A recent Cisco study placed the value of the Internet of things as a $19 trillion opportunity. It struck me that the PR industry should be investing some of its thinking about the future into IoE too.
IoE will affect all aspects of business and, like all other sectors, the PR profession has to find out the key things it will need to consider in this transition.
This paper examines The Internet of everything from a PR perspective and identifies where, in the short term, it will offer significant advantages to the PR sector.
We will discover that, with a new and developing set of professional skills and tools, practitioners will find new opportunities and the downside of underemployment will be avoided as a result.
We will also note that without developing such skills, there will be a chance for a significant deleterious effect.
What is the Internet of Everything?
IoE expands on the concept of the “Internet of Things” because it connects physical devices and everything else by getting them all on the network. It moves beyond being a buzzword and technology trend by connecting devices to one another and the Internet and offers higher computing power. This connection goes beyond basic Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, and it is the interconnection of devices that leads to automation and advanced “smart” applications.
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(picture: http://bit.ly/1RtPNFt).
IoE works to connect more things onto the network, stretching out the edges of the network and expanding the roster of what can be connected. IoE has a major play in all industries, from retail to telecommunications to banking and Public Relations.
There is a view that IoE will also include intangibles such as values, cultures and art and artistic interpretation (i.e.semi sentient considerations e.g. is switching a light on in daylight a 'bad' thing"). Also, it will encompass descriptions of features and benefits of products and services implied by the words and actions of the client and her many cultural constituencies.
By 2018, 20 percent of the business content will be authored by machines.
Technologies (http://gtnr.it/2pCFk2l) with the ability to proactively assemble and deliver information through automated composition engines fostering a movement from human-to-machine-generated business content. Data-based and analytical information is already being turned into natural language writing using these emerging tools (Here are some examples: https://www.arria.com/, https://www.narrativescience.com/Platform, https://www.narrativescience.com/).
Such automation should be a feature of Public Relations development. PR consultancies can and should be offering these services now.
Business content, such as shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases, articles and white papers, are all candidates for automated writing tools.
These outputs can include code to make it even more attractive to IoT devices.
For the past 100 years or so, financial reporting has been paper based. Only in the last 25-30 years have reports been created electronically in a word processor and then printed or saved to an electronic format such as PDF or HTML.
But the information contained in PDF and HTML is not easily scraped by computers. Digital financial reporting, by contrast, makes much of this information readable by computers, vastly expanding the potential for automating creation and analysis of financial reports.
Such help from machines can reduce the time and, therefore, the costs of creating and consuming reports and information and improve its quality.
With machine readability computers can read the reported and "understand" it and help make sure mathematical computations are correct and intact throughout the report. They can compare reported information to mandated disclosure rules and make sure the report's creator complied with them. This is somewhat similar to how manually created disclosure checklists are used as memory joggers.
No "magic" is involved here. For example, standard syntax can make a mobile phone ring or lock or unlock devices.
Progress towards IoE will also mean that a salesperson's mobile will also provide details travel, meetings, and conversations. Such data will be matched to travel, phone conversations, perhaps even mood measurements and, of course, sales closures.
Why should PR be involved?
In short - money.
If PR is at the centre of much of this development, it stands to make a lot of money through implementation and use.
Also, much of this evolution will disenfranchise the practitioner. Part of what is on offer will make practitioners redundant.
Much of PR that is not automated will be very mundane.
Being part of the new forms of PR will be very interesting, if not exciting!
When will it happen?
You can get an impression of the range of sensors already available from Intel (http://intel.ly/1GP8Unb). I like the ADIS16448 Accelerometer which I could put on my Ski's to prove I was jumping more than 5 metres.
Imagine the world in which everything is connected and packed with sensors.
50+ billion connected devices, loaded with a dozen or more sensors, will create a trillion-sensor ecosystem.
These devices will create what one might call a state of neo-perfect knowledge, where we'll be able to know what we want, where we want when we want.
Combined with the power of data mining and machine learning, the value that you can create and the capabilities you will have as an individual and as a business will be extraordinary.
Here are a few basic examples to get you thinking:
Retail: Beyond knowing what you purchased, stores will monitor your eye gaze, knowing what you glanced at… what you picked up and considered, and put back on the shelf. Dynamic pricing will entice you to pick it up again.
City Traffic: Cars looking for parking cause 40% of traffic in city centres. Parking sensors will tell your car where to find an open spot.
Lighting: Streetlights and house lights will only turn on when you're nearby.
Vineyards/Farming: Today IoE enables winemakers to monitor the exact condition (temperature, humidity, sun) of every vine and recommends optimal harvest times. IoE can follow details of fermentation and even assure perfect handling through distribution and sale to the consumer at the wine store.
Dynamic pricing: In the future, everything has dynamic pricing where supply and demand drivers pricing. Uber already knows when demand is high, or when I'm stuck miles from my house and can charge more as a result.
Transportation: Self-driving cars and IoE will make ALL traffic a thing of the past.
Healthcare: You will be the CEO of your own health. Wearables will be tracking your vitals constantly, allowing you and others to make better health decisions.
Banking/Insurance: Research shows that if you exercise and eat healthily, you're more likely to repay your loan. Imagine a variable interest rate (or lower insurance rate) depending on exercise patterns and eating habits?
Forests: With connected sensors placed on trees, you can make urban forests healthier and better able to withstand -- and even take advantage of -- the effects of climate change.
Office Furniture: Software and sensors embedded in office furniture are being used to improve office productivity, ergonomics and employee health.
Invisibles: Forget wearables, the next big thing is sensor-based technology that you can't see, whether they are in jewellery, attached to the skin like a bandage, or perhaps even embedded under the skin or inside the body. By 2017, 30% of wearables will be "unobtrusive to the naked eye," according to market researcher Gartner.
The Internet of Everything has a long way to go and we need to use our imaginations to see the opportunities.
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