Revisiting the future of PR

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For many reasons PR (or perhaps rather what PR could be) is close to the center of my interests. As we shift to a world driven by social media and influence networks, arguably the PR industry has the best background and capabilities to help organizations deal with the new challenges and opportunities that are emerging.

Yet the PR industry has not markedly prospered relative to adjacent industries, which have muscled in on the new work generated in a rapidly changing landscape. ‘Public relationships’, if we take the term literally, dominate the agenda, yet PR is not dominating the discussion.

I recently recalled that I wrote the article Six Facets of the Future of PR well over 5 years ago now. It’s nice to see that it is still the #1 result on a Google search for ‘future of PR’.

As a good article about the future should be, it is still entirely relevant today. I thought it would be worth revisiting a few of the points I made, as they probably bear repeating.

Six Facets of the Future of PR

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Detailed stats: Social networks dominate Internet usage, Australia still #1

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Research company Nielsen has just released detailed statistics on online activity, focusing on social networks and blogging, which at 22.5% of time spent online dominate Internet usage, with more than twice the next category games, at 9.8% of time spent. Below are a few highlights and comments from the full report.

Facebook completely dominates the social networking and blogging space, with over 70 times the next most prominent social networking site. Interestingly Tumblr’s dramatic rise (+183% over the last year) has taken it to overtake Twitter in time spent online. However Nielsen’s methodologies look only at website visits and don’t the majority of time spent on Twitter, which is on web and mobile clients. Facebook also dramatically surpasses the amount of time spent on Google, however Google is still mostly not a destination site. Over time initiatives such as Google+ may change that.
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Support for crowdfunding in Obama’s Jobs Bill is taking it mainstream

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Earlier this year I wrote how the US SEC was opening the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism with mooted regulatory changes.

Now the US President’s proposed Jobs Bill is explicitly focusing on crowdfunding as a mechanism to support entrepreneurs and startups.

A post on the White House’s Office and Science Technology blog titled The President’s American Jobs Act: Fueling Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-authored by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra focuses on five highlights of the jobs bill in supporting entrepreneurs.

The first point says:
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The continuing devaluation of LinkedIn connections

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How many LinkedIn requests are you getting?

Very likely significantly more than you were getting just a few months ago.

LinkedIn reached 100 million users in March. As one of the first 10,000 users, I early on saw the potential of a purely professional social network.

It consistently grew in size and user value over the years, however now that everyone is piling on to the LinkedIn bandwagon, the value of LinkedIn personal connections and networks are decreasing at what seems like an accelerating pace.
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Reconfiguring the world of business around the customer

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The esteemed JP Rangaswami, who was at the very front of creating Enterprise 2.0 at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and is now at Salesforce.com, has just written a compelling post Thinking about the Social Enterprise, in which he distills the essence of social business.

You really need to read the entire post to get the flow of his argument, however here are a couple of excerpts:
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The Internet of things will dwarf the Internet of people

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In 2008 the number of devices connected to the Internet surpassed the number of people connected, and in 2020 there will be 50 billion things connected, 7 times the world’s population, according to Dave Evans of Cisco.

The infographic below highlights some of the key features of the Internet of things, including the pace of growth, how external data can be aggregated so that your alarm clocks, cars, and coffee makers make decisions to fit with your schedule, and that some cameras and computers are now just a cubic millimeter.
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Corporate blogging: value versus risks

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Knowledge@Australian School of Business recently published an interesting article on corporate blogging, which drew on an interview with me. Here are the quotes it took from my interview, along with a few comments.

One of the greatest dangers is not getting involved in blogging at all, claims Ross Dawson – futurist, blogger and chairman of Advanced Human Technologies, a company that consults on “the network economy”.

It’s certainly not that every company needs to be blogging, far from it. But many companies that would get great value from blogging, in particular for defending their reputation online, are being held back by overwrought fears of the potential dangers.
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Proof: Intelligent machines can become religious by talking to each other

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Going beyond human interaction with (quasi) intelligent machines, we are now beginning to explore interactions between (somewhat) intelligent machines. One of the concepts of the Singularity is that machines will before long be able to teach themselves and each other, to the point where their interactions and conversations are incomprehensible to our puny minds.

This video shows the results of two ‘chatbots’ from Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab speaking to each other. I laughed until I cried. But it is funny partly because it is almost as much a human as a robotic conversation.

Breaking: Google+ will be a reputation engine

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For years I have been writing about reputation and have often said that this will be the decade of the reputation economy. Yet until recently there has been very little in the space. The social media measurement systems such as Klout and PeerIndex have limited data scope and while they talk the language of reputation actually measure influence. Honestly.com is a more pure play in the individual reputation space, but has got limited traction so far.

In recognition of the massive opportunity in the reputation space we have been building a stealth start-up Repyoot (holding page only for now), which will shortly be launched as a limited scale influence ratings engine, with the intention of morphing into a generalized reputation engine.

In developing the service and discussing it with VCs, we have always seen the most obvious latent competitors in the reputation measurement space as Google and LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s recommendation service is a long way from a true reputation service, but it provides a foundation for building one. Google’s depth of data, positioning, and mentality mean that it is well-positioned to develop an individual reputation service. While it is probably not related, I know that Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has been very interested in reputation services for some years, as one of the services that would be of most value in helping developing regions.
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Why Steve Jobs’ resignation is a (relative) non-event as Apple becomes a living company

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I was just interviewed by ABC TV for tonight’s 7pm news about Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple.

My initial reaction is that is as close to a non-event as it could be. 

It was absolutely major news when Jobs announced his first medical leave for a life-threatening disease. It underlined that he would not be at Apple for ever, and might not return to Apple from his leave. He in fact returned twice, and now on his third medical leave he has said his role as CEO is over.
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