values. I was also lucky to have Anne Gregory accept the invitation to participate in the formal discussion, with whom it was a pleasure to exchange ideas.

The reason why I put a stop to my blogging hiatus with this information is quite simple, it is a subject that will be somewhat recurrent in this blog. Not only when it comes to presenting my findings, also in regards to pursuing the theme a bit further.

However, the perspective on this blog will not be limited to the values that guide corporate communication, instead it will include both economical (a utilitarian definition of values) and psycho-sociological values as well as the relationships formed as a result of these values. PR’s approach to values and values systems tends to focus on the psycho-sociological definition, as a means to assure that corporate communication is coherent and credible. Recently, a post on the blog PR Conversations discussed the issue of values applied to PR while reviewing Jon Iwata’s plan for IBM which is a great example on psycho-sociological values applied to corporate communication.

The dissertation on Publics and Values systems takes the whole concept of values a bit further, supporting that values and values systems can be used to map and identify publics while at the same time providing a way to measure communication efforts in a quantifiable way across any number of communication instruments.