A small contribution for the Stockholm Accords

I am delighted at what I have seen of the Stockholm Accords

The dynamism of Toni Muzi Falconi is breathtaking and I am full of admiration for the efforts of Ronél Rensburg and Anne Gregory in their explication of the change that is taking place in the world today.

But I am not without concerns.

Perhaps, as we look to the next two or three years of PR practice it gives us a clue as to the life of the Acccord. It is a bold effort but, in my experience, will have a struggle to survive or have any impact.

My interest is in how the internet affects the world and PR in particular. I did predict its significance to the CIPR in 1995 and was involved in some of the papers for the now long forgotten 1999 CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (some of the papers are here and some are here Journal of Communication Management; Volume: 5; Issue: 2; 2000 ).

I am a practitioner, researcher and teacher and so am part of this industry. Part of me is agast at how little we regard the future. Students leave university with scant understanding of internet implications for their future work. At best they are told about something called 'Social Media' (a module that could equally be called etiquette). I see some agencies 'sliming down' because of the 'recession'.  They don't recognise that they are being by-passed. There is some form of belief in this industry of ours that the internet is, progresively, having a greater effect on our lives and has effects that mediate everyone's life. The big thinking concerns online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement. This is a linear view, a straight line graph of change.

The reality is much more potent.The influences brought about by the internet are not straight line, they are exponential. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will now be doubling every 11 hours. Some years ago Kevin Kelly explained the effects of exponential growth of hyperlinks in network rather well when he told of the prior and future 5000 days.

Some clue to this change can be seen in the consumer/tech cell phone in our pocket or handbag. The move from phone/text to email to hand held mobile computer has been quite quick and as quickly has become passe. Another clue may be found in changed consumer habits and annual growth of online retail sales of 25% plus every year. The biggest development is from, effectively, no cloud computing four years ago to common place corporate application with, in the UK, companies like Rentokil Initial replacing all their email into the cloud in two years, Insurance giant Aviva, Logistics firm Pall-Ex and Universal Music already implementing mass internal and extrernal communication in the cloud and tiny tiny organisations like mine with mega computing power for pennies.

Should it care to use it, the Centre for PR Studies at Leeds Met now has unlimited computing power available without making the lights dim. In the last month, the capability for my research into semantic public relations has moved from being stalled by the high levels of media coverage for the general election to being able to provide both semantic analysis of text and an automated taxonomy to find infered links. This is not a mega university reserach institute it is, literally, in a shed at the end of my garden.

In three years we will have both inference of relationships and predictability of discourse at very high levels of accuracy routinely using massive cloud computing power.

These capabilities will change how governments and societies operate because they will provide near complete radical transparency of every organisation. You and I will be able to find out the precise nature of the common values that hold disperate organisations, their financial backers, customers and other stakeholder in thier networks.

As for companies, so too for terrorists, wayward governments and so forth.

As the leading thinkers in the world explain in this video, we very nearly have the knowlege and we do have the computing power.

It may possibly be that it is the PR industry that benefits from these developments but linear thinking however ambitious the growth projection may be, is not enough.

From the values lecture, I gave in Lincoln four years ago to Bruno Amaral's Euprera discourse this year to cloud capacity for semantic PR development in the last month is pretty impressive.

But this thinking has drawbacks. It is not a conversation one can have with practitioners. They both could not understand nor have the inclination to want to stare so much change in the face. Equally, I know of only one Masters course world wide which is prepared to entertain such radical thought (I don't know of a PhD doing such work - but would be thrilled to find one).

It is for these reasons that I think the Accord, like the CIPR Internet Commission will need re-thinking from scratch in three years.

But it is a great start that can be developed in June.

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 Avata Hero

It is amazing how we have all become avatar junkies.

Today we mean and use avatars as more than a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet. Avatars have wider semiotic role that is even beyond an embodiment of a person or character or even view of life.

Sure, the characters we see rushing round the screen when we play tennis using an Nintendo WII are avatars but they are more. They are a representation of ourselves and our opponents. Who, one might ask, are you playing tennis with?

But what of the email address customerservice@leverwealth.com? Is this email address a person or the representation of a broader semantic description of a person or group of people? What of the music we offer from web site that represent a brand value, event or other range of values?

There are other manifestations that can be considered. Lots of web sites have pictures of people that represent 'the public' but which are really stock photographs from commercial libraries of the beautiful people.

These semiotic variants of the avatar are all part of the repertoire of representations we have at our disposal and there are many more.

In PR how should we regard avatars. Are they, for instance, a form of passing off... a cousin to astroturfing? Or are they a benign device like wall paper?

In a world that now values transparency as an tool in the construction of trust, should we use avatars in communication?

I suspect that they are not going away anytime soon. Indeed, I believe that we will have our own array of avatars that will be semiotic representations of our various selves in many Internet driven forms of interaction and communicating.

So now we need to think through the ethical and moral use, not to mention the legal ramifications involved in the use of avatars.

A simple utilitarian view will require a lot of mind searching before unthinking use of avatars is the norm in PR. After all, are we helping understanding or are we disguising reality in the use of avatars?

But avatars can be a useful device.

They can represent organisations, company departments, the professional occupation of a person who does not want to make their private self public.

When we use the semiotic device of calling ourselves 'the Press Office' what do we mean and what form of disclosure is needed to explain this 'person/department' called a press office?

Perhaps it is now time for some thought to be given to how we handle the avatar issue and where this fits into considerations astroturfing and passing off.


I think that there is a very good case for having avatars and virtual metaphors for people, activities, departments and even, in some cases, whole organisations.

So what are the rules for disclosure?

There is, of course, the utilitarianist view. The use of avatars and online metaphors is OK as long as the generality of the population understands and accepts them.

Well, that no longer holds water. It was fine for an era of mass communication. But its rubbish in an era of user generated publics (or social segments, if you like).

Today maximisation of the good by institutions for those within the society, and by individuals is a code (utilitarian ethical construct) for public actions and personal actions in a mass media era. The issue of what should be done about behavior that produces significant harm for a society on a mass media level would be to select policies which would reduce the overall harm. On the other hand in a era of niche and networked communities, this can become unwieldy as the network takes on a role of communication for a wide (even mass) community because of the network effect. With the unforgetting and time shifting internet at play today's decision can equally be found wanting in a short-while especially as the half life of existance is both short and long tailed.

There is the other way. We can charge practitioners not to use avatars or online metaphors of they will damage long term relationships with the organisation to the detriment of shareholders/voters.

There is some work to be done in this area.

Image NC&TA

The New Regulatory Environment

There is some good that comes from the miserable event in Parliament yesterday.

The Treasury Select Committee did little to shed light but its work, I think, points to how we can look forward to the changes that are needed in a new regulatory framework.

Mervyn King can begin to look for answers instead of frightening the horses.

I cannot speak of the role of compliance officers and risk managers in banks. I cannot speak for the PR industry and the role of the publicists who advised bankers facing a Parliamentary committee. But I can consider what we can learn from the debacle.

What was evident is that there is a need for enhanced corporate transparency. Transparency that allows regulators such as the FSA to have mandatory visibility of necessarily regular advice from compliance offices, risk managers and relationship managers (PR people) to boards of big commercial enterprises like banks.

Advice that can, in addition, be made, to an extent, available at times when such institutions seek support from shareholders and the public purse to re-finance their activities.

Such internal managers can be charged with a mandatory role of advice designed to protect long term shareholder value.

This changes the role of these internal managers. It gives them a mandatory role as well as an internal one.

For PR, it means that the responsible practitioner has to be able to evaluate and explicate the work of companies as it affects and can affect internal and external relationships and thereby trust and reputation. It makes them responsible to the board in the interest of shareholders and other stakeholders.

There is a case for the FSA to be charged with the role of monitoring this internal advice and acting upon it but this changes the mandate for such regulators. The mandate has to be able to respond not just the the industry sector or government but, in globalised industry and commerce, a responsibility for ensuring that the sector is not acting against the interest of the public sphere, a theory that is well grounded in Europe and more so in the USA.

Of course there is more to this but something positive is available from the farce of the Treasury Select Committee activities so far.

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?

Here Comes Everybody Part 1

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

I was going to read it cover to cover and then review it. But it's such a good book that I thought to express my responses as I go through it page by page (ok, few pages at a time).

It is written in a very engaging style and the first page that pulled me up was 17.

There is an assertion he makes that is interesting:

"When we change the way we communicate, we change society."

You have to test assertions like that.

If we look back at the history of changed ways of communicating is there evidence?

Was writing so important. Did those long boring inventories in the ruins of Babylon change that society?

How did the printing press change society?

Is this Middlemarch and the reach of the telegram translated into the 21st century? What of radio's influence in the 1930's, television, tapes and CD's.

Is society so changed? Do the have nots stir? Are communications changes always accompanied by social upheaval? Can common humanity ameliorate the effects?

The questions this simple sentence offers us also predicate social and economic upheaval.

The Battle for Seattle, McSpotlight, Al-Qaeda, Cyber assault against Estonia in 2007 and a host of threats against the systems for delivery.

The sentence has much more to it.

With all our modern systems for communication, are the starving fed, the poor rich?

Do new communications always have to divide peoples?

Do new communications always benefit an elite?

Was it really new communications systems that brought about these ills? Or would they be there without them? Are we really going to see society change, by that I mean, is it inevitable that evil will be exposed again as a consequence of the introduction of there new forms of communication?

Is ubiquitous interactive communication different?

So far, it does seem to be different. There seem to be sets of values that spread through these channels that provide checks and balances that past systems for communication did not seem to have.

Transparency the sword and scales wielded by ubiquitous interactive communication may yet have a part in this saga.

The book has to return to this theme.

What is more valueable trust or knowledge?

Slashdot announced today that

"After months of promises to IP-holders, the long-awaited filters system for YouTube has gone online. The new system will make it easier, the company claims, for copyrighted clips to be removed. 'YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.'"

Which, of course is hard work for the copy holders and YouTube.

Why?

Because there are lots of copycat sites like YouTube where the copyright material can go, folk will get fed up with being fed what the studios let them have (Stalin would be proud) and will, eventually punish them and the bright young things will have alternative entertainment anyway.

Its a question of understanding the nature of the value of knowledge.

Knowledge is expensive to produce and has no value at all.

Making available information that some knowledge exists is expensive too and has high cost and low value associated with it.

If a person or organisation has trust assets, people might believe them if they say they have knowledge and should that knowledge be of interest, it may have some value.

What is the most valuable trust or knowledge?

Knowledge in the form of copyright such as films only has value when the recommender makes it so.

'King Kong' is a film. It has value because we trust the view of people who have seen it. Among a trillion films, there will be a need for some very powerful and much trusted recommenders to give king Kong future value. After all, now that films have a 'Long Tail' who has time to see all the movies?

Perhaps the studios and broadcasters will eventually understand that citizen critics are seriously important and will stop the idiocy of trying to protect valueless copyright.

Picture: Wikipedia

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.

Harry Potter spells domination of computers over people

So Harry Potter Deathly Hollows is available at BitTorrent according to Duncan Riley. It just strikes me that the nature of transparency and Internet porosity need to be better understood by the big brand leaders.

Then there is another form of transparency. If you use Firefox, Guy Kawasaki says this is an essential plugin: It enables you to place your cursor over a link and see a snapshot of the web page. It is instant transparency gratification you might imagine. In a Social Frame it has that time quality. But is it helpful?

Part of transparency is about getting facts to help with planning (radical transparency helps with very dynamic change management) and changing the world which Seth Godin has offered as a metaphor for marketing is, he suggests, limited to a few weeks time but not tomorrow or a year's time. Does this mean that there is a time window for transparency to be relevant as well?

In his analysis of the works of Cory Doctorow, professor Graham J. Murphy in his paper 'Somatic Networks and Molecular Hacking in Eastern Standard Tribe' (which has delighted Cory who wrote the book) offers the anti-establishment view of Intellectual Property without criticism. Which is an issue because transparency is only transparent in a social frame.

The end game in transparency from a Doctorow “post-genre science fiction” perspective is shrouded in granularity and positivism but I think there is something else and it runs counter to the set of mores the characters in Cory's books seem to regard as set in stone.

People are not like that.

It is why I have developed the Social Frame concept.

People do have value systems and are guided by them in what they do but the value systems that count are:

At a moment in time,
Mitigated by the environment and
Subject to Interactive capability.

Thus only those people who are aware of the values of Eastern Standard Tribe can be involved with the tribe and where it is if they have the right environment and interactivity to achieve their tribal ambitions. Time again is an issue associated with transparency. If you try to be interactive outside your time zone, the story tells us - you go nuts.

The biological limitations of our techno/knowledge capability is now pretty well established and being able to scan ourselves--our intelligence, personlities, feelings and memories--into computers is a near reality. It is based on transparency and porosity. In this scenario, the person can time shift in the past. So transparency and time has some historic flexibility.

But there is a lot of work on systems that would use their experience of past executions of algorithms in order to automatically improve their own performance in terms of 'speedup'. That is, speeedup beyond the capability of human biology. Past transparency becomes one of the elements in developing speedup.

The computer can then determine which social frame it needs to optimise the speed of adoption of an activity. Thus accelerating away from human competence.

This suggests that the availability of the Harry Potter book days before its publication is yet another step towards the domination of computers over people.

Wizard!

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!

The ethics of the 'empty chair'

Like many people, I watched Jeremy Paxman on the BBC Newsnight programme Michael White of the Guardian and "Guido Fawkes" a political blogger.

The discussion talked of the relationship between Journalists, bloggers and politicians.

The debate told how some politician 'punish' some journalists by not allowing access, the 'empty chair' whereby access is denied to the fourth estate when the politician has had some sort of bust up with a newspaper, TV channel or journalist. The other side of this trade off is when journalists do not report or who selectively report about a politician in a way that harms the the politicians standing with the electorate and other constituencies.

This is, of course, an example of the all too cosy relationship between Public Relations and the Media.

Underlying this debate is a serious point.

Who is all this content really for? Would it be, just by mis-chance, electors or others who want to be informed about the events among politicians and government?

If not. It does not matter much, other than it is a huge and costly exercise affecting the public purse.

If it is, then there is a big issue and one would no longer doubt why people are turned off by political maneuvering to manipulate the information they need but a wrangle at their expense.

Lets take this further and into the realm of all Public Relations.

Lets suppose an organisation wants to get its message across to a constituency and relies on the media to act as the purveyor. Is this legitimate? Is it ethical?

There can only be legitimacy if this is the only method for communication. Today, of course, this is not so. There are endless channels for communication. The traditional Press, radio and TV are but three conduits among many (The press release is no more than a form of blog post that saves lazy journalists setting up effective RSS feeds).

If, on the other hand, the Press is being used to add legitimacy to a story, then it has to do the job. It should not be selective or deny access because it has had some sort of tiff. It cannot be childish about it. Today, the press release can find its way onto a web site; the background can be offered and debated using blogs, wikis or any other form of publishing and social media. On the other hand the Press can be critical, it can add that most precious of values, time and expertise. It has a resource and journalistic expertise to put the story into critical context. The same might be said of bloggers but without the authority of the publishing house. The closer the media gets to PR the less it is valued for its critical faculty and its authority.

At the same time, when a person (minister, politician, celebrity, company, brand) plays the empty chair routine and and does not provide access to a journalist, programme or newspaper, the media response has, once again, to be critical and explain to its audience that it is being denied access and transparently explain why it is not able to report or discuss issues in public.

The public, including the elector in the case of Fawkes, Paxman and White, can then make a judgement.

Pretending that the present state is 'News as Usual' demonstrates a lack of ethics by both parties. It undermines the authority of both and diminishes trust.

An ignored person, politician, celebrity, company or brand has YouTube and blogs available all the time. Its use is news on a number of fronts. An ignored journalist has the privileged position of showing how a lack of transparency is against 'the public interest'.

The status quo, in an age of social media corrupts both PR and journalism and both sides need to recognise it if only to re-build trust among their respective constituents.

This is not just a political issue, it is an issue for all practitioners. Why only use Press releases and private briefings when the whole world can see the story for what it is using social media.

It is time the publishing houses looked at what they can offer that blogs can't. Expert, timely, critical, reporting.

It is time for PR to act ethically and expose stories to their publics and not hide behind copy takers, the so called journalists of our time.

"You can't hide anything anymore" - Don Tapscott

Wired has a great article today.
There is nothing really new about it because it was covered by the CIPR Internet Commission five years ago as a principle but now Clive Thompson offers it in case study format.

The key issue now is the extent to which these ideas change organisation.

Today, at Bournemouth, we talked about theses things. We talked about how hiding from the digital rip tide is not an oprtion and embracing it must, of its nature change organisations.
Clive re-enforces the visible part but not the wholesale change that has to take place inside organisations.

It is not an option.

As Alex Iskold writes What has happened is that a load of 'Rights' are now transfered.

• The Basic Human Rights in the attention economy
• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.
• You have CONTROL. Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to.
• You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Y
• our attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

Patent off to use wikis ?

The Gowers Review recommended that Wiki technology, as used in Wikipedia, could be used as part of the peer process to build a knowledge base of comments on the application's suitability. Previous inventions — prior art — are also taken into account, before the application is submitted to patent examiners. The use of a Wiki, which can be edited by multiple experts, allows links to prior art to be updated.

After being contacted by ZDNet UK on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the patent office confirmed it was considering measures laid down in the review. She said that the Patent Office was "looking at an implementation plan" for Gowers' recommendations.

There would seem to be many ways wikis can be used. The PR implications for having knowledge building and consultation with peer review sounds a spiffing idea for new product and service introduction as well.

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.

Cutting out web censorship

A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers reports the BBC.

The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere.

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab software, called psiphon, will be released on 1 December.

Net censorship is a growing issue, and several countries have come under fire for blocking online access.

Of course, this is just another example of how Internet Transparency at work.

We really do have to wake up to this phenomenon and learn to live with it.

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.