Why wearables represent a PR opportunity, COVID trackers, and how to engage in intimate relations.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and my heart rate right now is 67, and my daily average walking average is 97, and I've walked over 5 kilometres and over 10,000 steps today. And how I know that? Because I have a wearable on. Now wearables, as we know, are probably one of the growth stories of the last 2 or 3 years. For Apple, now their wearables have paced the iMac sales and the computer sales and are getting up there to be online with the iPhone sales. And trackers and all the mobile apps that we can wear and carry around in our phones are hot news this week, obviously because of the COVID tracking apps. Now, in the UK, the National Health Service have just issued a press release on the 18th of June the Test and Trace service, which they launched on the Isle of Wight, which is quite a small island just off the south coast. And they say in their press release that following rigorous field testing and a trial on the Isle of Wight, we've identified challenges with both our app and the Google-Apple framework. Now they go on to say in this that they've encountered a number of technical challenges and that they have to stop the trial. Now, they have come down later on at the end of the paragraph and the press release to say that they are going to need to work with Apple and Google for the iOS and the Android platforms, because what the government is realizing is that they cannot develop a platform-agnostic app from scratch. Of course, any developer that's in the App Store knows that you need to build things that are within the framework of Google or Google's Android or the Apple. So the UK government and the Singapore government and governments around the world are realizing really the, the technology power that the, that the multinational firms have. So we're in an interesting place now because the governments are no longer in control of the technology that they need to reach out and communicate directly with their own population. From a public relations point of view, it's a little bit embarrassing for the government because they thought that they could take a stance and be developing something on their own without a nod to the technology platforms that are so deeply ingrained in all of our lives. But of course, it raises issues for PR and for consumers about the communication around privacy and public relations. So commercial entities, you know, health insurance, airlines, supermarkets— these are all now trying to give us benefits if we'll engage with their wearable or trackable devices. And it makes sense, for example, if it's an insurance firm, to want to know about our lifestyle and about our residual health benefits. And the trade-off, of course, is you get lower premiums. So from a PR point of view, we're going down a very interesting place because wearables and what are now called hearables are growth markets, but obviously they're things that as consumers and as businesses, we're embracing, but we're also getting quite nervous about. So what we've got now on a PR front is solutions, for example, like the test and trace for COVID, being met with some anxiety by the general public, being endorsed by, for example, the medical community, but relying on technology platforms for rollout and for consistency. But that means quite possibly that we're, as consumers or businesses, sharing our data with the government through these platforms of Google or of, um, Apple. So what this means then, of course, is that we are going into a new era from a PR point of view And there is a term called algorithmic PR, which is all about how data is being used for delivering information through platforms like Google My Business, which I mentioned on yesterday's podcast. But algorithmic PR is also going to be involved in analyzing the data that comes from all of our wearables and hearables and our smart home devices. And starting to create metadata, which becomes the basis for communication going back out into the marketplace. Now, obviously, what's going to be interesting there is that we are going to be seeing metadata come back from different users that may not be by geography, but maybe by demographic, for example, or by people with a certain body weight or a certain physiology, as we've seen with COVID We're seeing the same health profiles around the world being impacted rather than people just being by geography or by culture. So from a PR point of view, when we talk about our 3 different audience groups of internal, external, and allies within our Speak PR program, wearables and hearables and smart home devices are creating a level of granularity in those audience groups that we could have never imagined before when it comes to PR. And maybe it'll be time to, to replace the word public relations with intimate relations, because intimate relations— because the data that is going to be coming back from all these devices, including my heartbeat, for example, while I record this, is going to be increasingly personal. So I'm going to be expecting to get information relating to me and my circumstances that mirrors the data that I'm producing as a result of the watch I'm wearing, the phone I'm carrying, the purchases I'm making, and even now around the smart home where we can turn lights on and off at different times, where we can have a doorbell which has got a camera on it, where we're getting all this profiling that is showing people's behavior and importantly the response that people have to those kind of activities. Now this is becoming a big area. Pharma companies have got involved with buying into startups. Bayer bought $25 million worth of funding with a company called Medopad, which is a UK startup developing AI methods for building and tracking digital biomarkers. Alphabet's umbrella company has been involved in the thermostats and the Nest offering for video doorbells, for example. And has security cameras that automatically adjust settings based on user behavior. So as we have wearables and hearables and trackables in our home, we're creating data which is becoming the part of an automated response by other activities and other devices. So at some stage or other when we're doing our public relations and our media relations, we're going to have to become aware of the impact of all of these different kinds of technologies. So there was a research project undertaken by Charlotte Kerner and Victoria Goodyear in 2017 here in the UK on the motivational impact of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies. Now what they did was to take a look at the self-determination perspective of wearing Fitbits on adolescents. In this study, they gave Fitbits to children in one school in the southeast and another in the northwest of the UK. And over a period of time, what they found was quite interesting because the assumption had been that if you give these children trackable health devices, which are telling the children if they're doing enough exercise, how many calories they're using, that actually it would somehow impact their behavior. And what they found was in the short term, there was an increase in the amount of activity that took place, but it was through short-term motivation around competition and guilt and internal pressure. But the longer-term behavioral patterns were what they called amotivation. So after 8 weeks, what they found was that the children then ceased to actually undertake activity, ceased to participate. In other words, the external drivers that were coming to their wrists, which were around, you're not doing enough, you should— what you should do this more, and how many steps did you take compared to other children on the playground, were not sufficient to create behavioral change. And what they were really doing was to create potentially negative implications for young people because they weren't geared around internal desires for change. They were geared around other people's metrics for what they felt these people should be doing. So this then brings us to the role of PR, because technology in itself doesn't change behavior. I'm sitting here now and I can tell you that my heartbeat is 70, so I can tell you that I'm obviously quite relaxed when I'm doing this, which is, which is great. However, what it doesn't do is to impact how I behave while I'm making the recording. So when we look at public relations around this new area of wearables and hearables and trackables, as a PR community, we have to start to address the issues of personal privacy. We have to address the issues of anxiety, but also we must address the issues of motivation. So for those companies that are starting to promote wearables and all these other technologies that basically dovetail into the biometrics and the psychometrics of consumers and businesses, we really have to think about what it is that we are doing that's outside of the technology to reassure and to engage and to motivate the people that are using it. In other words, these trackables should not be the drivers of the communication strategy. They should be augmenting it, and the data that they're creating should be giving us some clues as to what other information we could be sharing. So I've mentioned just yesterday about the Google My Business, for example, and about geography-based tracking. And from a PR point of view, the importance of, for example, encouraging people or giving them traffic information so that they know that it won't take very much time to get to you if the store is about to close, or if there's an emergency, to know which is the nearest hospital. So the impact of wearables, I think, is going to be that we've got to, as PR people, reassure audiences to sell the benefits, but also to be mindful of the potential downside of those, as we've seen from this Kerner and Goodyear study, especially when it comes to young people. So if we're marketing products and services to young people that are basically a technology-based product or service, we also have a duty of care, and a duty of care to those children and also to society that that we are creating guidelines around what those technologies can and cannot do. I do think this when I look at the impact, for example, of screens and screen time, that there isn't any guidance given by the manufacturers to the children. There are some settings now, for example, on the iOS that we can control the time and we can change the light shift and so on. But education for the young people who are using the technology seems to be so far not there. So there's no, if you like, on-the-packet health warning as there is on tobacco or on alcohol. So we're giving young people and maybe people who are not well versed in the dangers and potential dangers of the technology products and tools that could have a major impact on their lives without necessarily giving them an understanding of what to do with it, how to use it, and how it could integrate into an overall goal that they might set for themselves. This, of course, then comes back to our public relations message of purpose. If our company purpose is to improve the lives or improve the profitability or in some way improve the world So that, as Paul Dunn would say from the B1G1, so that we can make a difference from a PR point of view. If our companies are involved in using technology within the private space of our customers or our consumers or our staff, then we have a duty to explain to them the role of that technology what kind of data it's going to be collecting, and to give them the rights to opt in or out. Now, if we work, for example, on newsletters, we have the GDPR, which are the guidelines on compliance and taking people's information without them knowing. We need to start thinking, obviously, with our consumers that we're sharing this information, and who with. To give them reassurance. If we don't do that, then the data will be not forthcoming. People will start to rebel against using those, and the benefits of the wearable technology, the benefits of cameras, for example, in stores for monitoring of quality control procedures using RFID tags, those benefits will be circumvented by people deciding to turn off the data collection. And from a PR point of view, if we talk about algorithmic PR, which is the use of the data that we get from what we say and what we do and using that to create new content and sharing that across platforms, we want to keep the benefits of that data, but we have to be responsible in our use of it. And part of the responsibility is going to be in communicating to people how we're gathering it. If we look back at the UK NHS and the Singapore government failure to gather data without partnering with the iOS and Android, we've obviously got an issue now where data protection is going to be collected by a third party or through a third party. So from a PR point of view, a messaging point of view, going to be even more important than ever to collaborate and to be in alignment with those partners about the use of the data. And as we saw with Cambridge Analytica, failure to have integrity with data can lead to the downfall of a company. So from a PR point of view, wearable technology is a new paradigm, both from a, from a commercial perspective, as a whole new product category that can generate whole new lines of business, but it's creating a whole new area when it comes to public relations and what I call now intimate relations that we're going to need to address. Thank you for listening. I can tell you right now that it's 6 o'clock The weather is fair, and my heartbeat is 64. So it's all good that we can track and see how we're doing. And I wish that on this weekend that you yourself have great health, that you've got a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speed PR. I invite you to come to our website at eastwestpr.com. To look at the Speak PR methodologies and also to sign up for our newsletter called Cognition, which goes out every Friday and shares more thoughts, tools, and technologies at the intersection of communications, technology, and commerce. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening.