The Home Office finds out the truth about 'Social Media'

The government and police have not sought any new powers to shut social networks, the Home Office said after a meeting with industry representatives, Reports the BBC.


While one may respect the Home Secretary for her political acumen and position in government, her knowledge of the internet, including mobile internet and social media may need some help.

That Facebook, Twitter or RIM can have some material effect on communication affecting a riot is undoubted (these are platforms and channels for communication). That they are  capable of activities that will change behaviours is very doubtful. That she can upset the economy with her tinkering is probable.

In the USA and Europe, and to a lesser extent across the world, £millions has been spent on using the internet to change behaviours by companies such as Wallmart, Exon, Toyota, General Electric and Allianz, the biggest in the world. They have all tried and all failed. They are not the only organisations who have a problem with getting online users to do things.  Google proudly released Wave and dropped it. TouchPad failed because it had few of the apps that made Apple’s iPad a runaway hit. Just 48 days after Microsoft began selling the Kin, a smartphone for the younger set, the company discontinued it because of disappointing sales.

The people in the thick of it are not so good either and the Home Secretary has realised that.

Meantime, economic research tells us:

• The Internet economy now represents 7.2 percent of U.K. GDP, more than construction, transport, or utilities.
• The United Kingdom ranks first in e-commerce and exports £2.8 in e-commerce goods and services for every £1 imported
• There are 250,000 U.K. jobs in Internet companies
• Small and medium businesses that are high-Web users experience higher growth and more international sales than those that do not use the Internet
• A recent additional study tells us that sales via the internet are, by themselves, of the order of £62 billion ($103bn)

The Home Secretary also had to consider how many social network outlets there are? The ranges of protocols being used that can be brought into play to avoid censorship (FTP, WWW, Email,etc etc)? The range of platforms in use (PC, Mobile phones, gaming machines etc)?

Her knee jerk reaction to the Prime Minster's elastoplast rhetoric was potentially very damaging and would solve nothing.

It is ironic that a British Home Secretary should attempt shackle the Web, invented by a British scientist  20 years almost to the day from its launch.

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."

Maggie Fox the founder and CEO of Social Media Group provided a time line of events:

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.

If the government tried to shut the internet in the UK.

Of course, its absurd but legislation to do that is in process in the USA already and we might fear for democracy and our loved ones if it all went away.

It is possible for you to stay connected. You might like to use https://www.torproject.org and downloading it now is a pretty good idea while HMG is being benign.

Of course, if you are really paranoid, you may want to protect yourself from snoopers and this can be done with http://www.privoxy.org/.

So here is a a really useful job for that old computer that you don't use any more and, believe it or not, action now will help people in Egypt connect back with the world today.

How Google selects news

Every media student should know how Google gets and selects the news it distributes.

This is not just for the publishers but for PR people. If you want your story to really caatch hold, it need the promotion power of Google News.

This video helps a lot

This Guardian articlee is very useful too.

Why would Google release this information now? Would it be to do with the moves by lots of publishers to charge for online content?

The Publicasity press release about our book

Public relations professionals who want to do business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading. The online world had has changed since Online Public Relations’ first edition in 2001, and this new edition is a comprehensive study into online communication and interaction. For public relations practice the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again; the advent of an online world means almost every aspect of the discipline needs to be rethought.

“It’s not just the practice that is changing, it seems, but its role and purpose. After a short section on the basic toolkit, this book deals in concepts: transparency, porosity, agency, richness and reach.”

Richard Bailey – review in Behind the Spin

“The internet brings public relations closer to the heart of corporate re-engineering, corporate governance, corporate and brand relationships, reputation promotion and issues management.”

The book “...provides clear pointers for organising public relations professionally now and indicates a vision of the future. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct his or her business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as a must.”

Professor Anne Gregory

“In the past, a PR person might have been judged by the volume of coverage generated for a client. The key today is not volume but influence: that is, how deeply into the networks did the story reach and for how long did it actively set the agenda in the online ‘conversations’?”

The internet is revolutionising the practice of public relations. This revolution has not only affected the way PR professionals communicate but has changed the nature of communication itself. This thoroughly revised second edition of Online Public Relations shows you how you can use this potent and energizing change intelligently and effectively.

This second edition is a timely and authoritative review of the new world of online public relations, supported by numerous online resources. Any public relations professional wanting to conduct business in the modern interconnected world will regard this book as essential reading.

About the authors: David Phillips is an online public relations pioneer. He has written three books about online public relations, lectures at Gloucester University and Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal. He is also the Head of Digital

Consultancy at Publicasity. Philip Young is a senior lecturer in public relations at the University of Sunderland, specializing in social media and media ethics. He is a lead researcher on the European Public Relations Education and Research Association’s EuroBlog project and has run the Mediations weblog (http://publicsphere.typepad.com) since April 2004.

'Online Public Relations' re-visited

With Philip Young I have re-written Online Public Relations. The copies arrived this week and so I have been re-reading it in its published form.

First of all, the thank yous.

Notably Philip. There are some flashes of writing style which he has been able to inject into my dull prose which, in a book, is significant and, of course, he is far to modest about his contribution. He has insight which is a great help when trying to go through the strategic significance of the internet to PR.

Anne Gregory, the series editor has been very flattering too and that is good for the ego. She says in her foreword that the book provides some 'clear pointers for organizing (I hate the modern use of 'z') public relations professionally now and indicates a vision of the future', which is what we aimed for.

But, as I have re-read through the pages, one thought keeps coming back. It is a work built on the expertise of so many excellent minds. In the ten years from the first edition to this one, the body of theoretical, academic and practical knowledge available is now huge. For this work which is about how to use the internet intelligently and effectively to draw on its potent and energising characteristics, we have plundered a wide range of sources.

Of course the work and insights of people like Neville, Shel, Richard (his bibliography is a brilliant aid for practitioner and academic alike) and Toni stand out in their writings (books, blogs, papers) and the thinking of David Weinberger, Don Tapscott, Clay Shirky, William Dutton and a the hundreds of other contributors refenced in the book are very significant.

Ours is less a book about mechanics or the application of communication tools and so other significant authors like Joel Comm's 'Twitter Power' (among many) are of immense value and publication coincides with the launch of Rob Brown's Book "Public Relations and the Social Web: How to Use Social Media and Web 2.0 in Communications" which is a great complementary, not to mention timely, contribution. Rob's book examines public relations practices in the digital environment and shows readers how digital public relations campaigns can include communication channels such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and SEO, and the Social Web, taking up from the short introduction Philip and I make to these communication channels in the second chapter.

One thing that was a bold move was to predict (Chapter 28) where the internet will go in its effects on future practice. Coming 20 years after the World Wide Web was introduced (some years after I got involved with the internet - it makes me wince to recall) we are pretty sure that the involvement of tens of millions of people in its evolution will both accelerate development and become more integrated in human interaction.

The reasons are simple. Thousands of new forms of interaction are presented to people every year (month?). Some take off and others whither away. This is digital/human interaction and evolution on steroids and the arbiters of what will succeed and fail is in the hands of a billion digital consumers and the people they influence.

The combination of Open Source (in its many manifestations) and Open Systems (corporations making their knowledge and capabilities available publicly like Yahoo! and very recently Google with its Analytics Data Export API not to mention the concept in use by the arts), offers to a massed development community access for developing new products, services and interactivity which will manifest itself in startling new ways (to get some idea of scale, the Yahoo open systems are accessed by developers numbering hundreds of thousands of people).

In PR we can expect the rate of change to get faster (who could have imagined we would add content about a book in Facebook ten years ago!).

At the same time practitioners will need new management capabilities and I am particularly pleased we included a chapter on risk management (Ch. 21). I think it is the first time risk management has been included in a PR text.

Of course, in a book for PR practitioners, a lot of great work can only be referenced and some of our further thinking had to be missed out (we are well over the word count as it is).

We aim to persuade Kogan Page to publish the book in its entirety online using a facility they have developed for this kind of thing. Its work in progress. We can then associated it with a web presence for the book that can expand the thinking add further bibliographical content (like Joel and Rob's books) and much more.

Of course that does not prevent making comments here or even on Twitter!

An (online) Advertising Potential Value

How much is the page worth where your online content has appeared?

Interesting idea?

Most of us have seen advertisement in online newspapers. They now form a significant part of publishing revenues.

In exploring the price of online newspaper advertising, it is no great leap of logic to try to attempt to satisfy the question of the difference between price and value.

This is quite an open and transparent market. The rates are published and in a form that equates exposure and price. This suggests that the market is not just active but transparent as well. The Guardian article yesterday puts this space into perspective even if it is gloomy about the prospects for the publishing industry.

Value and price, measured using the exchange rate of monetary currency, would seem to be a reasonable measure for online newspaper advertising.

But it is not a good currency for editorial and social content. There do not seem to be transparent markets or effective exchange rates that convert online conversations into a currency that can be used in most modern commercial environments.

In this research project, I have taken the price of online newspaper advertising and by using the published rates, numbers of visitors from ABCe and have worked through an Alexa comparison of user visits. This has given me an algorithm to provide a figure that would project the value of an advertisement on web pages that are not online newspapers.

In other words if you were going to advertise on that page, how much would it cost you?

If you like, an Advertising Potential Value!

In testing, I have played the results back into online newspapers and the results are pretty good. The formula got within 5% for the Telegraph and Guardian and within 10% of the price charged by Mirror Group.

I know that context is different and I know that web pages are optimised for purpose and thus not all web pages would be suitable to carry advertisements (and many blog pages and other content is not suitable either). I am also aware of the issues we have as between different web sites indexed by Alexa. This is not going to be a micron accurate measure but is will be, at worse, indicative.

However, this allows me to test an approximation of advertising value potential for web pages were they in competition with newspapers for advertising revenues.

NOTE: the return you get will be the value based on the UK audience figures only. The global equivalent will be bigger and based on a different base point.

Over the next few days, I will build a widget so that you too can have a look at the results and will post it here.

IMRG Capgemini - online retailing to top 50% by 2011

Online shopping is poised to take 20p out of every UK consumer pound by the end of the year, a landmark milestone that analysts believe will make the channel a critical business for many high-street retailers.

An IMRG Capgemini E-Retail report notes that online retail sales amounted to £26.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 38 per cent from the same period in the previous year and projected online retail sales would be as high as 50% by 2011.

In B2B because of the growth of online trading, IT workers, now have to be creative, world-aware and business-savvy to succeed. They are now a central part of the wider workforce and drive future development in sectors as diverse as retail, transport, finance and hospitality, reports Retail Bulletin.

Booming e-commerce means sectors not traditionally linked with IT are creating brand new technology-related job roles throughout their businesses and working much more closely with IT workers to help them succeed.

Of course, this also should include the PR sector. But figures are harder to find here.

New and Notable

Mark Phillimore has started a blog.

He is providing the online BA module and more at Bournemouth this year.

A PR consultant of 20 years’ experience he loves the media and technology sectors and lectures at several business schools and universities, as well as running his own training consultancy.

Academic interest and professional training are strategy, organisational change and culture, and new media communications. He just did an MBA and has these thoughts on his MBA.

Looking forward to the posts in his new role.

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!

Newspapers v Social Media

The World Association of Newspapers, have published phase two of a research project about youth media behavior. The study, titled "Youth Media DNA" is a result of interviews with young people in 10 countries.

...“discussion with friends” as a top source for news and information, sometimes ranking higher than TV or newspapers

..." social networking and user-generated content sites can be seen as complements to their news and information experience."

RSS Juice

I was checking RSS feeds that have, due to considerable laziness on my part, whiskers.

Absolute joy. David Meerman- Scott has his new book out and very kindly is sending me one. But - just look at the quality of the contributions - wow!

Estonian attack - cyber tank outside Parliament and economic sanctions announced

European and U.S. leaders have repeatedly accused Russia of using its energy resources as a weapon against its neighbors. Russia has always denied it, citing different technical reasons for energy supply halts.

Now Estonia Russian oil firms are re-routing a quarter of their refined products exports away from ports in Estonia and Russia's railways halted deliveries reports Reuters.

This is set againts what Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip called 'continuing cyber-attacks from the servers of Russian state authorities' a few minutes ago.

The Russioans have a cyber tank on the lawn outside the Tallinn parliament and now have economic sanctions in place.

I guess that we are still waiting for the EU to imagine this is not happening ahead of a nice long week end break.

Social Media can be controlled

There are riots in front of European Union offices in Moscow

There is almost no media coverage about it. There is even less Google news juice. There are few blog posts about it. Its just as though someone was working really, really hard at Denial of Service against a plan that has been in place for a long, long time.

The story could have been written by Ian Flemming and is about Russian imperialism and the scars that go back to Nazi and Russian deals over the Baltic states that kept peoples in shackles for fifty years.

It is a story about ethnic Russians abandoned by their own country and forced to face the ire of their one time subjects and Russia using both sides to drive another wedge between European interests and Russian ambitions.

So, how come a DoS attack?

What if wikipedia was closed to new edits? What would happen if some newspapers' stories seemed not to get indexed except in the copy of secondary pages - by Google? What if the news aggregators have lots of content from Tass and Interfax but not much from the mainstream European or US press?

It would seem odd. It is odd. Tim Wilson reports on DoS attacks which seem very slick and comprehensive for a country of a million people, even the clever Estonians.

It will be interesting to see if you have similar experiences.

If there is a way to hide/bury or deny a competitor space online would n't that be a good products to sell to the command and control freaks?

Round up of news snippets.

This is a busy week for online PR news

Google is now mobile.

Half of Internet users in the UK shop on-line.

"You're looking at a 30-second ad, not a four-minute pod," said Mike Ripka of Millward Brown. "You'll sit around for 30 seconds, so you're highly engaged with the advertising." Audiences are less likely to get up during those 30 seconds than during TV ad pods.

Now you can use someone else's delivery system software to deliver goods if you are a local shop wanting to deliver locally.

At Bournemouth we teach online risk analysis as part of every campaign - good job too. Its really easy to have you TV commercials hi-jacked.

Newspapers to take on TV

Press Gazette tell us online spending grew by more than 41 per cent in 2006 to just over £2 billion, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau. Online advertising spending in Britain overtook national newspapers for the first time in 2006.

'Newspapers are too cheap and there are too many of them.'

That is the view of the Guardian's deputy commercial director Adam Freeman, who today rejected the notion that newspapers are under threat as a medium and said the future for his newspaper will "probably be in video".

Newspapers are "in denial" about the need to invest heavily in an online communities, Guardian Unlimited blogs editor, Kevin Anderson has warned.

Sony is the platform for a third life

The BBC reports that the PlayStation 3 console has broken UK sales records with more than 165,000 machines sold in the first two days of release, say analysts Chart Track. More than a million consoles were shipped across Europe on launch day last week with 600,000 sold.

PlayStation has graphics, immersion, the Internet, a huge following and its user base spans the generations (OK... 6 to 26 at least).

If ever there was a new communication platform games machines are top of the pops this month.

They are a PR dream channel and then there are the others like X-Box and Nintendo. Between them, they reach into over a third of all UK households.

The games genre is too important to miss. Just look at the power of World of Warcraft - people PAY every month to keep playing. Compare that with the declining numbers for corporate web sites and media web presence which are free.

perhaps it really is time to think into the X-box.

The demographics of the web - broader than you think

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found according to the Daily Telegraph.

Emailing and online chatting to friends and family was the favourite internet activity of the retired people surveyed, followed by researching information, booking holidays and shopping.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes.

Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers.

This are the baby boomer generation. The generation that most marketers do not target online.

Which beggers the questions

Who is no longer part of the Internet generation?

What media is valuable for engaging with these people?

Is the PR industry using it?

Radio as we don't know it

The announcement of the latest Rajar figures is heralded as a great success for radio broadcasting by the broadcasters and the media. It is nothing of the sort.

Radio was dieing.

Then came the Internet

Then came that hackers and illegal file sharing folk

Then came light. Broadcasters found that MP3 was a friend, streaming Internet Protocol radio shows was a friend. The long tail is a friend.

They told the copyright lawyers to go away - well almost.

The shared their shows and find that digital radio is up, Podcasts are up, radio on TV's is up, Radio via mobile phones is up, listening via PC's is up.

Top programmes are up, niche programmes are up, listening to historic programming is up.

As the Independent put it: The digital revolution and the expansion of new ways of accessing information through the Internet has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.

There is one other angle. You can listen to the radio and do other things. It is great multitasking medium.

The research says that we we do things concurrently by switching from one task to another when we multi task so that is worth bearing in mind. This is not full and complete attention for much of the audience for much of the time.

PR practice has a big challenge, alongside the Rajar channels there are all the podcasts. Dozens of them.

Offering content both in terms of talking heads and ready made content is now a very definite part of the communication mix for PR.

Social media continues to take over

Some time ago I noted how social media is growing compared to traditional media. This post showed how social media page views and reach is dominating web evolution Now there is more evidence from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. She reports that social media search is showing this evolutionary trend too. The BBC has noted the same effect in Google searches.
Social media is a critical area for PR development and we need to embrace it fast.