X-Factor Directors Beware

An open letter the corporate managers

Dear Director

For all but a few company directors, the breathtakingly successful money making machine, The X-Factor, must have seemed as much a fairy tale as father Christmas. That is until Jon and Tracy Morter, launched a successful campaign to prevent The X Factor notching up yet another Christmas number one and replaced the top spot with Rage Against The Machine, a rap metal act.

At that point the rules were broken. All that marketing investment, with an average of 16 million people watching a brand on line every week, surely must mean that it will be the brand leader.

BBC News Entertainment correspondent Colin Paterson said “It is simply one of the biggest shocks in chart history.” Bookies for the last few years have only been taken bets on who would be Number 2, because X Factor always won by a clear margin. It only took a campaign from a Husband and his Wife, to take away the strangle hold that Simon Cowell had on the festive charts.

Rage Against The Machine had set two new records, for the first single to reach Christmas No 1 from purely download sales, and for the fastest selling download single ever. This is not because everyone suddenly got honest a British Phonographic Industry (BPI) survey has revealed that despite stringent measures for controlling illegal music download, one in every three consumers still get their music via illegal web sites.

This is a really high profile warning. It is alarm bells sounding for every board room.

Why is this?

It is because Internet agency, transparency, richness and reach, crushed the establishment and established management thinking in a few days.

This is not a new phenomena, all manner of industry sectors have been changed by the internet.

Cast around and look at retail banking or fashion or logistics and distribution, or perhaps the mail. Even the darlings of the digital age are being caught off guard.

The UK’s first home online banking services were set up by the Nottingham Building Society (NBS) in 1983. But it was not until 2007 that the electronic banking system changed banking forever in an unusual financial panic event. A banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot honour its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic.

Like the Christmas number one, the nature of the event was unexpected. It was a manifestation not so much of the web but of the internet at work. Big internet enabled systems are essential but their use has to be managed.

No one believed you could sell clothes online but today Jaeger said its online retailing operation now ranked as its second largest store after Regent Street in London. The ‘Threshers’ name is to disappear from the High Street tomorrow as the remaining stores close because of online competition.

2010 will continue to be tough for retailers, according to a new report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), and yet online retailing will continue to outperform high street shops. But we will continue to see manufactures spend more on Point of Sale than Point and Click.

Should the public know what is in the warehouses of transport companies? UPS.com makes a virtue of declaring the most up-to-date information about the status of shipment. Shipment movement information is captured each time a tracking label is scanned in the UPS delivery system. This is serious transparency and a different way of managing. But when will we see it applied to the last mile delivery or how long will the Government be able to support Royal Mail's pension deficit of £6.8bn before a big change upsets the apple cart.

“Everyone is selling something they don't have possession of, and the cost and revenue are not linked,” said Andrew Bud, chairman of mobile billing company mBlox at the Future of Mobile event, run by Westminster eForum in October. “There will be an initial boost but it will then come crashing down, unless there is a radical change in the business model,” reported eWeek in the wake of a huge data failure by O2 this weekend.

The OECD presented evidence three years ago of blurring of the distinction between manufacturing and services (PdF). It’s simple to understand why. Manufactured goods are, by historic standards, wholly reliable. When buying a car, does one buy the design, an intangible, the chassis, engine or wheels? No. We buy the service package. The regular servicing, the automated fault finding from the on board computer and so forth. Do you really know where your car was made? Did the engine come from South Wales or Mr. Tieyan (Tony) Xing from Shanghai Tongxiang? You see, I know his name but not the name of the company representative from Ford at Bridgend. Trading with Mr Xing is fast and I buy from the man not the company.

So that is how Jon and Tracy Morter upset the marketing traditions of more than a century. They are people more real in Facebook that Simon Cowell with 177,000 fans with whom he can have no conversation at all (too many people).

By comparison the Morters have lots of interesting people involved and offering stuff and a manageable number of friends and the interesting Rage Factor page and site.

We have, after a very long time, reached a tipping point. The levels of involvement of ‘the commons’ are such that they have real power. The power is irresistible the Bastille will eventually fall. This is as powerful as the near revolution that brought about the Reform Acts combined with the advent of the Edmond Burke’s forth estate. It is a power that will be more potent because it is still evolving in very dramatic ways ten times faster and, after a pretty average period of development, sooner than most believed.

The lessons are all there. If you are a traditional company or not:

• The next internet event will affect the most conservative industries as well as the most ‘with it’.
• Your company will have to face a very big marketing and organisational shock soon.
• The internet is now being taken over with masses of information not of your making but about you, your company and its stakeholders and its impact is direct and fast.
• Someone in your organisation must be monitoring the internet in real time.
• If your company managers do not have digital plans for 2010 ask them to justify why not.
• If you do not see significant re-structuring of management budgets and personnel deployment this year, you should ask why your organisation is immune from Internet effects – and get back a very convincing argument.
• Take down the silo walls when talking about the internet because its affects everyone (young and old, men, women, skilled and unskilled, graduate and school leaver).
• There are no digital experts but there are some well informed people who try to understand.

Last year was the last year to experiment, that window is now gone. It’s time to take the internet very much more seriously.

The anatomy of a crisis

You are invited to watch a PR crisis being played out in front of you.

The University of East Anglia is in the eye of a storm about emails that cast doubt on the accepted wisdom of human involvement in climate change.

I am conducting a series of monthly reviews across the whole of the web showing how this crisis is affecting the reputation of the University - and you can come and watch too.

This crisis also affects science, climate change scientists, governments and politics across the world and there are issues now emerging that affect the nature of science and politics and climate change and global warming.

This is quite transparent research. You too can watch it and can have access to the data.


The first data available is a view of the major semantic drivers evident from internet citations.

You can see the semantic drivers affecting the University of East Anglia here http://bit.ly/8SdZwf

The effect in comment on climate change and global warming is shown in the results here http://bit.ly/5PeNrs

In both cases you can use the slider to go back a year which helps you see how the issues change. At the end of each month the 'Wall' will be updated but every day you can see the new citations that will be added for analysis and presentation in the following month.

In addition, every week, I will present on my blog leverwealth.blogspot.com an analysis of the number of citations identified each day and the citation broken down into news sites, blogs, discussion lists etc.

I will be saving all the citations for both these projects and will make available to universities the list of citations, the most covered national audiences, type of web site (news, blog, discussion list etc), numbers of citations per day etc.

This will mean that, for the first time ever (and as the newspaper paywalls go up) possibly the last time forever, we will have a comprehensive view of the anatomy of a crisis online for research today and in the future.

Below you will find a list of significant climate change bloggers, a Google map showing how far the story has spread and other facilities that a reputation manager might use at a time like this.

Who and how is reporting on the University of East Anglia

A really quick way of finding the most authoritative sources talking about a subject is to use a semantic site search.

For The University of East Anglia, it may be helpful to know which are the most authoritative sources

I have not yet got the widget to work but this link will take you to the site.

The Real Time Web

‘You can't ignore the real-time Web’ claimed Gartner Analyst James Lundy in his keynote address to the Collaborate 2.0 Summit in October 2009.

The web has always been close to real time. That was its attraction from the start. Digital was more flexible and faster to process than analogue communication. But for non geeks the Real Time Web has become fashionable. It's fashionable because of the phenomenal rise of Twitter. Twitter, now over three years old, showed everyone how fast information was spread across the web by social networks. Closely behind Twitter is Google’s Wave, a service for instant key-stroke-by-key-stroke communication and interaction.

Lundy points out that companies, particularly publicly traded and regulated ones, are concerned about real time services for one simple reason -- compliance, a requirement that companies keep track of communications related to company business.

But companies can't ignore the popularity of these services or their inevitable use, said Lundy. He recalled, for example, being in meeting with a Wall Street client who said instant messaging wasn't allowed at their firm.

"The minute those managers leave, we asked the other people in the room and they said, 'Absolutely, we still do it,' referring to instant messaging."

Brian Morrissey reported on Diet Coke’s initiatives in Real Time Web in AdWeek last November noting that

“Marketers including Burger King and Adidas are warming up to real-time Web content, mirroring a shift in digital media away from asynchronous communication and content delivery (e.g., the sending of e-mails and watching posted videos) towards instant feedback and interaction. Upping the ante for these marketers are real-time systems like Twitter and Facebook, which mix content delivery with communication, making something hours' old seem stale.

People, and notably companies, found they needed to be better informed and they needed to watch for mentions online and, urgently, Twitter as well as blogs and other social media.

But what do we mean by Real Time Web? Daniel Tenner described it well in his blog post:

“Real-time web” can mean any number of things, from “live updates without refreshing the page” to “see text as it’s typed”, but all those are technological rather than conceptual definition. At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow. Something happens (whether it’s someone typing a message to you or Michael Jackson dying) and you find out about it immediately (or nearly so).

Monitoring the internet and specific content on the internet is not new. Organisation that offer such services include news monitoring by Google (Google Alerts), Technorati, CyberAlert and eWatch There are companies that exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. They cover blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, bulletin boards and discussion lists. Meanwhile the traditional press clipping agencies such as Factiva, Moreover, Durrants and Cision still keep a wary eye on newspapers and magazines and re-digitise the content for computers to analyse.

Some of these vendors offer regular updates every day, some hourly and some, like Google Alerts in near real time.

There are other services that help organisations such as RSS and Atom feeds that poll web sites at regular (typically hourly) intervals. Then there are the real time services based on a simple, open, server-to-server ‘web-hook-based’ pubsub (publish/subscribe)’ protocol extension to Atom and RSS called the PubSubHubbub protocol that can get near-instant notifications when a topic (feed URL) is updated.

Real Time Web is available using such services. They are time consuming to set up and the client needs to know which sites to monitor in advance. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds.

Code named Wasabi from Netvibes is a widget service that will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

More contenders in this field are covered in a guest article in Mashable, the Social Media guide by Bernard Moon, who recognises a level of hype about the issue.

So what we find is a host of services covering a wide range of online and offline media.

Very few services are real time. They offer monitoring at intervals and where these services are swift they do not include all the channels out there.

There is one further flaw.

None of these services comprehensively monitors all the content that is publically available online.

There are so many channels for communication online that it is hard to watch them all. Some are, and will remain niche and almost insignificant. Others, though of little consequence in themselves feed the big beasts of the internet.

Much of the content is driven by bots and other automated services and there is still spam galore.

The service provided by Klea Global through its www.nextmention.com service resolves these two big issues. It monitors’ the web for everything and provides ten minute updates free and real time updates in its soon to be announces premium service.

Of course, this is by no means ideal because the many divergent channels from web sites to news to blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks and all the rest are all jumbled up in the instant feed.

The service is more coherent on the Nextmention site which used a Bayesian bot to sort out the pages into media types and more developments in this direction are anticipated.

There are some other services that are worthy noting and which show how Real Time Web is driving a need for more and faster services. Topsy (http://topsy.com) is a real time search engine that stand out because it focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can even sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month. Meantime rumours have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot (http://oneriot.com/) offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results.

Meantime, People like Nova Sivack lead us to the problems this content and these services present. He writes in his blog Minding the Planet:

“In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something.”

This is where some of the thinking for the next phase of internet development is going on and how in a very short time one can imagine services that address both these problems with the Real Time Web..

The Tesco Story - A little help from online friends needed

I came across a video about Tesco that has been viewed a million times. Even for the biggest retailer in the country that is a bit excessive and all the more so because it was an activist video.

I just had to dig further.

On June 29th 2008, David Smith and Zoe Wood reported on the Annual General Meeting of Tesco. Tesco, like all big, successful companies has its detractors. At the time, the company accounted for £1 of every £7 spent at British shops, was facing the effects of recession, high input costs and resurgent competitors.

Tesco is the fourth most visited retail site in the UK, it had 32 million web page impressions claiming some form of allegiance and its sites www.tesco.com, www.tescoreports.com, www.tescocorporate.com (which had lost the link to the financial consultancy Investis) and tescoplc.com where its press releases and CSR policy statements are published.

According to David Bowen in an FT article in May 2006: "The web is even more important than newsreaders in the area of social responsibility. Whether a company is trying to provide data on waste, to explain how friendly it is to the community, or to lay out its policy on child labour, it cannot do so in sound bites – it needs space, and a website has more space than any other channel.

"Tesco and Sainsbury both understand this, though having looked at their sites I fear they may also believe CSR is a sub-division of marketing. What surprised me more than this is the variation, and in places lack of interest, I found as I wandered round other giant retailers’ websites."


But in June 2008 the message had not gone home. Contributing to the Boards woes were a number of issue campaigners:

• The celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall campaigning for higher-welfare chickens in Tesco stores; 
  
• Jim McLaughlin, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) in Arizona, told shareholders and the board that 'We are here to inquire why there has been no dialogue in the US, whereas in the UK it is an established practice for Tesco to engage with unions; 
  
• The anti-poverty charity War on Want alleged that Tesco is being supplied by an Indian factory where textile workers struggle to survive on less than £1.50 a day and a 60-hour week; 
  
• Activists had, according to Smith and Wood, also accused Tesco of bringing tons of produce to Britain from crisis-torn Zimbabwe 
  
• The company, it was reported, had become the shorthand villain of the piece for campaigners who blame supermarkets for driving local businesses out of towns and villages.
  

Robert Clark, an analyst at Retail Knowledge Bank was reported to likening the situation to the mid-Nineties, when Sainsbury's was the market leader but lost its crown after it was seen to become arrogant and lose touch with shoppers - an environment that enabled Tesco to expand rapidly.

Both sides of the arguments appear in social media like blogs, discussion lists and videos and there were those million YouTube views.... surely that MUST be ringing bells!

The remarkable evidence is that there is a debate and yet there is no evidence of Tesco interacting with the communities engaging in the issues. No press release, no comments in blogs, or video sites. Silence!


That month its shares fell to their lowest level for two months after a trading update showed growth half that enjoyed by rival Morrisons. Tesco also admitted that Asda and discount outlets such as Aldi were 'having a moment in the sun' in the tougher economic climate. The moment in the sun extended month after month.

In August 2008 the biggest private sector employer was concerned about the effects of negative press coverage on staff and hired the Wriglesworth Consultancy following a five-way pitch.

Then PR Week announced in September that Trevor Datson Tesco's head of corporate media relations had "jumped ship" to join Danone as external communications director in the UK.

Is there cause and effect?

Could there be a case for deeper engagement? Could this be achieved without the Board's fundamental approval and involvement?

Are we watching a case study on how not to handle social media in the making?

Here comes Everybody Part 2

I have a review copy of the new book by Clay Shirky 2008 Here Comes Everybody Penguin.

The subtitle is "The Power of Organizing without Organizations"

It is an idea that I contest.

A long time ago, last century, Mark Adams, Prof Anne Gregory, Infonic’s Roy Lipski, Alison Clark and some others worked on the key drivers that would be delivered by the Internet (CIPR/PRCA Interet Commission). There were three: Transparency, Porosity & Agency. They are proved right.

Organisations now have all three. There is greater transparency between actors inside organisation. Past departmental silos are dismembered, corporate hierarchies are an ever moving feast and the distinction between an employee and consultant, supplier and manufacturer not to mention factory owner and factory user are a nicety. The boundaries of organisations are crumbling and ubiquitous interactive communication has been the lubricant for this process.

This gave rise to a concept I call the relationship cloud. Transparent values (ethos + tangible and intangible assets) are exercised with transparent responsiveness and the internet facilitates employee relationship clouds with the networked relationship empowered online and offline actors.

There are no organisations any more. The transition is too far gone to make such assumptions.

All we have is the remnants of the 20th century pretending that Toyota is a company, the Prime Minister is Presidential and the shop is the home of retailing. We still use the names and the images but the reality is that the transition is too far gone to plan ahead on such assumptions.

We are already at the point where there is 'Power of Organizing without Organizations' is in daily practice even among the organisations but we all hasten not to recognise it. It is too far out of the comfort zone of all too many?

Next... page 19

Where are the values?

Who's Who at the Web 2.0 Summit

The Times has a list of the key players at Web 2.0 Summit in an article today.

This is a major conference and Professor Jonathan Zitrain will be presenting - and as always is controversial arguing that Web 2.0 is potentially a challenge with counterintuitive arguments that Web 2.0 architectures pose distinct problems for competition, innovation, and freedom.

But when you see how much he has in-press, and with whom it makes one wonder how far he will go:

• Internet Law, Foundation Press, with Charles Nesson, Larry Lessig, Terry Fisher, and Yochai Benkler (forthcoming 2006).
• The Generative Internet, 119 Harvard Law Review __ (forthcoming 2006).
• Generativity and Meta-Gatekeeping, 19 Harvard J.L. Tech. __ (forthcoming 2006).

One might start by reading this paper he published with Benjamin Edelman.

Let John Mackey be a lesson to us all.

Hans Kullin notes that If you are in public relations, a worry might be that one of your company's employees gets caught in the act of anonymously posting negative comments in online forums. But few would probably expect that this person would be the CEO of the company. That's exactly what the CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc. did. AP has the story.

I think it is inevitable that there will be negative comments. Live with it, manage it and if you don't think straightening out wayward CEO's is not part of the PR job - retire!

I noted the story and think it should provide a (lame) example of Transparency in the NewPRWiki. It would add to the essays I added on The Nature of Transparency, Internet Agency, Porosity, Richness and Reach.

Had CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., John Mackey, read these articles (and the concepts have been about for the last decade), he would not have been such a prat and if the Whole Food PR person had taken on board what the Internet really means to us all - and these are the five tenets, life would have been less fraught for Whole Foods Market Inc. shareholders.

'Blazing netshine' will find you out!

Transparency

Prompted by a post from Shel Holtz, I have added a couple of pages about Internet transparency on TheNewPR Wiki.

It includes the significance of Internet Porosity, Agency, Richness and Reach because they are all significant to our understanding of transparency.

Grown-ups need not apply

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

And if they didn't how would they know which CD's to buy?

Doubt if the music industry undersatnds this idea but they haven't got it yet at all.

Edelman 'New Media Release' is a PR exercise

PR spin, especially from 'Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm' (would it, could it be anything else - the marketing boiler plate from the marketing boiler just has to be added), has announced that it has a new template for press/social media story announcements - A sort of replacement for the old fashioned press release. Fantastic!

The concept of a social media news release, says Edelman, 'has been a key topic of discussion within the public relations profession during the past several months'.

Of course, had Edelman been awake, they would known that this has been a key topic of conversation for half a decade and that there is already a 'social media release' and it has been available for four years from Yellowhawk.


This would have saved Edelman’s me2revolution team (part of the world’s largest independent public relations firm) development of the StoryCrafter software (to help accelerate the industry’s adoption of the social media news release) years (okay - minutes) of revolutionary fervour.

One, of course cannot get a close look behind this revolution. In an open source aid to adoption of social media the command and control me2revolution (the technical brains behind the world’s largest independent public relations firm) did not acquire the ethos that goes with being a revolutionary (ahh for the good old days - where are the anarchists?).

Probably more important is that this has all the trappings of an underfunded, me-too, 'Public Relations Exercise' into the fashionable world of 'my new media is bigger than your new media releases' or Todd Defran 1.0. with (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) Edelman spin.

Here are some things one might expect in a NMR:

The Todd Defran layout
Content in format that can be re-purposed for print, web, blog, podcast, vcast, sms alert, mobile web, iTV. With full content for editorial mashup (including two-shots etc), deep briefing by way of searchable, editable wiki content.
It has to be XPRL compliant, NewsML compliant and must be able to have NITF tags the IPTC words need to be identified for the news agencies and for the business community there has to be an XBRL schema interface.

For authentication there is a need to have automated (duel key?) security and these days it is simple to include trace, tracking, monitoring and evaluation components.

Plug-ins might also include auto notifications to:
Backflip BlinkBits Blinklist blogmarks
Buddymarks CiteUlike del.icio.us digg
Diigo dzone FeedMarker Feed Me Links!
Furl Give a Link Gravee Hyperlinkomatic
igooi kinja Lilisto Linkagogo
Linkroll looklater Magnolia maple
Netscape netvouz Newsvine Raw Sugar
RecommendzIt.com reddit Rojo Scuttle
Segnalo Shadows Simpy Spurl
Squidoo tagtooga Tailrank Technorati
unalog Wink wists Yahoo My Web

I did not see the button to 'blog this release' , I did not see the 'vlog this' button or the podcasting buttons. There does not seem to be an 'email to a friend' capability or 'turn this into a PDF' for (the the dead tree paper) freaks in your office button.

I just have a feeling that this is another 'fire from the hip and to hell with the consequences' PR approach to an important issue.

Edeman (the world’s largest independent public relations firm) wanted to be seen to be the web 2.0 leader. Its WalMart problems show a lack of training in-house. Its pitching policies to bloggers show an even bigger training gap and now it is showing that it has only a shaky grasp of new media and its opportunities.

As far as I can see, this announcement is nothing more than a digital version of a 1970's backgrounder press brief with tags instead of tabs. Big Deal!

OK - you have to listen to Luke Armour

Its just too good. A sendup for all FIR listeners to laugh at for weeks.

This is a really great case study if you want to explain Internet Agency.

THE DOUBLE PARADOX

This is a case study from 1999. It is still relevant today:

It was a chill morning in London on October the 16 1986 and a day that was to create
one of the pivotal events in Internet Activism. It was the day when a campaign was
started to put McDonalds in the centre of anti-corporatism by a number of activists.

It gave rise to the longest civil court case in history between David Morris and Helen
Steel and McDonald's.

The appearance of a Web site created by the activists, came in February 1996 when
Morris and Steel launched the McSpotlight site from a laptop connected to the
internet via a mobile phone outside a McDonald's store in Central London. The
Website was accessed more than a million times in its first month. It was headline
news across the world.

By any standards, the McSpotlight site is big and has an amazing amount of content.
A large part of the content is critical of McDonald's and some is allegedly libellous.

£60,000 settlement against Morris and Steel, the Web site was accessed 2.2 million
times.

The first paradox is that McDonald's won the court case but the allegations are still on
the Web site available to this day (and is mirrored across the world so that if it is
turned off in one country, its content can be accessed from another).

The second paradox is that with so much criticism about the company available for all
to see, the company remains one of the most successful food retailers in the UK and
across the world. McDonald's ten years after the court case was the largest and best-known global foodservice retailer it had more than 24,500 restaurants in 116 countries. Its share price was four time higher than when the McSpotlight site was launched and dividends per share were up 44%.

It there a linkage between corporate performance and Internet criticism? Will there be
a link as the Internet expands?

There are a number of considerations. The first is that all this happened a long time
ago. In 1997, at the end of the court case and 18 month after the launch of
McSpotlight, the on-line population was 57 million (in 1999 it was 179 million) of which
only 960,000 were in the UK (over 10 million in 1999)

Today, the McSpotlight site is really a gateway site for people who are interested in
anti-corporate activism. Compared to many other activist issues, McDonalds is a
relative side show.

McDonalds significance for most people is its brand strength. It is a company that
delivers on its promise (caviar no, fries yes, silver service no, in a box with a paper
tissue yes). In this respect it is trusted by consumers.


The apparent double paradox is, in fact a matter of timing and the fast changing
dynamic of the Internet.

The Consumer Opinion pages of Yahoo show a list of rogue sites which reputation
managers should visit to see examples of what may affect them at any time.
Smaller brands in a virtual community ten times as big, may not be so lucky. So just
when should a company get scared of the Internet?

There is a lot to take out of this.

Critically, there is an issue of the real effect of activism on reputation and the effect of reputation on the value of companies.

Is the effect of the internet on markets more potent today than ten or even six years ago?

Do the financial markets reflect the trading patterns of companies under pressure from Internet activism?

Is there a parallel for, say Dell and in the blogging era.

Perhaps its time to re-visit the effects of on-line activism.

MySpace isn't fun anymore

MySpace is moving to stop its users illegally uploading music content by introducing fingerprinting technology to the website. The site will scan all uploaded music, check it against a database of rights holders and block any protected content.

Users who repeatedly try to upload content illegally will be barred from the site.

The fingerprint technology is to be licenced from software firm Gracenote.

MySpace is now operating like a Music Agent, Cigar an' all.

Now, if the music industry was half bright (OK 25% bright), it would understand the dynamic of The Long Tail. It would encourage people to spread the music - and the date of the next gig, the price of tickets, the shop for consumables, the book etc etc etc - all of which are more valuable that the price/margin on a CD or download.

These margins are available forever - longer than copyright - and the music moguls can't see it.

So, folks go look for real musicians who want to spread their music AND make a fortune instead of givving it away to agents and Labels.