Tuesday, September 26, 2006

ANTHONY HARRINGTON

When a reporter is immoral or dissolute or prostitutes their trade, they deserve such just one epithet. The Scotland on Sunday reporter fits the bill well.


He writes:

CORPORATE social responsibility (CSR) may at one stage have been little more than a public relations exercise for a good section of corporates. Today, however, it is central to how many leading-edge companies do business.


Is it, I ask, moral to be the user of information from Public Relations people and yet call what they do as 'no more than an exercise'?

In the article he even reports what Public Relations people say and called them to get more information. There is no restraints in his use of the work of people who only do this as 'no more than an exercise'. The service is in one moment worthless and at another accepted as part of his work. Indeed, it s the primary route by which information is derived for the article.

Is this the proper conduct of a journalist in seeking the truth. Is the checking of fact so evidently outside the influence of despised pariah Public Relations?

Even more improper is his passing reference to the identification of publics without proper investigation of the truths and sciences behind them.

He airily notes that

In broad terms, CSR reporting is generally seen as having four facets or "impact areas" across which companies measure themselves. These are the marketplace, the workplace, the environment and the community.

His view is partial, Fredmanseque and lacks any depth, an unrestrained blurting opinion, based on peripheral knowledge of a dissipated who has lost any sense of journalistic rectitude.



Just spin then!




Vitues and Vices

Gideon Rachman of the FT reflects

"Over the summer a strange array of politicians started blogging. They included Hillary Clinton, who hopes to be the next president of America; Lionel Jospin, who hopes to be the next president of France; and Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who is already president of Iran.

"Blogging as a medium has virtues: speed, spontaneity, interactivity and the vast array of information and expertise that millions of bloggers can bring together. But it also has its vices. The archetypal political blog favours instant response over reflection; commentary over original research; and stream-of-consciousness over structure.

"Was that last judgment fair? Does it really follow logically from the rest of the argument? I am not sure and I have no time to think about it further. I have to get back to my blog."



His references to some blogs are also helpful and include:

David Cameron: David Miliband: Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad: Lionel Jospin: ; Hillary Clinton: Segolene Royal: Ferenc Gyurcsany


How blogs and podcasts can give PR a human face

Steven Vass, Media Correspondent of the Sunday Herald reports and gets it wrong. Blogs will never give Public Relations a human face. PR can help organisations express themselves in human terms to publics.

But he starts off ok:

THE Thomson holiday people have got it right. Guinness has got it wrong. L’Oréal started off badly but has made a good recovery. Most Scottish companies, on the other hand, are not even at the races.

These are some of the conclusions delegates can expect at a conference about the business benefits of blogs, podcasts and other new media taking place in Edinburgh next week.....

JupiterResearch get into Social marketing Research

JupiterResearch has launched a new ‘Social Marketing research’ service which will specialise in online social networking and user-generated media, otherwise known as consumer-generated media or CGM.

The service aims to provide marketers and site owners with recommendations on how to profit from the use of consumer-generated content, blogs, podcasts, and other emerging media tools. The ‘Social Marketing’ offering will form part of the firm’s Marketing & Advertising suite of research products, which also includes Advertising & Branding, E-mail Marketing, Online Behavior & Demographics, Search Marketing, and SMB Marketing.

Banks in social space

Financial services firms are exploring the use of 'social media' channels to connect with new customer markets, and in particular the youth market, says Finestra.

Dutch bank ING Direct, for instance, has launched a viral video marketing campaign that promotes its new 'orange mortgage' to renters and potential first time home buyers.

The backbone of the campaign is a new Web site which features content, video clips and games. ING says the site also features a hidden secret mortgage offer that effectively reduces the closing costs on the mortgage to zero.

ING says the campaign is designed to reach first time home buyers through creative, interactive activities and links with other Internet destinations most familiar to the majority of the audience.

dot cwm

icWales has this report about a Welsh domain. A little change which could unite all Welsh people and those who belong to the world-wide Welsh community. That thing is .cym

Yes, the campaign for a Top Level Domain (TLD) for the Welsh language and linguistic community is up and running and is gaining strength as Welsh and Welshness looks for status on the world wide web.

I am thinking of running one for Wiltshire. dot wilt would be useful. imagine a domain called www.thou.wilt or www.myroses.wilt.

When pitching leave contact details

I talked about specialist vertical search engines yesterday and got a comment that was really a pitch.

It was anonymous. There is no evidence of who owns and runs the company, there is no contact address and it may easily be a scam from the Spanish Mafia without delving into the labyrinth of Companies House. The sites that are being promoted equally do not have contact information that helps so we do not know who this is and are expected to reveal our email address to them.

On yer Bike!

Of course I will not post spam comment especially if it could come from the man in the moon. But this serves as a lesson in how not to do online PR in the bloggersphere. Transparency is vitally important.

This is what the comment said:


Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Vertical Search":

Hi, David We would like you to check our vertical search sites: - Trovit Jobs - Trovit cars, second hand cars - Trovit Homes, real estate We hope you like them!


As it happens, the site is registered to
Enrique Dominguez of Rossello 277 6, BArcelona, 08034, Spain and was registered in March.

I still would not trust this site with my email address.


Monday, September 25, 2006

Xanga have criminal tendancies

A social networking website has agreed to pay a $1m fine to settle with authorities over allegations that it collected, used and disclosed personal details of children under 13 says The Register.

The Xanga site stated that children under 13 could not join, but then allowed visitors to create Xanga accounts even if they provided a birth date indicating they were under 13, it said.

Xanga has 25m registered members (mostly in the USA).

Of course, it should be shut down. Marc Ginsberg and John Hiler, the founders, need to be exposed for what they are.

Hype or Hip

Madgex, the UK market leader in B2B online publishing systems, today announces its new product Backnetwork, a revolutionary social networking tool ....

Oh Yea! This Second Life look alike may be interesting but would you want to partner an organisation that was soooo deep into scream marketing?

most comprehensive
function-rich
like never before

Well if you do want an online tool for delegates attending a conference, this could be interesting - but what ever you do, don't let the salesman in. You might end up with an iceberg in your coffee.

70,000 Freshers Get It

Univillage.com, the social networking website backed by lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman, claims it is on target to sign 90% of all UK university first years, making student recruitment tough for US rival Facebook.

The site, which officially launched last month, is targeting the 400,000 freshers entering university and, ultimately, the 1.2 million full-time students in the UK.

"It is clear British is best when it comes to social networking, with freshers preferring a site dedicated to UK students to something adapted from a generic US model," said Mr Hoberman, a strategic adviser and non-executive director at the company.



So reports Mark Sweney at the Guardian

Does your web site pass the eye test?

Nomensa, has been looking at web accessibility guidelines put in place to make it easier for people with disabilities such as sight impairments to use the internet. This affects an online population of 10 million disabled people in the UK who, according to the Disability Rights Commission, have a collective spending power of £80bn.

AAccordingto Nomensa, reported in Silicon.com

"The study of the top 30 retail websites found that not one homepage achieves single-A compliance, which is the minimum requirement by law for making websites more accessible for disabled people in accordance with the globally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines3 version 1.0."

Vertical Search

There is a form of public relations that is quite powerful.
It is in the creation of vertical search engines. TechCrunch talks of the new Estate agent search engine Nestoria today which is an example. The application of the principle need not be so detailed and can be used in many applications from law to second hand cars.

Considering the Internet

A major report of the future of the Internet is published today and is reported by the BBC.

For most people this is not of great interest. It is after all about what will be happening in 15 years time.

For policy makers, such as the CIPR, which is about to embark on policy making in relation to social media, this document is important calling, as it does, on 742 of the best informed experts world wide.

There will be 'bubbles' on the way but this report is about the long run. Its insights infest the core of organisation and the way we manage governance and defend our way of life. It has to be noted that this is about the Internet. Riding on this wave will be the communications platforms and multitude of channels for interaction (not just communication from now on) that will mediate all PR programmes.

If the institutions where to identify how these developments will be affecting organisations in 15 years time and were to put some goal posts between now and then, policies and plans for influence over the legislative regime, education institutions and so forth can be developed. It takes five years for legislation to be changed. Education programmes are just as unwieldy, investment cycles are still this long and so, using the agenda provided by the 742, we can see what has to be achieved over the next five years.

On the agenda:


Mobile

Application online not on computers

Luddite counter culture

Ownership of the network

Embedded/near field technologies

Interoperability

Regulation

Powerful will be less transparent

Privacy

Virtual worlds

This should lead to considerations as to what is sensible for future developments in education, practice, tools and technologies, business practice, risk assessment (and insurance).

One great reason for having a real voice

An article published today by the BBC Spam trail uncovers junk empire gives a clue about the size of some 'marketing programmes'.

This scam is about retailing pharmaceuticals using spam. The numbers are jaw dropping:



...Every day for 14 days the spammers behind the junk mail campaign pumped out more than 100m messages.
...there were more than 2,000 variations in the content of the messages making up the ... run.

....Over the course of the weeks when the spam was being sent a new variant of message was despatched every 12 minutes.


...more than 100,000 hijacked home computers spread across 119 nations had been used to despatch the junk mail.


This is one of the reasons why, even on a small scale, people have to be alert to spam tendencies whether it is spamming emails, blog posts, trackbacks, wikis and other forms of communication infrastructure.

It also emphasises the advantage of the 'real' and human voice.

A recommendation on a citizen blogger is useful and human. A recommendation from an organisation may be informative but if you mix up the two it is spam and the penalty when found out will get ever greater as the online community gets ever more fed up with being hijacked by 'marketing programmes'.

The Google way of business

The Fortune magazine article reproduced on CNN Money about Google is fascinating.

It is about cultures and boundaries and how to have a fast moving company.

PR with Business studies students should see this and see how it fits in with the European ISO 9000 culture and working hours directives.

I guess its also about where the fun is.

"He goes down there and sort of hangs with them for a while and comes back and says, 'You know, I'm really sure we should do this.' And it's not a numbers argument. It's a feeling of commitment."


This of the relationship between Google and Rupert Murdoch!

Geekier than thou

Via Andrew Lark I have come across another list of Social Media tools that may be useful or which might spark off a creative on-line PR idea. From Read/Write Web comes a list that is just full of new ideas.


Here is a small sample:
Data Security Systems Internet authentication and security DSSS, as a leader in the Authentication Security space, consistently strives to be in the frontier of the technology. Our state-of-art technology serves to provide enterprises and organisations from different arena protection against compromising of security

Eluma
Social marketing Eluma is the only brandable desktop application that drives customer loyalty and incremental revenue through the power of communities. Eluma enables marketers to create an always-on connection to their users, and to leverage the best aspects of social networking in order to provide users with the ability to collaborate with their most trusted source of information - their peers.

eSnips
Online sharing We created eSnips while thinking about how YOU would want to share your stuff. We believe that just like us, you have lots of things to share online. And just like us, you probably want to do it all in ONE place, to have the freedom to share ANY type of information, and to have control over what you share and how you share it.

EyeSpot
Video editing and sharing We set out to build a site which makes it easy to upload, organize and share all that video, photos, and music. Interact with the community, collaborate, and get some great content to work with too.

Flurry
Email on any cell phone Introducing flurry - free mobile email for everyone. With revolutionary ease of use, you can access your email from your mobile phone anywhere and anytime.

So that will be £200m paid to publishers then

I do not recall a time when the media complained about the amount if money governments spend on press advertising.

I am getting fed up with hearing snide remarks from journalists, some anonymous as in the case of the Evening Standard who say:

.....recent figures showed a vast rise in the Government's spending on spin doctors and public relations - up from £111million in 1997 to more than £300million last year.

Spin doctors are mostly journalists who like to put their own 'spin' on a news story. Public relations people are involved in building mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their constituencies.

Ergo ...I wonder what sort of back-handers have been made to the anonymous journalists employed by the Evening Standard to spin ggovernment stories - or am I reading too much into this?

Judging by how well newspapers are doing, this may simply be a hidden subsidy to the publishers.

Get a job - get a blog

Matthew Wall of the Times explains how spending some time preparing online can give you a head start in the hunt for better employment.


In a run down of many facilities available and includes the idea that blogging can help prospective employees too.

A spin doctor's worst nightmare

Ian Dale in the Guardian examines the issus and opportunities for political parties in a blog mediated era.

Blogs are a spin doctor's worst nightmare come true - and then some. It would be understandable if political parties regarded them as uncontrolled, uncontrollable and sometimes downright troublesome. But if they did, they would be missing a huge opportunity to market their message without the filter of mainstream media reportage and comment. The political party that can harness blogs to its cause is the one that will win the internet campaigning war.

It might also be said that this applies to a lot of companies as well.

Politics gets online boost

In a week when UK politics gets political conference headlines, news from the USA show how powerful online politics is becoming.

Nearly one-fifth of American adult users of the Internet in August 2006 spent some time reading about politics or the coming U.S. election reports Monsters and Critics.

Unmanned blog

A week in politics is said to be a long time (Harold Wilson) and a week in cyberspace is an eternity and for Lionel Zetter, the incoming president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations combining both is going to be hard now that he has to take on the role of writing PRVoice the blog of the CIPR presidential incumbent.

Lionel will be busy this week and next at Party political conferences where his firm have big stands equipped with handouts and giveaways and 'manned' by some very earnest, some even glamorous, political lobbyists and trainees.


Lionel promises at least two people to man the stand all the time "Nothing looks sadder than an unmanned stand,” he said to the Times .

Soon, one hopes, he will be saying the same of PRVoice which has been unmanned for 14 Days.

It is interesting that in the deeply thought through and careful devined strategy for the 'President's blog' that it will only have intermittent content in an era when the evolution of social media is so rapid and so much is controvercial.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Short of a quote? Use a blogger

"The National Day is a time of pride and joy, but it is also a time to read our history and think about the future," a blogger known as Saudi Jeans wrote on Saturday.


Now what is important about this is that it related to a Reuters story.

Saudi Arabians celebrated their National Day for only the second year on Saturday, an innovation in a country that has long discouraged national patriotism because of its commitment to Islam.

The festivities began on Friday and continued into the early hours of Saturday in the streets of Riyadh, which were jam-packed as men drove cars festooned with Saudi flags. State television celebrated the occasion all day long.


"Formerly there were religious strictures against celebrating National Day. There was a fear it would come to resemble religious festivals like Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha," said writer Hamza al-Mozainy.

These were the only two quotes for a heavy wight article.

Bloggers have a range of roles and being up there with the sources for journalists is one of them. A PR ambition if ever there was one.

Round up

If David Tebbutt says have a look at something, you can bet it is worth the journey.

I am no expert on different blog platforms having only tried three but he says

Socialtext, one of the business-flavoured blogs/wikis has just put out a new beta. If you've been turned off by its geekiness, take another look. It's nice.

he has written about it over on the Information World Review blog.


Airport Monitoring System Combines RFID With Video

A consortium of European companies and a university is developing a system to track travelers inside airports.

Eight free things every web site should have

Here is a flavour:

Rule #1: If you have a site, you want more traffic.

Rule #2: You don't have enough money to buy as much traffic as you need.

Rule #3: You've already made your site as compelling as you know how to.

The answers are revealing.




International service for folk abroad - a PR opportunity

If you are a British expat like then getting hold of Tetley teabags, Heinz Beanz and/or Marmite can prove difficult. Asking friends to send you food parcels every now and then maybe one solution. Another maybe to use UK2YOU, a new UK focused website with more than 200 shops ranging from Hamleys to Harrod’s to Thornton’s chocolates which delivers to all E.U. Member states plus most of North America and much further afield.

Thank you TechCrunch.

I wonder is there is similar site for service. For example, lawyers, estate agents, PR firms who can provide services for expats 'delivered to the door'.


No doubt there are a number of PR consultancies with such clients - and opportunities.

Fools only fool the foolish

I like this article by Nicola Natina. Is shows how a a corporation tries to fool people about its social policies using tricks and obfuscation.

The company is Disney and it is found out.

Its reputation has been further damaged.

From her post one will assume the company is a tricky customer. It is a sham. Would you trust your child to a person who was as devious as this. If you read Nicola's post what is your new relationship with Disney corp?

Does the reality match the rhetoric:
The Walt Disney Company has remained faithful in its commitment to producing unparalleled entertainment experiences based on its rich legacy of quality creative content and exceptional storytelling.
A cynic might say: Yup - its all exceptional storytelling.

What I am saying is that transparency is a way of life. Its use is part of the strategic DNA of the organisation and if it runs contrary to the aims and mission of the organisation, it has immense power to destroy.

This is about reputation of course but much more powerful and much more damaging is the effect on relationships.

Some rules for pitching to bloggers.

Niall Cook has some wise words for PR people who want bloggers to mention their products.

His points are here.

I like this one:
Assume that the vast majority won't ever mention it (NB. the propensity to not mention a product it is directly proportional to the influence of the blogger)
Not to mention finding time to even open the package.

FT goes online 24/7

PR people now have to think about news delivery 24/7 and will need to be able to monitor online as well as print news non stop from now on.

The Financial Times' multimedia newsroom - the much-planned fusion of its print and online operations - will launch in 10 days' time, said editor Lionel Barber.

PR people now need really powerful tools that can complement the new digital newsrooms and they need the basic capabilities such as XPRL.


The FT project will see all print and online news desks integrate: the production system will come fully online and journalists will work an extended rota with more early morning shifts.

"We will launch the new newsroom on October 1," Mr Barber told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

The FT Methode production system allows print and online stories to be edited off the same platform.

Other newspapers are following the Financial Times' integration plans.

The Daily Telegraph has moved its City section into its multimedia complex in Victoria and hopes all of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph to be in place by the end of October.

The Times has moved its online business staff into its print business section.




ITV making it online

Digital channels are set for a 33% surge in advertising income and are expected to contribute £10m more to ITV's coffers than they did last year. These early forecasts from media agencies are for the period from October to December from the Guradian.

The Long Tail up against the dead trees

You know you've hit the mainstream...

...when you make the newspaper comics page. Here's today's FoxTrot Well done Chris Anderson.

Teach flint knapping to PR students

Robyn Lewis, writing in PR Week (subscription required to read on-line) reports on a poll that has discovered that just seven of the 27 CIPR-approved higher-education PR and comms courses in the UK offer modules dedicated to new media.

Which say a lot for the CIPR; demonstrates PRWeek's 'new media' credentials in the UK and sloth among PR academics.

The target of 50% school leavers to get a degree education will create some stunning flint knappers. Hooray!

Publishers putting shutters may get shattered

Global publishers, fearing that Web search engines such as Google are encroaching on their ability to generate revenue, plan to launch an automated system for granting permission on how to use their content, I glean from ITPro.

Buoyed by a Belgian court ruling this week that Google was infringing on the copyright of French and German language newspapers by reproducing article snippets in search results, the publishers said on Friday they plan to start testing the service before the end of the year.

"This industry-wide initiative positively answers the growing frustration of publishers, who continue to invest heavily in generating content for online dissemination and use," said Gavin O'Reilly, chairman of the World Association of Newspapers, which is spearheading the initiative.

Of course, this is a quick way to commit suicide.

If people cannot get access to information, they seek other sources.

Of course, such a move would give blogs a gift. News blogs are gaining in popularity and would be a powerful alternative.

This means that PR people need to begin to identify the blogs and bloggers they want as information partners.

The face of old PR - its rubbish

Where do these people come from?

Talk about killing the goose...

An email from a PR, complaining about the fact that although his company advertised in a recent supplement I wrote some copy for, they were not mentioned in the editorial. “We advertise heavily in [name of publication]” he wrote, “and would therefore expect to get a mention.”

This folows a more detailed rant about so called PR people.

Why should you use Second Life

Text100 has a great video on YouTube (where else) explaining why an PR consultancy (or client) should use Second Life.

Shel Holtz gave me this link which also takes us (thanks to CC Chapman) to NMC' Second Life campus.

Virtual environments are not new. Architects have used them for years but SL is free and can be used for a wide range of application. Text 100 and NMC are real applications.

A new blog from the CIPR

Active Events is a new blog from the CIPR.

The opening post (20th September - oops that too me a long time) says:

Looking for information on PR events and training? Want exclusive previews of CIPR events? Interested in getting PR tips from top practitioners and trainers? You've come to the right place!

activevents is a new site from the CIPR training and events team. We'll be announcing all our events here, with the latest additions to our programmes as they are confirmed. You'll also find tips on a range of PR hot topics, taster information from many of our conferences and workshops, and news and reviews after the events. Plus we'll be giving you the chance to take a peek into some of our sessions when we publish information live from the front row of selected events – more details on this to follow.

Where are the TV audiences going - on-line of course

With TV audiences dwindling and interest in online video content on the rise, it seems that audiences do not just want to watch TV shows any more.

They want to make and star in them too says Marc Cieslak of the BBC.

According to Cieslak, Google's Patrick Walker believes a number of factors are coming together at the moment to facilitate this.

"First of all there is an incredible amount of bandwidth available. People have broadband at home so the speed is much faster than ever before," he says.

"Couple that with really easy tools of production from a basic webcam and being able to record that, to filming something and plugging your camera into a PC and doing some basic editing. Also storage cost has come down considerably."

This offers a range of PR opportunities.

First of course, this is a great way to share information about your organisation and its 'actors'. It offers sponsorship opportunities to people who make 'home made TV'. There are opportunities to re-purpose and redistribute relevant content from the existing services and all this content can be transferred from the computer to cell phone to handheld to iPod. It is then available to all employees to use and show to clients and friends in offices pubs and even in shops.




Free mobile phone calls?

Most people's cell phone plans come with a virtually unlimited local calls (think about all of those free night and weekend minutes). But long distance charges for international calls are usually costly. So what Rebtel does is it uses the existing cell phone system to allow people to use their local minutes, and then switches those calls over fat Internet connections to overseas cities in 35 countries, where it is switched back to the local phone system. You can call as much as you want for $1 a week, and you only get charged for those weeks when you actually use the service.

To find out more see B2Day article.

More disintermediation.

Virtual communities

I saw this on B2Day:
It's official. The domainers have taken over the asylum. Next week, a new social network/ virtual world called Weblo will launch where members can buy digital real estate (including cities and states), manage celebrity fan pages, and own Weblo domains (that only exist within the social network). Each piece of real estate is tied to an actual property in the real world—Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, your house. CEO Rocky Mirza came by my office today to explain:

The concept is very simple. We are recreating this world on the Internet. Weblo is a virtual world that gives people a second chance on something they missed before. It is social networking with commerce.

Anyone can buy and sell any building (they go for $1 to $2 each to start), or people can buy entire cities or states (New York City will be $300 or $400, and all of California wil go for $50,000). Mirza reports:

One guy has already sent in $25,000 to buy Ontario. We have three or four people waiting to purchase NY. Our first-day goal was to do $100,000. That is already done.

Its amazing what people will spend money on. Is this a competitor for Second Life?

All about Tags

We keep hearing about them. Tags I mean.
There are XPRL tags, Technorati tags, Social Media tags, bar coded tags, part of speech tags, and they all mean something. This article in New Scientist offers a spooky insight into where all this might lead us.

Social media tags are all over the place and here are some social media vendors that use them:

  • Del.icio.us - A social bookmarking site that allows users to bookmark many sites and then tag them with many descriptive words, allowing other people to search by those terms to find pages that other people found useful.
  • Flickr - A service that allows users to tag images with many specific nouns, verbs, and adjectives that describe the picture. This is then searchable.
  • Gmail - A webmail site that was one of the first to allow categorization of objects using tags, known as "labels" on emails.
  • LibraryThing - A social book cataloguing and community website, tags feature heavily here.
Practitioners might want to make sure that tags used about a client, product, service, brand or key employee is most associated with content that aids the PR strategy.

Most PR consultants are small busineses in a global world

Most PR consultancies are small businesses.

Is the Business Week description familiar:

Small businesspeople today have to deal with the same issues big businesses do—global markets, complex supply chains, and fluctuating currencies—and they have to do it without an army of MBAs to support them. Gone are the days when the business owner could walk out back to talk to his local production crew before knocking off early to sneak in a round of golf or go fishing. Many small businesspeople today are the business equivalent of fighter pilots—hurtling around the globe at breakneck speed as larger competitors leave them little room for error.

If a PR consultant is not involved in considering global issues there is a pretty good chance that they have been locked out of opportunities, are paying too much for services and have not got adequate tools for the job.

For example. Their name could be used in another country, they will not be visible to people looking for their services from out of town and there is a load of great software and tools available from other countries. Of course, they are not able to advise their clients, have no handle on the international effect of their media campaigns and cannot use social media much because of its international nature.

As
Toni Muzi Falconi points out We all now work on an international stage.

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.

The Dark Side Returns

If you buy a Zune player from Microsoft then you'll be able to share your songs with your friends using its built-in wireless link.

However Microsoft, clearly worried about what the record companies will think, has decided that you'll only be able to listen to a transferred song three times, and that after three days you won't be able to play it at all. Says the BBC's Bill Thompson.

Zune could have been a deal competitor in the digital audio player market but Microsoft has not yet learned the lesson. It is described here and the outcome will be more expensive wars and another alternative on the market that will hack to monopolies.

I just do not understand why normally rational people cannot see that the market has changed.

Understanding that disintermediation is a major issue for companies is advice that the Public Relations manager must put before the board.

In the meantime, I will remove IE from my computer again.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Bebo gets tough

The music social-networking site announced a new feature on Thursday that allows Web page owners to pre-vet all posts to their pages. The change enables owners to preview all responses, and delete or permit them based on their own discretion. They can also delete previous posts they do not like and ban specific posters altogether, reports cNet.

This puts even more control into the hands of the community... not a bad thing. It also means that badly pitched ideas and promotions will get no play time.

Linking up with a broadcaster to campign blog

Pakistan rape victim Mukhtar Mai has been in the international spotlight as a result of her campaign to seek justice for herself and other women in Pakistan.

She has been writing a blog for the BBC's Urdu website with the assistance of the BBC's Nadeem Saeed.

Is this a new breed of activism an campaigning? Are there opportunities to tie your blog to a high exposure we/news site like the BBC.

Food for thought and creative campaign ideas.

Good blog pitch

George Bush Snr is at the Ryder cup this week and is pictured on the BBC Ryder Cup Blog with glamoutous Ryder Cup WAGs. A well pitched story to the BBC bloggers the.

Sunderland Football Club seeks bloggers

Sunderland Football club is looking for Sunderland fans in Ireland to become resident bloggers here on safc.com.

The interest in Sunderland from Ireland has escalated in recent months, for obvious reasons.

Chairman Niall Quinn heads a consortium of predominantly Irish businessmen, Roy Keane, from Cork, is the club's manager and his squad features many Irish players.

Everyday Sunderland is on TV, radio and in the papers in Ireland.

Safc has had a stream of emails in recent weeks - from Dublin to Donegal - from fans wanting to know how they can set up an official Irish branch of the Sunderland Supporters' Association. The interest is huge.

To help with this initiative, safc wants some more blogging. Applications to safc

Alliance and Leicester gets e-prizes

Financial Services Forum has recognised effectiveness rather than merely awarding good copy or a creative advertisement in its awards scheme this year. Alliance and Leicester won twice, for e-commerce and integrated campaigns, as did Scottish Widows, which won in the public relations and new product, service or innovation categories.

Rider Cup chic

Cathy Martin, a fashion public relations consultant, said the golf WAGs knew how to look classy and chic but without taking attention away from their partners.

"With the golf WAGs (wives and girlfriends), they don't want to be the centre of attention.

"It's about their husbands and their sport," she said.

Sensible PR for the girls and thier golfing husbands

Social Text explained

IWR reports the Social Text upgrade and explains how this blog/wiki combo works.

The Sun Shines

I am often asked to explain social media in simple terms. I am defeated. But along comes the Sun Newspaper... great journalism and today.... How to download podcasts. As easy on the brain as Page three is on the eye.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Copyright or copywrong

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. He also has some interesting views about copyright.

He says:
Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers.
It may be worth the while of a Public Relations manager to ask if the company copyright statements are for the company or consumers and if the company - why?

Are your stakeholders Licencees?

Read the full article here.

Attribution Rules

Over at Media Orchard, they are debating attribution.
They are finding the newspapers are no longer quoting sources:

Matt Duffy, a college journalism instructor, has noticed that pubs as esteemed as the Wall Street Journal are running quotes directly from press releases without citing the source.

Is this how bloggers should behave - nope. Is it how we should reference work in other PR activities - Nope.

And if you do... chances are you will get exposed as a fraud online.

Ethical and practical reasons not to follow the hacks.

How Much is YouTube worth?

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch is saying that YouTube is looking for $1.5 billion.

He makes these points which are relevant to a potential purchaser:

YouTube is serving over 100 million videos per day, with 65,000 or so new videos uploaded daily.

These 100 million daily video views aren’t people watching kittens fall aleep. Most of the popular videos on YouTube contain copyrighted material that YouTube shouldn’t be presenting in the first place.
But it is a very useful service for the PR industry, allowing you to make your company videos available on line for everyone to see (and share with friends).

A really Good description of RSS


Back In Skinny Jeans has a great explaination of RSS, that essential that makes social media , well, social media.

For those of us who want a simple explaination, its really good.

Cross Channel communication

One of the issues Public Relations people face is being able to generate content for more than one communication channel. Bloglines has answered this issue with integrated Skweezer technology to optimise web pages for personal handheld mobile device's.

When you click on a link while reading a blog post in Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer will compress and reformat the content so you get it faster and better looking on your small screen. As you surf, the content will continue to be skweezed.




When disintermediated, disintermediate

Microsoft is planning free-web based versions of its word processing and spreadsheet programs reports the BBC.

The online versions of the programs will lack many of the features found in the full versions found in Microsoft's Office suite of applications.

Google recently bought Writely to do just this (I used it to write and share my XPRL paper last week). It is an online word processing package that includes a co-authoring and sharing capabilities.

Writely, offers a range of services that competes with Microsoft. Gamil, calendar, spread sheets etc.

These capabilities are useful in PR practice but are also a lesson for us all to learn about how the Internet disintermediates existing business models.

Bloggers, as citizen journalists, have undermined the role of newspapers in a big way and this means they have also undermined the press relations communication models that is the predominant practice of many PR agencies and in-house departments.


Bloggers 'Sad' or 'Brilliant'

There is the Athur Strain description of bloggers which is: ... - almost always unfair - that they are sad people sitting in their underwear rooted in front of a computer all day writing about how much worse their fungal nail infection is getting to an audience of three friends. - He does back off a lot when discussing political bloggers.

Why should a person of a 'certain' type, who may well not have used bulletin boards or usenet a decade (OK two decades ago) understand the idea of online social media?

Without that grounding and the time one really needs lurking in this space, Blogs are astonishing and bewildering. You see, I fall into the trap... lurk, space, 'social media' .... I use the jargon without a thought and, in the process widen the gap.

I get the impression that there is body of opinion that thinks that a blog is some form of rambling inconsequential chatter, no doubt this is true in many cases, but not true for most.

A serious blog such as 'CorporatePR' is a genre many middle and senior managers do not come across by chance, or have time to read because they are complex and most posts require time as with most worthwhile literature.

For many, understanding that a person, in the midst of their more serious occupation, might divert to an aside about an incident in their lives, is a difficult concept.

They see a comment, and without looking back at the blog topic, assumes every post is on topic, a serious, focused journal.

They forget that Gibbons, Chaucer, Lao Zi, Amis, Belloc, Eliot, Johnson in fact almost every philosopher and essayist also wrote asides even in the margins of their most serious works.

They cannot translate this into what we, with our jargon, would call an 'off-topic' 'rant'.

Thus, some seek to engage in conversation outside the prime interest (topic) of a blog, perhaps ignorant a wider and more profound contribution and the thrust of a blog.

What sort of 'sad' person would make comments like these on a blog:


Re:Symbiosis And Living Machines 2006-08-10
Re:Healthy Lurking 2006-05-01
Re:New study on altruistic punishment: people prefer groups that punish free-riders, if punishment increases profit to members 2006-04-13
Re:Computing 2020 - The Internet as Architecture of Cooperation 2006-03-23

Sort of kinky stuff for the average middle manager..... Untill of course you see who the author is and the read the posts (articles).

There are several things we can take out of this:

1 It is not well understood by a section of society that Blogs are a medium. Blogs have many applications. They are akin to the 'blank sheet of paper' upon which the author can write, originate, say, paint, videocast. There are other features (comment, trackback, RSS etc but these just complicate my argument).
2 That the marginal notes, the 'rants', add interest and a human voice, even insights into the character of the author. They have been included in literature since before Simonides. But in this new medium they tend to be visible as any other contribution.
3 Those of us who are involved have moved a long way from those who are not, we can no longer understand their (lack of) understanding. We can be offended when really we need to be sympathetic, understanding and educative.
4 Sometimes, our rants stir indignation and other emotions among our readers - but we know that and often we do it to achieve just such ends.
5 Our work is just beginning and we have to work hard at bridging the divide not least because our world, the digital world, is evolving at an ever growing rate.

Is 'Reputation Management' Hype?

Hack Anthony Hilton commenting on the HP debacle poses the question:

What is fascinating is that for all the yapping of the dogs the caravan moved serenely on ­ the Hewlett Packard share price which had been at a three-year high before the eruption, continued to test new high ground throughout.

The share price said that the damage to the company's reputation did not matter as long as it continued to do good business.

It raises the question of whether boards worry too much about reputation and its associated risks. It has become a cliche to say that reputation is the major risk to today's global corporation and this fear has fuelled a mighty expansion in spending on public relations to put a suitable gloss on corporate behaviour. Is it money which needed to be spent? The Hewlett Packard experience would suggest not.


Well, a simplistic view. But very close to home. Hilton, of course, has a shabby mind and can't grasp the role of Public Relations, imagining it as the sort of spin he puts into his stories and which he calls 'Journalism'.

We can start off with how to define an organisation is it the nexus of contracts (Coarse) or Nexus of conversations (Sonsino) or the nexus of relationships (Phillips)?

If of contracts, the contract between the board, shareholders and employees is all that is holding the company together when the simple contract of trust is brocken. If of conversations then for some stakeholders these must be trivial and irelevant to their needs now and trivial does not seem to matter to the shareholders or does it. But if of relationships then they are more powerful than the board might believe and the company can survive.

So this is more about relationship management that reputation management.

Among the values attributed to an organisation are elements of trust which are among many more. Some are brand values (owned by people not companies), some are about needs fulfilment, some are social and the most powerful are emotional. It is a treasure trove of many values.

The Relationship Value Model makes it clear that reputation is about what the organisation does not what it says.

A Blogging Cardinal -simple as ABC

Looking to marry the Roman Catholic Church's 2,000-year-history with the modern world's technological bent, Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley on Thursday became the first U.S. cardinal to launch a blog. This from Reuters.

Another case study in the making from 62 year old Sean.

How search disintermediates sales

From Phil Gomes

It just made me smile

This is one of my favorite tricks...

When SEO reps call me, I keep them on the phone long enough for me to
do a Google search on "search engine optimization."

Invariably, the company's name doesn't come up in the first 25 pages. I
tell the rep this.

"Well," the guy stammers. "It's a crowded space out there."

"Crowded?" I ask. "You want to talk about 'crowded.' One of our clients
sells BEANS!!!"

That usually gets the guy off the phone.
The thing here is that the person on the receiving end of the call can look up the company and check it out. The product performance can be evaluated during the sales presentation.

The salesman can create the link but the web site confines the sales script.

This also means that media comment, blog comment and a range of other reports about the company and product are part of the communication process initiated by the salesperson.

Sales and Public Relations are part of the same communication continuum.

Getting traffic from del.icio.us

From Sally Fallcow at New Media Release Discussion list:

the There was a great thread in the Search Engine Watch forums yesterday
about getting traffic from social media sites like del.icio.us

1. Write Good, Relevent, Useful Content.
I know its an obvious one, but it's the one to remember. People will
only bookmark what they find interesting. Watch what's popular on
del.icio.us for a couple of days to get an idea.

2. Get Popular On Another Site, Leap Frog to Del.icio.us
If you can make it to sites like Digg.com, BoingBoing, Kottke,
instructables.com - anything influential - chances are the cascading
effect of the web, will have your site be popular on del.icio.us too.

3. Use Del.icio.us Like a Directory
Find the best articles tutorials and bookmark them on del.icio.us with
the appropriate tags. People searching for similar content, matching
your tags, may find your site and (if they like it) bookmark it,
building your "capital" so to speak.

4. Make sure all your content has an "Add to Del.icio.us" link (along
with email to a friend etc) and as your content is found, it'll be
picked up by visitors and maybe even added to del.icio.us.

There are a few initiatives in progress to assist PR folk to take
advantage of these ideas. PRESSfeed, the content syndication service
that was built specifically for SEO-PR purposes, is one of them. All
enterprise level clients get social media bookmarking links, Technorati
tags and "easy subscribe" buttons for all the better known RSS
readers on their articles, news updates or press releases.

You can see it on the PRESSfeed site at
http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/index.php Put your cursor on
the RSS icon to see the drop down menu for subscribe buttons

http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/news.php?include=58189 At the
end of this article on the future of search and content syndication
you'll see the tags and the list of social bookmarking links.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Its nice - Yale agrees with Leverwealth about Marketing

I owe this to Jackie Danicki.

Yale School of Management is saying:

Effective leaders need to be able to own and frame problems and take real responsibility for solving those problems, and then work across organizational boundaries in order to solve those problems. The curriculum in the past was broken down by these disciplinary silos and because of that, got in the way of effective management and leadership…[W]e’re replacing the disciplinary courses that mapped onto the functional silos in organizations with new courses that are actually organized around the key constituencies that a manager needs to engage in order to be effective.

We now offer a course on the customer rather than a course in marketing, a course on the investor rather than a course in finance.

Marketing is slipping further away as a managment discipline.

Manchester WiMax

There is a rumour going round that English conerbation round Manchester (2.2 million people) is to get high Speed wireles Internet access. It looks like this could be a competitors to existing services both in terms of speed and reach.

Compared to the feint hearted Wimax offerings eleswhere (slow, patchy and tentative Milton Keynes is an example - where whole villages are still on dial up - Nash being an example) , The manchester service could compete on comparable terms with the likes of BT.

Blog ethic

Fact: Bloggers are becoming as influential as reporters. So when do they cross the threshold of citizen journalist and become de facto journalists? From what I can tell, many bloggers would be insulted to be called reporters.

Are we entering a journalistic/PR no man's land? What ethical considerations apply to bloggers?

Should Bloggers check facts?

My experience is that PR departments do not respond to Blogger requests.

Bloggers have to find another way.

Should bloggers seek a second source. Yes.

Should Bloggers only use reliable sources e.g. BBC, CNN Company bloggers? No. But it helps and then second and third sources are even more important.

Dan Geenfield asks about

...a news story run about your company, but the reporter never contacted your company for a comment. Makes us mad and clients mad. Journalists should know better we say.

But how about when bloggers post a comment about your company or pull comments from a company blog without contacting the PR department? Are we still as angry? My guess is probably not.

Would we still be as mad if the blogger was also a mainstream reporter or represented a mainstream publication? Madder yes, but as mad as a “pure reporter?”

So, this is a two ways street but having PR capacity and capability to respond is hard. There is a need to read past posts from the blogger and each one needs on-on-one handling.

I posted this story which has stock market implications with only two sources (BBC and Reuters) and was the first blogger to do so within an hour of the first report. It was tempting to go live without a second source.

I did not even try Yahoo and Facebook... but it was an option and I would hold out little hope of a response.

Bloggers are different - they are also easy to ignore - todate.
>


Electronic Roll-up - newspaper?

Roll-up laptop screens a step closer, according to scientists.

A Cambridge team have developed metal structures that can morph from flat screens into tubes and other shapes reports the BBC.

They say in the future the structures could form the basis for electronic displays that could be rolled-up and placed in a bag or pocket.

This is an area of rapid development with a number of developments in the news.

This thinking offers a next generation of flexible, thin materials for a range of applications.

E-books, Electronic Newspapers, laptops, posters, mobile phones, meeting rooms are transformed.

Yahoo 'to buy Facebook for $1bn

The BBC reports:

Internet search firm Yahoo is reported to be in talks to buy social networking website Facebook for $1bn (£527m).

US-based Facebook, popular with students, has also held separate discussions with Microsoft and Viacom, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook, which allows users to put up profiles of themselves, recently signed an advertising deal with Microsoft.

A similar such website, MySpace, was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m last year.

Washington Post reports Leverwealth

Well, I supose that after so many times the other way round it was inevitable that one day The Washington Post would reference a Leverwealth blog post!... :).

CIPR course has IBM speaker

CIPR has a conference which is going to cover stuff like writing a press release and how to shout at Journalists a and then at 13:55 - New media – how the web has changed PR -

Ian McNairn, Program Director Web Technology & Innovation, IBM who is also a keen photographer but does not have a blog). The important thing here is that IBM has a lot of both internal and external blogs.

This session will discuss the changes in PR using tools such as Podcasts, VideoCasts, Blogs, Wikis and RSS. You will also discover the impact that social computing has had on the reputation, visibility and reach of content. Topics include:

  • Looking outside the traditional media scope
  • The use of new media in a PR practitioners day
  • How to best use 'new media' to your advantage
  • 14:35 - Case study into the power of sound as a PR tool

    Jude Habib, Media Consultant and ex BBC person who is an advocate of the use of sound.

    This case study will open your mind to new media techniques such as podcasting which allows you to control your content and message. Hear how using audio sound as a communication tool has benefited many campaigns from the BBC to Unicef. Is the use of sound in an imaginative way the future for media?

  • An interactive session using powerpoint embedded with audio
  • The importance of audio in making social programming sexy, the power of celebrity and the importance of good content
  • Explore the applications of audio (audio press releases, audio direct mail etc)

  • Conference venue:

    Chartered Institute of Public Relations
    CIPR Public Relations Centre
    32 St James’s Square
    London SW1Y 4JR
    Tel +44 (0)20 7766 3333
    http://www.cipr.co.uk/prcentre

    Conference fees

    • CIPR Members - £300 + VAT (£352.50 inc VAT)
    • Non - CIPR members - £400 + VAT (£470.00 inc VAT)
    Chunky London prices for just two session about PR today and several about the dieing art of cutting down and re-purposing trees. This is, afterall, the CIPR.
    >

    Daily Mail is now an Online Beast in the middle market

    The Daily Mail, which for years gave only token resources to its website, has seen massive online readership growth this year since it started taking the internet seriously.

    Web traffic on DailyMail.co.uk has grown from 1.3 million unique users in January to the current 6.6 million, according to Associated New Media sources, quoting data from Hitwise.


    This means that if you pitch a story to the Daily mail, you may want to be sure you are also pitching it to the online version as well.

    It also means that in media evaluation, clips from the Mail have an on-line counterpart - a further redership of 1.3 million.

    This conversion to the Internet comes not a moment to soon.The Guardian reports:

    Daily Mail & General Trust today reported declines in advertising revenues at its national and regional divisions.

    At national group Associated Newspapers, home to the Daily Mail and London Evening Standard, ad revenues were down 6% excluding the effect of acquisitions in the 11 months to the end of August.

    Including acquisitions, advertising was down just 2%, a performance DMGT described as "robust", while circulation revenues were up 1.6%.

    Classified advertising was down 9%, with display advertising suffering less at 5% down and the market showing some signs of improvement.

    The guardian, of course makes profits from its online properties.

    Online Video Sharing Explosion

    Hitwise data shows that Market share of UK internet visits to the top 10 video sharing websites has increased 13-fold since the start of the year and has doubled in the past three months. YouTube is the dominant video sharing site, capturing 1 in every 400 UK internet visits and 2 in 3 of visits to the top 10 video sharing sites (week to 16th September 2006).

    This from Heather Hopkins of Hitwise. Her analysis of the use of uptake (available on her blog) shows YouTube a tad of 60% market share.

    Building teams located at many locations

    Research by occupational psychologists has shown that 'virtual' teams spread out across the world need to use a variety of technologies to communicate if they are to be effective.

    The researchers at Pearn Kandola found numerous problems in getting dispersed teams to work effectively and estimate that if different cultures are in the team it can take 17 weeks for its effectiveness to match a team working in the same location. The team recommend that managers use a variety of communications methods to combat the problem.



    This applies to consultancies with many locations, clients with consultants in many locations and any other combination. It also applies to building communities for almost any activity.

    This research is important for all people with a communications management roll.

    But you read all this here before.....

    Campiagn for your job or be prepared to move off-shore

    A lot of UK Public Relations activity will have to move off-shore if a new EU directive is passed.

    The AVMS directive, due to be implemented next year, would expand current EU broadcasting regulations to all audio-visual services, including content delivered to internet and mobile phone users.

    Currently being debated by the European Council and Parliament, it would aim to ensure the protection of minors and prevent other abuses. Ofcom's view is that this is a bad thing. I agree.

    However, concerns have been aired that the move would extend regulations to user-generated content such as video blogs. Britain has campaigned against the move, saying new media services should not be included (More here and more here).


    To make your voice heard you need to email your MEP and email the Secretary General of the CIPR. It is the eyes and ears of the UK Public Relations Industry and, hopefully its voice.

    In Yer Face Doc Martens

    One of the worst advertising sites I have come across was shown to me by e-consultancy. It is the silly, all flash, Doc Martens site.

    Saatchi’s MD, Neil Hughston, said to Ashley Friedlein “we’re not looking to sell products right now, we’re looking to engage likeminded people. Over time we’ll look at measuring how brand perception has changed…”
    Try it for yourself... engage if you can.

    Its a poster. A nice poster but a poster and belongs on a wall in Slough not on the Internet.

    Engage means engage mind to mind not poster to eyeball.

    Google win

    Phillipe Borremans has a great post about the Google News and its dust up with the Belgium Media.

    I commented yesterday.

    The outcome, it seems is that Google reacted quite drastically and simply "deleted" all search results that could lead to the sites of the newspapers in question.

    The Belgium media is now, in effect, cut off from the mainstream online audience.

    Google hit them where it hurts most. A blunt but effective weapon for publications that need to drive traffic to their sites to create value from their online presence.

    In PR, we gain from online exposre of our stories and for Belgian Public Relations practitioners, this is now an issue and a new strategy is needed.

    May be its is a case of creating online newspapers like this one.

    Disintermediated PR

    Erick Schonfeld has an excellent post about disruptive businesses.

    It is my belief that there are a number of models that will disintermediate the practice of public relations. For example, I can easily see services that will sort out relevant from irrelevant media pitches presented to journalists and bloggers. In an era when it is getting quite simple to source relevant news by getting it to come to you when you need it and in a form that you want, it is relatively easy to ignore the pitches and phone calls.

    This means that PR has to learn to use these techniques, understand RSS, tagging and interoperability that makes software do most of the work for you.

    The key here is to realise that many businesses online have a capability to undermine established business models. I have mentioned some of these from Erick before:

    1. Netvibes (The new personalized startpage)

    2. EEStor (Gentlemen, stop your engines)

    3. Coghead (DIY software)

    4. NextMedium (Web marketplace for product placement)

    5. Applied Location (Skymeter—fighting traffic with GPS)

    6. Salesforce.com (The Oracle-killing, Web database)

    7. BlueLithium (Google's new ad-versery)

    8. Clearwire (Craig McCaw's WiMax play)

    9. Zopa (Peer-to-peer banking)

    10. Jajah (VoIP 2.0)

    11. NanoLife Sciences (Cancer-blasting antiprotons)

    Thailand coup d'état already on Wikipedia

    In PR, making sure that events are covered across the media, and monitoring of the media to make sure that comment is true has to include Wikipedia.

    2006 Thailand coup d'état already has a page just 2 days after the event.

    There is a significant lesson here for PR practice.

    First, of course, we have to monitor ALL the media.

    The Arts use blogs to get wider apeal

    The Stage reports:

    Maybe this is pushing self-referential naval-gazing to the limit, but there’s an increasingly rich dialogue taking place away from the arts pages of the papers on the blogs, personal or media-led, instead. It’s a phemenon that Guardian blogger Maxie Szalwinska has usefully noted in her entry on the Guardian’s Culturevulture blog today.

    She notes how theatre coverage in the US is undergoing what she calls “a mini-revolution”, as the blogosphere is “reaching corners the increasingly PR-driven and squeezed-for-space arts pages of the print media can’t (or won’t).” She goes on, “A bevvy of New York-based playwrights, critics, directors, academics and assorted drama fans are using blogs to have conversations about theatre culture, post reviews, challenge critical consensus, respond to breaking news and plug their productions. What binds them together, from the formidably prolific Superfluities to Playgoer, is genuine excitement about the medium.”

    We may be lagging a little behind here in the UK, she says, but points out we’re catching on – and cites this blog as one that’s worth checking out (so it’s only fair to repay the compliment and say that The Guardian is leading the way amongst the national papers in getting their critics to participate, with Michael Billington posting regularly there).


    The PR industry working in the Arts sector has an opportunity to be in the forefront in the UK.






    Citzen Journalism on the reuters Payroll

    Jay Rosen Announced that that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net.

    That's the experiment I plan to launch next year with others who think there is something to the idea of open source journalism, where people collaborate peer-to-peer in the production of editorial goods.

    The money from Reuters will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, who will start in early 2007. (I introduced the idea of New Assignment here. A summary, with blog and press reactions, is here.)

    It's going to be a fun job. This is editing horizontally amid journalism gone pro-am. The idea is to draw "smart crowds" - a group of people configured to share intelligence - into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren't getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that's most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the "pro-am" part.

    This may be an opportunity for the journalist lurking in many a PR person's persona.

    Ex Shandwick Chief's new empire ups profits

    Huntsworth PLC , made a pretax profit of £5.02 million in the six months to June 30 2006, jumping from just £1.31 million the prior year.

    Continuing revenue grew to £70.1 million stg from £40.7 million.

    Chief executive Lord Peter Chadlington said the first half has given the group a strong start and a firm foundation for the full year.

    'We have been encouraged after the summer months by the marked pick up in new business activity which gives us confidence for the full year.'

    In the first half, the group's Public Relations revenues grew on a like-for-like basis by 6% and Non Public Relations activities (primarily event management) declined by 18% giving an overall like-for-like growth of 3.4%.

    Consultancies in the Huntsworth group include:

    Public Sector Podcasting

    The UK public sector news website, 24dash.com, is celebrating its first birthday with a major celebration in Birmingham this week.

    The event is being held to coincide with the National Housing Federation's annual conference and exhibition at the ICC and will be the occasion of the official launch its 'exciting Podcasting service'.