It’s tax season in Portugal, and that used to mean a huge headache of gathering receipts and filling forms. Modelo3 is a company that came to change all that.

The service is Simple, they take the tradition tax form:

and change it into this:

The simplified form alone would be enough to make this a great service, but the team went the extra mile and added a real-time simulator that suggests ways to save on your taxes.

Public Relations in the light of Business Strategy

I had the chance to talk with Celso Pinto, one of the four people that make up the whole team. It came to no surprise when he told which social media channels they were using: a blog, Twitter account and Facebook page.

Support requests and questions tend to come from the facebook page and the blog.

Having followed Modelo3 for a while now, I noticed a few changes, from a shift in price model to a concern in keeping everyone updated on what is going on behind the scenes. The blog also features tips and information on how to manage your taxes.

Celso told me something that makes perfect sense: by staying alert to people contacting them via email, Facebook and blog comments, they were able to stay on track and reach the public they thought would benefit more from the service.

On a larger scale company this would not be a linear procedure. How many times does management get insight from social media other than the number of likes and “engagement” rates? And is the team handling social media aware of the corporate strategy to be able to identify opportunities?

This is by no means a new issue, it is however a good practice that should be preserved as companies grow and expand.

The first was focused about what agencies and organizations do in regards to social media, in a Public Relations perspective, explaining a view of what is the web and showing examples to support the whole reasoning.

ISCSP was where I graduated before moving to a MA degree so there are always moments of some nostalgia and a concern to cram into 20 or so slides concepts I missed when I was attending.

The presentation at UBI presented a greater challenge. It was aimed at post-grad and MA students and therefore required more than an intro to social media. Instead, the topics present are :

• What is PR and how the concept evolved,
• What are relationships and how they reflect online (a tip-of-the-iceberg on values systems),
• Measurement and Monitoring,
• Management of Communication Channels

There was however an issue that I missed and only realized in hindsight when writing down this blog post.

We are used to see Public Relations defined as having a goal of reputation management, specially when it comes to social media. But the concept of Reputation has been losing ground in more recent definitions of the field. Recent definitions of Public Relations focus more on strategic management and building relationships.

Either path is fine with me, the Relationship concept is valuable when we discuss a Values Systems approach to Public Relations and the concept of Reputation is one of the factors pondered before we establish personal relationships or relationships with brands and organizations. Right now, I feel we look after reputation when we put an effort in providing organizations with a coherent corporate voice which is essential to approach key publics.

The resulting slides can be found on my Slideshare account and as a novelty, the whole research is available on a Delicious Stack.

Any comments you may have are well appreciated!

I am a firm believer that anyone that works in online Public Relations must at least understand the technology that powers the web. The argument for this is the fact that Public Relations professionals are often asked to establish channels of communication. Wether you are building a website, managing it’s content or working with any social media website, having a grasp on how html, embeded content and links work is an advantage to make sure your efforts are effective.

None of these arguments suggest you should be able to build a website from scratch, troubleshoot a server or programe at any level. They only make the case for the need to understand how all this works. Now lets look at something different. You find an article you like and you can then send it to any number of services that keep reading list. (Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability, just to name a few.)

It has always been the case that what you read for work is not what you read to relax, unless you have a burning passion for your job. Nowadays, with tablets, e-book readers and smartphones, the device you use to access content varies as well. The content is the same but the device and it’s screen are different.

Enter Responsive Design.

I am in no way sure if I should call this a trend or a requirement, but the truth is that web designers are doing their best to make sure you have the same ease of use and valuable experience wether you use a desktop or a smartphone or anything else in between. They are doing this by realigning design elements according to the screen, or even building a separate design for each device. Each solution has its ups and downs.

Back in October I indulged myself to build a new Theme Framework using the theme provided by the good folks at Automattic. It works quite well for me and I have put it to the ultimate test while applying a full design to a client’s blog. (It passed, instead of editing 27 files, the whole design was built with 2 files and less than 200 lines of code.)

And right now I am taking what I have learned and taking it one step further, applying a responsive layout to WordPress using the Semantic Grid System. (You can see it at work if you resize this window or view it on a smart phone.)

Back to Public Relations.

Why is responsive design important to you? Imagine your challenge is to build a website for a school, providing students and teachers with real time information for a number of reasons.

While teachers may opt to view that information using a desktop computer, students may use a smart phone. Both these publics will want that information with different goals in mind and your job is to ensure that they can use the website in a consistent way. A different design (and user experience) may mean your time will be spent providing support. These are all reasons for you to be involved and help bridge the gap between the user and the team developing your new communication channel.

I never planned to stop blogging for so long and I have a strong belief that blogs will endure. Yet, simply openning up the “new post” screen and typing away is not enough for me right now. I want more.

So to go along with the new promise of a post, this blog is getting a new design. But that is not the reason why it looks so plain and boring as it does now. The new design will come built into my personal WordPress Framework, built in html5 thanks to the toolbox template and using the 960gs.

Only when the new design is in place will this blog see some new features such as the Google+ share button and a greater link between comments and social network services.

What does this have to do with Public Relations? The point of taking the time to build a whole new framework is to make blog templates easier to build and to customize. If I want to spend more time writting and less time coding, then it makes sense to go for the long run and build something that will adapt to what the future brings in terms of online communication.

Stay tuned and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

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.

The conference focused on how Public Relations is responding to the challenges of the Internet, and with invited speakers such as Philip Sheldrake and Anne Gregory it was indeed a valuable discussion.

My take is that we have not changed much on the way we practice Public Relations, even though there is indeed quite a lot of opportunities and new tools just waiting to be developed and put to use. This does not refer to blogs, twitter or facebook but to the possibility to rethink a whole organization’s structure, to try new ways to communicate and ultimately to change society.

It was also a special pleasure to see the Spring Symposium in Lisbon, as it was the conference that in 2008 had a huge impact on how I think and see PR. For that my gratitude goes to EUPRERA and everyone who makes it the great association it is.

Last but not least, a huge thank you goes to the team at Nüwa Studio who came up with the amazing website design we used.

Part of the conference also meant a few changes for the Euroblog Study, but more on that later this week.

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.

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.

The conversation drifted a bit towards what is in fact PR, but another way to answer the question is to look at what PR does, more than what it is.

First off, one of our daily tasks is to develop and manage communication instruments. This means making sure that a newsletter or any other instrument is both effective and efficient, in a time of Crisis, it is also important to make sure there isn’t any waste (as publishing a newsletter that no one reads). Sometimes this means forgetting one instrument altogether and focus on a completely different approach.

But our job is also to manage relationships. In a time of crisis this means we have to make sure that we do not lose the tangible and intangible values and relationships that power the business model. Knowing which ones really matter is a first step into making them stronger, and as machiavellian as this may sound it also helps to identify which relationships to break in order to be more agile.

Times of crisis are also times of change, of changing corporate culture, procedures and even build entirely new business models. Internal communication plays a big role in this change and its management, it is important to keep people motivated and informed of the overall progress and most of all it is important to have monitoring mechanisms in place to make sure everything is going smoothly.

There are probably several other aspects that don’t occur to me, but it seems to me that the communication department should list its routine tasks and how they impact the organization in a positive way. Think about it as a personal audit, and if our audit proves that we are lacking there is nothing stoping us from expanding the focus, this time trying to find opportunities to help the company in a time of crisis.

Simply put, my dissertation puts into question what are publics and how we can identify publics online. This theoric basis is made complete with a case study using the website for the British Olympic Association. There is an executive summary available as well, and you can find the presentation on slideshare.

With a bit of extra work I believe that my research could be made into part of an Online Communication Course.

Recently I have been giving some serious thought in making the whole dissertation available. The problem is “How”. For personal and professional reasons I don’t feel I can afford to simply share the file on the blog for all to read and use.

But I don’t have a publisher interested on my work and I have never really looked into self-publishing options.

The reason for this post is to know two things:

• If you are a PR professional / academic, looking at the executive summary of the book would you buy it? And if so, is it something that you might recomend to others?
• If you have any experience with self-publishing services, would you mind sharing it so I know where to begin?