Publish First, Filter later

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

To solve the puzzle presented by the excess of information we adopted a series of mechanisms to gather and organize online content.

Search Engines were one of the first tools used, they index all the information and content they can find, to later gather it based on our search term and organize it by hierarchy according to both relevance and the website’s credibility which in turn is set by a private algorithm.

Useful as they may be, search engines are not a magic solution. Digg and Delicious are a different approach to solving the same problem: they both allow users to gather and organize information as they see fit.

However, the excess of information is not just a problem in organizing and filtering information, it also poses a problem regarding the maintenance and quality of that information. Wikis are one way to keep information accurate, allowing users to take charge and giving them a simple way to correct imprecisions and omissions.

All and all, we have moved from a single solution where large search engines presented the information we searched for, to a more diversified option where groups os users do their best to keep information organized and accurate. Each of these solutions as its shortcomings, but together they seem to be working well enough.

The idea of “publish, then filter” comes from Clay Shirky in the book “Here Comes Everybody”.

The Excess of Information

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

If we publish a document on the Web, it is immediately at the reach of millions of people with Internet access. The document can be an HTML page, a personal profile, a blog comment, an audio or a video file. We can look at all our online activity as publishing and sharing information.

Before the Internet, knowledge and information was limited to books, recordings, and encyclopedias. Today, information is distributed without restrictions. If on one hand this means that the Internet is the biggest and most accessible source of information, on the other it causes a problem regarding the quality of that information.

The speed at which we publish information on the web makes it impossible to catalogue content, to assure the veracity and accuracy of information much less the credibility of a great deal of sources of information.

To organizations this translates into an enforced transparency and a new management task, that of monitoring the online discourse and acting to preserve reputation as best as possible.

“The power of tags shows that the way to manage information overload is more information. That’s what the doomsayers of the 90′s — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn’t foresee.”

David Weinberger, Co-Autor do “Cluetrain Manifesto”; Autor de “Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder”

Intro – The Internet

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

It is wrong to think about the Internet as a platform or a mass media channel. What began as a project from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) came to be much more than network between machines. The goal was to use current infrastructures to access military databases in disperse locations. Thanks to the way it was designed, the Internet can now be used for a multitude of porpuses, of which viewing webpages and exchanging emails are just two of the oldest examples.

“(…) I did not forsee the powerful side of the internet community and its impact in every aspect of our society. My initial vision was for the network to allow for machine-to-machine or person-to-machine interaction but it’s main use is now the person-to-person interaction.”

Leonard Kleinrock in an interview to SIC Television

In time the Internet evolved and was used in universities and later became available to the public. With this growth we also saw an increase in ways we can interact, with each other and with machines. Content is now passed on to others at much greater speeds and be accessed through a vast number of platforms (computers, mobile phones, netbooks and even game consoles). Most of all, it is meant so that anyone can both access and publish content for everyone thus allowing for a number of interactions, from personal phone calls and messages to group forming and mass collaboration.

What we call the Internet is in fact a set of communication technologies that are made to interact with each other and allow for a rich and interactive communication. The most visible part of the Internet is the Web, a network of hyperlinked documents to which we are beginning to add a myriad of other features and possibilities of interaction thanks to the use of databases, dynamic programming languages such as PHP, Ruby and several others, and of course, HTML5. This means that today the web is not only made of documents, but also software applications.

Fighting the Hype

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

Over the next few weeks I will be publishing a small series of articles, most of which are the translation to english of previous writings.

The point of these articles is to bring down popular concepts such as “Web 2.0″, “Social Media”, “Social Web”, “Social Networks” and a number of others. These concepts tend to be misunderstood and misused, as a result Communication Professionals are faced with unrealistic expectations about what they do, how the tools they use work and what results are to be achieved.

Simply put, just because a word is used often it does not mean it is always given the same meaning or even understood.

First we will look a bit at the evolution of the Internet, and then we will pick up the concepts one by one.

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 3 Areas of Search Engine Optimization

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

When managing a website, one of the goals is to be listed as high as possible on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Working towards this goal is what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In Public Relations we need to divide the practice into three areas, Programming, Content and Relationships.

Programming

I do not mean that we as communication professionals should take charge of programming a website, or even optimizing the software on our own.

I do however mean to say that it is important to have a small grasp of the technology which powers a website, how it works and what alternatives are available. There are also several features of a website that make it more accessible to search engines, such as readable URLs, sitemaps and a careful semantic structure.

Content

Most of the time, PR practitioners will focus on building good Content. In fact, great content is still of the utmost importance. We can divide this area into two main concerns, one is providing Content with a good structure and organization, in which case Matt Cutt’s videos on SEO are a great help in understanding how content must be written for the web.

Another concern is in building relevant content. This means first and foremost to be aware of the publics that surround us and what their interests are. The next step is in finding common ground, and if it doesn’t exist we must take charge in building it.

Only we know to whom we are reaching out can we look into ways of building relevant content and becoming relevant to them.

Relationships

We build relationships of all forms and sizes, some positive, others neutral or negative. And the truth of the matter is that the Web was built to allow relationships to form, specially those relationships that lead to collaboration and cooperation.

When we create a website and publicize it, it ripples through the web resonating to a greater or lesser extent with its constituents. If the content is actually useful and valuable, it will be linked too, and while it is being linked to, in an underlying and sometimes unconscious process it is being given a set of psycho-sociological values.

We can reinforce this effect with advertising, relevant link exchanges, sponsored links in SERP, or any other artificial means. However, these tactics will prove less successful if our online discourse lacks relevance to a number of publics and to a certain context.

A SEO plan will only prove effective if it includes these three areas, focusing on just one of them or simply not taking the time to coordinate efforts between the PR department and the Webdesign team will result in erratic results.

Stakeholder Mapping at the Spring Barcamp in Porto

Posted on by Bruno Amaral

Attending a barcamp means that you should do your best to share an idea, projects you are working on, or knowledge that may be useful to others. That alone is good enough reason to attend, another one would be the opportunity to discuss these ideas with people with different backgrounds.

The Spring Barcamp was June 5th at Hub Porto and I opted to present a few examples of stakeholder mapping. It made sense to me given the fact that there were a few startups attending and that we would be talking about an important part of environmental scanning.

As usual, the interesting bit came after the slides.

One of the questions from the audience had to do with communication channels that stakeholders used. To explain, I believe that in some communication plans we may be able to clearly measure communication with a single stakeholder or public.

This has both to do with how we structure communication and the profile of a stakeholder group or public.

When we look into the profile of different publics we will find that they have different routines and different ways to find the information and content they need. While some journalists who cover IT may appreciate access to an RSS Feed of Press Releases, others may still prefer email and all of them may want the possibility to talk with someone directly.

Faced with this or other scenarios, an organization may choose to create separate channels for media and consumers. In doing so it will be creating the means to measure their effectiveness with a key Public and to better understand the nature of the relationship that is formed.

But it is important to keep in mind that Publics are not passive, and most of the time they opt to conduct their dialogue in channels that we either do not control or where we must first build an online presence. Wikis, forums and email newsgroups are a clear example of having to adapt our communication routines to a public.

As João Duarte made me realize, one of the issues that leads to a poor communication plan is that organizations seldom take the time to identify stakeholders and publics, much less to gather information and profile each one.

I will post a bit more on the Spring Barcamp as soon as I have the time, in the meantime please feel free to leave your remarks and comments.

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.