This video from UNICEF Sweden is a powerful reminder that Facebook Likes don’t really mean much, despite the obsession by some in the advertising and marketing business. In UNICEF’s case it quite literally tells us that Facebook Likes don’t save lives.

Picture from UNICEF Sverige Flickr.

This blog post started as a comment on Stephen ‘Wadds’ Waddington’s thought-provoking article about ‘The public relations industry’s confidence problem’, but it was so thought-provoking the comment rapidly became too long.

His central thesis is that public relations is too introspective and needs to have more confidence of the role it plays in the broader economy. I’d go further and say public relations doesn’t just play a significant role in the economy, but also in politics and society/social. The first three of the PEST analysis, which are all being changed by technology.

If advertising and digital agencies don’t eat PR’s lunch, then management consultants might

Wadds says there is a “turf war taking place between advertising, public relations and digital”. Another war that Wadds hints at, but doesn’t mention, is when he talks of “earns the place that it deserves as a management discipline” is with management consultants. Public relations professionals are not the only people to recognise that public relations should be a serious business discipline and that means we’re also competing with the big global management consultancies.

I think a major reason for public relations’ confidence problem is its identity problem. Public relations practitioners aren’t even sure and can’t agree on what it is we actually do. Worrying how we define ourselves seems introspective, but it’s hard to be confident about who you are if you don’t know yourself. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that others do ‘define’ public relations, usually incorrectly in narrow and derogatory ways. Too many public relations practitioners don’t do our business any favours by perpetuating the myths about what PR really is.

PR is not just part of marketing

If we are to be seen as a true management discipline as Wadds asserts then we can’t allow ourselves to be defined as mere publicists or as simply part of marketing. Public relations and marketing are totally different disciplines and the confusion arises because both will often use some of the same tactics. It’s quite legitimate for public relations to use paid media. It’s not even new, I did it 20 years ago with full-page display advertisements in trade press across the world, as part of a corporate restructuring.

Part of the challenge we have as public relations professionals is that we don’t start off with the same budgets or even ‘share of mind’ within clients as some of our competitor disciplines do. Advertising and digital agencies typically have bigger budgets so can afford to experiment. Using a small percentage of their existing spend they can try something new to see if it works in this time of massive change in society and media. In contrast you’d need a bigger percentage of most public relations budgets which means you don’t have enough left for the tried and trusted. Therefore the leviathan advertising agencies can ironically be more agile than the theoretically smaller more nimble public relations consultancies.

Wadds’s example of a retail brand working with a peer analytics firm such as Klout, Kred or PeerIndex to identify and target online influencers could be done by an advertising agency simply pulling one or two TV slots to find the budget. A PR agency might need to significantly reduce the time it spends working with influential journalists in order to spend that budget on working with the new influencers.

The challenge from management consultants is that their consultancy day rate frequently dwarfs the day rate of a public relations consultancy. This in turn means they pay bigger salaries and get better people. That’s not to criticise public relations people, but the fact is that many of the best do it because they enjoy it. They are bright enough people that if they’d entered a better paid profession such as management consultancy, law or accountancy then they’d earn a lot more. They chose public relations because they enjoy it. But this makes it hard for the public relations profession to attract the brightest and best graduates.

Is PR too introspective?

Wadds claims that the public relations industry is too introspective because it is obsessed with “inward focussed issues such as whether it is a profession and the issue of measurement”.

So what’s the answer? I think Wadd’s blog post perhaps starts to provide some of them. He’s right we need to win the professionalism debate through action. Despite being a Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) member for my whole career I didn’t complete its continuous professional development scheme until 2012. That’s wrong and I know I should become a chartered practitioner, but I’m not afraid to admit that the time involved still makes me hesitate. As a newly elected CIPR council member I feel obligated to at least complete CPD, but really I should also complete the accreditation to become a CIPR Chartered Practitioner.

He says that solid work is now being done by organisations such as AMEC to improve measurement and evaluation. This is one area where public relations could be more confident. Public relations is perceived as not being very good at measurement and evaluation. The fact is that we’re getting a lot better. The dirty little secret of much of the advertising and digital agency world is that they might be better at measuring stuff, but much of their evaluation is just as flawed as that used for public relations. Public relations needs to start being confident about what it can measure and evaluate, rather than worrying about what it can’t.

“The debate about who owns social media is flawed…”

… says Stephen as “The future will be owned by the practitioners that define it”. And he’s right. It’s also a sterile debate as social media doesn’t necessarily need to be owned by anyone. The fact is that social media needs to be used by human resources, legal, customer services, marketing, IT, public relations et al. As well as using social media itself one of the main roles of public relations is to ensure that others within the organisation don’t abuse or use social media badly, which will inevitably lead to reputational damage.

Public relations therefore has a dual role with social media. Firstly to use if effectively itself. Secondly, to coordinate and lead its use by others. In most companies and organisations public relations has a unique 360 degree perspective because reputational issues can arise from anywhere. That makes PR uniquely placed to lead on something that also has a 360 degree impact on the company or organisation. The danger is that there are disciplines out there, such as marketing and advertising, who might want to ‘own it’ and those disciplines are far more narrowly focused so while capable of doing brilliant work won’t necessarily sufficiently get the wider implications. That’s what we need to guard against.

It’s time for public relations professionals to take the advice of Mark Borkowski and Stephen Waddington and “find our swagger.”

There are a lot of Twitter analysis, influence, measurement and evaluation tools. A lot! However, for PR and corporate communications professionals TweetLevel from Edelman is definitely worth a look and there is new version just released. For a start it is designed by people who really understand public relations, corporate communications, public affairs and the relationship between influence and reputation.

TweetLevel lets you analyse by Twitter ID and topic or hashtag. Unlike some tools you don’t need you don’t need to authorise it on your Twitter account to analyse a Twitter ID. This means you can easily use it to analyse an account that you are interested in. It also doesn’t ‘force’ you to tweet about it in order to see your full report.

The topic or hashtag analysis lets you see who is talking most and is influential about the most relevant issues. The advanced search options on TweetLevel are also impressive with the ability to filter specific date ranges, languages, include/exclude words and phrases and search within a Twitter user ID. You can also analyse how a specific URL is being shared.

For the topic search you get three graphs. The first is level of buzz over the period, showing the peaks and troughs. The second is a pie chart showing the top users by share of voice and the third is a bar chart showing the most shared web links. You also get a ‘related phrases’ word cloud. The related phrases can be a really useful tool for helping to refine not just the words and phrases you monitor for, but also the ones you should use in conversation and engagement.

Another interesting feature is that once you’ve performed a simple or advanced search you can enter your email address to be mailed with a list of the most influential tweeters (not simply the most popular). This isn’t an email harvesting exercise either as Edelman don’t keep your email address.

A tip for PR or public affairs people is that one way of using the Twitter ID analysis is to identify other topics that someone is interested. You might already know that they are a relevant stakeholder for your issue or organisation, but what else makes them tick? Do their other interests make them potentially more of an ally or perhaps a threat? Do you share other common interests so you can engage on more than just your issue?

Once you have done the Twitter ID analysis you get a graph showing where someone sits on an influence/popularity axis and is categorised into different types of Twitter account: Viewer, Commentator, Curator, Idea Starter and Amplifier. You also get a word cloud showing the topics they talk about most, an activity graph showing when the user has been most active and the time of day that they tweet most. You can also compare one user with another.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to filter the word cloud, in particular to remove hashtags. If someone frequently uses a hashtag or has recently been at an event with a hashtag then this can skew the word cloud and make it difficult to see what they actually talk about.

My influence score is 80.8 and TweetLevel identifies me as an Idea Starter / Amplifier.

Idea Starters are the “small collective of people who are the creative brains behind many of the thoughts and ideas that other people talk about… their insightful opinions often flow and are repeated throughout conversations long after they have left.” Amplifiers are “people who frequently have a large audience and following.”

TweetLevel’s general verdict on my Twitter ID influence score is:

You are a Twitter superstar. In your segment, you have a huge number of followers who find what you are saying interesting. As Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Carry on tweeting and sharing your opinions – people like what you have to say.

One of the big criticisms levelled at Klout is that it doesn’t really measure influence and it can’t be trusted because it keeps its algorithms secret. Personally I find Kred and PeerIndex to be far more useful tools. Unlike Klout TweetLevel is transparent about its methodology and publishes the formula of how it calculates the TweetLevel. It uses more than 20 different variables, all of which are explained. Because the science of influence isn’t really a science then much of this is open to challenge, but that’s exactly what Edelman want you to do:

This tool will be in permanent beta as we seek to continually improve its functionality based upon your feedback. Even though we believe that it goes a great way to understand and quantify the varying importance of different people’s usage of Twitter, by no means whatsoever do we believe we have fully solved the ‘influence’ problem. What we would appreciate is your views, advice and criticism is crucial in helping us understand social media measurement.

TweetLevel was created by Edelman director and head of influence engagement @jonnybentwood.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the Share This: CIPR Social Media Conference 2012 and I have got a few more speaking gigs coming up later this year. It is great to see quite a few friends and acquaintances also speaking at some of them.

Social Media in a Corporate Context 2012

This year’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference organised by Communicate magazine focuses on using social media for reactive crisis management and proactive reputation and brand positioning.

This year I’m a ‘judge’ for the Social Media Policies X-Factor. Other speakers include:

• Alex Pearmain, currently Head of PR and Social Media at O2, but shortly to depart to join Brands2Life
• Amanda Coleman, Head of Corporate Communications, Greater Manchester Police
• Steph Gray, MD, Helpful Technology
• Antony Mayfield, Partner, Brilliant Noise
• Sunny Hundal, Editor, Liberal Conspiracy

Social Media Results for PR & Comms Conference – Mobile & Monetise

I’m running a measurement and evaluation workshop on the second day. Other speakers include:

• Dominic Burch, Head of Corporate Comms and Social Media at Asda
• Rob Skinner, Head of PR and Social Media, PayPal
• Simon Downing, VP Marketing Western Europe, Discovery Networks
• Amanda Coleman, Head of Corporate Communications, Greater Manchester Police

It takes place in London on Wednesday, November 28 to Thursday, November 29.

European Association of Communication Directors Forum

I’m one of the panellists on a panel discussion on ethics and communications organised by the European Association of Communication Directors (EACD). The topic is ‘Defining Relevant Ethics for Today’s Communicators’ and other panellists include:

• Andre Manning, Vice President and Global Head of External Communications at Royal Philips Electronics
• Nicole Gorfer, Head of Communications at Roche Pharma, Germany
• Moderated by Mike Cooper, a Creative Director at MediaPartners Group, the Netherlands leading content marketing agency, and editor-in-chief at KLM Royal Dutch Airline

It takes place in Amsterdam on Monday, December 10.

Another day, another new announcement from Klout. This time it’s topic pages:

Topic pages on Klout are coming! Dig deeper into topics, see the top influencers, the most influential content, and the latest activity around topics.

Klout topic pages launch in September, but only for selected news – Klout is treating the preview as a Klout perk. You can register for a preview of Klout topic pages here.

Altimeter Group produces some great research and it’s latest research report makes great reading. The Framework for Social Analytics research report was published yesterday and tackles that frequently asked question ‘What is the ROI of social media?’ Now we all know that’s an impossible question to answer truthfully, but this report provides a framework and set of case studies that demonstrate how social media is being used in business today.

It was written following several months of interviews with nearly 40 industry experts including brands, agencies and analytics suppliers.

PR and marketing people love a good list and Andrew Smith has done a brilliant job in creating some stellar PR business lists with his PRWeek Power Players of Social Media and PRWeek Power Book 2011 lists. Both Klout and PeerIndex attempt to ‘measure’ influence using a combination of factors such as authority, activity and audience. For understandable reasons neither reveals the exact algorithm that they use to calculate scores. For pure fun I thought it would be interesting to compare how they both score a sample of highly influential individuals. A major downside to any online influence measuring tool is that it only measures ‘online influence’ and not real world influence. The PRWeek Power Book claims to be a list of the UK’s most influential PR people and the criteria used to create it is also shrouded in mystery, but in this case by influence it does mean real influence, which is a combination of real world and online influence. That’s why I decided to take a look at the top 10 on the PRWeek Power Book 2011 list. I used Andrew’s PeerIndex list and added the top 10 to a Klout list ((Klout only lets you put ten people onto a list) to see how the rankings compare.

It’s absolutely just a bit of fun and means absolutely nothing, but it’s interesting that the only two people that have the same rank in both lists are at the top (Andrew Bloch) and 10 (Steve Earle). Second and third place switch between me and Mark Borkowski, while the rest are in quite a different order in each list.

I don’t think you can draw that much from this other than a couple of things:

1) Don’t put too much store in lists when you’re mapping online stakeholders.

2) Rankings change all the time – my PeerIndex has shot up rapidly recently, Klout has climbed much more slowly.

Andrew Bloch Stuart Bruce (me!) Mark Borkowski Chris Lewis Rob Brown Jimmy Leach Drew Benvie Sandy Lindsay Stephen Waddington Steve Earl	Andrew Bloch Mark Borkowski Stuart Bruce (me!) Stephen Waddington Sandy Lindsay Drew Benvie Rob Brown Chris Lewis Jimmy Leach Steve Earl

The great news is that it has finally banned AVEs from the PRWeek awards. We touched on this at yesterday’s CIPR Social Media Council meeting and Philip Sheldrake suggested that we should shame and humiliate those that still cling to this entirely bogus metric. I’m all for that and for years have been on attacking those daft or weak enough to use AVEs.

It’s not often I get the luxury of being able to attend a conference that I’m not speaking at, so I’m looking forward to attending the Social PR 2011 conference on February 28. Not only will it be good to catch up with great speakers such as Philip Sheldrake and Michael Nutley (editor in chief of New Media Age), but it will also be my first chance to meet face-to-face with Katie Delahaye Paine who talks more sense on public relations measurement and evaluation than anyone else (except perhaps for Philip Sheldrake!).

There will be some interesting case studies on brands like Barclaycard and Sony Ericsson (Disclosure 1 – client, but the case study by Ben Padley of Sony Ericsson and Pete Goold of Punch Communications is just about the Facebook activity, whereas we are primarily concerned with the broader social media corporate communications strategy).

Disclosure 2: I’m receiving a free ticket to attend.