Showing posts with label Agency issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agency issues. Show all posts

Monday, November 14, 2011

Dreaming into oblivion

Spurred by the responses to my enquiry into the attitudes of the CIPR presidential candidate's attitudes towards online public relations, I have been looking at the research and umpteen surveys (third party, good provenance,  UK centric, affecting online PR) available that could inform my thinking.

In the last year, there have been well over 100 items of research and surveys.

Many surveys would, in any other discipline be dismissed as fanciful.

For example, in an economy growing at less than 2% per annum:



  • The number of UK visits to internet video platforms in September rose by 36% year on year, to 785million[i]. 77% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2011[ii].
  • Debenhams unveiled a more than 70% rise in online sales during its latest financial year. Online value was up by 73.8% at £180.4m. Online now accounts for 7.4% of Debenhams’ total sales[iii].
  • Online grocery sales at Sainsbury’s grew in the order of 20% in the first half of its financial year.  Dairy Crest showed fast growth for its online grocery service. Sales are up  50% on its sales at the same time last year[iv].
  • Online retail in the UK will grow at a ten percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years[i].
  • Forrester projects that online retail across 17 of the largest EU markets in Western Europe will hit €114 billion by 2014
  • UK Internet use will be up by a factor of 3 in 5 years.
  • 190 million Europeans will shop online by 2014 (up from 141 million today).
  • Internet marketing budgets in the autumn of 2011 are up 16% and search marketing is up 9% four times more than all other marketing activity.
  • The console games sector remains the most lucrative platform. 
  • With an estimated £1.6bn spent on console gaming in 2011; £450m on PC/Mac games; £400m on casual games, £350m on MMOs and £330m on PC/Mac downloads with £300m on mobile gaming.
  • British gaming is big. We spend 43m hours gaming every day[i]
  • This is a huge sector and with Kinect being made available for PR applications, an interesting area for development[ii].
  • The cultural component of PR in areas like languages are also significant[i]
  • Human Resources and internal communication is now much predicated on the internet with some companies[i] creating social networks inside the firewall[ii]
  • recruitment today is mediated online[iii] with the UK lagging in international comparisons[iv].  Practitioners need the capability to manage corporate doubts and expectations to inculcate internet thinking as a culture[v].
  • Meantime 60% of organisations have not yet implemented internal social media training which is a serious internal communications issue[vi]
Fascinating stuff.

Then came the big story. 

The Connected Kingdom report of 2009 (PdF) revealed that the online commercial sector internet earnings is £360 billion. 

Now, as a very general rule of thumb if you add up the budgets of advertising, marketing and sales promotion of most companies you will find it is between 3-5%.  Is this £10 to £18 billion, I hear you ask.

Well the whole of the UK PR industry is worth £7.5 billion.

With a bit more calculation, I estimate that online PR is worth about £5 billion and is growing at the rate of 10% compound per year.

Is this reflected in the shape of the PR sector or are we dreaming that it might all go away and we can all go back to el Vino's.









    Thursday, August 04, 2011

    Reflections on PR productivity

    jellybean1233  http://bit.ly/nzXw81
    The Broadgate Mainland survey is a useful contributor in the development of improved productivity for the PR sector.

    We need to do something fast to reduce the effects of a perceived professional diversity trap brought about as a consequence of the present structure and practices in PR.

    The survey makes us very aware of the key role that a good old fashioned web site plays in Financial (and a lot of other) public/media relations.

    In addition, it offers insights into the role of social media as part of the communications mix that influences journalists and journalism.

    ABC data:
    A blow to an already struggling industry
    The Spectator http://bit.ly/pWC84N

    Because press agentry is such a big part of current PR practice, and because of the attrition of print media (see left), it is important that research into the interface between PR people and the press is better understood and that the interplay between PR and Journalistic actors is made much more productive.
















    Source: Paid Content http://bit.ly/aMGo7e

    The PR industry which is so dependant on media relations for its living has to acknowledge that it needs a thriving media sector to survive until it has adapted to the new environment. 









    The new environment is one where there are fewer editorial pages, fewer journalists per editorial page and where Radio, TV and digital (including social media) are even more important.

    It is now urgent that we develop, across the industry, some response to the implosion of the traditional media.

    There are a number of other indicators in the Broadgate Mainland survey  that show us where we might begin to look to make the PR industry much more effective and build a defence for the sector.

    As I have pointed out elsewhere, the PR industry is not the first to have a productivity issue and that we can learn from their experience.

    In the case of media relations, the best productivity driver is going to be a combination of quality management, cost reduction and satisfying the media that will eventually emerge from the ashes of the present industry.

    It is not the place of this blog to do all the research and to make recommendations to the industry and show it teaches best practice. 

    I can point out that PR is not alone, there is precedent and how research can inform the industry to help it become better at its job.



    In a post in May, I showed the anatomy of a news story (the killing of Osama Bin Laden). It was evident from the findings that there is an interplay between a range of media for all good stories. It is not one medium or another it is all media that really counts.

    In the meantime, who would not recognise a journalistic motivator when given this gem from Broadgate Mainland: "The number of hits a story receives has become the most popular measure of journalist success, followed by how an article is shared online." What this is telling us is that the media and the PR industry both have to take a multi-media view of media relations.

    From this, the PR industry can begin to assemble the information it needs to be more productive against a backdrop of a declining, but still critical, media relations practice.

    Online readership analysis – is bigger better?
     Show me numbers
    http://bit.ly/nZfF2K
    Here is an example:If journalists are motivated by the web effects of their stories, is the PR industry obsessed with getting stories published that achieve above the average  number of online page views for their stories in the publication's website?

    First we need the data (not hard - see graph) and then know what these data mean for practice.

    It is by examining these research findings and others that we can begin to find out what high quality looks like.

    For some it is the creativity of the original idea established in the strategy. For others, it may be the quality of writing and for another it may be way a story is pitched to the busy journalist.

    But for the journalist what is gold plated?

    Well, if the survey is to be believed, a happy editor and publisher is a good start and that means good clean original copy that can be used in the publication, blog and Twitter with a minimum of fuss and with every chance that it will go viral the instant 'enter' is clicked.

    For enhanced productivity, we can see that more research is needed and then recommendations can be made, best practice can be developed and practitioners and students can be inspired.

    Having a sense of what we need to deliver by way of quality, can we gain some idea of what we seek by way of cost reduction?

    Productivity tools may be helpful http://bit.ly/nSrBTS
    The practitioner should now be informed about how to manage time and resource to achieve out-takes.

    Hit rate, that is, the number of relevant citations matching the campaign objectives (citations in selected magazines, web sites, social media etc should all count today), is a way of measuring out-take. Too many citation or too few citations in selected media are inefficient. This means that setting realistic out-take objectives is important (and because 'all publicity is good publicity' remains a top priority for a lot of clients, now is the time to check them for blood stained knuckles).

    Time/cost ratio of output to out-take is what the industry needs to understand and work on. Another way of looking at press relations is the the reach and frequency of citations in selected media per input hour/cost.

    What the table (above) is really saying, and it is only one of many productivity tools that can be used, is that there is another way of distributing press releases that has an inherent  and minimum10% productivity advantage. In an industry that grew 13% last year and which is outperforming the market profitability should be brilliant. But its not. Essentially, the industry is living on borrowed time and the long hours of a measly paid workforce.

    When looking at services, in house practitioners and agencies should look at their functionality AND productivity gain. Today week Precise launched its new combined monitoring and media contact service.

    Here is a case of an integrated service that could offer productivity advantages. But it is a service a million miles from the industry that persists in wanting dusty old paper press clippings as evidence of effectiveness.

    Now my cry goes up... who in the PR industry is going to take productivity seriously and take it to the CIPR, PRCA, the universities and other major agencies of the profession?

    The industry needs press relations but it also needs to mitigate press relations damage to its productivity.

    Tuesday, July 19, 2011

    How can we make the PR industry more productive and profitable?

    Mac Funamizu

    Over the weekend I stuck my neck out and suggested that the PR industry needed to be more selective in its activities to release practitioners from the low paid, low productivity trap, short term future it faced by being so immersed in press relations.

    Yesterday, I suggested that the industry is a poor performer among a range of sectors with significantly better productivity.

    Peter Smith took me to task. He asked if I had any solutions!

    In this post I want to extend my brief reply to him in the CIPR group in Linkedin. Here I explore some of the ways I believe the PR industry can escape the low cost trap it has got itself into and evolve into a much more powerful profession.

    I did make the point that to see how we can enhance the profession, there is a case for looking at different sectors to see what they have done.

    At this time, as the Fourth Estate, Parliament and the Police squabble of the role of journalists and their place in PR, we too can have the same debate. There is a good case for PR to look much more closely at the value of the involvement of journalists in PR. Much of the argument I exercised in my post last Saturday. Today, I would extend those arguments a little. There is a place for a form of press officer to be employed in building and maintaining relationships between and organisation and its press (radio and TV) news journalist publics. They can be drawn from the media, re-trained and deployed. In the same way, there is a case for similar skills in online video media, text based social media, Website design and deployment, SEO, social and event organisation for face to face relationship management, Augmented Reality, widgetry and so forth.

    No doubt, as the profession evolves clients will expect PR agencies to have such skills available as a matter of course.

    However, having such skills available will not achieve the sea change needed by the PR industry.

    First the industry must be much more ambitious in what it wants to achieve. It might, for example set itself the target of being in the top quartile of economic sectors by way of productivity (using all three of the methodologies usually associated with economic productivity evaluation).

    Secondly, the industry might, just as other industries have done, go to the PR and management colleges to identify how the industry can seek more productive services, make existing products and services more effective (profitable), train for and deploy them.

    Thirdly, the PR sector needs take corporate management and practitioners along with it. No mean task and there will be exemplars and detractors and huge resistance.

    The Chartered Institute of Marketing now includes a good module on Reputation Management as part of its Diploma. There is a good case for the PR institutions such as the CIPR, PRCA, IABC and the PR universities to make sure that senior management (the people who employ marketing directors/mangers) understand that press relations and reputation management are only a small part of the PR whole.

    I do not want this post to be too overshadowed by the News of the World, hacking story but, it is by no means a co-incidence that a policeman thought that a News of the World journalist was his answer to solving his PR needs. Had the PR industry made its role clear, he would not today be appearing before a Parliamentary Committee.

    Of course, it is reasonable to ask what kind of changes would David Phillips envisage that could make so much difference? Is this just whistling in the dark as the PR industry looses face because a bunch of ill informed politicians and policemen joined some equally poorly informed industrialist hired inadequates to 'do their PR'?

    In all I would like to see a three fold increase in PR productivity over three years.

    The plan will have to consider where early improvements in current practice should be made; where change can be implemented with lowest disruption and optimum return and finally how the sector can move towards greater reliance on advanced productive diversity in practice as well as people.

    This means that:

    1. A large proportion of the improvement would have to come from PR as it is practised today. That is, largely predicated on press relations and events management.
    2. A range of enhanced value activities will need to be exploited which will inevitably mean a move up market into management consultancy and a move sideways to create greater breadth and depth in relationship management (and thereby reputation and brand enhancement).
    3. A very significant deployment of opinion to show the value of a holistic approach to management of relationships by the most senior management of, even the largest, institutions.

    There is a case of examining other industries which have been in a similar dilemma. Can the PR industry look at other sectors to get some idea of what is possible?

    I was working in Bradford in the 1960's when the textile industry was imploding and in manufacturing in the 1980's when we saw carnage in areas like machine tools, car manufacturing and many others.

    As I alluded to in my post in Linkedin, the companies and whole sectors that came through these times did a number of extra ordinary things.

    Today, the apparel industry in the UK is strong and the fashion industry is worth £21 billion.

    One only has to think of the high levels of productivity and quality achieved by the motor manufacturers by Nissan in Sunderland and Honda in Swindon or the Airbus aircraft manufacturing capability to see just how much can change when the effort is put in.

    The £100 billion internet industry and the highly productive music industries in the UK are examples of how success can come out of adversity once the people involved realise the opportunities available and the production and change that is required to become globally competitive.

    In examining what other sectors have achieved, can PR learn the lessons and move forward?

    I can imagine some of the first things that the PR industry can do.

    The first is to look at under performing activities and either ship them out to low cost suppliers or automated the process.

    In almost every PR office and agency in the land there are interns. Many of them do lowly jobs like filling envelopes, maintaining libraries of magazines and newspapers, prepare clip books and other tasks that consume time and are labour intensive.

    The task here is to look at the lowest paid people, examine the tasks they perform and the reasons for them and the enhance such activities to become less labour intensive, higher value and profitable.

    If, for example the library activities (press clips, evaluation reports and magazine libraries) of interns was transformed into corporate intelligence, and insights to allow deeper understanding and acquisition of knowledge for all the client board of directors, the mundane jobs would become interesting and very valuable. So much of these tasks can be transformed using modern technologies.

    At the same time some activities can be shipped out such that, for example, filling envelopes could be part of corporate social responsibility programmes giving work to the most disadvantaged in our society.

    Having turned the intern's most dreary work into a highly significant, intellectually challenging and adsorbing services and removed the lowest value add activities, an immediate advantage is available to every PR office in the country.

    What then of the next lowest paid member of staff. Here again, close examination of the activity, its transformation from low value to highest value can be achieved with imagination and application.

    A typical example is the (I really can't believe I am writing this) chore of researching and building media and other lists.

    Part of the role of the new intern activity will identify those clusters of interest (the nexus of values) and the people with particular interest in such values. Such activities are part of semantic search. If the Bank of England can use such capabilities (to identify economic trends) using Search and Twitter trends, so too can the PR industry. Its not just Twitter but many other forms of expression in media as diverse as computer games, motives for attending events, other social media, corporate transparency and other on and off-line activities that can transform the idea of finding opinion forming and behaviour enhancing activists.

    From such developments, the junior account executive's life is transformed from magazine list building into transformative PR campaign management. From just lists of magazines and journalists the activity engages real people and the their motivations. The work of 26% of practitioners paid less than £25,000 per years (according to the PRW/PRCA sector report) is transformed into activities worth as much as a £40,000 a year Media Manager/account Director. The productivity gain is considerable.

    This kind of activity is iterative. Take the lowest value activity and develop it into the highest value added activity until you reach the highest paid executive in the organisation/department and productivity enhancements will be extraordinary.

    High on the list of priorities in the 70's was quality. Total Quality Management which examined those areas which had lowest quality was worked on until it had the highest quality returns and iteratively, all activity was examined and improved. This was followed by Right First Time. This "do it one and do it right" principle would cut approval costs very quickly.

    In another time and in another industry, we went through such challenges and can now apply them to PR.

    The first problem we faced then and PR faces now is being able to measure quality.

    In almost every PR office you will hear the baleful cry of 'I am waiting for press release/tweet/blogpost approval'. Here is a measure of quality. Approvals, if they are needed should be a joy to give not a chore for the manager involved. Cutting number of people involved and approval times will cut costs significantly.

    Imagine, if you will, measuring the uptake of press releases without the awful and demeaning phone round. "did, you receive my press release?" THAT sort of phone call is a symptom of poor quality. Measuring it will immediately focus attention on a productivity leaching activity.

    Developing the 'Right First Time' capability is only one part of the process. The other is in motivating the approver such that approval is quick and a joy.

    Some of this activity will, no doubt, include that good old fashioned process of delegating up the management chain. Most people delegate down and that is a PR mindset. Try working the other way round.

    One of the other major developments we learned all those years ago was the need to be in the vanguard of innovative practice. In PR there are a lot of things we can do to innovate and at present, there are many ways we can enhance corporate relationship management with very exciting new approaches to PR.

    I hinted at some of the areas we can look into. At the tactical level there are exciting opportunities in areas such as online video media, text based social media, Website design and deployment, SEO, social and event organisation for face to face relationship management, Augmented Reality, smart phone games, widgetry and many more. They all interlock. Would you believe that journalists like widgets too?

    However, such activities are quite mundane when looking at what is available just over the current horizon.

    In the development of the high value added sectors in our economy, decisions are constantly being made as to whether it is more effective to make of buy. This means that the PR industry may well become a major economic driver in its own right. It will need a much bigger supply base and that is no bad thing and a big advantage for the sector. The upstream economic value of say the UK Space industry is such that it is needed by governments to enhance national GDP, employment and global influence.

    This is another advantage of making the PR industry more productive (as though growth, profitability and global leadership was not enough).

    But the industry does have to go much further.

    Being not the participant but the initiator of developing vision, mission, objectives and values at the most senior level is a start and when applied to organisational relationships is quite a challenge. It is a challenge that the PR industry is quite capable of meeting.

    As greater transparency becomes the norm (and here we get back to one of the outcomes to anticipate from the Hacking scandal) and transparency technologies gain in momentum (a consequence of the semantic web and the Internet of Things), the PR sector will become ever closer to being the expert in developing facilitators as well as drivers of corporate effectiveness.

    To be able to do these things, the overarching need is to re-look at the data from the PRW/PRCA research and take from it the urgent need to increase PR sector productivity by factors.

    Image by Mac Funamizu http://petitinvention.wordpress.com

    Saturday, July 16, 2011

    Press relations as a PR practice - a diversity trap for practitioners

    This week-end will be the first without the News of the World at our newsagents.

    It marks another occasion when the number of editorial pages that could be influenced by the media relations sector of PR shrinks.

    This post explores print media as an arena for future public relations practice.

    The prospects do not look good.

    The reality seems to be that there is a declining appetite for the kind of media to which we are accustomed.

    This has consequences for both existing practitioners and the likes of Amanda Andrews of the Telegraph Media Group (since 2008) who announced this week that she is about to jump ship to Freud Communications in the role of head of media, focusing on technology, media and telecoms clients.

    There already seems to be some reluctance to recruit from the media. A number of senior ex-News of the World journalists have enquired about PR jobs, reported PR Week. But recruitment consultants have warned that the paper's 'toxic' reputation could harm their chances of making the transition.

    In a word, will there be any media for these journalists to talk to?

    Yesterday (14 July 2011), Fraser Nelson the editor of The Spectator (and ex-political columnist for the News of the World) wrote about how British newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and influence. He said that on Sunday "we will see just how much this process has accelerated." Graphically, he showed that average circulation of daily newspapers is now lower than the worst days of the 1940's Blitz and for Sunday titles, we have to go back to the 1930's depression to find comparably low circulation.

    Notably, the trends show steady decline from the 1960's and very rapid decline over the last decade.

    In the same week Mark Sweney of the Guardian reported that "...the move to close the NoW was taken on political grounds in a bid to contain the phone-hacking scandal, it is nevertheless a hammer blow – potential relaunch notwithstanding – to a sector where publishers are trying to wrestle with high costs against a backdrop of declining revenues."

    He quotes Adam Smith, director at WPP's media buying network Group M: "It is like taking Channel 4 off-air on Sundays, you are suddenly taking out 20%-plus of the market, it is really substantial with no other home [for advertisers] to really go to."

    Smith makes the point that: "Taking the NoW's total 7 million readership out of the equation is massive, as there really is no substitute and the market is already not in great shape generally."

    Rob Lynam, head of press and media agency MEC, is reported saying: "The Sunday model is busted," adding: "The cost base on Sunday titles is significantly higher than running a daily and publishers are looking to reduce overheads. That is why News International is moving to a seven-day model, that is why Guardian Media Group made changes to the Observer and so on."

    In the same article we discover that in May 2007 the total circulation of Sunday newspapers was 12.5m; by May this year it had fallen 22% to 9.7m, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Advertisers have also walked away, with display advertising revenue down by more than 25% over the same period, from £406m to £303m. By comparison the daily national newspaper market has seen a slight increase over the past four years – although it is a very mixed picture with the only major winners the Sun, Metro and Daily Star.

    If the model for newspapers is bad, spare a thought for the celebrity titles.

    The Mail Online reports that circulation figures for Hello! and OK! make sorry reading.

    During the second half of last year the average net circulation for Hello! was 527,000 per issue and that for OK! 487,000 from previous levels as high as 800,000 and 600,000 respectively.

    Dominic Ponsford reporting in Press Gazette earlier this year showed that second half of 2010 UK market for print consumer magazines was still in decline overall. Overall, the UK's top 100 purchased magazine titles had an average per-issue total circulation of 28,844,482 - which was a 4.1 per cent decline year on year. A continuing trend.

    Is this just an issue for consumer magazines? It seems not.

    A Mashable report seems to show that the magazine format has its own problems among consumers. While digital downloads may be down, compared to the print equivalent they “roughly correlate their performance on the newsstand.” Based on the numbers, the decline may not be a lack of interest in the iPad as a digital print platform but rather a general disinterest in magazines.

    In the B2B sector life is not very different.

    Recently, business publisher Centaur Media announced it was merging its business publishing group – which includes The Lawyer and Money Marketing and it confirmed disposal of titles like The Recruiter, The Logistics Manager and Process Engineering. In November 2009 Haymarket announced the closure of the print edition of Media Week with the axing of 18 out of 58 editorial jobs across the media group as monthly title Revolution went quarterly and the websites Marketing Direct and Promotions and Incentives were merged into Brand Republic. It is putting its network of media titles behind online paywalls from July including Brand Republic, PR Week, Marketing, Campaign and Media Week. We also heard that United Business Media has sold its licensed trade titles to rival William Reed. In addition, Accountancy Age and Computer Weekly both abandoning the weekly news magazine format after more than 40 years and going online only.

    Ben Dowell at the Guardian reports that there were 4,733 UK B2B titles being published in October 2010, compared to 5,108 five years earlier.

    This decline in support of the media from marketing budgets is part of a significant trend according to PR Week. It reported the the second quarter IPA/BDO Bellwether Report showing marketing budgets were to reduce spend by 4.2% and a decline in PR budgets as well.

    This is reflected in a number of other reports. Wark reports on a study suggesting: "The year has proved harder going, particularly in print, and there is a similar narrative coming out of the other big European economies."

    So we see the long term decline in print and this must have an effect at some time on the media relations sector of the PR industry.

    Meantime, television is doing very well and radio listeners, who were found to be (PDF)  happier than TV watchers and Internet users, reached its highest audience level ever in Q1, 2011 and the internet goes from strength to strength.

    There are, no doubt, a lot of people who would argue that print media is only going through a trough and it will bounce back. However, this has the smack of whistling in the dark. The trends are long term and few in publishing seem to have any mould breaking ideas.

    Of course, no one should make assumptions about the UK media without reference to Michael Bromley, Visiting Professor in Journalism at City University London, UK Media Landscape study. An enthusiast for the press he may be, but has made the point about the future of newspapers and magazines very well.

    Against this backdrop one might expect the PR industry to be on its knees.

    But we hear from PR Week that PR is doing well. The International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) reported that the UK PR industry sector witnessed a 13% increase in overall fee revenue, a figure similarly reflected by PR Week's Top 150 PR Consultancies 2011 report, which showed the average growth for a PR agency in 2010 was 9.24 per cent.

    Perhaps we find some of the answers in the 2011 PR Census, a joint PR Week and PRCA research project, published this week.

    It is a thorough study of the British PR industry and shows UK PR industry contributes £7.5bn to the economy and employs some 61,600 people.

    PR could be compared to the UK space sector which is also worth around £7.5 billion to the economy. Space directly employs almost 25,000 people - so there is a considerable - a factor of 2.5 - productivity gap.

    At last we begin to see what is happening to the PR industry. It is really dying.

    What I read in the statistics is that there are far too many people doing media relations in the shrinking press relations sector which is depressing incomes and opportunities.

    85% of practitioners include 'General Media Relations' as part or all of their work (84% are also involved in Media relations strategy planning).

    Perhaps it is not surprising that with the media in such dire straights that the part of the PR sector involved in media relations (at least 77% have a direct role) has such a poor productivity performance compared to more advanced industries. Working on average 46.5 hours per week, PR people are doing everything they can to sustain a form of practice that is on the way out.

    The numbers offer us an even worse view. 70% of people employed in the PR sector are aged between 25 and 44. This is in the prime of their career, the springboard for their future and it looks bleak.

    Indeed the profile looks like white, middle class, middle aged women fighting for a falling slice of shrinking media pages available for editorial content and paid very little for long hours in a dying sector.

    We are fooled by the growth in the industry as it bounces back from the recession in 2008 and we see higher turnover based on sweated labour offering misleading and what can only be temporary margins.

    In an industry that prides itself on significance to corporate governance, it is evident that this is not a very profitable career choice. Only 30% of the people employed in PR earn £50,000 or more or the going rate for the mass of qualified Financial Accountants. For the average PR CEO/director in a salary of £83,000 is good which compares to the 40%of financial directors in the FT 250 who earn between £300,000 and £499,000 per year.

    Media relations would seem to be holding the PR industry back, depressing salaries and creating a diversity trap for practitioners.


    Image: DEATH A GROWTH INDUSTRY from Scrape TV

    Thursday, May 05, 2011

    The anatomy of news

    It was late on May Day 2011 when Kristen Urbahn’s life changed.  At precisely 7.24 in the evening, her husband changed the way the whole world understood that news was no longer the purview of the ‘news media’.  Of course for the Tweeting wife (@KLF0131) with a husband at work and a big house move on her mind, the emerging seismic global realisation may not have been big on her list of top events. After all, she and her husband had been in public life long enough for her to know that momentous events often come from the White House and her interest in the two Dachshunds, evident in her Facebook profile,  probably were a higher priority .

    A graduate of University of Kentucky in 2006 Kristen Urbahn  (nee Forcht), a one time staff assistant at the Republican Leaders Office in Washington and treasurer of the Christian Law Society, moved into Capitol Hill North on Aug. 18, 2009. It was time for a move when Yale graduate Keith was catapulted into global headlines.  The imminent announcement of Osama Bin Ladin’s death came from Keith, a one time navy intelligence officer and Chief of Staff for former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted “I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.” 

    He was not the first reporter. Shortly after 4pm EST on 1 May Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was live-tweeting a series of helicopter flypasts and explosions and was unwittingly covering the US forces raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Meanwhile somewhere in the vicinity @m0hcin was reporting too.

    The news was out.

    According to Brian Williams, the “NBC Nightly News” anchor, some journalists received a three-word e-mail that simply read, “Get to work.”

    The Horn picks up the story: “At 9:45 p.m., Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communication Director, tweeted “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time,” a message that was shared with White House press corps. The president had not spoken by that time but news outlets like CNN, New York Times, and CBS among others confirmed Osama’s death by 10:40 p.m."

    10:25 – Twitter is on fire, with a tweet from a CBS news Producer (Jill Jackson) with fewer than 4500 Twitter followers) confirming a leak that Bin Laden is dead retweeted over 1000 times
    10:50 – The White House invites Facebook users to discuss the pending announcement (where the Presidential address is also scheduled to be broadcast)
    10:53 – print media demonstrates where it can’t compete so well, with a journalist for a major national magazine noting that this announcement was going to “profoundly screw up” their Royal Wedding edition.
    11:15 – Osama Bin Laden’s death confirmed by the White House

    At 11:35 p.m, President Obama addressed the nation to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an operation carried out by US Navy SEAL's.

    For Kristen Urbahn, thoughts of house moves and the dogs vanished.

    Obama’s announcement was more of a confirmation to millions of Twitter and Facebook users around the world who were informed about the Al Qaeda leader’s death through social media platforms.
    A soldier in Afghanistan learned about the death of Osama bin Laden on Facebook, reported the Washington Times. A TV producer in South Carolina got a tip from comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter. A blues musician in Denver received an email alert from The New York Times. And a Kansas woman found out as she absently scrolled through the Internet on her smartphone while walking her dog.

    A Guardian article revealed that the spike was so large that some news sites were struggling to cope, and seeing their response times slowed so that they took six times longer to respond, or even crashed under the load. Mobile sites were particularly vulnerable as people logged in from smartphones wherever they were to read the news.

    Twitter announced that “from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second.” The number surpassed 5,000 at 11 p.m. and remained that way past the president’s remarks with details reported CNN.

    At geo-location service Foursquare, more than 185 people in San Francisco had "checked in" to a "Post-Osama bin Laden World" using their smartphones.

    Although Keith Urbahn says "My source was a connected network TV news producer. Stories about 'the death of MSM' because of my "first" tweet are greatly exaggerated," He is in the spotlight.  The confirming Tweet from Jill Jackson created the storm.

    It was Twitter that fired off the media coverage and required fast work from the traditional media to catch up to compete and feed the social media frenzy. The mix of media interaction and aggregation  is also fascinating with the BBC using Google Maps to show the site of Bin Laden’s hideaway. This is complete change in media dynamics as we understood it only months ago.

    The reach of this story is astonishing and reflects so much of what we understand about how social media in particular takes information from organizations and spreads it round the world. No one could doubt that the media, and ordinary people, fed the frenzy fast. Some information passed on and was fresh, some was a bit old (in internet time) before it was shared. The timeliness of response and reaction is a study in how fast information is now shared.

    We know that organizations are porous and that information leaks out of organization, including the White House. Keith Urbahn and Jill Jackson  not only knew, they made the intelligence public really fast and to a fast growing audience.

    What makes this story so fascination is the extent to which we can explore the lives of the actors.  Such is the transparency provided by the internet, we even know the names of Kristen Urbahn’s dogs and a very human story is told.

    The abundance of information and necessary curation needed to bring the strands together is part of the process of understanding what is useful  and helpful but what  happened in the hours and days after the event are equally fascinating. The nature of internet agency has changed people’s lives.  

    Keith and Kristen Urbahn have become inextricably linked to the events in Pakistan and Washington.  Coffee shop owner, Sohaib Athar a graduate of Preston University, has been plucked from obscurity and will forever be associated with the events of May 1 2011. "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it," he tweeted after connecting president Obama's announcement to what was taking place in his neighbourhood.

    While this story is one of our times, the nature of Reach,  Timelessness,  Transparency,  Porosity,   Aggregation,  Abundance,  Curation and Internet agency are by no means a mystery.  

    Five years before Kristen went to university, in a shed/come office in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge,  the notion of these drivers formed into the book Online Public Relations which is now a best seller with a third edition already on its way.