Phillips D., Young P. Online Public Relations
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Neil Thurman, a senior lecturer at City University, says that Americans
make up an average of 36 per cent of the online audience for British news
websites, with up to 39 per cent of readers coming from other overseas
destinations. That means that as few as one in four readers hails from the
United Kingdom (but UK online readership is nevertheless huge).
6
Meanwhile online page views have escalated, with Guardian Unlimited
in 2007 garnering 16 million each month, a trend that is now common across
most newspapers, magazines and business journals.
The work of three academics, Stephen Ward (Oxford), Rachel Gibson
(Leicester) and Wainer Lusoli (Chester) has shown that while people are
reading more news online, the UK audience for television news bulletins
declined by 10 per cent between 1994 and 2005, with a 25 per cent decline
among young people. Similarly, total national newspaper readership had
dropped by 25 per cent over the previous 40 years, with one-third fewer
people regularly reading a national newspaper now than 20 years ago.
It seems that a�ention is moving away from the traditional heartland of
public relations practice.
In 2007, the Daily Telegraph moved from Canary Wharf to Waterloo. The
facilities are extraordinary. There are 500 journalists in a 67,000 sq ft open
plan office with two screens per desk and a lot of technology beside. These
facilities may be a revolution in their own right but, according to Chris
Lloyd, who worked on the project from its inception to implementation,
the biggest change was cultural. News and other content are published
all the time and do not wait for the presses. The incoming content goes
to the website immediately. In addition, journalists blog, proffer opinion
on breaking news to ‘Telegraph TV’, record podcasts and use Twitter. The
communications channels in use grow, morph and change all the time.
Other media houses are following suit. The Guardian and the BBC are
both following this example.
The implications for press relations, that staple of the PR consultancy, are
pretty stark. The medium that is their bread and butter is shrinking and
is becoming a conduit for putting editorial, and by implication PR output,
online. In addition, as we have seen, the online media encourage people
to share their stories in social media information sharing websites.
As one PR consultant blogger noted:
During a recent wander round the press day of the British Motor Show, I kept
coming across these well-groomed, smartly dressed people talking to one-
People’s use of the internet as media
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At the same time, the process of exchanging corporate information through
the value network adds another dimension to many-to-many, many-
to-machines and machine-to-many data, information and knowledge
transmissions. We are seeing business-to-business (B2B) communication
increasingly migrating to the internet for a host of reasons, and this is hap-
pening very fast. Beyond the commercial sector, a huge amount of personal
and community information is becoming available through web-publishing
platforms, and thus available at the click of a mouse.
THE NATURE OF INTERNET PRACTICE
For a discipline that is all about communication, PR has been surprisingly
slow to adopt the internet as a core component of practice. Some of the
reasons why there is an urgent reason to make up for lost time are discussed
here.
There are billions of web pages. Collected together they form millions
of websites. This means that no individual can even begin to contemplate
visiting all the web pages that may be of interest and relevance to them,
still less to read or assimilate their content. And this is just what is on the
surface – below this lies a wealth of information buried deep in computers
that will be accessed only when asked for (called ‘deep web’) and that is
said to multiply information available to internet users by a factor of 500!
While technology is now used to access much of this information, most
people choose to access the information in their own time and from their
own research.
The internet is a ‘pull’ form of communication. People will seek informa-
tion, action, fun and anything else at the time when they want it. Mostly,
people use the internet with purpose. All other internet activity and pro-
motion is clu�er and some is irritation. Promotion may be ‘tolerated’, but
man-band camera crews. Now the motor industry and the Motor Show in
particular suffers from a distinct lack of mainstream media coverage – the
boys from housewife’s favourite Top Gear wouldn’t be seen dead there. So
who were these TV stars? Well, they were good old-fashioned journos from
the car magazines. At the last Show they were slouching around in t-shirts
and jeans, now they seem to own irons and have found the addresses of their
hairdressers. . .
Remember they are not increasing budgets at these magazines to support
this, just some serious multi-tasking – as an aside we have come a long way
from the Wapping riots and what a journalist does nowadays haven’t we? – So
how can we help? Well first we need to appreciate that journalists are under
pressure to get copy to website first, so the usual issues of speed, access and
accuracy are key.
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for a public relations practitioner or marketer to believe that a message can
be ‘pushed’ to an audience without the absolute and individual acceptance
of the recipient is to be arrogant and naive. The Oxford Internet Survey
shows that people are resistant – and are becoming more so – to spam and
‘pushed’ content.
Some believe that the currency of the new economy is a�ention; others
argue that significant rewards lie in being an internet navigator whose role
is to help people to find stuff on the web. From the perspective of those
who argue that wealth is now measured in knowledge units, both positions
may be right. Certainly the practitioner can aid this pull process and make
it worthwhile for the user by offering advantageous exchanges across the
internet.
One thing that is becoming apparent is the role of context. Different
people in different environments deploy different values and act on them
in accord with their ability to interact, and this changes from time to time.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points to a range of research that
shows that people behave differently in different contexts.
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Using a laptop
at home, a mobile phone travelling or a PC at work are not untypically
different physical contexts, and a need to find a plumber is a different
context from a search for music. The practitioner has a need to know about
the context in which publics will choose to seek online interactions.
Most internet users engage with the web by either visiting sites they
know from habit and experience (o�en bookmarked favourites) or use
search engines to find new content that matches keywords. They will also
have habits associated with the platforms they use: for example, an iPod
for music or podcasts, and a mobile phone to access a personal diary. In
addition they are influenced by peer recommendation through the news
and views of other internet users (information found on a favoured website
or from online discussion) and their browsing is stimulated by referrals
– links – from one site to the next. Online PR practitioners can build on the
social, technological and psychological factors that drive internet navigation
and access.
Making sure that rich content is known about is pre�y essential if the
aim is to encourage people to come to your organization’s site, interact with
your organization, identify with other offline activities and understand
your organization be�er. This means that organizations reach out to their
audiences via the internet, and through relevant platforms and channels
offer the incentive in the right context for the audiences to want to seek the
organization out as well. The digital footprint is important: those millions
of online impressions are an asset but they need to be put to effective use.
As we will see, they need to be used in online social interactions to gain a
return.
Reach is at its best when each party has mutual magnetism. This con-
vergence of values is complex, and many influences and much diverse
People’s use of the internet as media
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information will lead to a relationship. Online there is no magic bullet chan-
nel for communication; the be�er analogy is golden buckshot. Advertis-
ing, in this context, has its place but is limited in the range of applications
where it is the deciding influence. For example, context-relevant adver-
tisements are much more likely to get ‘clicked on’ than a generic ‘pop-up’
window.
Conversely, the practitioner must be aware of the parallel factors that
draw traffic towards information outlets that give exposure to competitors.
Although the phrase ‘surfing the internet’ feels as old and clichéd as referring
to the ‘information superhighway’, the phrase has some resonance – the
ease and appeal of links mean that visitors have a natural tendency to skate
over content, driven by almost subconscious forces that seem to carry them
inexorably onwards.
It is not enough merely to pull; successful relationships are built on
traction, and this means providing useful, relevant information and inter-
active capability in an accessible format – preferably in a form that people
want to pass on to others in a place, circumstances and using a method of
their choosing.
AUDIENCE SIZE
We have already touched on reach as one of the key drivers of internet public
relations. Practitioners will need to be able to convince clients that there is
an audience with critical mass enough to make the effort worthwhile. Here
are some basic facts:
Online reach in the United Kingdom was 67 per cent – that’s 31.7 million
people – in 2006.
74 per cent of users accessed the internet at least once a week, 52 per
cent daily.
55 per cent of users state that they would be lost without online access.
Among internet users, 25 per cent of all time spent exposed to media is
now spent online.
30 per cent of internet users were online for a minimum of 2 hours, 51
minutes a day.
60 per cent of users regard the internet as their favourite information
source (compared with 49 per cent for TV, 47 per cent for radio, 34 per
cent for magazines and just 24 per cent for newspapers).
Men were more likely to access the internet than women (71 per cent com-
pared with 62 per cent respectively). Most people use the internet at home
every day (60 per cent plus) for:
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finding information about goods or services (86 per cent);
sending/receiving e-mails (85 per cent);
using services related to travel and accommodation (63 per cent);
obtaining information from public authorities’ websites (46 per cent);
internet banking (45 per cent);
looking for information about education, training or courses – and
using Wikipedia (36 per cent);
playing or downloading games, images, films or music (35 per cent);
reading or downloading online news and magazine content (30 per
cent);
other communication (use of chat sites, messenger, etc) (28 per cent);
listening to web radios/watching web television (25 per cent).
(Sources: IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers Media Audit, BMRB Internet
Monitor Q3 2005, Oxford Internet Survey, TGI Q1 2006.)
There is a new player on the block: mobile internet. At the time of writ-
ing there were already two million people accessing the web using mobile
phones. Mobile e-mail has long been an established channel for com-
munication. And it has some interesting uses: e-mail, of course, chat in the
form of SMS and more web-based information. In 2006, 70 per cent of active
subscribers to mobile phone TV services (which was then only 9 per cent
of the population) were tuning in at least once a week.
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Web surfing on
mobiles is now very significant and growing.
The most significant thing to take from these figures is that in the key
areas users outnumber non-users. Put simply, in the United Kingdom, as
elsewhere, most of us are doing it! The internet is fast becoming the medium
of choice for many activities. It is even beginning to challenge the most used
forms of entertainment.
The case for the internet replacing television as the consumers’ medium
of choice is strengthened by a 2006 YouGov survey that claims the average
internet user in the United Kingdom spent 20 hours a week online. This
figure excludes e-mail usage, which accounts for over three hours of our
weekly internet activity, and 28 per cent of people in the United Kingdom
say the internet has caused them to watch less television. Among all people
in the United Kingdom, three in five of those who use the internet seek news
and 20 per cent read additional publications online that they don’t read in
print – less the 1 per cent of people who pay for news online.
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In addition,
as we have already noted, people multi-task. For example they will use a
PC online and watch television at the same time. The numbers of students
who swap notes in Facebook or have multiple IM windows active among
course group members while writing essays with internet-delivered music
going in the background is probably a majority in the United Kingdom.
The internet’s challenge to traditional media has become a lifestyle
change for many. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, revealed that
People’s use of the internet as media
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television is of declining interest to many 16–24-year-olds; on average they
watched television for one hour less per day than the average television
viewer. Of the television they do watch, an even smaller proportion of their
time is spent viewing public service broadcast channels.
In March 2008 the addiction to online video was evident. Twenty-seven
million people watched more than 3.5 billion videos online in the United
Kingdom according to comScore. The BBC iPlayer service accounted for
3–5 per cent of all internet traffic in the United Kingdom according to The
Guardian. Research by Nielsen Online in 2008 showed that Facebook and
YouTube were the two sites with the fastest growth, based on the number of
minutes spent on each website by Britons. Facebook experienced a 387 per
cent increase in the number of minutes spent on it by UK internet users per
month to 2.2 billion.
The impact of the internet on where people spend time is affecting most
social groups. Reports come in daily. For example, research by the insur-
ance company Axa, in a 2005 survey, found the over 60s spent more time
online than gardening or DIY, and 41 per cent said the internet is a favourite
pastime.
As public relations is largely dependent on communication it has to fol-
low the public appetite for media, and this is fast becoming internet based.
What the practitioner can take from these figures is that it is important to
monitor such trends.
SOCIAL MEDIA ARE OVERTAKING THE
TRADITIONAL WEB
A lot of people in public relations and marketing were wrong-footed when
the first corporate and business websites started to emerge in the mid-
1990s. They did not see how the internet had evolved in chat, e-mail and
Usenet – that is, as an interactive arena. Even many of those who realized
that the world wide web was going to be a lot more than a passing fad fell
into one of two traps, and many managed to be snared by both. First, they
saw internet and computer stuff as the province of the socially challenged
characters in IT, and (usually simultaneously) saw the web as primarily
a promotional tool. Their errors are quite understandable; back then,
it was quite difficult to create a website. You had to learn a whole new
language (Hypertext Mark-up Language) – which though less difficult than
shorthand was beyond the scope of most practitioners’ CPD, and you had
to understand how to host, load and manage web pages. It was difficult,
and anyway wasn’t that what the IT people were there for? So they went
on to make another mistake; instead of creating content that was suited
to this new, interactive environment, they took the easy route of handing
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over brochures and other corporate outpourings and asking the IT chap to
stick them on the website. Very o�en the result was soporific, dull and off-
pu�ing, or worse flashy and tiresome to load.
Web design has evolved very rapidly over the last 10 years, and today
there is no excuse for an organization to maintain a website that is not
a�ractive, accessible and user friendly. At the same time, the technology
has advanced in another direction. Not only can it offer hugely powerful
tools to professional designers, who with an adequate brief can produce
wonderful results, but we have also seen the emergence of the ‘writable
web’, the extended applications that have evolved from e-mail, chat and
Usenet discussion lists. A whole range of applications have become widely
available, which means almost anyone with a computer and internet
connection can create their own online presence, perhaps uploading photos
to a photo-sharing site, through a blog or a social networking site such as
Bebo or Facebook. The speed of change has been phenomenal. When 10
years ago it took a great deal of patience to download (by dial-up modem
connection) a relatively small photograph, broadband-enabled bloggers
and social networkers can now embed their own video and sound into
clean, accessible microsites that require li�le investment beyond time and
creativity.
Hitwise reported that UK internet visits to weblogs reached an all-time
high during the week ending 7 June 2008, accounting for 1.19 per cent of
all UK internet traffic, equivalent to one in every 84 website visits.
Such activities have entered the mainstream so quickly that many users
don’t really have – or need not have – much idea of what they are dealing
with. Put simply, you no longer need to understand what happens under
the bonnet, you just get into the virtual car, turn the key and surf. Most
people can set up a blog within half an hour, and a Facebook account is up
and running in a lot less time than that.
Looking at how much time people spend online, one can see that this has
appeal (remembering of course that surfing can be concurrent with other
online and offline activities). The activity that accounted for most time spent
online in 2007/08 according to Nielsen research was instant messaging,
followed by shopping on eBay. Facebook was the next most favoured use
of online time, followed by search, e-mail, music and video; of the top 10
all the rest were in social media sites. Intimate conversation, shopping,
group interactivity, communication and entertainment are all very human
activities enjoyed across the millennia and are reflected in this research.
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The fastest-growing use of time also reflected this appeal of social media.
The fastest-growing time consumers were in order: Facebook, YouTube,
Second Life, Google Search, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Asda, iTunes, Club
Penguin and Veoh (another video-sharing site). Six out of 10 were social
media, that is, Web 2.0 sites.
It is such data that has prompted us towards our emphasis on the social
web in this edition of this book.
WHAT IS WEB 2.0?
Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera offer
most people their window onto the web, but is worth remembering that other
tools exist that can allow people to do much more, and make their experience
ever richer and more exciting. 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 that aids the transfer of
knowledge and conversations and a place where people can easily mix and
match both. This has immense implications, and is nowhere more evident
than in the sudden significance of channels like Facebook, Bebo, Wikipedia
and blogs.
Web 2.0 is bandied about by a lot of people as being new. It is really an
evolution. The network that was until recently primarily a repository of
information through interlinked but essentially static websites, and com-
plemented by channels for interaction such as e-mail, discussion lists and
instant messaging, has evolved to create a seamless platform for all three. It
is now possible for almost anyone to create a type of website that not only
provides an information resource but also offers the means by which people
(and machines) can add, change and share content with others; blogs are a
common and now widely recognized example of this new phenomenon.
In Chapter 2 we listed many common channels for communication, and
most of them combine the dual functions of information provision and
information exchange.
Web 2.0 has another aspect. It allows these new channels to be integrated
(‘mashups’). This development allows one channel of information and its
associated content, plus contributions by third parties and the associated
sharing capability, to be integrated and absorbed into another channel. For
example, a Bebo page can include YouTube videos, Google Maps, surveys,
podcasts, slideshows and much, much more.
Another significant addition is the ability to index content in a new
way, known as tagging. Content generators can describe content by using
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keywords in a format that can be read and aggregated by other people’s
computers. For example, the tag ‘public relations’ included in a blog post
will be picked up by a search engine like Technorati, Google, Yahoo! and
MSN to allow anyone to search for those blog posts (or other web pages)
that have this tag. Called folksonomies, these are user-generated taxonomies
that help to link or aggregate different content into common themes, and are
powerful in helping people ‘pull’ content they find relevant.
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For example,
the social bookmarking site Delicious uses tags to offer taxonomies as a way
to work with an underlying folksonomy. As Quintarelli shows, this allows
structure to be added without the need for direct collaboration between
classification experts and content consumers.
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Adding a tag requires either
an embedded capability (a box where users can add tags) or some html
code, for instance rel=‘tag’>folksonomy</a>. (It is worth remembering
that because such tags are user generated they do not have the quality or
structure of more formal and disciplined listings.)
One of the principal drivers of the ‘web 2.0 era’ is an XML-driven cap-
ability to share information. There are two basic systems: RSS and Atom.
They allow people to ‘subscribe’ to a site and be informed when its content
is changed or added to. All practitioners should examine their own online
content to assess whether it should include an RSS feed. A very simple
description of RSS is available on the BBC site. Most newspapers, TV and
radio stations, blogs and many websites offer RSS subscriptions (all free) to
their content. RSS heralded the mass use of ‘many-to-one’ communication.
Anyone can now accept content from many people all the time. Being
one of the many requires high levels of ethics in communication. Once an
organization has lost the confidence of the user and is ‘unsubscribed’ it is,
in effect, on a blacklist forever.
Because web 2.0 has brought the ‘conversation’ into the web and spawned
high-profile mass interactions in sites like Facebook, Bebo and Wikipedia,
and has facilitated the blogging and other communication phenomena, it
has spawned a range of off-pu�ing expressions like ‘PR 2.0’. It is important
to look beyond the shiny new labels to assess where its true significance
lies.
THE TRADITIONAL WEB HAS A CHANGING ROLE
Despite more time being spent online, faster internet connection, high pen-
etration of broadband and huge sums being spent on websites, traditional
websites do not seem to be a�racting a lot more users. In 2006, students at
Bournemouth University used alexa.com to view the reach of a range of
‘traditional’ websites. In every case, they showed a decline in popularity
(Figure 11.2).
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Figure 11.2 Traditional website traffic in slow decline
Figure 11.3 Reach among social media sites showed a strong upward trend
At the point where the downward trend for traditional sites and the upward
trend of social media sites intersect, it becomes apparent that there is a new
paradigm of online communication that in part is about information (tradi-
tional websites) and in part social content sharing and commentary (social
media). This was, the students discovered, new territory for communicators.
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80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
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2006 2007 2008
2008 Mar 26
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Daily reach (per million)
ebay.com microsoft.com amazon.com bbc.co.uk guardian.co.uk
There was obviously something going on that needed further investigation.
The slow decline of the websites shown in the figure might have occurred
because there are more websites, but the evidence the students found sug-
gests otherwise. Social media sites such as blogs, file-sharing community
sites and interactive shopping (eBay is the best known example) were not
only competitors for the biggest reach, page views and dwell time on each
page, their popularity was growing at an astonishing rate (Figure 11.3).
Daily reach (per million)
wikipedia.org facebook.com myspace.com youtube.com blogger.com
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0
2006 2007 2008
2008 Mar 26
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