Museum of communication

If one was to suggest to a young person that they might have an advantage in life should they know about channels for communication, where might one send them. Where is the collection, the centre for communication channel research.

One of the problems so many people have is knowing just how many channels are out there. For too many believe that this or that approach is a silver bullet.

The traditional channels, the fora for travellers tales and old men's stories still exists and remain important and sit alongside Twitter and Facebook, books and magazines.

So where is the research about availability, use, reach and application for each of these repositories of knowledge and fun?

For one of those people who spends an amount of time trying to keep abreast of what is happening to forms of communication, its not easy. For PR, Marketing, advertising and other political, socvial and economic communicators, it must be even harder.

Ans, as we know there is quite a lot we want to know about each channel.


There may be a case for collaboration between a number of Universities.

Edelman 'New Media Release' is a PR exercise

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

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

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


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

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

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

Here are some things one might expect in a NMR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hezza -un reformed

The Tory party may like to think it is going to use social media to engage the British electorate.

I suggest they avoid ex-Tory minister, and leader hopeful Michael Heseltine's publishing houseHaymarket. Not only does it try to run Social Media conferences that pretend some speaker is going to show how a PR person will 'control' the bloggers, it can't even get a blog to work on its site.

The whole Hezza empire is surrounded with subscriptions, passwords and restrictions that, even if I get a copy of PRWeek because of my membership of the CIPR, there is no way I can use it here except in passing.

Byting the bullet

In PR we sometimes want to send a file to an editor or journalist. Sometimes we want to make an audio comment of a video comment available.

Of course we want to keep it short and to the point and put the news first and then fill in the background.

What, then are the limitations. Is it words? Time? Or megabytes.

And how would you know how many megabytes is acceptable?

A megabyte per second is good.

CIPR Scotland AGM

The Annual General Meeting of the Scotland Group of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations will be held on Tuesday 26 September 2006 at 6.15pm in George Suite, George Hotel, 19 -21 George Street, Edinburgh. Members of the CIPR are invited to attend and vote.

Is this time to vote for people who see Social Media (blogs, Wikis, RSS etc) as an important part of PR practice?

Email is chaotic

Over a third (38%) of large organisations across the UK admit their email management system is in ‘complete chaos’, according to the findings of a survey released by AIIM, reports Retail Bulletin.

I have pulled out the key points. But waht this report says to me is that it is about time the Public Relations department got control of email and managed it properly and as a communications medium.

• The survey also found that the same number of end users admitted that their company either had no policy or they didn’t know their company’s policy when it came to email archiving.

• A third of UK organisations do not have any clear plans and procedures for dealing with compliance issues, especially concerning historical records, which poses a number of compliance related risks.

• Only 16% understand that the broader concept relates to information within enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.

• Half of the users surveyed admitted that employees do not fully understand how to access current versions of policies and procedures or other critical corporate information.

• Over two thirds (70%) of organisations admit that content created by employees who have then left, is not actively reviewed or archived appropriately.

Corporate assets need PR maintenance

I have argued elsewhere that hyperlinks are corporate assets (and should be on the ballance sheet).

Working from the Steve Rubel test, "Wikipedia articles on the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. are consistently among the most highly ranked pages in Google on direct searches." would suggest that keeping you organisations' Wikipedia entry up todate is a pretty good idea.

I know, you do that every month anyway - don't you.

Beta Blogger

I have converted to the new style of Google's blogger. It is in Beta and I have some work to do on it to add the things I like to have. Time is short and it will take a few days before full service is, again resumed.

So far I like what I see.

Up the Tubes

YouTube have been "putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins" for the last four hours.

They say they will "be back later. In the meantime, please enjoy a layman's explanation of our website..." See graphic left.

This at a time when I included it in a Usenet post among the new media resources for consideration for added content in the New Media Release.

How embarasing... But where has YouTube gone?