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
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.
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Interesting post, but you don’t seem to understand the situational theory of publics well. The central concept is that of a problem, a concept that can be traced to John Dewey’s books “The Public and Its Problems,” “Logic:The Theory of Inquiry,” and “How We Think”–all written in the 1920s. Dewey maintained that human thought and inquiry is motivated by the perception of a problem–something missing in a life situation. Problems are perceived when someone’s expectations are not met. Thus, we seek the advice of a doctor when we don’t feel well. We search out health information on the Internet when we experience symptoms or someone else close to us does. We think about a new product when the old one doesn’t meet our expectations. We think about an organization when it intrudes in our life in some way, such as causing pollution or traffic jams. For the most part, people don’t think about situations that are not problematic to them. There simply is not time nor motivation to think about everything. That is why so much poll data or measures of reputation have little value: They ask people for ideas about things they rarely think about. Issues are different from problems. People (especially when they become members of publics) make issues out of problems that someone else causes or that cannot be solved. Values and ideologies relate to problems. They shape our expectations and therefore the problems we perceive. Thus, I believe we can trace what people search for in cyber space and with whom they communicate based on the problems they perceive. For most people, there is little reason to seek information from people in other countries. However, when life situations are similar or intersect in some way, people seek out or simply pay attention to people or information from other countries. The situational theory, therefore, is powerful in explaining how people use the Internet to search for information and to communicate with others. My former student, Jeong Nam Kim of Purdue University, wrote an excellent Ph.D. dissertation expanding the situational theory of publics into a situational theory of problem solving (“Communicant Activeness, Cognitive Entrepreneurship, and A Situational Theory of Problem Solving”, University of Maryland, 2006). An article based on the dissertation will be published shortly in the Journal of Communication and a book based on the dissertation will be published in about a year. In the meantime, however, you can e-mail Jeong Nam if you would like to read the dissertation.
This is an interesting exchange and I am grateful to you and to Professor Grunig for pursuing the differences between the Situational and the Relationships Values schools of thought.
We seek to identify the situation of organisations in the natural discourse of its constituency. If we can do this, it is possible to observe the nature and drivers of relationships. We are able to present to the public relations industry the Relationship Values hypothesis.
What I found interesting when Girish Lakshminarayana presented his latest Latent Semantic Analysis tools was the extent to which one can identify, develop and explore a huge corpus in a very short space of time.
This has led to a form client evaluation which has a number of steps:
Identify the semantic concepts in the client website
Identify the semantic concepts of the web pages of third parties who link into the client web sites (I call this the client sphere of influence).
Identify the the semantic concepts or the web sites of third parties who link into the client web sites
Explore all web pages indexed by search engines for the last year that mention the client and extract the semantic concepts.
Explore all web sites where pages have been indexed by search engines for the last year that mention the client and extract the semantic concepts.
This process can be done in time series.
The semantic concepts can be viewed as discursive expressions of the actor’s values.
What we are able to see from this analysis is an agnostic, semantic, content analysis of the corporate view of the client by the client evident in its web site. In addition we have the emerging and changing view of the client sphere of influence and can view this in the context of the wider interests of these external (sphere of influence) actors.
Adding the wider, search, sphere creates a view of the wider context in which the client is of interest.
This is an astonishing amount of data.
The results will be most interesting.
I am not, at this stage, sure as to whether the Relationship Values proposition will identify the extent to which values based relationships are also issues. This research process is much more granular and is based on two assumptions.
The first is that semantic concepts are the same as relationship values and that the internet is sufficiently pervasive to be representative of other forms of human discourse.
I have a completely unscientific view that the discourse in online in social networks is less about issues resolution and more about self actualisation. I will be interested to read Jeong-Nam Kim’s view of the extent to which issues resolution is part of daily life as expressed online.
This is very exciting for the PR industry.
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