Phillips D., Young P. Online Public Relations

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A shift in culture, communication and value

Notes

1. Netmedia 2000 (h�p://www.net-media.co.uk/survey/) and City Uni-

versity’s Department of Journalism National survey of print and

broadcast journalists. The survey was funded by Grant Butler Coomber

using the Mediadisk journalists’ database

2. Forrester Research (2000) eMarketplaces boost B2B trade, January 2000

3. Shirkey, C (2008) Here Comes Everybody, Penguin Press

4. Evans P and Wurster, W S (1999) Blown to Bits, Harvard Business School

Press

 The practitioner now needs to consider the organization’s internet

strategy. This is a discipline beyond the organization’s web presence,

social media presence and local presence, and is a discipline in its own

right.

Information and

things

One might take, as an example, a high street store as being a thing. It is a

building. For the building to be of consequence, people need information.

They need information to manage and run it; they need information about

its purpose and location and the products sold behind its doors. Without,

for example, the person who has the knowledge to open the front door to

allow the store to be used, the building has li�le value – staﬀ and shoppers

can’t get in. Such information can be kept anywhere on a computer and be

available from the internet. But information about how to unlock doors can

be used for many shops as well as houses and cars and so on. Most of it is

not unique to any one single store. Information about the nature of keys,

codes for security systems and microprocessors that set and unset alarms is

not unique to any individual building. By extension, information (how to

get in) can be separated from things (merchandise in the store). The value of

the information (how to get in) is very high and is diﬀerent from the value

of the things needed by shoppers (the building and merchandise).

Information can be valuable in its own right. One cannot access products

in a store without having the information needed to open the building. This

makes such information valuable. It also tells us that a thing loses value

when it is not associated with relevant information.

In his paper, ‘The eEconomy: it’s later than you think’, Richard Melnicoﬀ

says:

A shift in culture, communication and value

What eCommerce has allowed ﬁrms to do is to bring intangible assets to the

fore – to tease out the value they add, and even to make a business of them,

pure and simple. By making inter-ﬁrm collaboration easy and inexpensive,

eCommerce allows intangible assets to be leveraged across a much larger

buyer base. Time and space constraints no longer apply, so they no longer

have to be co-located with the tangible means of production.

In other words the expert who provides internet-enabled information about

keys can operate independently of the shop and make information available

to householders and car manufacturers as well, opening up new markets

for the related information and knowledge. In the communication ﬁeld,

we see newspapers publishing their news online o�en well ahead of the

print version in order to leverage value from its publication on the website,

citations in blogs, inclusion in television programmes (on- and oﬄine) and

so on. The newspaper (a thing) is now separate from the news (intangible

asset).

Both as commodities and assets, intangibles such as brand equity and

information are like a traditional inventory. In the same way that a company

may beneﬁt from the wealth that can be generated from a physical invent-

ory, a corporate information inventory can be managed to access wealth.

Public relations beneﬁts from this new environment when it provides

the means by which people access information assets and can use them to

beneﬁt from both knowledge and things.

By deploying corporate inventory, a wide range of organizations are

already providing information to the public to allow them to use this know-

ledge in designing bespoke products, services and even environments:

 Aston Martin is by no means the only example of a car manufacturer

offering a bespoke service, but its website offers this opportunity

for potential buyers (and wannabe owners). Its site offers the

‘conﬁgurator’: ‘The Aston Martin Car Conﬁgurator lets you select and

design your Aston Martin just the way you want it. You can then view

your perfect car in 3D.’

 ICI Paints asks visitors: ‘Want to see how a proposed colour scheme will

work? Like to try out some colour alternatives and print them out for

comparison? With MousePainter you can do all this at the touch of a

button.’

These are capabilities made available by providing information about

physical inventory in combination with corporate intellectual property

and public creativity, using the internet. Such a capability offers a new

form of relationship with a range of publics and is a communication tool

Information and things

Information inventory that can be turned faster, that is used more frequ-

ently, can add to wealth. When it is used to access a high-value asset by

a consumer or supplier, the value of this new form of inventory is also

increased.

There is one big diﬀerence. When one sells ownership of inventory (a

thing) it belongs to the customer. Ownership of information when shared,

for ﬁnancial gain or not, does not deplete the store of the corporate in-

formation inventory, or necessarily its worth. It remains and can (mostly)

be used again. Many people buy holidays online. They use websites for

selecting destinations, comparing prices and gleaning more information.

This is done many times and is equivalent to browsing through brochures,

spending time with travel agents and booking the holiday. In the ‘real

economy’ there is a lot of cost associated with this transaction. Such costs

include the brochures, travel agents, shop facilities and so forth needed for

each customer. Online, there is one website that can be used many times for

the same, comparatively low, cost at any time by thousands of customers

sequentially or at the same time.

The same applies to an online press release – one posted on a corporate

website or online distribution service versus many e-mails. Using social

media press releases there is an even greater advantage when the information

is made available to other interested parties such as bloggers.

Now here is the rub. Most press releases are still issued to newspapers

and magazines. Their content, once published, takes on the authority of

a third-party endorsement from the publication. Distribution can be en-

hanced through further distribution via social media such as blogs and

social networks. But if the content was worthy in the ﬁrst instance, is there

a need for the intermediate step of publication in a newspaper or mag-

azine? Would it not be distributed by the online community anyway? The

answer is that for a number of organizations the online network eﬀect is

powerful. But this eﬀect is only really relevant as part of a conversation.

If it’s interesting it will go a long way, and if it’s spin it will probably die

quickly. Some marketers have discovered this the hard way when trying to

incentivize networks to spread the word. A good story is probably a be�er

tool than any other incentive.

Many companies use the exposure of information in websites and

through other internet-enabled devices to lever up added value. This

transparency has a range of beneﬁts. By making information available to

with wider PR capabilities for the creative practitioner. It is not completely

wacky to imagine an organization offering journalists (among others)

capability to create their own press releases online.

A shift in culture, communication and value

all – that is, by exposing corporate information inventory – the company

can share its information assets with most of its stakeholders. In this way

the cost of moving information inventory is reduced. Instead of having to

tell each public or each stakeholder group about information in turn, the

company can provide information to all stakeholders in one go. Indeed,

as we will argue later, there is an imperative for organizations to be more

transparent.

The publication of CSR activities on corporate websites is a classic ex-

ample. To be able to inform the wide range of publics likely to have an

interest in ethical purchasing practices, environmental policies, charitable

giving, employment practice and the like would be impossible without the

internet. Today all these stakeholders can ﬁnd this information at the click

of a mouse and, be�er still, can share the information with others of a like

mind by sending/posting an e-mail to a social media link like Delicious

(h�p://delicious) in seconds.

The cost of storing information in one place (the website or database

that feeds the website) is relatively low compared with having to store the

information at a number of locations. The cost of maintaining web-stored

information is also low. It needs to be maintained once, and not at each

and every location for each stakeholder group. Furthermore, the cost of

distribution is very low. It can be held in just one location to be available to

all stakeholders.

CASE STUDY: TO PRINT OF NOT TO PRINT

The cost of designing, writing and printing a brochure or catalogue is an expense

that most organizations regard as a necessary evil. For some organizations, the

use of PDFs has been a boon.

The essence of the argument is that if people need a printed document, it

can be made available online; instead of the organization paying for the cost of

printing, it is the user who pays for the process. Even in places where brochures

are a necessity, the technology can be used to cut cost. Being able to print only the

number of copies needed at the time means that long and often wasteful print

runs can be avoided. There are a number of cases where the trade-off between

information and things is used in this way.

Richard Stephenson, chairman and chief executive of online publishing specialist

Yudu, argues that travel companies should continue their print runs but try to

convert customers to the digital edition little by little.

We’re not ‘print is dead’ merchants. I would not ditch my print edition, but, if you can

move a percentage of hard copy, say 20 per cent to 30 per cent, online, you can save

money. Give people the option to take the digital edition, and if 30 per cent do and

are happy with it, you are sending out fewer brochures. It is a bold move to ditch a

glossy, beautiful brochure.

Information and things

First Choice head of e-commerce Alun Williams is an advocate for that approach,

and the tour-operating giant sees print and digital as supportive of each other.

We know people are coming to our site with a (print) brochure because they are

typing in their brochure code, so we see it as a marketing mechanism driving people

to the retail network.

Williams adds that it is not a ‘huge leap of faith’ to think tour operators could

slowly reduce print volumes as most people now begin their holiday research

online.

According to Stephenson, producing a digital edition need not be expensive,

but the cost depends on volumes and what you want to do within the brochure.

He has witnessed travel companies substantially increase clicks through to the

booking pages of their websites by using e-brochures.

This is one of the beneﬁts of corporate wikis that have the beneﬁt of col-

laboration. Here is an example. Once, the PR department kept a ﬁling cabinet

full of past press releases. If someone asked for an old press release, or

worse asked about something covered in many press releases over a period

of years, the process of ﬁnding, copying and posting it was long-winded

and costly. Now, searching for it on the intranet and sending it by e-mail is

easy, quick and cheap. Even more helpful is that anyone in the organization

can do it. In addition, for well-run organizations, the information can

be collected and collated by the person making the enquiry. The cost of

running the press release archive has plummeted and most of the work can

now be done by the person looking for the information as opposed to the

practitioner.

Thus information about what stock is available inside a store can be

shared with the customer, buyer, supplier and security chief. In the past,

each would have needed a system and access to such information individu-

ally. Today each of the stakeholders can access the same information from

a website. The cost of storing, maintaining and distributing information

inventory is massively reduced and the availability empowers many more

people.

In 2006 one of the authors was faced with having to keep a register of

attendance for 60 undergraduates at lectures and seminars. A boring,

bureaucratic activity that cut into precious teaching time.

Because the course was run primarily from a wiki, it was relatively easy to

put one register on a page and get the students to enter their attendance

at each lecture and seminar. The information was transparently available

to all the students, providing a built-in check, and because the wiki page

was available to the bureaucrats, the reporting process was eliminated

and more time, in a much better atmosphere, was available for learning.

A shift in culture, communication and value

In sharing information, its wider use turns it into a commodity. Such

information has value in its volume but also has costs associated with

garnering, storage, processing and transfer. For example, in the past an old

brochure was discarded with but a single copy held in the archive. Today

every web page has potentially been bookmarked by lots of visitors. When

building a new website, this entire inventory has to continue to be made

available or the legacy value and relationships with stakeholders (not to

mention the search engine optimization opportunity) will disappear.

In addition, some organizations can separate price and value of assets

to grow markets and gain commercial advantage. In 2006, PR Newswire

disconnected the relationship between the product and its price by using

eBay to sell its services. It invited people to look at the value of its service

instead. The consequence of its action is that the ‘marketing’ inside PR

Newswire is now dependent on relationships and not the value chain.

Auctioning oﬀ your service may have been an interesting idea as a

promotion but now the genie is out of the bo�le. News release distribution

costs are no longer what they seem – they are negotiable.

If information is valuable, losing it can be harmful. At what point

ownership of information’s value changes hands (and its value as copyright

changes or passes into the value network) is a ma�er for wide debate.

The extent to which any data, information or knowledge is vulnerable to

inadvertent, accidental, careless or malicious distribution in an internet-

enabled society, irrespective of the rule of law, is not in doubt. In principle

there is no protection (once online, content cannot be destroyed and can

be accessed moments and decades later) and the law of copyright is both

inadequate and largely irrelevant to the new paradigm.

In 2008, a computer program (by a company called MediaDash – and

part owned by one of the authors) captured 86 per cent of all the articles

archived by Factiva using a combination of search engines. Many of the

articles were behind ﬁrewalls and were defended by password-protected

gateways by both Factiva and the publishers. No passwords or robot blocks

were violated by this program. The developers found that all these articles

were available to the general public using search engines from the list at

http://www.searchenginecolossus.com.

Rothschild suggests in Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem that the digital

path between things and consumers is a river and, like all rivers, tends

toward a straight line.

The digital rip-tide ﬂows round historic information

gatekeepers. They are no more than pebbles on a storm-tossed beach,

temporary and exposed to the full force of the elements.

Information and things

IN BRIEF

 Information and things can be separated.

 Information can be valuable in its own right.

 The traditional supply chain is disrupted, with the internet acting as

intermediary.

 Information is spread by many devices that are platforms for many

channels of communication.

 Communications models include one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-

many.

 The internet has enabled organizations to act as customer, supplier

and competitor at the same time.

 Intangible asset management allows practitioners to tease out the

value they add, and even to make a business of it.

 The newspaper (a thing) is now separate from the news (intangible

asset).

 Both as a commodity and an asset, intangibles such as brand equity

and information are like a traditional inventory.

Data and information are very accessible from many sources. Informa-

tion, being data relevant to its users’ context, is now historically cheap

and becoming more so, a trend that will continue. Managing, protecting,

deploying and exposing information as content on computers and across

the internet is critical to corporate relationships, reputation and proﬁtability.

In the internet era, this content is very vulnerable, and security breaches are

costly for corporate reputation.

For the practitioner, this is a consideration to be included in all issues and

crisis management planning and practice.

In 2008, nine out of 10 doctors in the United Kingdom had no conﬁdence

in the government’s ability to safeguard patient data online according

to a poll by BMA News magazine. Over 90 per cent of respondents said

they were not conﬁdent patient data on the proposed NHS centralized

database would be secure. The magazine said the profession’s scepticism:

appears to ﬂow from scandals such as security breaches in the Medical Training

Application System, the junior doctors’ online job application service, and the

HM Revenue and Customs loss of computer discs containing the details of 25 m

child beneﬁt claimants.

Online and data security is a reputation issue.

A shift in culture, communication and value

 Public relations beneﬁts from this new environment when it provides

the means by which people access information assets and can use them

to beneﬁt from both knowledge and things.

 Online, one website can be used many times for the same cost at any

time by thousands of customers sequentially or at the same time, and

at a lower price than creating brochures and print collateral.

 To be able to inform the wide range of CSR publics likely to have an

interest would be impossible without the internet.

 The cost of running the press release archive has plummeted when it

is available, and searchable, online.

 Managing, protecting, deploying and exposing information as content

on computers and across the internet is critical to corporate relation-

ships, reputation and proﬁtability. In the internet era, this content

is very vulnerable, and security breaches are costly for corporate

reputation.

Notes

1. Melnicoﬀ, R M (1999) The eEconomy: it’s later than you think, Outlook,

21, pp 33–43 (Anderson Consulting)

2. Rothschild, R M (1995) Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, Henry Holt

Knowledge

For some organizations, inherent knowledge is viewed as a considerable

asset because of its capacity to change something or somebody.

Microso� proposes that people gain knowledge from their experiences

and their peers’ expertise, as well as from analysis of business data such

as sales and ﬁnancial reports.

As the internet becomes more pervasive

we see wider evidence of exchanges of experience, ideas, insights, values

and judgements, and widespread collaboration within organizational

intranets and beyond into the internet. The use of this phenomenon, using

what is called ‘open source collaboration’, by organizations such as BMW,

Goldcorp and Procter & Gamble is transforming their business model and

reducing development time and time to market, as described by Tapsco�

and Williams in their book Wikinomics.

The use of e-mail, newsgroups and discussion lists, wikis, chat, blogs and

other channels is now widespread in business.

‘Today,’ reports Microso�, ‘an individual’s contribution to a ﬁrm is in

the creation of new knowledge through collaboration with others and in

synthesizing existing information and data.’

For some, and for Microso� (with not a li�le self-interest), the exchange

of knowledge is seen as being wholly desirable. Once, the diﬀerentiation

between information and its application in the form of knowledge was the

distinguishing feature for many organizations. It provided the foundation

for more than a few companies to declare that ‘our most valuable asset is

our people’. No more. Knowledge is just as easily transferred across the