Concerning that complex whole which creates cultural acceptance for people including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society to contribute values through the creation of effective relationships and safe productive environments.
Elisabeth Lewis-Jones, director of Midland’s based consultancy Liquid Public Relations, has been elected President of the Charted Institute of Public Relations for 2008 reports the CIPR magazine Profile.
The 8th woman President of the CIPR, Elisabeth will take up her presidency on 1st January 2008, the Institute’s 60th anniversary year. Before taking over the position, she will serve as President Elect to Lionel Zetter, CIPR President for 2007.
Elisabeth, who has nearly 15 years’ experience working both in-house and in consultancy, is a former CIPR Young Communicator of the Year and chair of the CIPR in the Midlands. Today she is director and co-founder of Liquid Public Relations and a director and Honorary Treasurer of the CIPR.
Microsoft is releasing the latest version of Office 2007, scheduled for mass market launch early next year.
The new version of the code has been altered based on feedback from earlier betas and is free to all existing beta 2 users. The company says it has improved performance, built in better product integration, improved collaboration tools and added general 'fit and finish' changes.
I love this Guardian story. WPP Group has signed an advertising deal with digital video recorder company TiVo. TiVo allows US users skip TV commercials. Tivo then developed a product that allowed it to show adverts from its own software.
It, in effect, replaces one advert with another. Under the deal, GroupM - WPP's combined media planning and buying agency - will buy an agreed minimum amount of TiVo advertising.
I bet there will be a row over this and most of it will come from people who find scream marketing offensive and can't escape.
This is a big issue and one that the digital channelFX and others are trying to resolve. They find that people are getting very creative in time shifting to avoid watching advertisements.
What I cannot understand is that if people try to avoid watching these horrid little adverting interruptions to their lives and go to extra-ordinary lengths to do so, why keep putting them in?
Soon TV adverts will be the kiss of death to brands. Both geese and both golden eggs gone in a moment of greed.
This could be a two way street. The advertising industry's lip smacking visits to The Ivy and eye-wateringly expensive trips to Cannes means that fewer than half of financial directors believe their agencies are trustworthy, according to a survey.
The Accounting for Creativity report, conducted with 100 financial directors in the creative services industry by independent research company Loudhouse, revealed that only 42% of those surveyed thought that clients perceived their agencies to be trustworthy.
Clients think they are being ripped off, customers turned off by the adds the Advertsing industry still thinks it has a future.
If you have not already tried it out its time you did. YouTube is the fastest growing online brand in the UK, increasing the number of its users by nearly 500% in the first six months of 2006. It is a must for PR practice and offers a wide range of opportunities. With 3.6 million unique users in July, YouTube is used by more than one in eight Internet users in the UK.
Thank you to the Guardian for pointing it out but Put another way. This is 6% of the UK population. Its bigger than the Sun or the Mirror. Its 'readership' bigger than any newspaper. It can be on your 'press list' by Monday morning.
Websites with user-generated content dominate the top 10 hottest online brands, according to Internet research outfit Nielsen NetRatings.
YouTube beat rival social networking sites Flickr, which increased by only 131%, and Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace, which is only up by up 98%.
Now... we are talking 6 (yes SIX) months here not year on year.
Come back in a year and do not be surprised to find that 15% of the uk total (baby Fiona, mum, dad, grandma and uncle Herbert) population all using YouTube.
PR colleagues will have an excellent opportunity to develop platforms and channels for communication in thier very own private Internet.
The health service in the UK is linking everyone up using BT as the vendor.
"We have quietly created Europe's largest virtual private network that will connect every NHS site in England, enabling information to travel at great speeds between those sites," said the chief executive for BT's Global Services division Andy Green.
The network is due to be completed within 6 months. Currently 15,000 offices have been connected and he network will eventually link 18,000 hospitals and GP surgeries.
“Never have there been so many media options available to advertisers and consumers, a trend that has both excited and frustrated brand marketers as media buying decisions have become more complicated by a market veering toward new media. But traditional media companies have responded by investing in multiple media platforms to reach this increasingly fragmented audience." said James Rutherfurd, executive vice president and managing director at VSS in an e-commerce article.
Now that old media has cottoned on the the idea that on-line is not about washing clothes and Google and others have presented statistics stuff to make decision making based on facts hard to avoid.
Add to this the growth of social media and the poor old marketing mind is in a whirl.
In PR we do have to recognise the growing range of communications platfoms and the range of channels available to us and the we have to plan.
Some people like me are pathalogically averse to email marketing (you dont know me and want to send an email - phone or get your news to find me) but most are less irritated and some are quite sangine.
Google has added interactive content from the Discovery Channel and other providers to popular geospatial software Google Earth.
The overlays can be accessed by clicking a box in the software's sidebar, and support videos, photos, RSS feeds and blogs.
Is every corporate headquarters going to be added? Or can PR practitioners be much much more creative
The Discovery Channel, for example, is offering video segments about landmarks, cities and tourist attractions around the world ..
"Google Earth Featured Content is a way for Google to connect users with really compelling, high-quality information being illustrated and shared on Google Earth," said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps.
I owe someone an apology. They pointed me to this and I just can't track back to who did it but its great.
Create your own morning or evening newspaper from Simply Headlines is really cool. You select where you want the news to come from and there it is in a newspaper. So your daily news could be from this blog, the BBC or the Economist or all three. Here is a clipping service for online stuff.
It also has that half way house element about it.
People keep telling me that clients like to see paper, well here it is.
I have no difficulty with agreeing with News Corp. President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Chernin
“I’m dead serious when I say that mobile could be one of the greatest entertainment platforms we’ve created.”
We have known for quite some time that the "mobile world" was going to be hot. In Asia, it has been for a long time and people maintain a very personal attachment to their phones.
Using a mobile phone, consumers can now pay bills, check a bank account, download books, games, and news content, surf the Web, podcast, share photos, download ring tones and music, and more.
So far none of these wonderful applications has taken hold.
Partly this is because of the silly pricing models associated with mobile. calls cost (almost) nothing and are chared, phones cost mony and are given away. It nuts.
The bundling of services is far too complex.
The application that allows someone into your head and imagination is a different to video and text but each of these is treated in the same way.
But - Mobile is big. We need the imagination to tap its potential.
Confused of Calcutta is a really good place to go if you want to be challenged. I go a lot.
The issue of Intelectual properties, patents and copyright is one that has bugged me for a while. I like owning what I own but keep finding out that when I share it, I get back more. This applies to software, comment and research and even this blog. I am more than please that these thoughts are also in the mind of a Nobel laureate.
JP Rangaswami reports on what he has just said in New Scientist.
....... There’s a fascinating article by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the latest New Scientist. Yes, of course it’s hidden behind a paywall, what did you expect? Here’s the stub.
I quote from the article:
Locking up products with patents is an unfair and ineffective way to reward innovation.
There is a growing sentiment that something is wrong with the system governing intellectual property.
Recent years have seen a strengthening of IP rights…..The changes have been promoted especially by the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries, and by some in the software industry….
…[some] patents take what was previously in the public domain and “privatise” it — what IP lawyers called the new “enclosure movement”.
In any system, someone has to pay for research. In the current system, those unfortunate enough to have the disease are forced to pay the price, whether they are rich or poor. And that means the very poor in the developing world are condemned to death
In the relationship value model we see convergence of values to create relationships. Secrets, patents and copyright are not there to build relationships.
Mail is really key for Yahoo, and its 255 million e-mail users are one of its most valuable assets so this upgrade is important.
Yahoo mail is first or second preference for quite a lot of people and was my first on-line mail service (when Adam was a lad and eve was trying to get him into Usenet).
Dan Greenfield do have a great blog and his interview with Aaron Uhrmacher, senior account executive at Text 100 is an excellent insight into Second Life.
Aaron's opening comment of:
"Our SL presence stemmed from a presentation that we made at the Arthur Page Society on the future of communications and social media. In our work, we are very involved in peer-to-peer media blogs wikis, podcasts, etc. SL allows for a more immersive form of communications. In SL, you can collaborate in three dimensions. "
Is an excellent introduction as to why people in PR should understand this form of communication.
But its in more than an interview it is a Second Life case study. It shows why an organisation might like to use these kinds of channels for communication - for commercial gain.
Microsoft has announced that its Zune digital music player will be released in the US in time for Christmas.
Unveiling more details of the player, which it hopes will rival Apple's iPod Features include: wireless connectivity (allowing nearby users to exchange songs and photos), an ability to play videos and includes a radio.
Scott Button, of Unruly Media in London, called his four-week-old project "the world's first comprehensive and independent online video chart." The Viral Video Chart, a hit parade tracking the most popular videos on YouTube, MySpace and Google Video is worth a look. Thanks for knowledge to BL Ochman who has more about the results - beam me up Scottie.
The point being that if you see what is popular, you may like to include similar content in your work.
The website for fellow drinkers to exchange views about local pubs and bars is a reaction to the police pubwatch scheme - which he claims is one sided.
Harry Bingley, of Church Street, set up the discussion site ‘pubs4people.com’ for people to chat about their experiences of Wilmslow’s pubs and clubs on the web.
The 50-year-old former marketing consultant says it is a reaction to the changing nature of the town’s pubs and clubs.
He hopes his website will redress the power balance of schemes like pubwatch and encourage publicans to think more about the views of the paying punter.
He said: "I recently saw a joke cartoon in the newspaper where a man was banned from a pub for smiling after happy hour - that just about sums it up for me."
This is the kind of site that is worth watching. It is the sort of blog that could become popular and so, for some organisations being involved in conversations relevant to this blogger may be interesting and advantageous.
Among some constituents there is a common affinity that it just creates content. The magazine Farmers Weekly has a blog running where farmers can comments on how well they are getting on with this autumn's drilling (that is planing seeds for you townies).
One of the interesting things to note is the branding that goes with it. Seed types are brands and many are specific to seedsmen. In this blog they get coverage (Google Juice).
PS, the winter wheat is now sown in the field behind us here in Wiltshire. The got it in yesterday just before it rained and rained and is still raining.
Spongebobhas a blog. He is a celebrity Squirrel Monkey, cute and with many adventures to tell. Not least that his girlfriend bit his foot.... you could not make it up ... Unless you were Freddie Star's publicist.
Spongebob went missing from the theme park and zoo in July but was later found being played with by children in Clapham. He had been kidnapped.
What a great way to build a brand and bring visitors to see this charming celebrity. More from the BBC.
Ryan Gilbey uses this phrase in his article 'A Right Royal failure' in the New Statesman.
In their refusal to play the public relations game, the Windsors create an opportunity for Blair to nip in quick and claim the glory.
Of course it is nothing of the sort.
Public Relations 'games' are practice session in Business Schools. In real life public relations is there to create effective relationships between organisations and their constituency.
One might ask in analysis of the film based on the death of Diana 'The Queen' (15) which of the players has, in the long run, the best public relations The Royal family or Mr Tony Blair.
You see Mr Gilbey, public relations goes to the heart of the organisation and the fluffy bit, the bit that journalists see; the bit that marketing people so often use is mostly of peripheral consequence.
Like most journalists, Mr Gilbey, you have been succored into believing the spin of your colleagues, fluffy bunnies, marketing people and Tony Blair.
Websites that offer users the chance to express themselves - whether by sharing their latest home videos or editing encyclopedia entries on obscure Japanese anime - are reaping the rewards in spades, research has found and reported in Silicon.com
Sites championing user-generated content have seen a significant leap in traffic on the year ago period, according to statistics from research company comScore - and several are now among the top 50 UK web property rankings.
The first parts of the story were published in online sites, then came the major newspapers: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times with their coverage. Their stories then helped spark the interest of TV and radio news crews.
The Guardian's Katie Allen believes its boom time in PR. She writes: In the wake of recent bad press for big names such as Cadbury and Thames Water, companies are waking up to the importance of "reputation management", fuelling a boom in the public relations industry.
Managing reputation is not about public relations it is about managing managers. If the PR person (corp affairs person, comms officer or other description that avoids the words 'public relations') is not facing down managers who should have been put out to grass with Stalin, then they are not doing their job.
So this 'Boom' is built on a fallacy and PR managers who are not gutsy enough to sit in on the board and other meeting and stir the waters.
The other boom has to be teased out of this quote:
The chief executive of Chime, Christopher Satterthwaite, said most companies were taking public relations more seriously as a result of advances in technology.
"If we live in the information age when anybody can find out virtually anything about any individual, any brand, any corporation, then the need to manage your reputation to me is so self evident that not to do so is corporately irresponsible," he said.
note the words 'advances in technology' - THAT is where the boom really is.
The reason I say this is that the online community is already disrupting the organisations (e.g. if you sell on-line you have systems that allow you to. This is the Internet audience changing the organisation for more about this see my lecture) it forces transparency and it makes organisations more porous.
It also means PR has to be the arm of the company that drives this area of activity.
Below is a list of PR firms that maintain blogs it says here. It goes on to say: 'Please note that this list is meant to only include official PR firm blogs. Please only list blogs that are directly affiliated with PR firms. We welcome the listing of PR firms of all sizes on this list.
This is a little wizz by the Bivings Group and you might like to check them out before wasting too much time because I there seems to be no reason to do it that I can see except to drive traffic to thier white papers .....
There ought to be a law that says “Information tends to go corrupt when hidden, and tends to corrupt those who participate in the process of hiding the information,” says JP Rangaswami.
We waste so much in the procurement process for the same reasons. We don’t use the tools we have to discover what’s out there. We don’t make the process a participative one. We make it worse by allowing the tenderers better access to the requirements than anyone else. I’m confused.
As with wikipedia and with the celebrity blogs, there will always be vandals, some in the interests of art, some in the interests of “freedom”, some for the heck of it.
In the early days of the Internet, most companies would create a destination website, wait for users to show up, and then make money from the advertisements. Now they use widgets to reel users in. Consider a typical MySpace user's page, studded with widgets that pull from video goliath YouTube or photo services such as Slide. Everyone's a winner here: MySpace, because it becomes stickier; YouTube and Slide, because they get the traffic; and the user, because he or she gets it all on one page.
To learn more about this see what Om Malik has to say and add imagination.
Google and Intuit agreed today to let all the small business owners who use Quickbooks automagically list their businesses on Google Maps, manage Adwords campaigns and post items to Google Base from within Quickbooks, says Eric Schonfeld. This is a must for all those small companies and smaller clients to help them gain effective presence in thier locality.
Shel Holtz makes a very good case for Public Relations people to be responsive to the medium they use. In his case he is talking about blogs. He says: There is an expectation in the blogosphere—and not an unreasonable one—that bloggers will check their blogs frequently and clear out their comment moderation queues quickly in order to keep the dialogue fresh and current. As businesses expand their presence in the blogosphere, they appear to be doing so at corporate speeds, not blog speeds. That’s a mistake. The blogosphere will not adapt to the pace of business.
I guess that if a PR person forgot to call journalist back they would suffer sanctions. So what is the difference?
A new opportunity for podcasters to market their content creation and technical production skills has just arrived in the form of an offer presented by Voices.com, a web service dedicated to giving everyone with a voice the ability to be found, listened to, and hired for podcasting and voice over work.
Meanwhile, the Independent reports BT is launching a podcasting service to give the nation a platform to show off its talents (or lack of) by making videos and audio clips available on a new internet service. The telecoms giant has teamed up with US PodShow Network to provide the service, to be available to all UK internet users.
while its one thing to see people talk about Bebo because its cool, the number of suits talking about it tells a different story. The latest one is here.
BT and the BBC must have run a ruler over it already and the hype is about price not functionality.
Yahoo and Intel are teaming up to pipe sports statistics to TV screens, targeting fans who devour data about real-world players to manage their fantasy teams, Reuters reports.
The deal helps the Internet media giant expand away from the computer screen to the TV screen, while the world's top chipmaker aims to showcase the benefits of its Viiv initiative aimed at making the PC a hub for home media and entertainment.
But think of the other applications. Imagine being able to add PR messages to TV screens.........
David Tebbutt is excited about about BEA's moves into the Social Computing and its "upcoming blog/wiki combo (called Builder)."
David knows about these things.
He says BEA will make sure that theirs is tightly integrated to organisational computer systems, giving the ability to surface material from these systems right up to the wiki, for example. Another element, called Runner, will provide access control and audit trails.
So if you need to implement a Blog/wiki corporate programme, have a look.
WPP has continued its online spending spree, leading a $2m round of funding in internet marketing for its LiveWorld acquisition e-consultancy reports.
The move comes after WPP and LiveWorld formed a joint venture in July, with both firms saying they have seen growing demand for marketing services focusing on online communities.
LiveWorld has developed social networking applications such as blogs and messageboards for firms including MTV Latin America and eBay.
"In less than two months since announcing the LiveWorld-WPP joint venture, we have already closed new community marketing programs with major brands," said Mark Read, strategy director, WPP and CEO of wpp.com.
The Guardian says BT is launching an online "social media network" that will combine elements of the video site YouTube with clips and shows from the entertainment and music industry.
The site, called BT PodShow, is being launched as a partnership with the 18-month-old US-based PodShow.
BT is looking for content if you have some and the is a green eye element cast in the direction of MySpace.
The website is being positioned as a hybrid between the likes of MySpace and YouTube and fulfilling the online aims of traditional companies such as MTV and ITV.
Meanwhile, the BBC says that three-quarters of staff at the largest satellite communications station in the world could lose their jobs after BT said it planned to scale down the site.
Ninety of the 120 workers at Goonhilly, in Cornwall, could lose their jobs or be redeployed, as satellite operations are moved to Madley, in Herefordshire.
I just wish it would provide me with a high speed connection without the packaging, fluff and hard disc junk.
One thing we can be sure, if BT can charge more for the Madley 'pipe' they will just as soon as the wreckers leave Goonhilly.
This is a story about two puppies. They are siblings and cute. They inspired this article.
It is also about social media and Royal Canin. Royal Canin is a dog food.
Yesterday, there was a blog post about Royal Canin in the 'Hotdog blog ' it said: "Well I have tried Blue (puppy formula) none of my 2 puppies even touched it. They put one in their mouth, spit it out and that was it.. it stayed there untouched. No matter how I try, they just won't eat it. So I stick with Royal Canin (puppy, small) since the vet was recommending that one anyways."
This citizen endorsement will be available for anyone seeking information about this dog food for years.
There is another post which references a press release which says: Royal Canin is a world leader in Pet Nutrition (www.royalcanin.ca) specializing in high quality foods for dogs and cats including breed specific foods for …
This is another post that will be available for anyone seeking information about this dog food for years.
There is little doubt about which is the more powerful statement.
The statements that endorse the product are very evident in post after post.
"Royal Canin has done a lot of research in the development of their pet food," said Vicky Jones, who co-owns Petland in Murfreesboro with her husband, Bob Hyde. The couple, both veterinarians, re-opened the store in March, and sales have exceeded their expectations. "Geared to be breed-specific, there are foods for Chihuahuas, (Yorkshire terriers), shih tzus and others. Royal Canin is really giving Science Diet a run for its money."
"So, on Derek's suggestion (Derek is my gay boyfriend/dog trainer buddy, if you don't recall) I'm giving Royal Canin a shot. He swears by it."
"Royal Canin is really giving Science Diet a run for its money.”
Different aproaches to advertising
If you compare these statements with, for example, an advertisement or a sponsorship programme there are many differences.
The blog posts
The first is the authenticity of the voices. There are people endorsing and recommending the product.
Second is how inexpensive this promotion was (free).
Third, and this is key, they will remain available to people seeking information about the product for years to come. Its half life goes on and on and on.
People seek this information in their time, when they want it and in a form that they want.
An advertisement
The language of the company
Expensive
A life of a few days at most.
Interferes with people's interests and lives when they don't really want it, have little current need and is disruptive.
There is a need to build a strategy (see below) but we learn from the above that, with sympathetic engagement with ambassadors such as those above, we can lever the value of this endorsement a lot.
It has the advantage that it will be online for a long time and because we can engage such people, if only by offering a 'thank you' comment to their posts, we increase the google juice of their posts and our own web site. ROI is high and is measurable (links are assets ).
Optimising a blog (or wiki) post by adding empathetic comment, linking it to other blog and wiki posts and effective search engine optimisation, tagging, trackback and RSS implementation can increase the value of comment considerably. The investment in time and effort has a long 'half life'. The difference between issuing a release to the press and a blog post is that press comment has little by way of longevity but blogs (and press comment online) has a long life . What is important to know is that if its on-line it is cumulative.
Organisations that are not building a significant presence online now will have to race to catch up or they will be swamped by the sheer size of the presence of competitors.
There is one other issue. People who do not see (search for, don't have access to the web etc) are not excluded from these conversations. A person who offers a post and gets a comment, will talk about it to friends and family - even total strangers - and a greater affinity is developed. Of course, they might even spread the word by email, IM or other means as well.
Compared to an advertisement (seen today and forgotten tomorrow) online relationship building (always there, personal and human) online interaction is very powerful and is much less costly.
Building the strategy
Let's suppose our aim is to provide presence that aids development of market share for the product (I can't keep on promoting a dog food - even if our puppies do like it a lot and it keeps them fit).
What do we do best. What do we like to do, what do we want to achieve. (remember, it has to be authentic. It is the building block for the whole approach). Perhaps we are best at creating the right formula product, we like to manufacture and distribute it so that everyone can enjoy its benefits.
We need to develop a knowledge base.
Our company, its people, products, processes, stakeholders , users and their interests.
The events and activities we endorse, sponsor and why.
The third parties we work with and are involved with and why.
The content of the conversations about our organisation, products and service (what do people like to talk about)
The empathetic and mutual interest between constituents and the company (what do we like to talk about that our constituency also like to talk about.
Identify dissonance
We need to articulate our objectives
Articulate the benefits
Create presence
Build credibility through broad engagement of our stakeholders
Involve our active, aware and latent publics
Resolve dissonance
Deliver ROI in the short, say, three months, and long term over a period of, say, 12 months through consumer involvement
Mobilise our stakeholders in support of the company, its products and partners
Directly and indirectly involve our consumer audience which is a broad constituency (age, sex, income, location etc).
Encourage our consumer audience to consider us when they think about or are discussing dogs
Address dissonant issues for that proportion of our consumer audience and stakeholders that are expose to them
It seems incredible that the PR institutions are so slow when their members' interests are obviously at stake.
It seems like negligence.
Why are they not involved in this debate:
I think that PR-firms editing in a community space is deeply unethical, and that clients should put very firm pressure on their PR firms to not embarrass them in this way.
It is part of a very important post in Constantin Basturea’s weblog. This is much bigger than a spat between the PR industry and Wikipedia. It is about the ability of a PR practitioner to represent an organisation. It is not about in-house/agency differences it is about practitioners.
I realise that organisations like PRSA, CIPR, IABC and the rest are big lumbering giants of bebureaucracynd that it takes time to formulate policy and get consensus.
In the new world order for PR that is not good enough. There is a need to use social media to get concensus and for fleet footed responses otherwise events will overtake us.
This kerfuffle is two weeks old and there seems to be no visible stiring among the great and the good. This is going to cost PR practitioners a lot of money, not to mention angst. It will have legal consequences and provide precedentor many other PR activities including the ability to issue statements and news.
It is time that there was a rapid deployment force in the institutions to look at such matters.
Are these institutions monitoring the web and social media? Are they considering the implication for their members? Have they realised that the pace of change in communication is quite rapid. Do they know that a week in cyberspace is a very long time.
It is well argued and has contributions from a range of sources.
But, for those of us who lived (painfully) through the collapse of the last 'bubble' - the web bubble, the hardest thing to do was to tell people the facts about what had happened. The expansion, explosion of the web and web applications did not 'burst'. It kept growing and growing and growing.
Sure the get rich quick merchants go burned.
Just like the 'lets put advertising online' brigade will get burned. Just like the 'it is all paid for by advertising' brigade will get burned but social media will continue.
One of my heros is BL Ochman and her comment about acceptance of new media at corporate HQ is right (later today I will post further on this) . She goes back to a post by Jerry Bowles, "Why CEOs Are Afraid of Social Media" and extends the fact that most leaders do not want to operate their organizations as experiments in democracy or collective intelligence.
Resistance also is futile. Look at Dell. They ignored the great hue and cry about their customer service for years. Meanwhile, the online commentary grew to a tsunami. When Dell finally launched a blog, they still tried to play by the old rules and push their message out while ignoring the elephant in the room.
A week or so later, when the Dell battery recall was mounted, the company already had a way to communicate with customers, and that forum made it clear that they were trying. Looking back, I'm sure they're wondering why they were so afraid of customers.
Perhaps what we are seeing at last is the enforced transparency that comes from the semantic web.
This was a conclusion we came to in 1999 at the CIPR Internet Commission. (It would be soooo useful if the papers were published by the CIPR - its site needs an archive capability. Perhaps we should introduce them to Google which is said to be building a global archive) .
Andrew Lark has a post on the subject of trasnparency and 'green policies and notes: What is going on here is interesting. Recognizing the very tangible commercial advantage of messaging green, companies like Sun, GE and Dell are moving beyond messaging as hyperbole and into making the message very real. The stand to gain from the mantra of "live the message and prosper".
Chime Communications PLC said its first half year pretax profit rose 62 % to £5.4 million from £3.3 million a year ago.
Operating profit increased 65% to £6.1 million and margins continued to improve to 15.8% from 13.3%.
Chime chairman Lord Bell said the results were 'very encouraging' adding that the company is 'positive about the outcome for the full year'.
The Chime companies are:
Bell Pottinger (which includes several Bell Pottinger and Good Relations companies, Harvard, Insight, Resonate, Ozone, De Facto,The SMART Company, MMK, Rare and Traffic); the UK's leading research and consultation group (Opinion Leader Research and Ledbury Research) and now with VCCP, one of the fastest growing advertising and marketing services groups in the UK, including specialist agencies in financial services (Teamspirit) and property marketing (TTA).
Own It offers free intellectual property advice for London's creative people.
It offers a range of services, from basic to specialist support, through online and face-to face seminars,workshops and, where appropriate, surgeries with intellectual property lawyers. They work with a network of IP advisors including lawyers and specialists at various trade associations associated with the creative industries in the UK.
Own It likes to keep with the times, and so that everyone, no matter of location, can benefit from Own It’s free intellectual property advice, they’ve created podcasts from some of our free events.
Number one breakfast presenter of North East radio station Metro Radio, Tony Horne, is tuning into the i-pod generation with the launch of a unique series of podcasts dedicated to a selection of real-life topics and high-profile sporting events.
Launched on 7 September the podcast kicked off with exclusive coverage of Cancer Research pioneer Findlay Young’s Great World Run.
While is seems good for rail passengers that they will be able to access broadband connections via satellite under plans published today by media watchdog Ofcom, it is not the big application.
The regulator is making a new type of spectrum licence available that will allow train operating companies to install "satellite earth stations" on trains.
Some operating companies already offer wireless broadband access through trackside terminals, but this is not always reliable.
So what about ships, ferries, coaches, buses, cars and events? In fact any location that wants access on a moving platform or at a temporary location could benefit.
For people in PR who organise days out and events this could be useful.
Robbin Goodman, Executive Vice President and Partner, Makovsky and Company. Goodman argues a strong case for corporate blogging as an emerging public relations and business tool in a paper at the Institute for Public Relations.
But the case that she makes stands in stark contrast with the other thrust of her paper - which provides the most complete published review of findings from the Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey. That study - a nationwide telephone survey of 150 senior executives (directors and above) of Fortune 1000 companies - was conducted for Makovsky by Harris Interactive.
"Who will admit that in 1996 they questioned - even doubted - the power of the Internet to transform the way business everywhere would be conducted?" Goodman writes. "Despite evidence of another major shift taking place, many senior executives seem determined to doubt the Internet's power to alter business communications."
Oh... yes and what about the communications sectors like Public Relations. Did they see the web coming? This time it is dimensions bigger. The PR job is to show corporate leaders how big, pervasive and structurally different and to point up the dangers and opportunities of disintermediation.
This is, of course consultancy. are we good enough at it yet?
In terms of ad network reach, according to comScore data, the re-launched vcmedia network is now second only to Advertising.com in the UK but ahead of players including 24/7 Real Media and Burst Media.
ValueClick announced today that it has completed the integration of its vcmedia and Fastclick online advertising networks, creating a network with 59% reach among UK internet users.
The announcement, which follows the purchase of the US network Fastclick a year ago, is significant because it demonstrates the increasing competition in the ad networks space and the importance of reach as a selling point for the major players.
Meantime, Burst Media this week shook the stock market because it did not think it would hit its financial targets.
I just have a feeling that this form of on-line advertising is getting less effective. It is based on the 'scream marketing' model and is a turn off.
User-generated content (UGC) has increased dramatically in the UK over the last year, according to research by comScore and reported in e-consultancy.
The firm found Wikipedia to be the top UGC property, and the sixteenth most popular site overall with 6.5m visitors in July 2006, up 253% from a year earlier.
Other UGC sites that have moved into the top 50 in the UK include MySpace.com (up 467% to 5.2m visitors), Piczo.com (up 393% to 4m), YouTube.com (3.9m visitors), and Bebo.com (up 328% to 3.9m).
"Web 2.0 is clearly architected for participation, as it attempts to harness the collective intelligence of Web users," commented Bob Ivins, MD of comScore Europe.
I am not sure about collective inteligence but that is a lot of extra eyeballs and shows how much PR has to do to stay with the media that is really beginning to count and be part of user generated content.
IBM has an island on SecondLife - the 3D online virtual world - and will use it to foster collaboration between employees, ex-employees and industry colleagues.
As he says: "Good attitude when it comes down to testing new ways to collaborate and communicate."
According to KolawoleOlaniyan, Amnesty International's Africa Programme Director, a cover up of mass human rights violations among the poorest people in Zimbabwe is a public relations practice.
I take offense.
His comments, published in ZimbabweJournalist.comand Reuters are a direct attack on the work of Sarah Green,Eulette Ewart, Neil Durkin and Steve Ballinger who are all practicing public relations employees of Amnesty International and whose profession, this statement infers, can be directed towards human rights violations.
A sad state of affairs that Amnesty should employ such people unless KolawoleOlaniyanmistakes public relations for state propaganda. If so one might expect a public apology to his colleagues and my profession.
The FT reports "Financial Dynamics, one of the top financial public relations companies, is being bought for an initial $260m in cash and shares by FTI Consulting, a US consulting and investigations company."
The FT says: "It is also the first time a financial PR firm has been acquired by a consulting company, rather than a media or marketing group."
This does not say a great deal for the media groups who own "Public Relations Consultancies".
It does reflect conversations with CEO's of PR firms owned by advertising dominated groups who are frustrated at the 'in yer face' publicity pitches they are routinely asked to provide.
Blogs, podcasts and RSS newsfeeds create both opportunities and threats that communications professionals simply cannot ignore. The University of Sunderland is bringing a groundbreaking conference to Edinburgh which will give you the knowledge and skills to react, respond and participate in these fast emerging social media technologies.
This conference will consider how practitioners can adapt to ensure they continue to communicate with target audiences who are becoming increasingly selective. Presentations will be given by a roster of highly renowned international speakers who are experts in their fields and are at the cutting edge of these new communications practices.
The event is being supported by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, Scotland offering a discount to CIPR members. Delegate tickets are £145 + Vat for CIPR Members and £185 + Vat for non-members.
For further information or to book your tickets please contact Nicky Wake at Don’t Panic on 01706 828855 or by e-mail nicky@dontpanicprojects.com
THE City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has become the first major ensemble in the world to launch a regular podcast.
The free 30-minute monthly download includes the latest CBSO news, interviews and discussions with musicians and conductors as well as music clips.
The report in the Manchester Evening News shows how podcasting can be used in public relations to help promote and build communities online. Well done City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
The Times has announced that kicking off from next Monday, TheGame will make its first appearance as an online show in the shape of The Game Podcast – presented by Danny Kelly.
Each week, the show will bring news, chat, debates and interviews with top football players and managers, starting with an exclusive interview with Michael Owen, the England and Newcastle star.
No doubt a target for some PR interaction, this is also an example of how podcasts (and associated blogs) offer a channel for communicators.
Offering content to web masters and social media editors has always been a useful tactic for PR practice. Vasrue.com is launching a directory for articles with free RSS news feeds, travel portal design refresh, a travel blog and a newsletter. It is an example of how technologies like RSS can be used to deploy PR services and is reported in Internet Travel News.
In an effort to support other webmasters, Vasrue.com is offering its original articles through RSS news feed free of charge. Now newspapers, ezines, magazines and independent websites can effortlessly integrate fresh, captivating content from the Internet portal in no time. Each article is available for PDF download, RSS feed or browser printing.
The increasing functionality of cell phones is an area of interest to Public Relations as this platform for communication increases the range of communications channels available for adoption for public relations practice.
A study reported in Cellular News has found that location aware services will prove increasingly popular with 3G phone users. This interest in global positioning technology was one of the findings in the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS) released last week. The annual survey also found that besides voice calls, the current most commonly used features on cell phones include text messaging, web surfing, email and picture messaging.
Survey respondents also reported an interest in Bluetooth technology that allows users to connect their cell phones to other devices without wires. Broadband internet access and MP3 uploading were high on the list of most desired features.
Chris Anderson makes the obvious obvious. Your news release can be news for years. Your news release becomes more influential over time.... here is how he describes it:
Online, everything is equally available and relevance is not determined by where something is on a page but by what other people think of it. When you look at it from that perspective, you see that stuff that is deemed ‘good' builds its incoming links over time — that is, the longer it is out there, the more people link to it and the more people discover it.
Google and other search engines measure relevance on the basis of incoming links which will rank it higher and higher, and as a result it will appear higher and higher in search results and therefore get even more traffic. In a weird way, it completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn't matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.
I think it was a surprise to many people that search would be such a powerful driver of demand for news, especially when you consider that canonical search — the regular search rather than news search — doesn't even find stuff until a week or so after the fact because the spiders just take that long to find things. What you're realising is that people care much more about what's relevant than what's new.
Dan Greenfield commented today: "No longer is a PR person’s reporter Rolodex the gateway to successful corporate communications. Instead, that Rolodex is as big as every customer, vendor, partner and competitor who interacts with your company."
What Dan discovered is that converastion is more powerful than the press release.
I am delighted. It is evidence of values driving public relations. His public is now defined by a convergence of values. The values of his constituency and his and his organisation's values.
In combination this is more powerful.
It is levering value from relationships instead of shouting at market segments.
I hope that thi is a virus that is attacking every PR department in the world and it seems that it is.
Now lets see if we can understand this better. It will inform PR practice and is applicable at the coal face too.
e-consultancy were sharp eyed with this one: BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial arm, is apparently looking for an acquisition to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s Myspace, according to the Mail on Sunday.
The paper says the BBC has £350m to spend on acquisitions and wants to target the youth market through a social networking site.
I guess they are impressed with Rupert's claim of 30 BILLION clicks in June.
can I spot PR practitioners are rushing to Bebo to get some idea of what the new domian will look like.
The 67 Britons killed in the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago were remembered today at a memorial garden near the U.S. Embassy.
Before an early afternoon ceremony led by U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle, bouquets of white roses and yellow carnations were piled beneath the oak pergola where the names of the victims are inscribed on three bronze plaques.
It is well argued and makes a lot of sense for a web 1.0 mind.
Of course he did not factor in the revenue stream from mobile, or interactive posters or other forms of digital signage. There are opportunities to provide content for other media and then there is the podcast ( vidcasts where there is a ton of money to be made.
With a bit more imagination, the day of the free newspaper, a 'marketing device' to get 'digital eyeballs' is not far away.
What then, will be the role of press agentry? Will it be as an aid to driving eyeballs to digital properties?
ASOS.com, the online fashion retailer that sells cheaper versions of celebrity outfits, is to launch a monthly glossy magazine to attract more customers to its website. The Aim-quoted group is to charge £1 for ASOS, which will be sold on its website. Am I sure that I follow this Guardian story?
Chris Anderson has presented us with a list of papers that are a must read. They deal with the issue of the 'long tail'.
This is important to PR practice for a range of reasons.
There are the traditional reasons. The long tail is how organisations can generate revenues that are denyied to them when they have to limit their offering because of contraints like warehouse or showroom space (but can offer/display such products online at marginal cost and thereby offer a wider range). Another argument is that the long tail allows small organisations to compete in markets where mass marketing and product bundling is common.
Also the long tail is importnat in areas like the knowledge that an organisation might make available to, for example, journalists and, on the darker side, the long tail is where people will find criticism that could be half a dozen years old.
What journalist given the choice between a New Media Release and releases currently in use would opt for the old one?
There is no choice. Press releases as we know it will continue for several years but will progressively become less effective, less used and less relevant as the media builds its new publishing model on a combination of on-line and print.
This week the NMR podcast introduced some applications of New Media Release.
The gene is out of the bottle.
Links to the top topics on NMR podcast covered can be followed here:
Here is a practical example of how a newspaper generates, re-purposed copy from a NMR. we have to be able to offer content like this as well as the 1000 word backgrounder or knowldege resourse generated via this technology and posed to del.icio.us for added depth.
From Shel Holtz I find that Cogenz, Niall Cook’s startup that aims to bring social book marking to the enterprise level, is looking for corporate beta testers.
What Cogenz does is offer a capability whereby people can create a knowledge base that links people, departments, places, expertise and knowledge resources in a way that makes it easy to find and re purpose.
It is worth following the whole story from Niall's site to see how useful such a resource can be now and in the future.
To be able to create a New Media Release with such a competence will be easy and will make the whole process much more manageable for the Media Relations specialist.
Of course there are many other applications and some of them will make some organisations fundamentally more competitive.
What must we do to our media releases to serve the publishing industry.
First of all we need to be able to offer formats that are helpful. Just as a paper press release is unhelpful to a journalist these days, so too is a format that forgets the media need to use SMS.
There is another consideration which is described byAdrian Holovaty who gives a good idea of what 'repurpose' means and says: "I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.
This is important for public relations on a number of counts.
Would we have to provide the wider and broader content? Does this mean that the New Media Release is inevitable? Yes it does in order that we can offer the formats that are realistic for todays' media.
But we have to go further.
For example, suggests Adrian "say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."
This goes some way beyond a New Media Release because it uses will use the NMR tags to mix and match news stories.
This is how XPRL and NewsML will be helpful to the media and to readers who want to go beyond the news story to offer more facts.
IPTC G2 Family of Standards (which is the new NewsML) will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.
The PR industry has to work on this to stay with it.
He makes this comment: Pressed by increasing social and media criticism of our profession and a recent comment by Richard Edelman on the potential merit of licensing, PRSA the other day asked its ethics committee to discuss the issue and make recommendations to the Board. Criticisms emerged when the Committee decided to keep contents of the meeting confidential and subsequently a brief summary of that discussion was published on the PRSA website. Interestingly, the debate on licensing of the profession is open also in many other countries. Some have already proceeded (Nigeria, Brazil, Panama, Peru amongst others), others are in the process (Russia for one, but also Puerto Rico…and one may also argue that the 2005 decision of the UK’s CIPR to be the first European Union country to be formally recognized by the national Government could well lead to this result, and this would inevitably influence the ongoing discussion in other EU countries).
Public relations professionals worldwide are being profiled by the Global Alliance. Toni Musi Falconi reports on preliminary findings.
They are more or less equally divided in three main categories (30%): private industry, public sector, consultancy and services, while the non profit sector is close to 10%. 79% are either directly heads of their organization or report directly to top management, while a solid 79% indicate that the main part of their job consists in developing and implementing communication and relationship strategies and programs. 71% travel intensely in their home country while 36% travel frequently international. 67% earns a minimum of net 40 thousand US dollars per annum, but 12% more than 100 thousand, while 61% also benefit from free health insurance and 47% from a supplementary annual bonus. 58% is in the 25-44 age range, while 34% in the 45-60 one. 68% are women, 80% has a university degree and 98% speaks the English language.
Jamelia reveals how she can't wait to get married on Victoria Newton's Bizarre podcast offered by the Sun's web site.
Two things are important here. The first is that the Sun is working hard to get its readers to go on line and is providing simple and easy to follow instruction. second is that the Sun's podcast is another vehicle for communication.
Second Life, the fast-growing online virtual community has suffered a computer security breach that exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
Linden Lab, the company behind the Second Life site, said in a letter to its 650,000 users this weekend its customer database - including names, addresses, passwords and some credit card data - had been compromised.
Old fashioned hacking has not gone away. Linden labs now has an issue management job to do because so many companies have begun to take space in their virtual world to gain commercial advantage.
With companies increasingly using blogging to communicate both internally to staff and externally to clients and customers, 10 of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT user panel said corporate blogs are more than just another technology fad that has found favour among senior managers.
Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "Like all new technologies corporate blogs are often misapplied but there are valid applications, usually employee communication and not external. We do have a couple in use here in the former category."
The Enquirer has this take on a YouGov pol. A survey of British directors, carried out by YouGov, has discovered that 29 per cent of them are prepared to steal corporate data when they change employers. But the hidden danger is from the mobile phone.
The chief devices fingered for enabling such data to be stolen are primarily memory sticks (obviously) and also digital music players – like the Apple iPOD. But what the experts appear to have forgotten is that a standard feature of any Nokia Series 60 3rd edition handset is its ability to appear to be a memory stick.
There is no doubt that many platforms offer communication capabilities to steal information from an employer.
Government minister David Miliband has vowed to continue experimenting with online engagement after his department's first move into wiki-policy ended in disarray, reports c|net.
Miliband commented on his blog: "Since writing this I gather that we have demonstrated the extreme openness of the wiki by playing host to some practical jokes... Strange how some people get their kicks. But the experiment will continue."
This was a brave idea and is an excellent case study. Using Social Media is not just a question of starting a blog or setting up a wiki. It is a serious undertaking offering great benefits but with its own management needs.
Just like starting a press relations campaign, a wiki or blog needs a strategy behind it.
