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.

Some research questions

Now is the time of year when students begin to look forward to their next steps in education.

I am fortunate to be able to help some students with an interest in online public relations and at this stage, we are exploring ideas.

Without giving away any of my students work but just exposing some of my thinking to them and a wider audience I seek criticism from real experts.


The first of the conversations I have had is challenging. It is for a work in social media.


We know that there is a lot of practitioner experience available from all over Europe and the United
States in particular.  However, there is much less well grounded academic research available. This is a fast moving environment and traditional academic publishing is, by comparison, slow.

This means that the student has an opportunity to add to the body of knowledge as part of a Masters degree by submitting their own papers.

While, at face value, one may like to look at so called 'social media' as it is used today there are some early decisions one would have to make.

Perhaps it is a good thing to first of all think about what we mean by  'social media'.  Is this truly a media, or is is a defined range of communications channels used by people (after all FTP is not social media but is used a lot). If so which people?

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and bulletin boards, Blogs, wikis, Foursquared, Augmented Reality, video and other sharing channels (like, for example, YouTube, Slideshare and Picasa) are available on many communications platforms such as PC's laptops, smart phones, games machines like Nintendo Wi and Xbox and slates like iPad. Some are good on one channel and not so good on others.

The range of platforms offers us a view as to what sort of people access which channels and under what kind of circumstance. We still need more research in this area.

From this we might understand that people without the relevant platforms or channels might be disenfranchised. But we know that there are intermediaries (who has not seen a child show a grandparent
something 'cool' on a mobile phone). 

Thus I think it is worth exploring what we think we mean by social media. 


We have to define the channels that  exemplify social media and then explore the  platforms on which these are available.

A student will need to find sources  that can inform an understanding of channels that are available, useful and are or can be (or have been) popular.

A student will need to explore the recent academic works from the PR, marketing and communication academic journals.


The extent to which these disciplines are new suggests that it will be useful  to look  at a number of other academic disciplines.

I find that the behavioural sciences and neuro-psychology research is informative and is beginning to
explain people's use of platforms (for example people watch television and use a laptop and a mobile phone concurrently under a number of circumstances) and these activities use a wide range of parts of the
brain that normally would not be active using only one platform/channel.

This involves a lot of searching and research - and playing with lots of digital toys too :)

At an early stage, it is helpful to look at how much content there is available to the public and how much of it is about, for example, a specific brand. Here is some software that gives us a quick overview http://www.trackthisnow.com/.

I would not be at all surprised if, at an early stage, a researcher did not discover that there is a lot of content discussed and shared about almost every thing in many channels and across a lot of platforms.

Experience suggests that most organisations do not and actually probably cannot engage their communities at such a hectic pace across so many platforms and channels. This is an interesting consideration when thinking about the role of both PR and marketing in an age of near ubiquitous interactive communication.

For one student this  may help in a finding as to how relevant Social Media is as a brand communication instrument. In the totality of all the conversations of all the people using a range of channels and platforms, it may be that research will explore any opportunity to be part of such conversations and if, in addition, the brand can be 'inserted' into the conversation. 


My view is that it will quickly becomes noticeable that this is much more difficult than most believe (and challenges much current practice).

A proposal to consider the future is one that has me hooked.

A student might be extremely brave to consider the future and the evolution of Social Media communication past, present and the new trends for the future. 


 It is a fascinating subject. The amazing first burst of Usenet and BB's activity three decades ago was astonishing. It showed that people want to engage with each other online, globally and in a new and dynamic way. 


I know it has taken the communications industries a couple of decades to see how dynamic the whole concept is and there is a long way to go among leaders in industry and commerce (and academia and government).  Equally, I recognise that there is the potential for a radical revolution as potent as any in prospect or history.The Bourbons discovered what happens when eating cake is no longer an alternative to recognising social change in 1792. Such revolution is in prospect for a lot of countries, economies and governments not to mention companies in the next few years.


The extent to which near future developments such as the Semantic Web with automated ontology creation will affect corporate transparency and porosity  is an interesting thought.

The development of virtual realities such as 'walk in' Augmented Reality will change personal relationships, experiential marketing and even replace some travel and meetings and is an exciting prospect. I can bet, and history is on my side, that it will become popular in personal relationship experiences long before commerce really gets its head round the wider applications.

The ability to, at will,  identify clusters of online values (words, pictures, experience values) and their proponents, supporters and interested constituents will transform marketing. But much more important will change the nature of relationship building, commerce and even the nature of value.

Yes, the future is interesting.

There is another tack that has been presented to me. It is the consideration and strategic analysis’s of brand
communications in different social  media platforms. I am sure this will be fascinating for people in PR and Marketing. 


Its drawback is that it will need updating every six months or so and so the challenge is be to find a replicable methodological approach - but, of course, each time results are report, they will create a sensation of interest as long as the methodology is robust.

Being able to'listen' to the totality of conversations of a sample in each channel and across a number of
platforms has its challenges and then to try to identify the extent to which the brand is implicitly or explicitly part of these conversations is not impossible and there will be a lot of people who will find this capability really helpful.

A researcher would have to deploy some heavyweight technologies but they are available.


No one can imagine how excited I am at working with bright enquiring young brains in such an array of new thinking that will soon be available to the public relations practitioner - well, those who are following there new developments.


I am, of course interested in comments and insights from you..... One thing we do know is the power of the network to help answer hard questions.

Stockholm Accords and Sustainability

This is second of a series of lectures notes I am preparing about the Stockholm Accords.

Some months have passed since the World Public Relations Forum discussed and approved the Stockholm Accords. It was the culmination of an intensely participated collaboration process which involved some 1000 leaders of the global public relations community from 42 countries by the PR industry's Global Alliance.

There is a Stockholm Accords digital HUB that you may visit here at: www.stockholmaccords.org. The discussions are worth following and I recommend all practitioners to visit and get engaged.

You can access the Accords here. I have also provided a text version here (for all those people who like to copy 'n paste and not get irritated by the use of PDF)

The Accords offer us a view of sustainability in these words:

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions*.

In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity* to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Public Relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders* contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
· interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate)*;
· creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener)*;
· ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter)*;
· going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).

Reviewing each of these elements in turn, we can extend the debate.

An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions is a bold and, I suggest, a late 20th century view. It will hold good for some time to come but the move towards greater competitive transparency, the evolution of the semantic web and ever more effective 'Blazing Netshine' that allows us all to search and expose the minutia of human endeavour will challenge economic, environmental and social dimensions with added elements.

The nature of value is being challenges in many ways.

What is 'free' (i.e. not paid for with today's monetary currencies) is frequently challenged in today's society. Patents and Trademarks, copyright and personal assets are exposed in near ubiquitous interactive communication and yet many things seemingly 'free' are much valued.

The 'Free' search engine Google has immense value for most people well beyond the irritation (and much ignored) advertisements. Its value as part of a new form of memory and access to knowledge is huge and dwarfs the utility of Library of Congress and all the other libraries in the world combined.

The nature of value is changing so fast, one might begin to consider coinage as being of lesser utility this year compared to last.

We are beginning to understand value differently. We are beginning to understand commonly held values as being the element that aids/is the essential ingredient for relationship creation (paper by Bruno Amaral and me) and meta values commonly held between two or more people as an indication of the strength of relationships.

Indeed, we are now seeing such values attached to ideas and artefacts as a description of their value and utility for individuals and communities.

It follows that basing anything on economic needs may have to face up to a new form and understanding of economics that truly are (in a process of becoming) dimensionally different. Here is a simple example of what I mean. What is the value of Google to humanity in this generation? Google valued by markets at $165bn  gets two trillion site hits per year. It is a lot of knowledge transfer and priceless (if sometimes trivial).

This leads one to imagine the environment for the existence of organisations.

In an era of developing ubiquitous access to knowledge, corporate environments will have difficulty being an entity. The nature of transparency, porosity and agency as described by the PRCA/CIPR Internet Commission a decade ago (and revised by Philip Young and myself in Online Public Relations) mean that organisations become less bound by a corporate 'hard shell'. We already see this in organisation where 'contracting out' and the use of agents such as PR consultants to act on behalf of and in the interests of an organisation is commonplace. As each employee gets a Twitter Account, the evolution of this transparent and even porous nature of organisations becomes ever more, and publicly evident. The changing environment militates against the structure of organisations as we know them today and we see this in a range of manifestations where the boundaries between one organisation and another is blurred.

An organisation’s sustainability based on balancing demands in social dimensions is also a significant challenge. The social constructs for much of society is changing.

The emergence of Brazil, India and China as big and developing (and more open) economies, the ability to communicate across borders at will and the dynamic of  social groups formed in the silicon sitting rooms of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are very different social dimensions. Add smart phones and location based micro communities and society looks very different. These are considerations for all who signed up to the Stockholm Accords and have to be thought through by the professional bodies as well as their members.

The professional bodies also have to re-act or be left on the shelf.

The Accords postulate that, in this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity to enhance the organization’s reputation and demonstrate success across the triple bottom line.

Sustainability to be long lasting has to be flexible and enhancing reputation is not limited to economic, ecological and social advantage.

I have already suggested that economical advantage my be difficult to quantify as values take on a different role and are probably better viewed in relationship building terms than monetary value.

Environmental and social advantage may then also be measured in their capability to bring relationship values to the fore. This is not a tautologous argument. Environmental and social values are not the same and current practice needs a lot of new and additional work to achieve 20th century gaols. To be effective in the 21st century, PR has to evolve a triple line that can extend into the much more complicated world of individual, corporate and environment relationships and their value drivers today.


Oddly enough identifying, involving and engaging key stakeholders is very easy. We have not yet developed the technologies sufficiently well but espousing values will quickly build relationship clusters with people holding similar values. In the bast it was a little understood but effective brand empathy matrix. Today, we understand it as a not wholly different, but stakeholder derived values matrix.


As we move towards greater competitive transparency and learn to manage organisational porosity it will become much harder for an organisation to determine what information should be transparently and authentically reported. The stakeholder not only has the whip hand by virtue of a wider view of values porosity will inevitably reveal and the community will punish any organisation that lacks authenticity. Secretive accountants and pharmaceutical companies are going to have to find a values driven accommodation with society to remain as they are.


It is professionalism that develops a capability to go beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow and, in addition more emphasis on todays word among PR teachers.

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.

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?

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.

Managing the risk of technology

The graphic below comes from a post by John Milan in Read/Write web and is very germaine to PR practice. We are not going to stop Internet Transparency or porosity. We have to manage it.

If you look at the image, it offers the means by which the senior practitioner can manage lack of IT knowledge and responsibility or innovation.

Using the techniques of Risk Management, Organisations can asses thier level of risk along both axis (1-5) and can then look ate what can be done to mitigate the risk and test the assumptions again.



Sophisticated applications of these types of approach offer a good idea of ROI for managing risk (and opportunities).

Nice graphic!

Workplace Blogging is OK

James Richards has just posted his paper on work related blogs. It is timely because today The Telegraph reports that an Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday.

	Catherine Sanderson: 'It's really fantastic to be vindicated like this'

In a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes".

Her former employer, the British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, was ordered to pay 34-year-old Miss Sanderson 44,000 euros in compensation plus 500 euros in legal fees, and to reimburse the French benefits office the equivalent of six months of wages.

Meantime, The Register reports that Blogging is part of the job.

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.

According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company "has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively".

So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?

The Register had to find out.

The employment lawyers are going to get rich on this.

Internet Porosity

Roy Lipski coined the expression Internet Porosity for the CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (published by the CIPR five years ago called 'The Death of Spin' a document now lost to practitioners and members alike now that online PR seems to be of interest to the PR industry). It describes the effect when people let slip information about their organisations to an online audience.

It can be accidental, innocent or malicious but it happens a lot.

There is more about this here and there is now some new research into into Internet porosity using blogs from James Richards .

Internet Porosity (listen to the podcast and see the definitions) is by no means new and the use of blogs is pretty old too. It is a factor in any and all online PR and so this paper is important for all practitioners.
For those that take online PR risk management seriously (and we all do - don't we - and here's how), this is an interesting paper.

Bang bang ... both feet

The International Cricket Council has ordered YouTube to remove "hundreds" of World Cup clips claiming copyright infringement, says the Guardian.

ICC Development, the body's commercial arm, and commercial rights holder the Global Cricket Corporation, have gone after the video-sharing website to protect the rights of broadcast and sponsorship partners.

"We are here to protect the commercial broadcast rights for the ICC and GCC and there is an issue here," said Christopher Stokes, the chief executive of online rights protection agency NetResult, which represents the ICC.

"In general there is a dilemma for rights holders in that they want people to enjoy the event but also have stringent contracts with TV broadcasters and with mobile rights holders. In today's world, broadcasters buy highlights as well as live coverage and mobile rights means clips. There is an obligation to protect them.

Of course this is nuts. More YouTube content means more viewers for the TV people.
If you hide the sport of cricket, it will be hidden and who than will care.
TV is not YouTube. They are different just like online news and newspapers are different.

Killing off a channel is just daft - just like shooting yourself in both feet.

Bad management is not made good with firewalls

Web 2.0 report that a survey of more than 1,000 office workers found that 42 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 discussed work-related issues on social-networking sites and blogs.

The research, carried out by polling company YouGov for content security specialists Clearswift, revealed more than a quarter of young workers spent three or more hours a week surfing blogs and sites such as MySpace and YouTube during working hours.

Nearly four in ten admitted accessing such sites "several times a day".

This is supposed to say what?

Is it that organisations are, as a result going to become more porous. Well there is no news in that. The CIPR was telling the world about that when Lionel Zetter was in short pants.

Perhaps porosity is a bad thing? Well if Employee relations are that bad, then there is little hope for thr corporate future anyway and that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Perhaps having employees aware of online information is a bad thing... well... what sort of employer is this or perhaps employees are so badly motivated about their job they go off on a YouTube hunt for the banal.

All-in-all, I don't see what all the fuss is about except that bad management is not made good with a firewall.

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.

Financial dodge e-monitoring

VNUNet report a survey conducted in the financial districts of London and New York suggests that Wall Street workers are more aware of compliance breaches and monitored electronic communication than their City colleagues, but are also more likely to try to dodge communication controls.