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?

“In less than five years, a movement has taken hold that is having a profound effect on public relations. Called Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media in 2003, it heralds the evolution of the web from a repository of information and communication technologies into a space for symmetrical communication; a platform which aids the transfer of knowledge and conversations and a place where people can easily mix and match both.”

David Phillips e Philip Young em “Online Public Relations — A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media”

The idea of a Web 2.0 was widely adopted after O’Reilly made it evident that there were changes that could not be ignored and that allowed for more people to use the internet to communicate and to collaborate. These changes were in fact the result of a tipping point in usability, in a growing concern to make the web more accessible to those without programming skills. We can’t even determine what caused this tipping point, as it appears to have been a set of factors: Companies became more aware of usability requirements, the number of internet users was growing more and more each day, publishing online content became easier thanks to blogging services and software developers saw great improvements in both programming languages and web servers.

When we talk about web 2.0 we are simply mentioning a point of evolution, characterized by real time communication and a growing interaction between people, groups and organizations. It is in no way “a new internet”, and by it’s own it is not a paradigm shift.

As if this wasn’t enough, in an interview for an IBM podcast, Tim Berners-Lee showed an interesting perspective regarding the hype surrounding Web 2.0.

Sometimes we even refer to it as the “social web”, which leads us to another fallacy. The web as always been social in nature, it was always meant to assist cooperation between people, to spread information and to allow for low cost and high efficiency tools of communication to be developed. Before 2003, when Web 2.0 was proclaimed, groups were already forming through mailing lists, online forums, Chat Rooms and Instant Messaging services.

Web 2.0 is bandied about by a lot of people as being new. It is really an evolution.

David Phillips e Philip Young

Despite the lack of references, I feel it is easy to see it is influenced by the Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody”, David Phillips, Philip Young as well as a number of friends and bloggers whose work I follow.

Next up, we prove that Web 2.0 does not exist.

We have been using the term “social media” to describe the channels of online communication that somehow level the playing field between people and organizations. In fact, social media channels allow for publics to form with relative ease and gives them the ability to communicate in real time at a very low cost. It is therefore no surprise that these publics are able to organize and act to influence an organization or a government institution.

These organizations then face a new challenge, they must monitor the online dialogue and obtain permission to participate in that dialogue. But it is not only a matter of monitoring, it is also a matter of choosing in which channels it is important to participate. It is not just a matter of which channels are the most used, it is also important to identify the ones were the most engaged publics communicate.

But “social media” is also a term used to describe that same online dialogue. In that aspect, it is important to listen and to infer the values and values system to which an organization must adhere to or at least understand to build a middle ground.