In a lift the other day, I was talking to a BBC person who said that she thought the BBC now understood how far it had got behind.
Now some of that thinking is in the public domain.
Pete Clifton told the World Digital Publishing Conference in London today that the plans could include new topical pages to aggregate information from BBC and external sources on a variety of topics; increased personalisation features for the front page of BBC News Online, an expansion of the site's live statistics tracker and possibly wiki style pages that would let users contribute to compilations of information.
A news API could let users outside the BBC access BBC content for their own development projects.
The BBC will not be expanding its existing blogs aggressively according to Clifton but he said he hopes to launch a new blog to be written by BBC foreign correspondents around the world.
Clifton said the BBC will not be making new content for mobile phones however, it will be making more of the text, audio and video from the news website central to the expansion of its offering for mobile devices.
The Press Gazette offers more.The executive editor of Computer Weekly was a runner-up in last week's Paul Foot awards for what judges called "relentless investigation" into the £12.4bn NHS IT programme in the face of "consistent obstruction and obfuscation from the Government".
Collins told Press Gazette "We're seeing Government spinning more, Government departments using the FoI (Freedom of Information) Act not to answer my questions. They're referring me to the FoI Act to get them answered, but we're still waiting for a judgement for the request we put in in 2005, 18 months later. It's very useful for a press department to refer the journalist to the FoI Act because the chances are there won't be a decision on it for 18 months."Now we are getting a good idea about what local newspaper TV really looks like.
Four North Wales Newspapers titles have carried video footage on their websites for the first time.
The group used the web to publish footage of two "lunatic" motorcyclists riding erratically at 100 miles per hour along the main arterial highway along the North Wales coast.
The video, in which North Wales chief constable Richard Brunstrom describes the motorists as "crazy", and says the video remind him of an episode of The Wacky Races, was used on the websites of the North Wales Pioneer, North Wales Chronicle, Rhyl Journal and Denbighshire Free Press.
The opportunities for PR video stories are huge.I always feel that David Meerman-Scot is good but just misses the mark.
This paragraph is an example:
If you agree with me about the importance of buyer personas in Web marketing, then the most important next step is you need to know what you want each of your buyer personas to believe about your organization.Absolutely right. Here he is talking about the nexus of relationships called a person going about the days toils, or a blogger, or author or wiki manager or Digg presence (etc).
David has a good tip about viral marketing. Of course you will need to be monitoring your presence to do this. While many organizations plan viral marketing campaigns to spread the word about their products or services, don’t forget that something may go viral that you didn’t start like Mentos and Diet Coke, and it may show you or your products in either a positive or negative light. You need to be monitoring the Web for your organization and brand names so you are alerted quickly about what people are talking about. And if a positive viral explosion that you didn’t initiate begins, don’t just hang on for the ride—push it along!
TalkSPORT has achieved its highest audience figures in 18 months, allaying fears that speech radio is struggling across the board.
The nationwide talk station, which benefited from a boost in listening last quarter thanks to the World Cup, has managed to keep listeners tuned in after the final match — putting on an extra 176,000 listeners (8.4%) year on year.
Side by side isChannel 4's first foray into radio which has got off to a slow start, with the digital talk station OneWord losing 20 per cent of its listeners.
Figures released today by Rajar show Oneword's audience has fallen from 129,000 to 104,000 in the last 12 months.
Community, focused, passion filled audiences count - sound like social media to me.
WPP numbers this quarter show strongest growth was in the communications services sector, public relations and public affairs, with sales up by almost 14%, followed by branding and identity, healthcare and specialist communications, up almost 12%. Information, insight and consultancy was up over 8%, and advertising and media investment management up over 4%.
So reports the Guardian.
Oh! So PR seems to be doing well then.
A film highlighting how journalists in the UK have learned to deliver TV news in eight days has been nominated for an international award in Berlin.
The film 8 Days features eight regional journalists working on papers including the Hull Daily Mail, the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News, getting to grips with a murder case re-enacted by Cleveland Police.
The film, made by senior lecturer at the University of Westminster David Dunkley Gyimah, focused on journalists training at Press Association's video training course.
Press Gazette says that the Guardian is launching a new music site today which will be sponsored by computer firm Intel.
According Guardian digital boss Emily Bell, Intel will "integrate their brand" into the site, but she said it will retain editorial independence.
This is interesting because it is another way that a good media brand can generate revenue - sponsorship.
Sponsorship as a public relations practice is well established although it is worth remembering the cost of promoting sponsorship is not cheap.
The PR industry is not having a good week. Its worst practices and the abominable practices of the clients it advises are being exposed all over the place. This time it is the pharmaceutical companies that are exposed with Blazing Netshine.
They are supposed to be grassroots organisations repre
senting the interests of people with serious diseases. But Drummond Rennie, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, believes that some patient groups are perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments. "There's a crisis here," he contends.Rather than grassroots, the word Rennie uses to describe such organisations is "astroturf". Originating in the black arts of politics and public relations, astroturfing is the practice of disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous upwelling of public opinion.
Talking of pathetic Web 2.0 efforts here is another one:
With the launch last month of www.lphchat.com, Langham Place Hotel invites customers to build an online presence, posting thoughts on any topics close to their heart.
I saw this today... It is as under-whelming as it is possible to get. Where is the picture sharing, the comment from the stars and the punters in podcasts? How much is going to make YouTube? Are there going to be Skype conferences and conversations on Skype?
Judge for your selves...
IPC Ignite!'s Uncut has overhauled its website, including a design revamp and the introduction of a daily news service, as the monthly music and film title battles to reverse a circulation slide for its print version.
The news pages of the website include exclusive stories and a blog by Uncut editor Allen Jones, with the first covering Bob Dylan's tour of North America.
Anthony Thornton, IPC Ignite! digital editor-in-chief, said: "Uncut's daily news service is the perfect complement to the distinctive world famous in depth coverage in the monthly magazine. Uncut's no longer a monthly event, it's daily."
Andrew Warmsley says that
Corporate blogs have come in for a lot of stick in recent weeks - the latest being the efforts of Wal-Mart to persuade us that they are a nice bunch of people by sponsoring two bloggers to drive a camper van around the US, staying nights in the company's car parks.
What caused this one to come unstuck was its disingenuous nature. The blog neither revealed the backing of the firm (via a body called Working Families for Wal-Mart), nor the professional status of the participants, and in doing so broke one of the basic rules of blogging: don't hide the truth.
This rule has emerged not because of the high ethical standards of bloggers, but because they have learned that given the vast resources of the collective blogosphere, readers are going to find you out. So it is ultimately pragmatism that keeps bloggers on the straight and narrow, and while you will find inaccurate statements in blogs, you will almost always find them challenged and hotly debated.
While the experiences of the Wal-Mart bloggers were real, its credibility was fatally compromised. Eventually, the PR agency behind it, Edelman, apologised publicly amid derision online.
Most corporate blogs do not attempt to fake it on such a scale - but they are strangely unappetising nevertheless. They are one of those strange beasts that emerge from the internet from time to time - generally giving neither the personal views of a commentator nor the official corporate statement.
They exist in an odd limbo between these states, and it is this perhaps that makes them thoroughly unsatisfying.
In the UK, the marketing team behind one popular beer has maintained a blog for just over a year, talking about the brand and the events it sponsors. Full marks for effort, but as it attracts hardly any comment from real consumers, you find yourself asking why they bother. As a drinker of its brand, I am supremely uninterested in the fact that the marketing manager has 'had his head in spreadsheets' for the last few weeks - and as a marketer it looks like a clumsy attempt to put a human face to the brand.
Michael Parson at the Times warns of the end of the Web 2.0 bubble:
Social networking is one of the building blocks of the Web 2.0 dream: bringing together like-minded people online to create a community of interest that can share knowledge, information and resources and make useful contacts. However, we must not forget its older, fleshly incarnation – the real networking event. During the height of the dotcom boom you had to fight off invitations to internet networking events. Societies like First Tuesday, The Chemistry, and Land of the New Giants brought together badly dressed people with business cards to exchange lies about their website's readership and drink a lot of nasty white wine. After the crash, decadent gatherings like this became much less popular. Yet this week I've received invitations to several, which perhaps means it's time to start selling tech stocks again. It's a market top.
NHS Lothian lifted the award for Scottish Public Sector Team of the Year, with Glasgow-based 3x1 Public Relations taking the Consultancy Team of the Year and VisitScotland the In-house Team award.
The City of Edinburgh Council scooped three top awards, in addition to the Grand Prix: Issues or Crisis Management Campaign; Newsletter, Newspaper or Magazine; and In-house
campaign. Their Grand Prix award was for their work on the G8 Summit.
Putting blogs to work for Wall Street | CNET News.com - news.com.com has an interesting take on what can now drive share price - Social Media.
Collective Intellect has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public-relations executives. Start-ups like Monitor 110 provide similar services.
The idea is to give traders back the early and easy access to critical data that they used to have when this information came through many fewer channels. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Bloomberg terminal or subscriptions to news services could give you a jump on the hoi polloi. Today, it's the masses that often have the jump, thanks to blogs and other tipster sites.
"They aren't sure where a story will break and how it will break," said Don Springer, Collective Intellect's CEO. "Traders are going crazy."
Dan Gillmore wrote this week.....
Some PR and marketing folks have, as you'd expect, taken word-of-mouth as just another great opportunity to sell stuff. Fine, if it's up-front and honest. But word-of-mouth marketing should not mean, as Procter & Gamble and other companies have been doing with such cynicism, getting people to talk up products without disclosing the corporate inducements behind them. "Beyond lame" was one typical reader response to a P&G site, made to look as if it was written by users of its Secret Sparkle Body Sprays. In reality, the site is filled with advertising copy. If any friend of mine did this to me, that person would have one less friend.
A world of conversational communications can be so unstructured at times that the people who once thought corporate messaging was a command-and-control operation can't abide the inexactitude of it all. Understandably so, because they came to their positions in a simpler time, when the message went through a stratified system to specific people.
But the complexities don't justify retreat. They do justify appropriate caution, especially in the kinds of enterprises where proverbial loose lips actually sink ships, such as the military. In the end, the conversation is about culture. If senior people don't believe in the value of conversational communications, they won't happen. But bloggers aren't going away, and younger employees, customers, et al, now think this kind of communication is natural. And it's worth remembering a simple demographic fact: They are the future.
Corporate Blogging: What Could Go Wrong? - www.cioinsight.com notes:
The majority of companies spend too much time worrying about unfiltered comments getting out. They should be more concerned with what happens when lawyers, executives and PR/marketing folks get the notion that blogs and other such media are nothing more than a new way to manipulate information.
COMPANYNEWSGROUP - CONTACTS - www.companynewsgroup.com makes a number of points about Europaen financial reporting. The news is better but it highlights the need to integrate XPRL with XBRL in financial reporting.
Generally speaking, this year listed companies have improved the quality of their Investor Relations websites. There is a 15% increase in results over all of the indexes studied and a 20% increase over the indexes in the Euronext zone.
Also noticeable this year is the appearance of new practices such as financial glossaries, business-sector statistics, Investor Relations forums and RSS feeds.
European listed companies have very good practices when it comes to publishing their basic data: 100% of companies put their press releases and annual reports online and 96% have a section on "corporate governance" for their investors.
We also note that 95% of companies give their market price on their website and 65% place it directly on their homepage.
This year has shown an improvement in websites' interactivity. Companies are making increasing use of dynamic documents and rebroadcasting audio/video of their financial events: 55% of companies offer their annual report in Html/Flash format, 65% broadcast the webcast of their analysts' meetings and 30% rebroadcast their Shareholders' Meetings online.
With regard to interactive services, although 65% of the sites studied offer press releases via email, only 30% make it possible to receive email alerts for financial events and 34% of companies offer a portfolio-simulator service.
The comprehensiveness of the information given on companies' websites is generally satisfactory: 93% of companies disclose information concerning analysts' meetings and 87% disclose information concerning Shareholders' Meetings. Although 75% of companies publish management biographies, they are less willing to disclose management dealings (26%) and management compensation (24%).
We also note that tools linked to market price are little used by companies: 35% provide a technical analysis tool, 25% enable comparison of their market price to that of their competitors and 9% have a market-price graphic linked to the news.
IR Daily » Hey Google, Where’s the YouTube Video of Your Earnings Call? - www.irwebreport.com/...
Google just acquired web video sensation YouTube for $1.65 billion.I would only add, this is another case for the fast development of XPRL
Google — webcasted it earnings call yesterday using investor relations website outsourcing service Shareholder.com, a company owned by Nasdaq.
Visitors to Google’s investor relations pages have only two choices to access the call. Windows Media Player and Real Player. And in neither case is the call indexed to make it easier to review.
No YouTube? The audiocast archive is available only in Windows Media Player or Real Player formats and there’s no transcript here.
There’s also no podcast option (available free at EarningsCast!) or MP3 for playback in a Flash player.
But what’s stopping Google’s investor relations people putting a video camera or webcam in the conference room?
They could live videocast the call and then post the archive on the site as an embedded YouTube video.
Even little Telecom New Zealand has been doing something like that for ages.
Seeking Alpha transcript sucks away Google IR’s traffic
Here’s another irony. Right now, one of the most linked-to items about Google’s earnings call is nothing that Google itself provides.
It is the earnings call transcript provided by Seeking Alpha, the blog network. Like about 87% of other companies, Google itself doesn’t offer transcripts of its earnings calls.
Actually, if you go to Google’s page on Google Finance, you’ll find a link to the Seeking Alpha transcript buried at the bottom of the page below the fold under the heading “More Resources.” But that’s not indicated anywhere on the company’s main investor relations site.
Drinking your own “Kool-Aid”
Google isn’t the only company that should do a better job of communicating with investors by using its own technology.
Microsoft also uses Shareholder.com for its earnings calls. Funny thing here is that when I tried to load the Q4 webcast in Microsoft’s just-released IE7 browser I got an Active X warning telling me that the website wanted to run Quicktime from Apple Computer Inc. (see the screenshot below)
The warning in IE 7 reads: This website wants to run the following add-on: Quick Time from Apple Computer Inc.
Well-known VoIP analyst Andy Abramson was critical of eBay back in July for not using its own Skype services to host its earnings conference call.
To quote him: “In my view not using the technology you tout …shows a real lack of belief in the technology.”
Investor relations people, especially at consumer Web companies like Google, need to understand that they don’t operate in a vacuum.
Investors can also be your customers, your suppliers or your employees. How management handles its investor communications can make a big impression on their opinions of your company in other areas as well.
IR Daily is looking at PR ethics (note 1) . It makes some powerful points. There are others that have emerged this year. It is time to take stock.
"Increasingly, it appears that companies are being sucked into a
quagmire of risky Web communication practices.
PR firms set up front
organizations and websites to say nice things about their clients and their
products. People using these sites are supposed to be deceived into
thinking the sites and the information they provide are
unbiased.
Marketers offer money to
people who will write nice things about products and companies on the Web,
without disclosing that the company bought their opinions.
Companies
infiltrate message boards to post nice things about themselves or their products
and services. They do so under fake names so that people will think they’re
unconnected to the company.
Sleazy practices go unquestioned!
Then there are practices in the IR industry that are just
plain sleazy.
For-profit agencies dress themselves up as “associations” or “societies” and hand out undeserved awards to companies who fail to ask questions.
A consulting firm pretends to have a glitzy New York address when in
fact it is merely renting a “virtual address” and its real head quarters are in a place most people can’t spell. </P>Over 100 American companies use technology to compile detailed reports on the online habits of individual visitors to their websites, never stopping to ask if this might be an invasion of privacy.
Sometimes deception and dishonesty seem harmless. If it’s not illegal or it’s not personally or monetarily injurious, it’s seen as acceptable. A minor inconvenience to the user.
We’ve dabbled in a bit of “minor inconvenience” deception ourselves here at IR Web Report. I’m not proud of it. We used to use our articles to link to pages on
the site that promote our services.
We might say something like “In our recent research on online annual reports, we found that…” The problem here is that there’s no indication that the link goes to a sales pitch for our membership plan.
Nothing wrong with that, right? Lots of people do it, from the Web’s
usability guru to a former SEC lawyer who uses it to pitch subscriptions to
his online services.
But it’s absolutely not ok. All it does is lead someone to click on a link that they might otherwise avoid. They immediately feel cheated after you “get” them to do what you want. It’s a stupid tactic, isn’t it? Someone who has just been deceived >by you is hardly softened-up to become your customer.
This is but the tip of the iceberg.
Pick any press release and read it. The content, claims and syntax is transparently hyped. This as a document given to a journalist, is patronising, arrogant, elitist. Here, the company, one partner in the communication process, is demeaning the other. Talking down, assuming journalism and journalists need to be fooled. What kind of partnership is this? What kind of people is the company prepared to partner with - some hack journo who cannot check if 'world leading' is meaningful? Would the company really partner with such people?
What sort of company is this? Elitist, deceptive, manipulative and prepared to work with second class partners. This is what the PR industry is prepared to recommend to its clients.
PR by the very documents it shows to the world condones elitism and perpetuates the divide between communication partners and yet in a second breath will talk about diversity.
Take this as an example statement from the PR Industry:
It’s really the sense of most blogs being first jottings and half thought
through that bothers me. I value the language of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and
Hemingway too much to see its daily massacre. ‘Blogs’ seem in many cases to
spring straight from a semi-engaged brain on to the page. I cringe at the
inability of people to stand back and critically assess their thoughts before
committing them, arrogantly, world-wide (or so they think – most get read by a
few saddies and surfers).
Here we see the PR industry commenting ill of and ill prepared to learn about, understand adopt or use a channel for communication and a form of social interaction. It makes demeaning comments about people whose first trade is not writing. It even is disdainful of the blogging editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Once again, PR shows how elitist, arrogant and, perhaps ethically at odds with a readership as big as the national newspaper industry it has become.
Alongside these issues there are concerns about atroturfing (passing off) which is another case of bad practice endemic in PR practice... it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products. There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend. There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts. Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads. (Yes, this is a real problem.)
The fact of Internet Porosity, Transparency and Agency firts put forward by Anne Gregory (2) and outlined here in a sequence of posts (click 'next' at the bottom of each post).
It is time to look at the ethical issues from the inside out (note 3). The essential is this:
Now, and
increasingly in the future, trust will be
imperative. Ethical PR will need to
prevail. Part of the ethic will be deliv-
ered by technology, and only then will
a brand be able to survive electronic
navigators able to compare efficacy dis-
passionately. The wider implications
for ethics will then come into play.
Part of ethical practice will be in the
management of reputation. Essentially
this is management of transparency,
porosity and agency in all aspects of
corporate governance. When, because
of ethical misdemeanour (whether
actual or perceived), trust is lost, com-
panies lose competitive advantage.
An average 29 percent of European Internet users access the Web on mobile devices. This includes users in Germany (34 percent); Italy (34 percent); France (28 percent); Spain (26 percent); and the U.K. (24 percent). In the U.S., 19 percent of Internet users access the Internet on cell phones and other mobile devices.
IR Daily » News Digest for October 24, 2006 - www.irwebreport.com/...
This is a valuable case study:
"Often credited as being a pioneer in investor relations podcasting, IBM is one of the few companies that has used podcasting with a strategic communications objective rather than just as a parallel distribution channel.
"Starting in August 2005, the company ran a series of interviews with company experts discussing future trends in particular industries. It called the series “IBM and the future of” and its primary objective was to educate investors and demonstrate the depth of expertise inside the company.
"IBM’s podcasting series, which was also available in transcript form, had the happy side benefit of producing significant positive press for the company in the mainstream media as well as on a wide range of smaller websites and blogs.
"That may help account for the fact that as of a couple weeks ago, IBM’s podcasts had been downloaded 186,000 times — a huge figure when compared with other companies’ podcasts."
IR Daily » The State of Podcasting in Investor Relations - www.irwebreport.com/...
Shel blogs:
Southwest Airlines‘ Paula Berg just wrapped up a talk on the ”Nuts About Southwest“ blog, one of the really excellent examples of a company blog. Paula noted that she and three other members of the blog team moderate comments; she listed a number of criteria for comments that don’t make it, including specific customer service issues and politically incorrect meanderings.
Wisely, Southwest lists those criteria under its ”User’s Guide.
That’s great, but I like the idea of putting these guidelines on the comment page itself, which is what GM does on its Fastlane blog. Many readers who opt to comment will never click to a discrete page containing your moderation policy, but it’s entirely likely they’ll see that policy if it appears right where they enter the comment. It can reduce the risk of somebody accusing you of censorship when their comment doesn’t appear and they don’t know why.
a shel of my former self - blog.holtz.com/...
Indiana University Professor Edward Castronova has made a name for himself as an economist who studies virtual worlds. Now he's been awarded a US$240,000 (128,000 pounds) grant to create one himself, based on the world of William Shakespeare.
"What we plan to do is have people encounter the texts in Shakespeare and ideas in the text at many points within a really fun, multiplayer game, so without even knowing it, they gradually are learning more about the bard's work," said Castronova, author of "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games".
Well its good to see that Shakespeare has a good PR agent in Second Life.
Note created Oct 25, 2006Professor funded for virtual Shakespeare world Technology Internet Reuters.co.uk - today.reuters.co.uk/...
Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, yesterday celebrated the launch of his new MySpace by simultaneously posting his first blog on both http://blog.myspace.com/tombrake, and in the History Matters, 'A Day in History' archive.
The EU is not alone in looking at ways to regulate technology it doesn't approve of: Iran, too, hopes to stem dissenting voices, this time by taking the drastic step of banning high-speed internet connections.The Guardian reports Iran has 5 million internet users. This worries the country's fundamentalist mullah leadership, who worry that these impressionable young minds are open to the evil influence of western culture. This, they says, "undermines Islamic culture" in young minds.
Almost two-thirds of UK employees say they are allowed to act independently, but less than half feel they contribute to their company's overall mission, research has found.
An international survey of more than 9,000 workers by software provider NetReflector also revealed one in 10 UK respondents said they were unlikely to recommend their own company to a friend. The global average is about 8%.
"I've never seen things changing as much as they are now," says Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of trade magazine Advertising Age and a 40-plus-year observer of marketing. "Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass."
Ad-zapping devices — and a decrease in consumer attention spans — have created doubts about the effectiveness of traditional TV, radio and print ads. In response, marketers have become increasingly invasive.
"It's out of control," says Jenny Beaton, a mother of three in Westlake, Ohio. "I don't know how advertisers can think they're selling more products. It's just annoying everybody."
Many, such as Beaton, are tuning out.
"Advertising is so ubiquitous that it's turning people off," Crain says. "It's desensitizing people to the message."
The more consumers ignore ads, the more ads marketers spew back at them, says Max Kalehoff of marketing research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "It's like a drug addiction. Advertisers just keep buying more and more just to try to achieve prior levels of impact. In other words, they're hooked."
Bebo, the popular UK social networking site that is rivalling social networking giant MySpace in share of UK visits, looks set to overtake eBay as the most searched-for UK brand according to the latest analysis from Hitwise.
Tech Digest tells us that..."There's huge amounts of interest around mobile social networking right now, and in particular over who's best placed to make the most of it. Following Tech Digest's feature on the issue, and the follow-up interview with MTV's Angel Gambino.
A new survey has found that the number of CIOs sitting on the operational board has increased to 46%, from 43% last year.
Harvey Nash got KPMG to survey over 500 CIOs from leading UK businesses -- average salaries were up to £104,000 from £84,000 last year
Daniel Terdiman celebrates"A few years ago, it was considered an article of faith that massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds struggled to the million subscriber mark.
Then along came World of Warcraft, which quickly disabused the world of that notion.
Now, Second Life has joined the seven-figure club. On Wednesday, the so-called metaverse, which launched in 2003, passed the million mark.
And its growth -- it was at 963,212 accounts midway through Tuesday, and sits at 1,014,617 at the time of writing -- is continuing at a brisk pace of at least 20 per cent a month."
Pension customers at Legal & General have access to a three-minute podcast, which offers information and advice on their contracting out decision for the 2006-07 tax year.
Sony Pictures has launched an interactive campaign to promote the release of its latest film 'Marie Antoinette'.
The online campaign is targeting 16- to 25-year-olds with banner, MPUs and flash overlays, which will run across youth-orientated and social networking sites such as Piczo, Get Lippy and Refresh.
The sites will run interactive promotional activity including SMS and instant message campaigns in addition to competitions offering users prizes such as a trip to Paris and Sony Walkmans.
Natalie Wilkie, account director at Spinnaker, said: "Our challenge was to speak to our target audience, creating a strong campaign which encompassed the aspirational nature of today's youth culture and the decadency of the period in which Marie Antoinette is set.
CONTROVERSIAL Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom is to face an inquiry over his use of the North Wales Police blog to label people "idiots".
The issue will be discussed behind closed doors by the police authority's professional standards committee next week.
Authority member Darren Millar, a Conservative candidate at next year's Assembly elections, said there had been complaints from members of the public about the Brunstrom blog, which the Chief Constable updates just about every day.
Recent entries have criticised opponents of a needle exchange scheme as "nimbys" and called a driver a "dangerous idiot" after she broke the speed limit going to a speed awareness course.
So this is what it's come to. After years of scribbling in notebooks, using typewriters and mastering keyboards to produce stories on a screen for newspapers - I have been launched into the brave new world of online journalism. This is the first day of a Bucks Blogger's diary I hope you enjoy what will follow!
Voices.com, the voice marketplace, has produced a web-based guide for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to start their own podcast, including complimentary pre-recorded podcast episode numbers.
The Financial Times will next week launch FT Alphaville - a digital news and commentary service.
The sub-site of FT.com, which will feature blogs and rolling discussions, is aimed at finance professionals working in hedge funds, private equity and investment banking.
Lionel Barber, FT editor, said: "Our readers need timely and tailored news - FT Alphaville will do just that.
"The '6am cut' will allow readers to pick up vital financial news either on their way to work or as soon as they get into the office and the rolling blog and online discussions will mean FT Alphaville will constantly be on top of breaking financial news, giving readers core relevant information when they need it."
Vodafone may be under the cosh from shareholders but it emerged today as a world-beater when it comes to corporate social responsibility.The mobile phone giant led by the embattled Arun Sarin has been ranked as the world's most accountable business in a survey by AccountAbility, a London thinktank on organisational and corporate accountability, and csrnetwork, a British corporate responsibility network.
Research, carried out by DJG Marketing indicates that visitors to the OPA sites bought more frequently and spent more money across several major categories including, entertainment, financial services, travel and automotive.
On-line Publishing Association president Pam Horan believes her members’ sites offer value for advertisers because:
“This study demonstrates that branded original content sites deliver more valuable buyers than portal and search sites. OPA sites allow advertisers to be where consumers are eager to learn, more likely to buy, and more willing to spend."
Advertising executives may take a different view. Advertising on portal sites gets products and services seen by a larger audience and also allows them to target potential customers through paid search marketing.
In anticipation of the forthcoming debut single ‘I Know U Like Me’, from Mr Skillz and his Crazy Girls, EMI Music UK label, EMI Liberty,has launched "a multi-channel campaign" with interactive website and WAP site.
Andy Way, Digital Media Manager for EMI Liberty, explains, “We have created a cross-platform campaign with a strong viral element, to appeal to a young fan-base. The interactive website enables fans to interact online. However, as we will be attracting a young audience, all submissions to the site will be strictly moderated at all times
CEN comments on PR pride....Now it is in the bloggershpere....The story had jumped from the press to bloggersphere and has another life in a new channel..... a lesson for PR people everywhere ....
"Hurt pride has made the PR team at Cambridge-based WAR withdraw from the latest Chartered Institute of Public Relations Pride Awards.
One of the region's premier media agencies, WAR has pulled out of the contest after not getting two of its campaigns short-listed this year.
As a result, the agency has withdrawn all its entries and says it is concerned about both the judging process and the standard of entries.
WAR's PR team swept the board last year, picking up 10 awards, including PR Consultancy of the Year."
Google has given a boost to the blogging community by highlighting its blog search service on Google News.
The move, which took place over the weekend, has seen links to the one year old service added to the front page of Google News and at the end of search results.
Blogs have become a way of life on many websites and we now have the facility to do the same here on The Bolton Blog.
So if you feel like letting off steam or would just like to go public on anything let us know.
There's no money in it (naturally), but you can always let the fame go to your head . . .
Reply to Internet Editor Chris Sudlow if you would like to be a Bolton Blogger.
Blogged by: Andrew Stroehlein
Khartoum has ordered Jan Pronk, Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN in Sudan, to leave the country by Wednesday because of comments Pronk made on his blog. Some may dismiss this as hardly surprising because diplomacy and openness don't exactly mix. I'm always a bit cautious of claims about the revolutionary character of blogging, and in some respects, I remain so in this case. After all, a diplomat can get kicked out of a country for saying the wrong thing in any forum, and annoying a host in a blog is little different from doing so in a media release or op-ed. But there has been something unique about Pronk's blog. While it hasn't been as casually written or as frequently updated as many bloggers' fare, it has provided a running log of a high-level diplomat's thinking quite unlike anything we have seen elsewhere. What other top envoy dealing with such delicate matters of conflict resolution regularly pens such an ongoing account and commentary?
A football fan site that has links to YouTube showing Premiership goals has been told to stop this practice, according to reports.
NetResult, the company monitoring internet activity for the Premier League has warned the website 101greatgoals.blogsport.com to not put any more links on the site.
Cisco has a new 'telepresence' product which uses three large-screen televisions with a resolution of 1080 vertical lines. It requires a high speed network connection of 10 megabits per second.
Telepresence is essentially videoconferencing on steroids, using high definition (HD) streaming video on large-screen televisions.
"Telepresence can do for business networking what Myspace and the other social networking sites is doing for social networking," said Marthin De Beer, general manager of emerging markets for Cisco.
"It will create new relationships with people you may have never met before and enable you to do business in a much broader circle than what you are able to do today."
A new training workshop for PR (Public Relations) executives explains the well-intentioned behaviour that consistently annoys journalists in contact with them – and how to avoid many of the most common errors when seeking to place a news story or feature, to secure media coverage for PR clients. The post goes on to list many of the things Journos hate...
Here is another wiki application. It provides information for campaigners and other interested bodies.
NHS 23 wiki (http://editthis.info/nhs_it_info/ ) is a dossier of documents, reports, letters and press coverage about concerns with the direction and progress of England's National Programme for IT in the NHS.
The digital divide is deepening in the UK, with the most tech-savvy households embracing the internet while a growing number of standouts are being left behind, according to new research. The reasons for not getting internet access were found to fall into three broad groups – lack of need or interest; cost or other material constraints; and lack of the necessary skills. Almost everybody has at least heard of the internet, but only 26 per cent of respondents from non-access households believe they have a good knowledge of how to use the internet.
Symbian's research VP, David Wood had an excellent comment reported by Guy Kewney.
He is reported as saying:
"In Web 2.0, the network itself has intelligence, rather than just being a bit-pipe for pre-cooked information".
Ashley Friedlein talks about measurement for online marketing: He says: "My own feeling is that the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should still apply, be they ‘hard metrics’ like sales, clicks, conversion rates, or ‘softer metrics’ like brand favourability, purchase intent. Engagement metrics need to be understood in terms of how well they contribute to delivering these KPIs, rather than be seen as the KPIs themselves.
But what how can we measure “engagement”? A few thoughts:
- Number of friends, connections etc. on social media sites
- Volume and quality of mentions in the blogosphere
- Network analysis of the above, as well as inbound link mapping and analysis
- Dwell time on site / Depth of visit / Page views per session / % repeat visits
- Customer satisfaction (e.g. how likely are your customers to recommend your brand to a friend of theirs?)"
Interesting to find that the newspapers' blogger' becomes a news story in the newspaper.
"It occurred to me while sifting through the winners in this year’s Hollywood film Awards on Monday just how pointless these ceremonies seem to have become, writes our Movie Blogger Carl Jones.
Dominic Ponsford has found that a new Dutch daily newspaper is attracting thousands of new young readers – but unlike most other new dailies around the world, it is paid for.
NRC Next is attracting “young, well-educated people who were not regular newspaper readers” – according to the World Association of Newspapers.
Jeff Jarvis makes the point that opinion is cheap and there are now new rules in publishing. He says:
"The problem with old guys on newspapers trying to attract young people is that they pander and insult the people they so desperately want to attract. They create lite products because they think the young have no attention span when, far more likely, the young have no patience for the overlong blatherings of the old"
Well, I have been working with on/off electricity at home with teaching and so I am late with this great news. Good luck to Joseph Jaffe, veteran communicator Shel Holtz and podcasting pioneer CC Chapman Gary Cohen, Aaron Greenberger, Chris Trela and Michael Denton with Neville Hobson for thier new company crayon,
We will hear a lot about this new company and its a great venture.
Neville's Blog post describes more here.
I have been working on Social Media Planning and Management models. This extends the model I proposed last June against a case study setting.
It occurred to me, after comments in on the Hobson and Holtz Report show 183, that I should make it available here to add to the debate proposed for show 184.
In a press release issued this week, Sanger, who is now on leave of absence from the Digital Universe Foundation announced the progress to a pilot project. "A major new encyclopedia project will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online. Like Wikipedia, the Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), or "the Citizen's Compendium," will be a wiki project open to public collaboration. But, unlike Wikipedia, the community will be guided by expert editors, and contributors will be expected to use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms. This week, the fledgling Citizendium Foundation will launch a six-week pilot project open to potential contributors by invitation (see http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html)."
In an era when trust and recommendation make or mar content this could be a valuable tool for PR to use when providing background information.
Via Always on we find Thomas Hawk writes "One of the most interesting things to come out of Yahoo's earnings call with analysts yesterday was a statement by Yahoo's COO, Daniel L. Rosenweig on Yahoo's plans to 'monetize' their various social network properties. Flickr was mentioned five times on the conference call and their de.lic.io.us property was as well, after neither were mentioned in last quarter's call. Rosenweig characterized these services as being largely unmonetized and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base.
The 23 academics who wrote to Parliament outlining their concerns about the progress of the National Programme for IT have set up a wiki to track media reports and act as a resource for NHS IT, reports e-health insider.
The NHS 23 wiki, available at http://editthis.info/nhs_it_info/,
features links to articles tracking problems with various suppliers and coverage
of the academics' open letter and the agreed statement. It was developed over
the past few months as a resource and reference tool for those interested in the
progress of National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
e-consultancy has been looking at WebThumb invites you to enter a URL and then spits out thumbnails in four different sizes. Websnapr, by contrast, only provides one (small) size at the time of writing.
WebThumb’s brainchild – and AJAX guru - Joshua Eichorn has made the code available as an open API, allowing you to do something lovely with it.
An alternative is Bluga.net .
More than 30,000 people across Britain have recorded a diary of their day as part of a project to create an online snapshot of life in the country, reports the BBC.
The National Trust said the entries - which range from the mundane to the extraordinary - have created "Britain's biggest blog".
In Point Topic’s latest Broadband Consumer Survey, 91% of broadband customers said they were happy with the quality and reliability of their internet service, and 82% are satisfied with download times says e-consultancy.
However, a quarter of the 2,122 people surveyed earlier this year were unhappy with the standard of customer service offered by their internet providers.
Pure Digital Point & Shoot Camcorder has introduced a new, pocket sized camcorder which will allow videos to be uploaded to sites such as Google Video (but not YouTube, for some reason) within seconds.
The Pure Digital Point & Shoot Camcorder is currently available in the US for $129.99 (around £70) and features 30 minutes of storage capacity, with a 60 minute version also available.
from e-consultancy.
Dow Jones is to buy Reuters' 50 per cent interest in Factiva for £85.5 million to become the sole owner of the online news archive reports Journalism.co.uk.
Factiva, has 1.6 million paying subscribers and supplies business news and services to the finance, corporate, professional services and government sectors.
News monitoring is big business and Dow now opperates at both ends of the news chain.
I wonder if it can compete in a web 2.0 world.
Universal Music has filed lawsuits against two video-sharing websites, one owned by Sony Pictures, for allowing users to swap pirated versions of its musicians' videos, reports the Guardian.
The two websites are Bolt.com and Grouper, the latter being the website that Sony agreed to buy in August for $65m (£35m). Universal Music has stated that it is retaining the right to add Sony Pictures to the suit.Of course, Universal is shooting itself in the foot. The key to getting revenue is more outlets not less.
Guardian Media Group has bought GCap Media's two Century commercial regional radio stations, in Manchester and Gateshead, in a £60m deal.
Local radio has had a torridtime recently but there is alot more to this extension of the Guardian's radio empire.
Radio is in the mix of channels for editorial and is a useful channel in its own right. Add an ability to re-purpose radio programmes as the BBC is now doing and the options for attracting a different range of listeners grows.
Good move.
"The Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability is a comprehensive document that provides marketers with a guide on their email marketing.
Available from the Interactive Marketing Bureau it is full of marketing verbiage but is, never the less useful.
It offer marketers a single standard definition of 'deliverability' as well as accurate and timely information around causes of delivery problems and measurement.
As a very high proportion of such conetnet is regarded as spam and because spam filtering is getting better all the time, this is a valuable contribution in the use of email for communication.
The news from every corner of the publishing industry in the UK is that they have a new way of doing business. In less than a fortnight the announcements have poured out one after the next.
The media has discovered that good, competent and rigorous reporting has value. In addition, its value is enhanced when attached to a well respected brand. Add these assets to digital distribution and publishing is a money machine all over again.
For PR, this is a massive change and a big shift in how we manage the PR process. This is what has happened and is happening now. Its too late to wait. First mover advantage is now.
The news that prompts this post is this:
The Guardian has re-branded to reflect its new digital self. Reuters has a Second Life. We see the Telegraph's new multimedia centre opened (see picture), The Times is getting new interactive features, National Magazines is creating an aggregated digital network. Then there is a huge change at Trinity Mirror which is to re-launch all its regional and local newspaper websites by the end of the year. Trails are already in taking place. The change will include 60 video journalists round the country (competition for local TV stations) .
The Express and Echo ran its first video story this week scooping the local TV station.
The Telegraph's integrated multimedia newsroom
We can now expect every publishing house to begin to deliver news in a huge array of formats. They will all broadcast with podacst radio, TV and video on-line and there will be print. There will be blogs and wiki type resources, file and picture sharing, story forwarding and sharing facilities. News to cell phones will include text sound and video and much more.
Why?
Because the same story, reformatted automatically will have a revenue stream attached to it.
In the past in print, there was one opportunity to sell advertising alongside several editorial stories. Today each story can have a dozen advertisements attached to it in a range of formats through an array of channels. Furthermore, where once a story had no market the day after it was published, today it stays on a server for people to access and use in perpetuity (with a brand new add attached).
The best editorial, the fastest news the best journalism will gain market share.
The market, once largely limited to UK audiences, can now reach round the world, the audience opportunity is far greater.
The PR industry now has a big challenge. We have to understand these forms of publishing. We have to be able to offer content that is optimised for this new form of publishing.
We will need to re-adjust to news being published as a continuous flow 24/7. The first edition will be published every few minutes and there will never again be a second edition. We have to monitor news all the time. Not once a week or day but every hour, every minute.
We also have to recognise that reach has changed. Half of news across Europe is first read online. In fact only half of the readership of newspapers sees the print version. The readership, audience and demographic is completely different.
Value added will come from the further opportunity to attach relationship values to these stories and give them added life among our client constituencies. We can do this with our own media. It might be hyperlinks on blogs, wiki posts, content in Second Life but whatever additional channels we use will be enhanced by using highly regarded content from the new and reformed publishing houses.
These are exciting times.By Mike Manuel, Voce Communications and SNCR Research Fellow & Chair, Best Practices Committee has a problem with PR people.
He says: an emerging crop of "citizen journalists" that have developed an unrealistic sense of entitlement and have ceased asking and are now demanding, at least in some cases, the same level of access and information from companies that has long been the exclusive privilege of mainstream journalists.
So, how should Bloggers approach a company?
He has some tips:
Who are you?
Introducing yourself never hurts.
What's your schtick?
What's your blog called? What's the link? Some basic info about what your blog is about.
Whaddaya want?
Well - pretty self explanatory.
Also, why?
Just a basic explanation will suffice.
When can I get back to you?
A practical time-frame for getting back to you.
How do I reach you?
Email's great but ... a phone number as well.
Don't be a dick.
PR people in general have pretty thick skins and I think most will make a concerted effort to address an incoming request, but man, I've heard some horror stories lately of bloggers with just zero tact or respect, trying to use strong arm tactics to bully and manipulate (and blackmail) companies for info and access, and that's just ridiculous — and totally unnecessary.
More at New Communications Review.
Personalising your browser front page is quite fun.
The biggest by far is Google Personalized Page, but there are many more.
They offer interesting opportunities for promotion. For example, creating widgets for them, content for them and even creating or adapting them can offer promotional and message carrying opportunities.
Examples of the genre are:
Webwag,
Motto
Microsoft's Live.com
Pageflakes
Congratulations to Charles Bailey for making the 10th anniversary of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography! For those of you playing along at home, this is version 64, and covers over 2,750 articles, books, and other resources related to scholarly electronic publishing online.
Read/Write Web has been looking at some of the products that are available for monitoring and evaluation blogs.
He has reviewed:
Techmeme
Topix
Tailrank
For more read the reviews here.
Others might include:
It happened with the web and its happening with social media.
The PR industry is letting outsiders take over the role of communications advice, service and competence.
For example, many companies are already setting up shop in SecondLife. CNET Networks, Reuters, Adidas, Sun Microsystems, Toyota.
Is the PR industry involved. Yes. Notably Text100. And the other consultants?Media companies even face competition from virtual upstarts inside Second Life, including New World Notes and SL Herald.
Reuters has even commissioned its longtime tech reporter, Adam Pasick, to cover Second Life full-time and act as Reuters' Second Life bureau chief.
Simon Wakeman has begun a discussion about the nature of brand for bloggers.
It is an interesting and well considered piece.
One of his thoughts is about the way blog content is delivered which means the visual identity is less important. As a blogger your personal brand is communicated more through what you write and how you act as a blogger - how your site looks is less important than ever before, especially for your audience that reads your RSS feeds.
Yahoo posted a 37-percent slump in third-quarter profit and announced it would buy back up to three billion dollars' worth of its stock.
The Express & Echo in Exeter beat television news to a major regional story by publishing a video report on its website Reports the Press Gazette.
Using only a £190 camcorder and consumer software, the paper rushed an exclusive story onto the web which revealed that Devon County Council's preferred bidder for Exeter Airport was a consortium of London City Airport and Balfour Beattie.Online PR practices can now learn the lesson that Newspapers take theironline presence very, very seriously. Contributing to this new mindset is essential in PR practice.
Richard Edelman today issued an apology for his agency's role in creating a blog for client Wal-Mart that did not properly disclose its origins or funding says Brand Republic.
The blog, walmartingacrossamerica.com, chronicled a couple's journey across the country in an RV while stopping at various Wal-Mart parking lots. Although the blog did not initially bear any clear disclosures outside of an advertisement, the trip was funded by the group Working Families for Wal-Mart [WFWM], a Wal-Mart-backed organization designed to promote a positive portrayal of the company. The group is part of Edelman's effort to turn around the reputation of the controversial retailer.The fact is that, 'passing off' is bad practice, transparency is essential and both Edelman and WalMart know this and both are culpable. There is no excuse. It is, as Edelman says, an error. It is also bad practice and reflects on the professionalism of the profession. In the UK Asda was acquired by Wal-Mart and would hope its PR team is more professional.
Richard Edelman posted a statement of apology for the incident on his personal blog on Edelman's website today."For the past several days, I have been listening to the blogging community discuss the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for Wal-Mart," the statement said. "I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client's."
Edelman went on to say his agency supports the transparency guidelines of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association [WOMMA], which call for disclosure of the source of such efforts.
| Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a social media encyclopaedia that will attempt to balance the original's democratic principles, allowing anyone to add content, but with much greater editorial control. |
Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), which will go live in the next few days, will initially be made available to a limited number of content editors and members of the public who apply. It will become available to the masses by the end of the year. |
PC Advisor has an inside story.
German media giant Bertelsmann AG has begun crafting plans to develop an entertainment-driven social networking website to compete with MySpace and other similar services, a source familiar with the discussions has revealed.
The news comes less than one week after Bertelsmann agreed to sell video content to the popular internet video site YouTube, which has a social networking component and which was acquired days later by Google.
With the new site, Bertelsmann aims to create a community for its music and video projects, according to the source.
"It really took off last year," says Saudi journalist Rasheed Abou-Alsamh to the BBC.
There are now between 500 and 600 Saudi blogs - in English as well as Arabic - and the bloggers are women as well as men.
"I think young people see the internet as a way of expressing themselves easily and in an uncensored fashion," says Mr Abou-Alsamh.
This means it is not too difficult to open a dialogue with Saudis.
Hey! I’m Rhian, I’m the new teen blogger for the Shropshire Star.
And away goes another blog published by a newspapers. What is going to be interesting is the kind of pitches she will get from 'PR' people.
She says:
Before I get started I just want to get one thing clear, in case you don’t already know. Rhian is a Welsh name, pronounced Ree-Ann.So at least there is no excuse for getting her name wrong.
Here is a nice quote for Colin Farrington:
All the world's a multimedia platform, and all the men and women merely bloggers. Or perhaps to blog or not to blog sums up better the sense of Hamletian introspection, the solitary unburdening of one's hopes and fears.It comes from Tom Leonard writing for the Telegraph. He reports:
Research published yesterday by Harris Interactive suggested that nearly one internet user in 10 has started a blog.The big suprise is how few undergraduates are bloggers. In Bournemouth the figure is (was) 2%. So these figures worry me a little:
The figure suggests that the blogging habit goes way beyond the teenager stereotype and, today, charities including the National Trust and English Heritage are asking all of us to submit a blog of our day to a website (historymatters.org.uk) to provide a snapshot of a day (October 17) in the life of Britain.Perhaps David C has more than one blog.Once more famous for people wanting to talk about their sex lives, their views on politics or, perhaps, just what they had for dinner, blogs are now frequently seizing the news agenda.
Who'd have thought David Cameron would ever jump on a fashionable bandwagon? But sure enough, he has his own blog, featuring video clips of his thoughts on cleaning up politics and his actions on cleaning up the kitchen, while his children scream in the background.......
BL Ochman reports that Kami Huyse has posted a PDF transcript of a meeting of communicators' avatars in Second Life last week. ....
Hosted by Text 100 this is a classic PR tool. It is a conference.
The BBC is reporting a debate in the UK Parliament. Members of the House of Lords were told trying to impose new rules on audio-visual internet providers - like the YouTube site - could stifle new broadcasters.
Internet broadcasters should not be subject to the same rules which govern television, peers have been told.
The cost of complying with new rules could deter new would-be Internet entrepreneurs, the committee heard.
And it would prove difficult to get TV regulation to fit online services, as well as impose any rules on such fast-changing technology.
Each point is valid and the debate should be enjoined by the PR profession as well.
Andrew Lark has a comment about LinkedIn.
He shows how valuable it is for job hunting (in his case recruiting).
It is this kind of exposure - public relations - that demonstrates the value of social media.
His comment begins:
I was extremely skeptical of LinkedIn but unlike Stowe and Jeff have found it to be pretty valuable. First for recruitment - the quality of the candidates I have seen through advertising on LinkedIn are fantastic - and I like the fact that some of them come recommended by people I trust. Second, it has proven to be immensely valuable in connecting with old colleagues and keeping my current network humming along
Evert press release and all blogs, web pages and emails need to be optimised for search engines - if you want them to be found by journalists, bloggers or in email searches on the Intranet.
Its called Search Engine Optimisation. It is acore discipline for PR people. It is best done by a professional and here is are 20 reasons why you could do it yourself or could use Anthony Mayfield.
Mark Sweney at MediaGuardian.co.uk tells us:
Sky News is to be broadcast in major Network Rail stations across the UK, replacing BBC News 24.There is a case for much wider use of big screens offering interesting content. The technology is changing fast and soon we will gave digital posters like this one all over the place.Transvision, the national digital outdoor screen network owned by Titan Outdoor, chose Sky News after a pitch against BBC News last week.
The outdoor network, which is seen by around three million people each week, will provide five strands of Sky News including main headlines, financial, entertainment and sports news and the weather.
With virtual economies booming at double digit growth per month the world's tax collectors are on the lookout for a new source of revenue says IT Pro.
Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.
"Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise -- taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth," said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
Online network LinkedIn is to offer a new directory search, giving its members a new method of choosing business service providers based on recommendations, reports e-consultancy.
With a massive student user base, this could help in development of markets to student networks and a revenue stream for this MySpace/Bebo competitor.
In the new directory, LinkedIn users will be able to search for service providers among those recommended by friends, or else broaden the search to include friends of friends.
The site will also offer a global search option, which will search for service provides across the whole LinkedIn network.
User profiles on the social networking site MySpace now automatically display latest clips for users who have uploaded material, removing the need to embed videos with HTML code.
This is another example of how even the simplest of technology is being removed to let notnerd users participate in Social Media.
It is getting easier - for the PR person - and everyone else........ (is this how PR will be disintermediated in the future?
Henry Hyder-Smith has some good comments about the use of email marketing (e-tailing). There is a lot of good work being done and there are a lot of companies that, for the sake of a few pennies are just making consumers irritable. His comments include:
Many eRetailers use a ‘spray and pray’ targeting technique to push out one size fits all marketing to their database. Despite the intelligence that can be gathered through email marketing including interest areas and behaviour on site/ within the email, the email promotion resembles more mini-brochures and less tailored communications using techniques such as dynamic content. None include any information about any local stores or capture this information on sign-up despite many asking for address.
Unveiling the study, EU commissioner Viviane Reding said citizens needed re-assuring that radio tags would not lead to large-scale surveillance.
Ms Reding said she was ready to draft new laws to control how the radio frequency tags could be used.Potential abuse
The Information Society Commissioner made her comments at a conference called to mark the end of a six-month EU consultation exercise in which it sought opinions about the growing use of radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags.
These "smart barcodes" are increasingly used by businesses to monitor goods as they move along supply chains. Governments are also starting to think about putting them in many identity documents such as passports.
I would add that such technologies can be used by event organisers instead of tickets (and also to keep track of guests as they move round on a facility visit); They are great for monitoring exhibition visitors and are useful when following up the use of 'freebees' such as a trip to the Tower of London and the Savoy Grill - if you get my drift.
Movable Type is currently being positioned as "the most advanced business blogging platform". This is marketing speak for 'upgrade' which is revrealed today.
It is having to compete with a lot of others.
From Wikipedia I have this list:
Software packages installed by weblog authors to run on their own systems:
Software services operated by the developer, requiring no software installation for the weblog author:
The BBC's heavily publicised "Tardisodes" - one-minute Doctor Who episodes designed specifically for mobile phones - were a flop, the corporation has revealed.
Stella Creasey, the BBC's head of audience research, said they only attracted an average of 3,000 phone downloads per mobisode.
"That's not many," added Ms Creasey. "It seems we have a long way to go to understanding this new space."
Perhaps Skype can provide an answer.One problem, said Iain Tweedale, the new media editor for BBC Wales, was that even though the BBC provided the mobisodes free, most users had to pay a charge to their phone operator of between £1.50 and £2 per Tardisode.
"The fact that there were 2.6 million downloads to PCs shows that there was an interest, so I think the problem with mobile was purely a commercial issue," said Mr Tweedale.
"The operators' tariff structures aren't flexible enough to allow for low-priced usage," he added.
Guardian Newspapers is the latest national newspaper group to change its name to reflect the importance of new media activities says Press Gazette.
Guardian Newspapers – which comprises The Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited – is to be re-named Guardian News and Media.
Chief executive of parent company Guardian Media Group Carolyn McCall said: “Over the last five years our output has expanded from print to include websites, digital TV, online communities and podcasts. These name changes reflect this ongoing transformation of our businesses.”
Reports are spreading of a mass spamming campaign organised by phishers which uses spoofed MySpace addresses to direct users to bogus web sites.
The ruse uses spoofed MySpace messages, that even contain the regular site boilerplate copy, claim to have a link to a song the recipient might like. Instead the link leads to a site selling very cheap music, but when the user tries to buy then the credit card details are harvested for later use.
Following on from Neville Hobson's post this morning about an XML based media release, there is the wider need in the industry for XML compliant content.
Social Media depends on XML to work which means that any tools created for the industry have to be XML compliant to have any long term value.
For many people who do not want to delve into the finer points of XPRL, I have made the XPRL standards Guide (PDF) and the Schema Semantics (PDF) available for download and of course the full schema is available here.
This will allow any programmer to develop XPRL compliant tools for the PR industry.
More information is available from Peter Wilson at Yellohawk.
Richard Bailey is a great observer. He has put telephony in the frame as a communication channel ahead of the Internet. Right.
And he notes The Economist article which shows how the Internet is a platform for the Internet.
Good one Richard.
The fall and fall of advertising is making Sir Martin wriggle.
He is now desperately distancing WPP from advertising. He is right to do so. Investors can see that it no longer delivers the goods. Here is what WPP is saying to The Business:WPP is not now an advertising agency. More than half its business comes from areas outside traditional advertising and media planning and buying – in specialties such as insight, information and consultancy, public relations and public affairs, branding and identity, healthcare and specialist communications. The most significant part of the last specialty is direct, interactive and internet.
Here is why PR has a role, which may dig WPP out of its hole.
Reuters has joined the rush by big companies into web-based virtual worlds, setting up a news bureau in Linden Lab's hugely popular Second Life.
On Wednesday, the news agency plans to begin offering coverage of real-world events for Second Life members, and vice versa, at a new site.
Thank you e-consultancy for the tip off and a much longer comment here.
Try taking this into an exam.
Steve Rubel says:
You gotta love geeks. Can't find what they're looking for, they code it.That's what Matt Swann did. He wrote a script that loads Wikipedia and all of its internal links onto on iPod.
According to Digi:Nation, says the Guardian, millions of internet users are now moving beyond using the web as a tool for shopping, information and entertainment and are creating their own content, downloading music and video and sharing photos online.
I guess this means that 10% of 'online adults' in the UK (3 million people - ish) are bloggers.The largest group identified by the researchers - dubbed Digi Joe Public - are regularly embarking on the kind of digital activities that just two years ago would have been considered the exclusive preserve of teenagers and early adopters.
Nearly four in 10 of that group have read a blog, with a quarter having started their own blog or website. Nearly three-quarters have downloaded music and almost a quarter have downloaded at least one movie.
Gary Bivings has a comment about 'pay for play'.
... it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products. There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend. There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts. Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads. (Yes, this is a real problem.)
the ICCO Global Conference in Delhi.
Lou Capozzi, chairman of the Publicis PR Group, and Paul Taffe, chairman of Hill& Knowlton, challenged PR firms to step up to the opportunities created by what Lou called “The New Conversation Age.” The panelists documented the changes and outlined the skills needed in this emerging new environment — skills possessed by PR practitioners more than any other discipline.
Read on to find out more... these guys are looking to the future of PR
Toni, as always sees the gold without panning for it.
Here he picks up one sentence that is important to PR practice from Jean Valin.
As community consultation and stakeholder engagement practices continue to grow… I believe negotiating, conflict and dispute resolution skills are going to be as important… if not more important… than media relations and crisis communications skills. This is only one sentence from Jean Valin’s recent remarks at Puerto Rico’s recent Annual Conference (see recent post). Here attached you may find the full text Puerto Rico Speech Power of PR Sep 06.doc of his important speech. Jean Valin, Canadian, is past Chair of the Global Alliance.
The X in AJAX stands for XML, a way of wrapping up information to send it from computer to computer that is infinitely more flexible and powerful than old HTML ever was.
This is why the PR industry needs XPRL and to understand why it is so important, visit this BBC page.
Platforms for delivering content through a range of channels for communication range from PC's to cell phones but the iPod and its cousins are really cool.
Just look at these...... drool and then get ready for Chrismas.
I take this from Always On because it makes sense.
YouTube accounts for over 47 percent of visits to video websites. Add Google’s 11 percent share of hits to their own brand video service and we see the company is now in control of the lion’s share of global online video. This audience will only increase as broadband becomes the norm, as online video matures and as mobile devices develop the ability to act as seamless extensions of the Internet.
Time to both cosy up to Google/YouTube and to explore ways for creating more online video content.
Never were cameramen and editors more in demand for the PR industry than now.
The great thing is that there is a role for vox pop content and very polished content on the same channe - interesting to see which way the PR industry goes.
Stuart Bruce was up early today to spot today's Financial Times report of sharp growth in online marketing. The survey of marketing spend on the internet and direct mail both up - mainstream advertising down.
I am not convinced about online advertising. Some good - some bad.
The a bigger slice on social media interaction would make a huge difference.
Today The Daily Telegraph completes its move from Canary Wharf to London SW1.
The new newsroom, new approach, new services, new philosophy... and new editor combine to create news for a digital era.
New editor Lewis (37 - to be ageist - I can't resist) will see a depressing picture in most sectors of the newspaper market but he has a vision of a multi-platform future in which the print journalists provide the content for far more outlets than simply the paper. In this brave new world, they will be delivering podcasts, vodcasts and blogs, as well as their newspaper stories, and contributing to updated editorial online at the various "touchpoints" - key publication moments - during the day.
This heralds a new era for those who woyld help such hapless hacks by providing content in the form it is needed and presented for purpose (newsprint, podcasts, vodcasts and blogs etc).
Of course it would help a lot if the preparation of the PR outputs was tagged using XPRL, then re-purposing can be automated.
No doubts the Old Men of the PR industry will get round to it when they have finished their toast and Coopers.
Mark Snelling in a compelling blog from Lebanon for the British Red Cross and wrote about his impressions.
It Starts:
Day 1 The last time I saw rubble like this was the Java earthquake in Indonesia. The same twisted metal, the same pulverised concrete. But this is not a natural disaster. It is the work of men and machines, just one more community devoured by the omnivorous appetites of armed conflict.
Here the Reuters Alertnet Foundation is giving a voice, not to mention its network reach, to individuals and organisations (in the case the Red Cross).
It is a relationship that has some considerable benefits for both parties.
Where the Red Cross goes, so too can others.
An interesting PR opportunity.
Two scientists from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London are blogging their way across western Australia as they search for meteorites, and it’s a good read.
Museum meteorite curator Caroline Smith and meteorite researcher Gretchen Benedix arrived in Australia on September 26, and arming themselves with supplies set out on October 11 into the Nullarbor Desert, where they expect to find plenty of meteorites. They're keeping an online diary on the NHM website which you can read at piclib.nhm.ac.uk/meteorite-blog
Here is an idea. If you want to promote an long running enendeavour. have a blog to act both as a diary and to attract a niche audience.
Another Blog application to put in the library of Social Media experiences.
From Ian Delaney there is a report of an interview with Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0, who has just instructed all his journalists to start writing blogs in addition to their normal duties. The individual blogs will be aggregated on a super-site, in addition to the normal Business 2.0 blog.
I think this is shooting from the hip.
There has to be more to it than 'be a blogger'.
Sam Sethi has been watching some campaigns that are being run in MySpace.
He offers these comments:
In recent months, the online hangout for over 35 year olds, MySpace has taken a more active role in promoting social causes. For example on September 21st MySpace (Europe) partnered with Bono’s latest venture Red in a joint campaign to eliminate Aids in Africa.
Today MySpace (USA) has announced it is going to organize 20 concerts featuring bands promoted on its site as part of a campaign to raise awareness and money for the humanitarian relief in Sudan.
For more details, a longer report is at Sam's blog.
Suw Charman defines a blog by what it is not at Watson Farley & Williams.
She lists:
a) The blog entries are PDFs.
b) The blog entries are dire. The company has asked the trainees to blog, but obviously hasn't helped them understand what blogs are, what might be good to write about, or how best to write it.
c) No comments.
d) No trackbacks.
e) No archives.
f) No blogroll.
g) No RSS.
h) No links to other blogs.
It is a great read.
Public Relations today we have to be able to present the case for letting society into our organisations. It is hard. It is news that management does not want to hear.
The hard bit is to be able to say to the Board that at least some of the business will be disintermediated and it is better to join in that resist.
If you are Microsoft, cosy up to the Open Source movement; if you are W H Smith, offer e-books. The alternative is the Tower record solution offered by Chris Anderson this week:
In August, it was bankruptcy; now it's liquidation. Tower Records is no more.
Mike at TechDirt describes what led to this end:
See what I mean....While other record stores began to recognize that that they needed to completely revamp their business -- from becoming combination music/dance clubs and stores to starting their own record labels or becoming "destinations" rather than just stores -- Tower Records leadership insisted that the web "is certainly never going to take the place of stores."
Ian Delaney has interesting news that Revver is to partner with UK TV company FameTV to air user-created clips on the channel. Viewers will be able to send SMS messages voting for their favourites. As with its advertising, Revver will share the revenue 50-50 with the clips’ creators.
Revver is less well known than YouTube but hosts the videos from Ze Frank, Ask-a-ninja, and (now ’she’ has outed herself) lonelygirl15.
Sid Yadav comments that the system ought to work, since it compares to the other well-established ‘vote-for-your-favourite’ systems in place:
I see a clear-cut model here: users like the content, they want the owners to be paid AND they want the content to be popular (just like they want their favorite American Idol contestant to win), so why not support them by voting for them?
Over on the FameTV site, there’s more explanation:
On Fame TV, viewers will be able to create their own moments of fame by uploading video clips, pictures and texts via mobile phones and the internet. Broadcasting will take place all year round, 24/7, and be available to Sky customers in the UK and Ireland.
Fame TV aims to broadcast all video submissions live on air within 15 minutes of the user submitting the content. Viewers are invited to send in their own music selection which will play as the backing soundtrack to their clip during broadcast.
David Teather at The Guardian
Lloyds TSB last year sent more than 92m pieces of direct mail. That is almost 1.8m letters a week, detailing offers of credit cards, insurance and loans, landing on the nation's doormats from one bank alone. A spokesman for the bank sheepishly said the mail simply reflected the size of the bank and the volume of products it offered. "It is never sent to customers who explicitly say they don't want it," he said.
The Derby Evening Telegraph has posted a video on its website of a woman pleading for her partner to be allowed to stay in the country.
Her Iranian partner is the father of her 18-month-old son, and her unborn baby is due in three weeks.
Press Gazette reports The Northcliffe paper has published the woman's full story and filmed her plea to the immigration minister, which had been sent to the Home Office on DVD.
The use of video by a print newspaper is interesting. It has now extended its offering from print to web to video. It also means it can cross sell and cross promote the paper, web site and the video. It is great PR.
It is also an opportunity that any PR practice can develop. Have story - have video - can cross promote.
Jonathan Kranz has a post about how an ebook became a dead tree book.
This is a classic example of how values online convert to real money. It takes the seller direct to the buyer. Note: no advertising, no marketing, no pop-ups just value.
If you offer values to people with similar values the symbiotic reality is a relationship. In this case a book contract.
Half of those surveyed in the US said that they would turn to network television for immediate news information (NB: 66% in the UK)
The next most popular source was the radio (42%)
37% of consumers would use daily local newspapers
33% cable news or business networks
25% of those interviewed would rely on Internet sites of print and broadcast media
6% would turn to Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms (24% in the UK)
I have doubts about this sort of survey. It may be that the first call is, for example, television, but then there is all the background and the net is awash with added information and knowledge, In addition, when people are interested in stories, they go to sites of interest such as company web sites and government sources. It is not either or it is both.
For this reason PR practitioners have to use multiple channels. There is problem associated with this which is an ability to re-purpose our news for many channels and this is one reason why we need tools built on standards like XPRL.
hiring a web promotion company or specialist.
A good web promotion specialist/company is someone who:
•knows how to code a framed site and get it indexed, especially on Google;
•knows the most popular search engines and their affiliations;
•is an expert on web copywriting;
•will teach you how to decode your web traffic stats and monitor your website; and
•admits on aspects that they are not familiar with and refers you with other good companies that know the task better.
SOURCE:
What to look for in an online promotion company
PRWeb is to discontinue its free press release distribution service on Oct 23rd.
Like I said last week and Ebrahim Ezzy wrote Read/write in a post entitled Social Networking: Time For A Silver Bullet - its time to integrate. Ebrahim argued that the current state of thousands of 'walled garden' social networks can't continue - we need meta social networks to connect up niche SNS. According to the poll we ran at the end of the post, 69% of you agree.
On Wednesday night hundreds of clubbers descended on Liverpool Street station, turned on their iPods and danced all over the concourse. Mark Brown brought us this gem.
Its called mobile clubbing.
The rules are simple: Arrive at location at given time. Start dancing to the music of your choice on your personal stereo. Please utilise the whole space, spread out. The mantra comes from the website mobile-clubbing.com, where after-work dancers can sign up to be told of the next surprise venue.
Buzzlogic is to launch new tools for bloggers to use to understand and act on the market around them - and to tap into the value they are creating. Marketing and PR tools will be substantially enhanced drawing in more data from specialized sources that shape conversations as well. The service already provide by the company has software that helps marketers track social influence among blogs and other web sites.
Read/Write found this out durring an interview with Mitch Radcliffe.
Times Online, the website of the Times and Sunday Times, is being re-designed.
Features will include:
Times Online has 9 million monthly unique users and is increasing its blogs and podcasts.
The rapid movement by the core print media this year is affecting how PR interfaces with its traditional communication partner.
This week has seen many major announcements.
Two-thirds of UK internet users are not prepared to pay for podcasts, according to a wide-ranging report on the digital habits of UK consumers.
The survey, to be published by Guardian Newspapers on Monday, reveals that of the 29% of consumers who did not refuse outright to pay for podcasts, the most they were prepared to pay was £1.
After reading this Philip Young post, who wants to do press relations anyway.
Quote from ex-Sun editor:
In my day we used to put the untrue stories on page one and the truer ones through the paper, so by the time you got to page 38 there was nothing wrong with them!
The National Magazine Company, the main UK publisher owned by the Hearst Corporation, has launched the Hearst Digital Network to aggregate all its online content.
Nancy Cruickshank will become as managing director of the division whose properties include; cosmopolitan.co.uk; netdoctor.co.uk and the Handbag network.
Journalism.co.uk, who ran the story has the equivelent of a grin on its web site.
The ability to lever reach by being digital for consumer media is a must for PR now.
Journalism UK finds out that Trinity Mirror is to re-launch all its regional and local newspaper websites by the end of the year to refocus on interactive elements.
The re-launch will start with the Liverpool Echo, before expanding across all its 240 other titles - some of which will be going online for the first time.
This will mean that regional PR strategies will have to change to meet the new requirements. One anticipates that this will mean that the PR industry will have to prepare to meet the new challenge.
Trinity Mirror also hopes to have as many as 60 video journalists working across its regional titles by next year.
Ofcom has vowed to tread carefully when it comes to determining how internet-based TV services should be regulated.
At the same time, the issue has prompted the watchdog to take a step back and review its approach to regulation in other areas.
Media Orchard reports from PRWeek US:
The 2006 PRWeek/Cymfony Corporate Survey reveals that communicators on the corporate side are grasping the importance of new media and measurement - but not everyone has jumped in with both feet...
A key finding this year is that while PR professionals are paying more attention to the online marketplace, the numbers of adoption do not nearly reflect the hype. One-tenth of this year's respondents had established a blog -- showing virtually no growth over the 2005 figure. And while pundits discuss the explosion of new media, it doesn't appear that number will shoot up in 2007...
Glen offers this from work by Professor Osvaldo Feinstein, evaluation consultant. The main thrust of his workshop was to challenge us to consider fully the assumptions that are made in development projects - and consequently the impact on evaluation. He has created a guide to what we should consider when exploring assumptions, namely: Incentives, Capacities, Adoption, Risk, Uncertainty and Sustainability. Cleverly, it makes the acronym Icarus, whom we all know flew too close to the sun which melted the wax holding together his wings.
Too true.
Recent research shows that consumers spend as much as 164 minutes each day online compared to 148 minutes watching television. "This shift,"says Heather Hopkins, "in media consumption along with our analysis indicate that online can be an effective medium for raising brand awareness and can shift brand association. The findings support the move to bring a larger share of marketing spend online. "
A comparison of costs will show that on-line offers some real financial benefits as well.
Erin Caldwell has a lovely story.
Naturally, as players in this online world, we’re all QUITE familiar with spam. But in this case, I’m talking about SPAM (Hormel’s food product). A story on the news caught my attention this morning: “The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails.”Of the Marketing domains, brand management is one that retains interest (the rest being largely about scream marketing to social groups that are vanishing faster than snow in a microwave).
Even the news anchor reporting on the story was ridiculing the food company’s recent attempt. Hmm. Not a good sign, Hormel.
In this Fortune article, this little ditty is my favorite:
“Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, ‘Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?’”
Sir Martin Sorrell talked to e-consultancy this week.
Here are a couple of comments that interested me:
Very good point
We have to understand the implications of what’s going on, so we can advise our clients what’s the best direction. The more technologies there are, the more advice we’re asked for, and the more complex the media planning and buying decisions.
I’m old. It’s older people’s inability to be flexible. If you see what kids can do, it’s amazing. If you’re young, you’re not as terrified by technology as people my age are. It is much more difficult for me – as I’m not a nerd - to understand the technology as it changes so rapidly.An excuse for not taking time to understand - it is NOT rocket science , even a kid will tell him that.
Graham Charlton reports that BT hopes to take a lead in the battle against the scourge of spam on the internet by introducing a new system designed to filter out spam before it reaches their customer’s PCs.
BT’s Content Forensics system, devised by StreamShield Networks, will scan millions of emails every day, alerting them to the location of spam related problems on its network.
So here we have a company offering a service, and being considered heroic for it initiative, to block out advertising.
Q: Why do you use email marketing
A: I want to be an anti-hero
Four major mobile phone operators yesterday launched trials for a new mobile TV service, which will take place initially in the Bristol area says Graham Charlton at e-consultancy.
The trial, which will run for the next three months, will test whether mobile operators into can use their existing infrastructure to deliver mobile TV and other multimedia services to users with compatible handsets.This is very important to PR. It means we now need to offer TV stations mobile optimised content for the most importnat consumer demographic.
The ONS e-commerce survey, based on results from businesses with 10 or more employees, shows rapid growth both in the use of Information and Communications Technologies, and the value of trade over the internet.
The total value of internet sales by businesses reached £103.3 billion in 2005, a rise of 56% from the 2004 figure of £66.2 billion. The survey showed that businesses are making more and more use of ICT.
Read more at e-consultancy.Here is another application of Social media. This time from Trevor Cook.
FPA chief executive officer Jo-Anne Bloch has embraced the 21st century by creating a blog on the FPA website.
The aim of the online journal is to communicate regularly with members and encourage the exchange of views and ideas. It will cover government legislation and regulation, the value of advice, FPA activities and events, and industry challenges and concerns, an FPA spokesman said. Already members have said the blog is “a great innovation” and another posted a comment that read, “as planners get familiar with this 21st century media, you will see some lively debate there”.
The Australian Press Council has looked at the future of newspapers.
Traditionalists believe that the Internet is no more likely to bring down newspapers than the advent of TV half a century ago. The special attributes of newspapers, their immediacy, involvement, credibility, creativity, consistency and flexibility of use will continue to ensure their longevity.
Traditionalists are, however, being stalked by doubters, including most recently The Economist (August 2006) which is following the line that extinction of all or some of the papers in the UK is only a matter of time. It claims '…that newspapers are on the way out and that it is only a matter of time before there are closures with half the world's newspapers likely to close in the foreseeable future because 'business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.'
In just one month, more than one in three (40 per cent) Scots will make an online purchase while at work and many more will book holidays, do their banking and send e-mails to friends and relatives says the Scotsman.
Do they also do work on computers at home (like read their emails?).
But this is an opportunity.
If they need to, want to, enjoy - harness it.
You can't stop it - well you can but then you get second rate employees such as people who don't mind being disconnected from the world.
Sydney Morning Herald has a headline that applies to you!
BLOGGERS beware: thoughtless musings in cyberspace can have costly consequences.
That's one lesson that might be gleaned from a Florida jury's decision last week to order a Louisiana woman to pay $US11.3 million ($15.2 million) in compensation, after she used an internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud. The damages award is believed to be the largest relating to amateur postings on the internet.
Recent research has surfaced that quantifies the difference employee engagement can make to the bottom line. ISR, a Chicago-based HR research and consulting firm, conducted a study of over 664,000 employees from 71 companies around the world. Most dramatic among its findings was the almost 52 percent difference in one-year performance improvement in operating income between companies with highly engaged employees as compared to those companies with low engagement scores. High engagement companies improved 19.2 percent while low engagement companies declined 32.7 percent in operating income over the study period. The data covers financial performance through 2005 (www.isrinsight.com)
Think this and wonder:
Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on? We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.
Sam Rose posted this paper this week at the The Aspen Institute.
It struck me for this summary:
We are living in an epochal period of transition bridging two very different types of economies and cultures. We are transitioning from a "push" economy: that tries to anticipate consumer demand, and then creates a standardized product, and "pushes the product into the market and culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing. We are transitioning to a "pull" economy: open and flexible production platforms that use network technologies to coordinate many different entities from disparate regions.. "Pull" economies produce customized products and services that serve localized needs (demand-driven), usually in a rapid manner.
has posted about research by Chloe Kane who did a survey of 105 senior communications practitioners in the UK - the majority working in-house - asking them about their training needs.
He says he "Was not amazed at all to see that 58 of them put "new media skills" on top of the list.
"Planning communications programs" came in second.When asked about what practice of communications they wanted to learn more about in the next year, 52 of them responded "Corporate PR", second most popular was "Internal Communications." Talking about areas in communications that will feel/are feeling the effect of new media... they are right on.
Confused of Calcutter (JP Rangaswami), of which much in the past and much in the future, commented:
I must have missed it the first time around, and only saw it via Boing Boing (thanks, Cory!).
Reuters reported last Friday that “Book sales get a lift from Google scan plan“.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the story. Read it for yourself.
Someone’s finally figured out that letting people ‘taste” books actually helps sell books. Even obscure ones. Especially obscure ones.
I guess the penny had to drop sometime. As Doc is wont to say, they will make money because of the excerpts rather than with the excerpts.
Much has been written about trust, about equity and about innovation. Stewardship rarely gets a look in.
Hmmm...
Investor Business Daily is watching the old advertisers try to put their imprint on New Media.
As usual they are bleating for all the wrong reasons.ComScore Media Metrix says Google's share was 44%. Nielsen/NetRatings pegs it at 50%. Hitwise gives it 60%.
With 6.5 billion total U.S. searches in August, that's a difference of 1 billion Google searches between the lowest and highest share ratings.
Which is most accurate? No one can say for sure.
"This is why we are screaming bloody murder for all of these sites to be audited and certified," said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Every major Web site publisher and rating agency is under the gun to be audited and certified by an independent firm as it increasingly becomes more important for advertisers and others to know just how many people are visiting a site, viewing a page and clicking on an ad.
To hammer home that importance, eight big advertisers signed a document in August saying the fees they pay for Web ads will be calculated based only on audited, certified numbers, starting in mid-2007.
The Internet, as an advertising medium, has joined the big leagues alongside TV, print and radio. In the first six months of this year, advertisers spent $7.9 billion on U.S. Web ads, up 37% from the year-earlier period, says the IAB. Uncertainty about how many people are viewing a Web site, page or ad worries advertisers.
Of course its does. They want eyeballs because they think eyeballs on pages makes people see the adverts. How good is this as a metric?
When people can choose not to see advertising, they choose not to. So much for advertising.ClickZ has an interesting report.
Market research firm Compete has released a report on the convergence of social networking and e-commerce, and in the process has tried to coin a new buzzword: “social commerce,” or s-commerce for short.
The report, “s-commerce: beyond MySpace and YouTube,” finds consumer visits to social networking sites have increased 109 percent since January 2004, and page views per visitor have grown by 414 percent in the same time period. "Social networkers” spend less time viewing traditional media and have more discretionary income and agreater penchant for online shopping than non-social networking site users.
Marketers having the most success with s-commerce are using a combination of branded micro-sites, customer reviews, forums, peer-to-peer transactions, product blogs and user-generated content projects, according to Compete.
PC Advisor is whistling in the dark to keep its spirits up. There is a bubble 2.0 and it will burst.
One of the reasons why the first dotcom bubble popped was that many of the companies behind the unwarranted enthusiasm for e-everything assumed that people were eager to spend money on the internet, and that minor niggles such as web security wouldn't affect user confidence. But not enough 'normal' people were relying on the internet on a daily basis in 2000. And in the years that followed the daily security threats and arrival of hi-tech crime as a viable business ensured that few were prepared to reveal their credit card details to the wider web.
Six years later, however, things have c
Toni, we see here the break between old and new PR paradigm.
These concepts are significant to the constituencies involved. The exchange also demonstrates that we have a lot to lean about the nature of conversational relationships.
Historically, a person would provide a paper and circulate it for approval and comment – and that is what happened.
Now, there is a different way.
What if the paper is made available using any of the many forms of social media. It needs to be in one of the formats that can be progressively opened up for wider consultation, contribution and participation. It can be surrounded by debate and discussion (email, IM, Blog, wiki, Skype conference, meeting, congress etc), progressively it becomes the common property of all active, aware and latent participants.
This is not soft v hard, old v new it is just a way of creating a conversation. It is as old as mankind and as new as the Internet.
Well entrenched and robust views are still available in this model and progressively more evidence, research and resource can and should be added to enhance its value (peer reviewed knowledge added to any property enhances its value). Reasoned consideration can be in the hands of all participants – even the whole world.
The new way needs avail contribution to a conversation among active, aware and latent participants.
The nature of transparency, porosity and agency is the at the heart of this way of doing business.
As it turns out, you posting the papers, is a move in this direction but suppose the debate and discussion used modern communications tools. Would that not be more useful powerful and relevant?
The very fact that the initial paper is an old fashioned word processed document set the agenda.
The medium affected the message as much as the contribution by the participants.
One alternative might start like this: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhd98n6g_26f2twh2 and can then be moved to any number of channels for communication such as as a wiki, word document attachment by email, an email, a web page, a blog post, an instant message or even as (dead tree) paper.
Public Relations is changed but we have to walk the talk.
Ignorance, of course, is no defence when the participants are …… communicators?