Phillips D., Young P. Online Public Relations

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Foreword

Without doubt, a new age of communication has arrived. With it has arrived

a revolution in public relations. This revolution not only involves the way

we communicate, but the nature of communication itself.

In this book on e-public relations, the authors show how the internet

and especially social media, are revolutionizing the role and work of the

public relations professional. The book is not for those who wish to learn

the mechanics of how to construct a social networking site or how to set

up a virtual press oﬃce. It is about how to use this potent and energizing

medium intelligently and eﬀectively.

Much has been wri�en on the internet as just another means of com-

munication. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a channel of

communication, but it is much more than that. Its unique properties of

reach, richness and personalization have transformed the mode and quality

of mediated communication. Furthermore, the nature of internet publics, or

communities, is quite diﬀerent from those that have been traditionally the

domain of the PR practitioner.

They provide an overview of the online communication environment

and its potential. They then go on to explore how an organization can

meaningfully engage with internet communities and exploit the commun-

ication potential that is inherent in the various ‘tools’ that are now available.

Developing an online strategy that is realistic and robust is essential, as is

monitoring, measuring and evaluating your presence and actions. Of vital

interest are the topics of reputation and issues management on the internet.

The ability of groups to form quickly and mobilize action provides a great

opportunity as well as being a potential threat for PR professionals who are

the guardians of organizational reputation. They explore how reputations

can be destroyed or enhanced depending on how relationships are managed

and also provide similar advice on managing issues as they arise. Their

warnings of the dangers that await those who engage with individuals

and communities in a naïve, unprofessional and unethical way need to be

heeded.

The potent eﬀect of online communications is well demonstrated as the

authors go on to show how the internet is changing the news agenda and

news itself. The internet within an internal communications context is also

discussed: its uses, abuses and how to harness its power eﬀectively.

Rounded oﬀ with a chapter on Corporate Social Responsibility and a look

into the future, this book provides a timely and authoritative overview of

e-PR. It provides some clear pointers for organizing public relations pro-

fessionally now and indicates a vision of the future. Any public relations

professional wanting to conduct his or her business in the modern inter-

connected world will regard this book as a must.

Professor Anne Gregory

Series Editor

Foreword

xii

Acknowledgements

DAVID PHILLIPS

This book is possible because of three groups of people. First it was made

possible by public relations professionals and thinkers like my co-author

Philip Young and friends like Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and Richard

Bailey. They have provided a reality check as have the growing host of PR

people who are interested in online relationships and PR. Some are people

who share their research and thinking and can see forward beyond my

a�ention span deﬁcit. They include David Weinberger, Don Tapsco�, Clay

Shirky and William Du�on among many others who oﬀer insights that can

be synthesised for PR practice.

Then there is a huge group of people who make stuﬀ available. They

are the academics across so many disciplines who share their research,

social science and technology practitioners who share their knowledge

and skills and the folk out there who are passionate about the channels

for communication they invent and oﬀer to us all. Every hour of every day

their contributions come via RSS feeds to inform PR. In all, something like

100 contributors.

Who could write a book like this without robust debate with Toni Muzi

Falconi on his PR Conversations blog, fellow For Immediate Release pod-

casters and futurologists and so�ware magician Girish Lakshminarayana?

Finally there are the people who really make these things possible. Work

colleagues and clients, supportive friends and understanding publishers

xiii

have been wonderful, especially Margaret, my wife, an internet widow if

ever there was one

PHILIP YOUNG

Most of all I would like to thank David for inviting me to help with the

second edition of Online Public Relations. I have learnt more about social

media from him than anyone else and am grateful for the opportunity to

make a contribution to this book. I would also like to thank my Delivering

the New PR friends Chris Rushton, Tom Murphy, Neville Hobson, Stuart

Bruce and Elizabeth Albrycht, my EuroBlog partners Ansgar Zerfass,

Swaran Sandhu and Anne-Marie Co�on, and the blogger I think has done

most to help PR students, Richard Bailey. All of them exemplify my belief

that the more you put into social media the more you get out of it.

Acknowledgements

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xiv

Part 1

Everybody’s public relations

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The battleground

When writing a book like this, it is hard to avoid making the claim that ‘the

internet changes everything’. In some ways, nothing changes everything,

but for public relations practice the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing

will ever be the same again; the advent of an online world means almost

every aspect of the discipline needs to be rethought.

Crucially, it is not just a case of devising, adopting and developing new

tools and tactics, or restructuring to meet the ever-shrinking timescales for

campaigns that are increasingly played out on a global stage. Far beyond

this, what we might call ‘the new PR’ demands a dramatically diﬀerent

approach at the level of strategy. Indeed, it is the need to radically rethink

strategy that provides the intellectual justiﬁcation for using a term like ‘the

new PR’ in the ﬁrst place.

We will look in detail at strategy and management in Part 3. First we need

to understand what the internet is, partly as a technological tool but more

importantly as the enabling mechanism for a communications revolution

that is driving signiﬁcant changes in the dynamics of society. This section

looks at the signiﬁcance of the internet, providing the framework for an

analysis of key terms such as social media and aggregation, and their role in

an evolving PR practice.

Everybody’s public relations

WHY EVERYTHING IS CHANGING

Almost all deﬁnitions of public relations agree that at some level it is a

discipline concerned with an exchange of information. In practice, this

usually involves the management of an organization trying to convey this

information to external and internal audiences and, to varying degrees,

trying also to receive information from a range of stakeholders.

Sometimes this is simple factual data, perhaps a council telling local

residents that dustbins will now be emptied on a Tuesday; more o�en it

is about persuasion, where public relations seeks to change perception or

behaviours. Usually, such communications seek to enhance or consolidate

reputation, which can be seen as the basis of trust. Indeed, some regard

‘reputation management’ as a useful explanation of the purpose of PR.

Reputation can be seen as an aggregation of lots of individual opinions,

some derived from personal experience (‘I bought one of those cars and

it was always breaking down’) but more o�en a synthesis of fragments of

information derived from a wide range of sources, some more accurate than

others (‘I haven’t been there myself but I have heard. . .’).

We would argue that a more sophisticated deﬁnition of public relations

goes beyond reputation to be concerned with the broader and more chal-

lenging realm of relationship optimization, in which reputation clearly plays

a part but which demands an understanding of a much more complex set

of factors.

The point is that at each level the core processes demand the exchange of

information, and the outcomes are predicated on responses and reactions

to this information. The challenge for the PR practitioner is to understand

how this information is exchanged and then work out how to inﬂuence

such exchanges in a way that beneﬁts the client.

In the roughest and crudest terms, let’s examine how information is

exchanged in modern Western societies. To get us underway, let’s pretend it

is 1984, not for its Orwellian connotations (though they may help to inform

our analysis!), but because that was when Grunig and Hunt wrote Managing

Public Relations.

BUT THIS ISN’T 1984

In 1984, as for the previous hundred years, it was possible to split in-

formation into two areas, that of mass communications and micro-

communications. Yes, there is a signiﬁcant grey area in between the two,

but for present purposes these categories are distinguished by a qualitative

diﬀerence between that which is made available to large numbers of people

and involves a decidedly asymmetrical relationship between provider and

The battleground

audience, and that which is fundamentally an exchange between individuals

and may have a greater degree of symmetry.

Mass communications includes newspapers, magazines, television and

radio, and for our purposes can include books and directories, perhaps

located in libraries, and extend down to, say, organizational newsle�ers

and business-to-business publications with a relatively limited circulation.

The detail doesn’t ma�er; the key point is that all such communications

require capital and labour investment to produce what are, by and large,

static texts. Clearly the content of such exchanges is inﬂuenced by audience

expectation and reaction, but this can be a slow and ineﬃcient process.

And the texts are usually produced to an extended timescale, whether

scheduled television news bulletins, the daily production of a newspaper

or the monthly publication of a periodical.

Micro-communications are inﬁnitely more ﬂexible, in terms of timescale,

reach and inﬂuence. The most obvious example is a conversation, perhaps

between you and a friend: ‘Where shall we go tonight?’ ‘I have heard there’s

a new Italian restaurant on the High Street.’ Perhaps you go on to discuss

a number of restaurants, perhaps you include information gleaned from

newspapers and magazines, but also friends and colleagues – word of

mouth and peer recommendation. Such exchanges can be replicated by

groups and extended over time, and in 1984, augmented by the (ﬁxed, quite

expensive, landline) telephone and by slow and time-consuming le�ers. In

the vast majority of cases telephone conversations involve two people, and

are ephemeral – their contacts are overwhelmingly not recorded and not

accessible to other people. Yes, le�ers can be duplicated and sent to a whole

host of people, but each mailing is discrete; only the sender is likely to have

an overview of responses. It is quite diﬃcult even to think of circumstances

in which the contents of these le�ers or telephone calls could have been

made more widely available except by the laborious process of transposition

to a mass medium.

Somewhere above the one-to-one or small group conversations, micro-

communications can also include oﬃce meetings, and associations of hob-

byists (railway enthusiasts or ﬂower arrangers) that can develop commun-

icative structures – perhaps photocopied newsle�ers, distributed by mail,

for example.

We will look at all this in more detail later, but the essential points revolve

around the vectors of communication – the direction of travel, from A to

B (and back again?), and the ability for individuals or groups to collect

together that information in a usable way. There are of course other sig-

niﬁcant dimensions, including reach and time, but the argument here is

that in these cases the vector of communication remains the same; if we

move on from Grunig’s 1984, we can see a le�er being superseded by a fax

(in business at least), then by an e-mail, but remaining essentially the same

type of one-to-one wri�en communication. There is a signiﬁcant change