Top PR Consultancy Owner - too old

Sir Martin Sorrell talked to e-consultancy this week.

Here are a couple of comments that interested me:

We have to understand the implications of what’s going on, so we can advise our clients what’s the best direction. The more technologies there are, the more advice we’re asked for, and the more complex the media planning and buying decisions.

Very good point

I’m old. It’s older people’s inability to be flexible. If you see what kids can do, it’s amazing. If you’re young, you’re not as terrified by technology as people my age are. It is much more difficult for me – as I’m not a nerd - to understand the technology as it changes so rapidly.

An excuse for not taking time to understand - it is NOT rocket science , even a kid will tell him that.

The marketing anti-heros

Graham Charlton reports that BT hopes to take a lead in the battle against the scourge of spam on the internet by introducing a new system designed to filter out spam before it reaches their customer’s PCs.

BT’s Content Forensics system, devised by StreamShield Networks, will scan millions of emails every day, alerting them to the location of spam related problems on its network.

So here we have a company offering a service, and being considered heroic for it initiative, to block out advertising.


Q: Why do you use email marketing
A: I want to be an anti-hero

Mobile TV arrives in Bristol

Four major mobile phone operators yesterday launched trials for a new mobile TV service, which will take place initially in the Bristol area says Graham Charlton at e-consultancy.

The trial, which will run for the next three months, will test whether mobile operators into can use their existing infrastructure to deliver mobile TV and other multimedia services to users with compatible handsets.

This is very important to PR. It means we now need to offer TV stations mobile optimised content for the most importnat consumer demographic.

Better start working out how now.

Online sales up 60% last year

The ONS e-commerce survey, based on results from businesses with 10 or more employees, shows rapid growth both in the use of Information and Communications Technologies, and the value of trade over the internet.

The total value of internet sales by businesses reached £103.3 billion in 2005, a rise of 56% from the 2004 figure of £66.2 billion. The survey showed that businesses are making more and more use of ICT.

Read more at e-consultancy.

And also read Richard Maven who says that Europe’s high streets could eventually be devoid of banks, travel agents and mobile phone shops as consumers turn to the web for research, according to ACNielsen.

He reports the study found consumers used window-shopping less than the net when choosing their purchases, except when it came to clothing and accessories.

Financial Planning Association sets up CEO blog to communicate with members

Here is another application of Social media. This time from Trevor Cook.


FPA chief executive officer Jo-Anne Bloch has embraced the 21st century by creating a blog on the FPA website.

The aim of the online journal is to communicate regularly with members and encourage the exchange of views and ideas. It will cover government legislation and regulation, the value of advice, FPA activities and events, and industry challenges and concerns, an FPA spokesman said. Already members have said the blog is “a great innovation” and another posted a comment that read, “as planners get familiar with this 21st century media, you will see some lively debate there”.

The Australian Press Council has looked at the future of newspapers.

Traditionalists believe that the Internet is no more likely to bring down newspapers than the advent of TV half a century ago. The special attributes of newspapers, their immediacy, involvement, credibility, creativity, consistency and flexibility of use will continue to ensure their longevity.

Traditionalists are, however, being stalked by doubters, including most recently The Economist (August 2006) which is following the line that extinction of all or some of the papers in the UK is only a matter of time. It claims '…that newspapers are on the way out and that it is only a matter of time before there are closures with half the world's newspapers likely to close in the foreseeable future because 'business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.'

It is important for us to follow what is happening.

I do not believe in the demise of newspapers. I think they will take their place as an alternative channel and that publishers will learn that news (views and opinion) can be transported through many platforms and across many channels and, with content optimised for the platform and channel, they will do really rather well.

PR in the meantime will have to help provide optimised content which will mean the death of the press release as we know it today. It is also why we need XPRL

Workers go online at work - shock horror!

In just one month, more than one in three (40 per cent) Scots will make an online purchase while at work and many more will book holidays, do their banking and send e-mails to friends and relatives says the Scotsman.

Do they also do work on computers at home (like read their emails?).

But this is an opportunity.

If they need to, want to, enjoy - harness it.

You can't stop it - well you can but then you get second rate employees such as people who don't mind being disconnected from the world.

Law reins in wild webbers

Sydney Morning Herald has a headline that applies to you!

BLOGGERS beware: thoughtless musings in cyberspace can have costly consequences.

That's one lesson that might be gleaned from a Florida jury's decision last week to order a Louisiana woman to pay $US11.3 million ($15.2 million) in compensation, after she used an internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud. The damages award is believed to be the largest relating to amateur postings on the internet.

Internal PR - just the job?

Trevor Cook found this:

Recent research has surfaced that quantifies the difference employee engagement can make to the bottom line. ISR, a Chicago-based HR research and consulting firm, conducted a study of over 664,000 employees from 71 companies around the world. Most dramatic among its findings was the almost 52 percent difference in one-year performance improvement in operating income between companies with highly engaged employees as compared to those companies with low engagement scores. High engagement companies improved 19.2 percent while low engagement companies declined 32.7 percent in operating income over the study period. The data covers financial performance through 2005 (www.isrinsight.com)

Charles Leadbeater on mass creativity: We Think, the book

Think this and wonder:


Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on? We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.

PushMe - PullU the difference between then and now

Sam Rose posted this paper this week at the The Aspen Institute.

It struck me for this summary:

We are living in an epochal period of transition bridging two very different types of economies and cultures. We are transitioning from a "push" economy: that tries to anticipate consumer demand, and then creates a standardized product, and "pushes the product into the market and culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing. We are transitioning to a "pull" economy: open and flexible production platforms that use network technologies to coordinate many different entities from disparate regions.. "Pull" economies produce customized products and services that serve localized needs (demand-driven), usually in a rapid manner.

Public Relations practice stands between external forces and internal forces in a process of bringing thier values into sync. Hey! This is the Relationship Value Model all over again.

What do practitioners want to learn

This week Philippe Borremans has posted about research by Chloe Kane who did a survey of 105 senior communications practitioners in the UK - the majority working in-house - asking them about their training needs.

He says he "Was not amazed at all to see that 58 of them put "new media skills" on top of the list.

"Planning communications programs" came in second.

When asked about what practice of communications they wanted to learn more about in the next year, 52 of them responded "Corporate PR", second most popular was "Internal Communications." Talking about areas in communications that will feel/are feeling the effect of new media... they are right on.

Optimise content is key to its use and value

Confused of Calcutter (JP Rangaswami), of which much in the past and much in the future, commented:

I must have missed it the first time around, and only saw it via Boing Boing (thanks, Cory!).

Reuters reported last Friday that “Book sales get a lift from Google scan plan“.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the story. Read it for yourself.

Someone’s finally figured out that letting people ‘taste” books actually helps sell books. Even obscure ones. Especially obscure ones.

I guess the penny had to drop sometime. As Doc is wont to say, they will make money because of the excerpts rather than with the excerpts.

He mentions Doc Searle of the ref="http://www.cluetrain.com/">Cluetrain Manifestoa> fame (among other things). Cluetrain was online long before it became a best selling book (made out of trees).

These are different media. Why do people find it hard to understand that we like to use different media at different times. I do not want to 'read a newspaper' online. I read newspapers that are printed on paper. I get news online - that is different.

If I want to watch a movie I go to a cinema. If I want to watch a video, I put it in my TV, if I want to watch an online movie, I use my computer. These are different activities. There is different emotional and experience attached to each.

I really do not want to watch a film on my cell phone - thank you very much.

Optimise the content for the media - this is not hard to understand.

All the nuts talked about 'protecting film copyright online' just shows how paranoid the film distributors are. If they stopped listening to lawyers for just a day, they would find out exactly how GOOD it is to have OPTIMISED content online - and they would make money from it.

It is also how to find out about convergent values in relationships.

Stewardship

Much has been written about trust, about equity and about innovation. Stewardship rarely gets a look in.

Hmmm...

Advertising numbers will do for advertising

Investor Business Daily is watching the old advertisers try to put their imprint on New Media.

ComScore Media Metrix says Google's share was 44%. Nielsen/NetRatings pegs it at 50%. Hitwise gives it 60%.

With 6.5 billion total U.S. searches in August, that's a difference of 1 billion Google searches between the lowest and highest share ratings.

Which is most accurate? No one can say for sure.

"This is why we are screaming bloody murder for all of these sites to be audited and certified," said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Every major Web site publisher and rating agency is under the gun to be audited and certified by an independent firm as it increasingly becomes more important for advertisers and others to know just how many people are visiting a site, viewing a page and clicking on an ad.

To hammer home that importance, eight big advertisers signed a document in August saying the fees they pay for Web ads will be calculated based only on audited, certified numbers, starting in mid-2007.

As usual they are bleating for all the wrong reasons.

The Internet, as an advertising medium, has joined the big leagues alongside TV, print and radio. In the first six months of this year, advertisers spent $7.9 billion on U.S. Web ads, up 37% from the year-earlier period, says the IAB. Uncertainty about how many people are viewing a Web site, page or ad worries advertisers.

Of course its does. They want eyeballs because they think eyeballs on pages makes people see the adverts. How good is this as a metric?

When people can choose not to see advertising, they choose not to. So much for advertising.

People do participate in advertising if its is good enough but as participants.

In the UK, there is a huge issue for the publishers over what to measure and how.

To placate BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, ING, Kimberly-Clark, PepsiCo and Visa someone will come up with a number (almost any number will do -for all the good it will be). It will be useless. It will confirm doubts about marketing as a profession.

All it will tell these enormous online advertisers is how to generate more distrust, distaste, hell, frustration and distance between their brands and their consumers.

This is an issue for PR. It will be the Public Relations professionals that will have to pick up the pieces.

convergence of social networking and e-commerce

ClickZ has an interesting report.

Market research firm Compete has released a report on the convergence of social networking and e-commerce, and in the process has tried to coin a new buzzword: “social commerce,” or s-commerce for short.

The report, “s-commerce: beyond MySpace and YouTube,” finds consumer visits to social networking sites have increased 109 percent since January 2004, and page views per visitor have grown by 414 percent in the same time period. "Social networkers” spend less time viewing traditional media and have more discretionary income and agreater penchant for online shopping than non-social networking site users.

Marketers having the most success with s-commerce are using a combination of branded micro-sites, customer reviews, forums, peer-to-peer transactions, product blogs and user-generated content projects, according to Compete.

Marketers may be involved but this space is the domain of PR but because launching a branded social network means competing for a dwindling slice of end users' attention, there is a need for the conversation to be lively and engaged.

Its about building relationships stupid.

Bubble and Squeek - Web 2.0 is finite

PC Advisor is whistling in the dark to keep its spirits up. There is a bubble 2.0 and it will burst.

The article says:

One of the reasons why the first dotcom bubble popped was that many of the companies behind the unwarranted enthusiasm for e-everything assumed that people were eager to spend money on the internet, and that minor niggles such as web security wouldn't affect user confidence. But not enough 'normal' people were relying on the internet on a daily basis in 2000. And in the years that followed the daily security threats and arrival of hi-tech crime as a viable business ensured that few were prepared to reveal their credit card details to the wider web.

Six years later, however, things have changed: Google, a search-engine company in 2000, has become as advertising firm; eBay, an auction site for geeks back then, is a viable business allowing anyone with a net connection at home to set up shop; and traditional old media firms like News Corp are terrified that their readers and advertisers will abandon the printed page and are snapping up web firms left, right and centre. The web is a viable business, and so many of those predictions about Bubble 2.0 are completely unfounded.

The real problem is that web 2.0 is massively predicated on the advertising model.

Ads ain't everything.

Emerging from this will be a state of relationship development that invites people to become consumers. Advertising is too clumsy, it irritates, it gets in the way, it can be ignored and any economy that falters by just a tiny bit will bring the whole edifice tumbling.

Emerging from the fall will be a different and more competent paradigm which is beginning to emerge. It is a paradigm that sees people who are involved in social media as the nexus of relationships with shared values. The conversation with these people will change organisations and the way they can contribute at many levels.

Pop! to the advertising model.

PR's can do software too

One of the things that stops PR from being ultra powerful is that it has a big problem with software. Its geek stuff. Its too complicated for the PR brain. So the geeks are making it simple.

Coghead just launched a service that lets anyone create a Web-based business applicationfrom expense management to project management.

So far so good, but what has that got to do with PR.
Here is a simple idea. What about running PR programmes with project management software. Real deadlines with goals and deadlines for creation, approvals and distribution.

It saves time effort and reduces cost.

Ah! Now there is a good idea.

Ultra Mobile

Business2Day has an interesting piece about a small New York City startup called Transmedia it is getting ready to launch Glide 2.0, the second version of its Webtop software.

It is also partnering with Intel to include the Glide service with all upcoming ultramobile PCs (new devices bigger than a Treo but smaller than a laptop, with only a touchscreen). While Google just yesterday merged its Web docs and spreadsheets, Transmedia is much further along in developing a full-fledged Webtop that combines a Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, e-mail, and photo editor. It also lets you upload and share all your digital music, photos, and video. "All the apps are integrated. Each app is one click from the next," says Transmedia CEO Donald Leka. And, oh yeah, any file, document, photo, or video on Glide can be accessed from many mobile phones (because everything is transcoded into flash). It can also sync all of your files between Glide, your desktop PC, your laptop, and your mobile devices.

These developments are new platforms and offer new channels for communication.

Detaching the Internet from the ubiquitous PC is very important. It adds a lot to the reach and versatility of the net. It is also a big challenge. There will be few places that are private and secure as mobile takes hold (see this post to know what this means).

Who own your copyright?

The intellectual property question of ownership of material submitted to social media sites is heating up as corporate acquisition talks for YouTube and other startups catch fire, says BL Ochman.

She has some very interesting points such as: "Interestingly, you don't own the rights to material you submit to video contests, or to YouTube, but you do own the rights to coding you do at Second Life."

She adds: As Mark Cuban ever so succinctly puts it: "The copyright shit is going to hit the lawsuit fan."

The market for real goods created from the digital objects coded in virtual reality could be enormous in a virtual world like Second Life, where the creators own the rights to the objects that they make, Michael Buckbee told Wired

Robin Good says of participatory sites like YouTube, MySpace: "While paying lip service to the democratic, free sharing of information, then, services like YouTube reserve the right to co-opt, edit, repackage and sell on the citizen produced media that they distribute."

As always, there is more good stuff on her post.

Mean time Shaun Woodward suggests new technology is the key to beating movie piracy, the UK film minister has told industry executives reports the BBC.

Making films available on demand as soon as they are released at cinemas could help stop fans watching illegal copies, Shaun Woodward said.

"The real answer is in the technology," he told the BBC News website, citing the success of legal music downloads.

There is another issue and that is the differences that will emerge between interpretations of copyright between countries and cultures. At present the big moves are in the USA next I guess will be Europe but when these things get to the authorities in the Middle East and China, there is a whole different culture and a few billion people who are not going to sign up to copyright as we know it.

People are shy online

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox discusses participation inequality in online communities, where 1% of users account for almost all the action. Blogs have the worst participation inequality, says Nielsen. "The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users."

BL Ochman has her own views....

I agree there is inertia and the details of the research is here.

It take courage to change other peoples ideas and work. We are at the very beginning of this liberalisation of interactions.

Interactivity has been suppressed by so many dominant coalitions on so many occasions that people have reservations.

There are plenty who would control the message, the conversation, the population.

Are they really right, is social media self governing?

No it is not. There are rules. Some have legal sanction like copyright. Some are held in trust because people understand and sign up to the values (or their perceived values) of their organisation.

But given the freedom to be transparent, the interactions offer huge benefits to the individual and organisations so encouragement has a major upside.

PR has to manage the board when it comes to social media

Greenfield Says:

When it comes to employee blogging, how much freedom should employees have? Does management really need to know who is blogging, when they are blogging and what they are saying about the company?

In the old days, all corporate communications channels went through the PR department. PR had the messages. PR directed the messengers. Everything was centralized, formalized and contained.

How different is today's world of employee blogging. I don’t have time to monitor what everyone is saying. Employees must find their own individual voice. I may not always be wild about what they might say, but I am confident that the process and the wider community will keep individuals in check. Outrageous statements by renegade employees lose credibility. And personal expression does not mean carte blanche to say anything. Employees are still employees beholden to company policies and codes of conduct.

So as we send our employees out into the blogosphere, we need to set the boundaries for engagement and determine our level of comfort for transparency and candor. Should employees who talk about your company go through formal training? Should they use the same templates? Should their comments be approved beforehand? Should we dictate what they say?

He is, of course wrong. 'In the old days' employees went down to the pub and had a good bitch just after work. Now they do it online. Now managers have to take note and a good job too.

The idea that PR 'controlled the message is also false. We used to offer messages but our publics offered their own interpretation (gosh! Sentient journalists... wow!).

If an organisation is well managed and employees know what its values are, then there is little to fear but if not the PR Director needs to get hold of the Board by the scruff of their combined necks and give them a good shake.

Why? Because, you can't stop the conversation.

Spreading the word

The government of Libya is reported to have agreed to provide its 1.2 million school children with a cheap durable laptop computer by June 2008.

The laptops offer internet access and are powered by a wind-up crank. They cost $100 and manufacturing begins next year, says One Laptop per Child, reports the BBC.

The non-profit association's chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, said the deal was reached on Tuesday in Libya.

This is not the same as being online but goes a long way towards it.

Break up the Internet - threat or promise?

Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), set up by the UN, warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation, reports the BBC.

"People are concerned about whether the system we have now will also work five years from now," he said.

Mr Desai was speaking at a conference in London to discuss the net.

The conference was organised by Nominet, the UK body in charge of domain names ending .uk, ahead of the first-ever Internet Governance Forum, a global gathering of stakeholders in Athens later this month.

The internet was increasingly being shaped by companies and organisations at the "edges" and not by government, public sector bodies and regulators, he said.

This was concerning some countries who wanted more involvement in the development of the net.

"These are the reasons these entities - government and private sector - feel they need to be reassured that the system they are relying on is secure, safe and reliable - that they cannot be suddenly thrown out of that system by some attack," said Mr Desai.

He said the Chinese government was concerned that users still had to type webpage addresses using Latin characters even when the pages were in Chinese.

Carphone Warehouse buys AOL UK

Carphone Warehouse is to buy the UK's third-largest internet provider, AOL UK reports the BBC.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said Carphone Warehouse, owner of the TalkTalk broadband and phone offering, was paying £370m for the operation.

AOL UK has 2.1 million customers across the country - 600,000 on dial-up and 1.5 million with broadband connections.

Carphone Warehouse, which runs the UK's largest chain of mobile phone stores, first moved into broadband in April.

If education is online - so is PR

For those who think this online stuff might go away, I offer this news from the BBC:

School pupils can now take a GCSE entirely online - including doing the coursework and exams electronically.

Online courses have been around for some time and there has been online or "e-assessment" of various tests.

But the new environmental and land-based science course is said to be the first totally non-paper GCSE.

What is significant are the range of social media tools used in these endeavours. In PR we need this knowledge and there skills, there is a whole generation that does not find it different, it represents a huge market.... It offers really fun conversations.

The difference between PR and Marketing

The difference between Marketing and Public Relations is highlighted by BL Ochman in this post.

On the one hand there is a glitzy promo and the alternative is to make it a fun conversation. She says:

OfficeMax has launched an elaborate, and undoubtedly expensive interactive campaign featuring "graphologist" Dr. Gerard Ackerman to launch OfficeMax’s new private label design pen brand, TUL. It's created by DDB Advertising-Chicago and the heavy hand of ad agency cluelessness is evident.

The very nice, and intensely cheery PR person told me the campaign is "hilarious" "amazing" and "a hoot." It's definitely funny, and I laughed out loud when Dr. Ackerman told me he loves me. I didn't feel compelled to pass on the URL to friends, but I did think it was fun. If I am ever in an Office Max store and see a Tul pen, I'll certainly look at it.

But there are many missed opportunities in this campaign, like feedback from participants on how accurate they find the readings. All in all, it's an amusing old-fashioned push message with a couple of new media bells and whistles.

People have the option to go straight to TUL.com for a "personalized" on-site analysis or to mail in a sample of their handwriting which results in Dr. Ackerman emailing them a video that shows an image of their handwriting as he analyzes it.

Facing up to social media

Andrew Lark has a great post about employee blogging. It is to the point and is going to be the hardest sell the PR industry ever had to make, defend and plan to manage.

Thay is why it has suddenly become such a great profession.

He says:

One of the new dimensions that all employers are going to face in an era of participatory media is more employee and contractor dialogue in the market. Some of it you are going to wish you heard first or could take off line. But that privilege is something the writer gets to extend - you don't get to demand it unless it breaches policies and the like.

Employers should view this as an opportunity. Take the feedback and revel in it. More than often it reflects a broader trend or opinion.

Suspect measures by the FT?

E-consultancy has an excellent critique on the measurement methodology used by the FT in an article this week which attempted to cast some light on the most influential blogs in the UK and Europe, though the methodology used to calculate the blog rankings leaves a little to be desired.

The piece was based on a study conducted by blog search engine Technorati and Edelman, the PR firm, but instead of using traditional metrics such as reach and audience share, it used the number of inbound links to determine a blog’s ‘influence’.


So what’s wrong with that?

Well, firstly it is certainly a case of grabbing the lowest hanging fruit. Technorati publishes a list of the ‘top 100 blogs’, using inbound links as the basis for positioning. Edelman, for the record, has an exclusive and slightly mysterious deal with Technorati.quote>


For the PR industry there is a big lesson to learn. If we use data then we have to be sure that that we use relevant and sound metrics. If not we will get found out. Fake PR is all around us and its being exposed. Fake reporting has the same fate awaiting.

Have nots - have to be considered

Esther Dyson

Made a useful contribution to the "Office 2.0" conference which is reported in IWR blog.

She offered words of warning:

For a start, ubiquitous access to Office 2.0 applications is restricted to those with continuous and reliable access to power and internet access. How many global companies can even claim that?

Some of the later demonstrations proved her point when access was so slow, the presenters mumbled about "the Regis St Francis Hotel wifi network" and quickly changed the demonstration focus. I've never seen so many rotating "waiting" icons.

She predicts "a long long time" before mass adoption. She also pointed out that the focus of the successful applications would be different to today's: they will focus on tasks and collaboration, not just documents. She said, "I want an activity manager not a data manager."

It came up this week for me when a student was trying to follow my netpr Internet lecture. With a slow connection, the benefits are lost.

Practitioners (yet I put my hands up) have to be aware that there is a big audience out there that still does not have broadband or access to a reliable on-line service. We have to accept that in spreading the word to our publics we have to consider what platforms and channels are available.

Google outage

Juan Carlos Perez at PC Advisor noted that:

Citizen journalists were unable to update their weblogs yesterday after Google’s Blogger and Blogspot hosting services went offline for two hours.
A "network malfunction" caused the outage, Google said in a short note posted on Blogger Status, a site where the company informs users about Blogger system issues.

No data was lost during the outage. "We know how important Blogger is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously," a Google spokeswoman wrote via email.

17 October - A great PR campaign

17 October is just an ordinary day, but you can make it special says the BBC by keeping a blog or diary for just one day. The aim is to create the biggest ever blog throughout Britain, and by taking part you can contribute to a day in history. Organisers hope it will provide a useful archive for generations in the future.

Meanwhile BL Ochman tells us that Yahoo is inviting participation in the Yahoo Time Capsule.

Until November 8, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio and drawings - to this electronic anthropology project. You also can and comment on the contributions from around the globe.

These are great PR campiagns... we can all learn.

Getting an image online and on TV

Paul Trotter at PC Advisor notes that Endemol UK is working with a photo blogging site to find images for a TV programme marking the rise of the citizen journalist.

The company behind reality show Big Brother is putting together content for ITV1’s “I was there: the people’s review of 2006” programme, which is due for broadcast either later this year or early in 2007.

Blogging site Fotothing has been enlisted to find suitable shots, which could be anything from photos from the World Cup, or videos from the recent coup in Thailand, it said.

Well, here again is a Public Relations opportunity to contribute. This is great because it offers both online and television exposure.

More political bloggers - an opportunity

CEN reports that MP Richard Spring, whose constituency includes Newmarket and Haverhill, has opened an internet blog - an online diary.

He said: "I believe blogs will take political communication to the next level in Britain over the next few years.

"The better blogs are already beginning to set the agenda on political issues, break key stories and most of all, make politics entertaining without trivialising the process. I have always strived to be at the heart of new political developments and that is why I shall be blogging on a regular basis with my views, thoughts, stories - and occasional rants - from Parliament on issues that matter to me and that matter to my constituents.

There is an interesting opportunity here. If an MP is a blogger, they are a channel for communication and influencing their content is a useful channel for PR activity.

Updating iPod content

From MS Mobile there is a comment that works fo me.

If you are tired of listening to music when you commute, nowadays you can find plenty of podcasts produced both by amateurs and professionals, available both as free downloads of MP3 files accessible through RSS feeds, and as commercial podcasts, where exclusive content or advertisement-free content is available for some small fee. Unfortunately Microsoft still has not built-in podcasting support into Windows Media player and ActiveSync, although Apple iPod and iTunes have podcasting capability already for almost 2 years.

Where facilities do not exist, there will be people who will offer alternatives, which is the basis for thier article but more alternatives will come.

I can't wait for near field updates for my iPod.

Top Blog

Edelman, in conjunction with the blog search engine Technorati, published a list of the top British blogs. Reports TechDigest which also has its own list.

Medical podcast covered in glory

The University of Leicester has been pioneering the use of social media for quite a long time. MicrobiologyBytes is one of its great successes and has a number off awards and accolades reports Medical News.

Creator of MicrobiologyBytes, Dr Alan Cann, of the University's Department of Biology, commented: “There's a tremendous storehouse of knowledge locked up in universities. New technology, such as web 2.0 - the read-write internet - allows us to share this by blogging and podcasting.<br>
“The aim of MicrogiologyBytes is to bring people the latest news from the forefront of biomedical research in a form that everyone can understand. Obviously, I hope that this will also attract more students to the University of Leicester, but I don't expect that someone who listens to my podcasts in, say, Mexico, will turn up on the doorstop wanting to study for a degree. It's all about the conversation we should have with the public.”

It is worth following these experiments to see how they can be applied to PR practice.

Monitoring for online video content

One of the things that PR people have to work on is how it monitors on-line content.
Andy Plesser has come across Suranga Chandratillake, the Cambridge University-trained computer scientist and founder of Blinkx,whose company has a solution for effective search of video.

Second University Life

A Harvard University class is meeting on its own "Berkman Island" within Second Life (SL). "Avatars," visual images that represent the students and teachers, gather in an "outdoor" amphitheater, head inside a virtual replica of Harvard Law School's Austin Hall, and travel to complete assignments all over the digital world. (If SL could be magically brought into the "real world," it would cover about 85 square miles.)
Some 90 Harvard law and extension school students taking the course, called "CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion," can receive real college credit. But anyone on earth with a computer connection can also take the course for free.

This is a great public relations campaign.

Text 100 is well known for setting up in SL and Lewis PR has just won the global PR account for this phenomenon.

In PR we have to look at many forms of communication and this is another one (of many virtual reality domains) here then is another opportunity and it is getting serious traction.

Found-out fake is a fake PR

Shel Holtz is on the case: a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in WalMart parking lots turned out to be a fake blog, the brainchild of WalMart’s PR counselors at Edelman. While fake blogs (and other fake social media) are nothing new, it’s dismaying to see it emerge from Edelman, which has some of the smarter new-media people on its staff (Phil Gomes, Michael Wiley, Steve Rubel and more), and which touts itself as the PR firm that truly gets social media.

If publicists believes they can fool all the people all the time especially when 'all the people' run into millions, they are nuts. Publicists who do it should not regard themselves as part of the public relations profession,. In the UK this practice is not permitted among CIPR members.

Social media is emerging in fun forms for UK politicians and parties. The latest to hit the headlines is Birmingham MP Sion Simon who has recorded a spoof YouTube video of David Cameron's Webcameron.

Even more odd is that after a howl from politicians, its has been removed from YouTuble which is rather silly.

It could have been construed to be offensive. If that is the judgement then Simon is the looser.
Why can't the viewer choose?

Boring old men have to learn

Typically the boring old men (because invariably too many are - old and
male) of British politics don't like it and claim it "goes against the spirit of
confidentiality of the talks." Having quickly scanned the blog it appears to be
mainly about the process and an insight into how these things happen, rather
than the details of the negotiations.
One of the points I always make when
I'm running social media and blog training is that it doesn't matter if you
think social media is a good thing or a bad thing. It's happening and you have
to learn how to deal with it.

Stuart Bruce is right and we have to ensure our clients understand this now rather then at a time when it is an issue.

Scream Marketing parked on the PR lawn

David Meerman Scott has posted about the nonsense corporate speak that pervades our industry.

Its another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge press release from a market-leading, well positioned mindless PR marketing core message.

Yatching World - podcast and scream mareketing

Yacthing World's podcasts by Matt Sheahan are interesting and informative and offer a new form of interaction that the PR practitioner can get involved in.

Having your client (Grant Simmer this time) interviewed bu this iconic publication would be a big plus.

I just wish that YW did not have such horrid advertising on its site.

Fear of the Internet

Fear of internet crime is now more prevalent than concerns about more conventional crimes such as burglary, mugging and car theft, according to a report in the Guardian.


In planning online PR programmes this is an issue that needs to be considered.

GoogleTube

John Harris has an alternative view of the Google acquisition of YouTube.

Thus far, there seem to about sixty, most full of fear that their beloved virtual community is about to be turned into a drab corporate hell-hole, and as the US wakes up, the volume of anti-Google agit-prop will surely skyrocket. Looking once again at Google's own video site, you can only sympathise: its front page offers the obligatory home-made clips, but its "featured" section rather tediously flags up The Cartoon Network, a new Oasis DVD and Sky Sports' coverage of the Ryder Cup. There is also the dull sound of cynical commerce: charges for video "downloads", when - doh! - the whole point of streaming technology is that no download is required.

Apple's secret society exposed

I am not sure what TechDigest is doing.

It reports (and one can only assume from an insider tip off)

Take one uber-secretive company, the ongoing saga of the perils of blogging at or about work, and someone who claims to be working for Apple (and in the UK at that) and all the ingredients are there.

It seems to want to scoop the next blogger to get fired for blogging about their employer.

The problem here is that secretive companies get 'exposed' and cannot get across their own viewpoint when they are secretive. Apple has a reputation as "uber-secretive" and so is under constant attack and investigation.

Exhausted celebs

Does the use of famous names still have the power to attract the public to events and causes, or have we over-used them, and is their power diluted by B lists and scandals? Love them or hate them, celebrities are still sought after to help promote new products, launch events or attract clients to a new venue.
Active Events discusses this issue. Celebrity has always been with us. It is something that society enjoys. The Hittites, Ancient Greeks and Romans had celebrities.

Today there is a big gorilla in the room. It is really easy for celebrity status to emerge in social media very fast which can make some celebs appear passe.

Press relations and the vultures

The CIPR Active Events blog reported on its media conference that Justin Hayward and Sam Stokes from MS&L began the conference with ‘Selling-in you stories playing a game of network bingo. Justin, Head of Technology & Telecommunications, went on to discuss the rapid changes in media and recognising ways to remain relevant as more consumers turned to the web as an information resource.

Perhaps the best way to remain relevant is to create news stories that journalists want to find, have it in social space or, at worse where an RSS feed will find it and save all the cost of the phone round and 'selling in'.


The old model is dying, the vultures are sitting on the shoulders of tradition means of press story distribution.

Online is now bigger than magazines and papers

From e-consultancy, a pick-up from the FT:

European consumers are now spending more time online than reading newspapers and magazines, according to a new study.

The Jupiter Research survey, covered in the FT, shows internet consumption has doubled from two to four hours per week in the last two years, but is not cannibalising print and TV.

If ever there was a reason for PR to take the Web seriously this is it.

Risk trust and reward

What a sensible post at J LeRoy's blog:

....... we have to assume a certain amount of risk tolerance when we venture forth into the world of net based business.

This week, even vaunted Google was hacked. The post was actually quite brilliant and has made its point.

Risk and trust are a balancing act online and we have to be sure that we both tell our clients and, like Google, have a plan in place for when it goes wrong. If we do these things the rewards are great.

Issues management planning in PR is often put to one side in the excitement of planning programmes. It should be an integral part.

Why Internet Mediated PR will win - it's measureable

Where the Internet is really making TV look creaky, though, is in the most important area of all, the one that determines where the money goes: audience measurement.

So claims Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune

Readers know, by and large, what it means when they hear that a TV show has 3.2 million viewers: The Nielsen Media Research monopoly has extrapolated from its sample of the U.S. population's viewing habits to arrive at that number, and if that show is on a network, it will be, in all likelihood, canceled very soon.

But people outside of the business often stumble over the meaning of Internet-specific measurement terms such as "hits," "page views" and "unique visitors," to name some of the most common ones. They don't grasp how site rankings are arrived at. And, bigger picture, they fail to understand, perhaps, how very fragmented the Internet audience is: Social networking site MySpace made news recently when it climbed to the top of the Internet heap - by tallying just 4.5 percent of all U.S. Internet visits.

So consider this a primer, necessary in so new and dynamic a medium, on Internet audience measurement.........

We its quite good and worth reading.

We do need to harness some of this stuff. But there are caveats. This is not a 'mass audience medium' and so the numbers can and do conceal a lot of information and comparisons are very hard to make. But if we use it wisely it will offerpower to Social Media PR such that now one has seen before.

Shopaholic dream

Printed material can be turned into a remote control for digital content. Imagine clicking a product on the catalog, only to have it fire up the Web browser on your PC that brings you to the store’s online checkout counter with the item in mind already in the shopping cart.

Cameron or Murdoch - you choose

Rupert Murdoch said he was not yet impressed with David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, because he is a 'PR guy'.

"Look, he's charming, he's very bright and he behaves as if he doesn't believe in anything other than trying to construct what he believes will be the right public image," Murdoch said.

"He's a P.R. guy. He came out of public relations. He was a lobbyist and P.R. man for Carlton Television for seven years, and then went into Parliament five years ago, and that's the only experience of life he's had."

Rupert, you're charming, very bright and behaves as if you doesn't believe in anything other than trying to construct what you believes will be the right public image. But really just another jumped up journo.

But, you might be successful as a publisher - who knows .

One in five don't trust the net

David Smith Sunday in the The Observer reports that

People fear they are more likely to become victims of online crime than they are to be mugged or burgled, research shows. A survey at the start of Get Safe Online Week reveals that 21 per cent of people now believe they are at greater risk from e-crime - up from 17 per cent last year. This fear of online crime is deterring the public from using the internet for everyday activities, the survey on getsafeonline.org found, with early a quarter of respondents too concerned about e-crime to bank online.

This is an issue for PR. We depend on people finding a reasonable comfort zone using Social Media.

Second Life, Work and PR play

More from BL Ochman. She says:

"Its Hard to understand how an interview with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale could be boring, but Toby Sterling at Associated Press asks questions that are (extremely) far from insightful. The Guardian, on the other hand, has a meaty article.

I agree, the Guardian article is excellent and presents how people Use SL, to promote their organisations and even trade with this 800,000 population.

Some examples:

Universities are staking out places on Second Life to offer virtual courses.
Politicians have started doing interviews in Second Life
Doctors are doing simulations that may have real-world benefits
The Hedrons will become the first British band to do a virtual concert in Second Life
The BBC has rented an island on the site for music festivals.


There is much more in the article. It offers good ideas and is well written.

Consumer trials online

From BL Ochman, comes this find.

It is another form of online promotion. Give active users a product to try and focus their response into a single social media site and the result is coverage, comment and buzz,

Email - Porous, Transparent and an Agent

Email is a great channel for communication. It is also easy to use.

It makes organisations porous (information leaks out). It makes organisation transparent (information can be shared easily) finally it is easy to for people to change the content, for the technologies to alter that structure and re-purpose the content. It is truly a thing of the Internet because the Internet vests email with its own agency - a capability to do things beyond the initial purpose.

This is evident from the Sunday Herald's story yesterday.

SCOTLAND’S green watchdog played down the risks of radio active contamination at a popular coastal resort in Fife following an 11th-hour intervention by government spin doctors.

Internal emails reveal the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) delayed and then altered a news release after it had been described as “not entirely helpful” by a senior Scottish Executive public relations official.

How to pitch a blog

Lee Odden tells that Online Marketing Blog gets about 5-10 pitches per week on average, which provides more than enough of a sample on how blogs are getting pitched these days. What’s the verdict? It doesn’t look good.

This is a good post on how to be really good at blogger relations and makes these points:

1. Be relevant.
   
2. Personalize.
   
3. Make it easy.
   
4. Schwag is good.
   
5. Be persistent.
   

The full description on the blog and lots of references to other good works.

Its relationships, stupid

Charline Li focuses on why Google and YouTube would be interested in working together. She makes this point:

It’s not just the sheer numbers that grabs Google’s attention. YouTube is a gem because it figured out what Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and all of the other video players in the marketplace couldn’t – that it’s not about the video. It’s really about the community that’s around the video.

In PR we can focus on the social element. The channels are interesting and can be ceeded to the folks like marketers, but the social group is the key.

This is where Public Relations has to focus.

In practice, YouTube is interesting for PR because it is a place where we can engage with social groups and their conversations.

ROI and relationship value

JP Rangaswami is one of the good thinkers. He is following through Charlene Li's discussion about discussion on Calculating The ROI of Blogging. He quotes: Strategy Under Uncertainty in Harvard Business Review, November/December 1997,

If we restrict ourselves to measuring investments by ROI alone, we run the risk of weakening our capacity to survive, much less thrive, in an age of strategic uncertainty. Big Bets are like early stage investments, you have to work out what percentage of your investment portfolio you want to expose to those risks and returns; that percentage could be zero, but you then give away the right to receive hockey-stick returns. Big Bets are measured like early-stage VC portfolios. Options are just options, the price you pay for a place at the table, and you decide which tables you need to sit at. Options need option pricing and suffer time decay. No-Regrets Moves, in contrast, are all about ROI. You have to do something, now all you’re working out is the best something. Build Or Buy. Which Build. Or Which Buy. And there’s probably no better tool than ROI to work this out.

In a long and very interesting post he concludes:

There is a destination. One that values human capital and relationships and institutional knowledge. And we will get there. So I will continue to track the conversations on the blogosphere looking for signposts that will make it easier to get to the destination.

Well, I am glad he has had his pop at current accounting practice. When all value is a metaphor, you are left with the elements and knowledge. If all knowledge is freely available through the Internet the balance sheet rests with those who can use knowledge to convert elements using knowledge.

Throughout mankind's history (as for every other sentient being) this depends on relationships.

Why are we so slow in looking as relationships and its social value?

That is why I the Relationship Value Model is helpful.

Dog blog

He's got a hairy coat and a glossy nose and is fast becoming a Norfolk celebrity, says EDP24

For Murphy the dog has got his own internet blog which has just celebrated its 1000th visitor.

There are regular updates, the topics including 'What we did for our holidays' and 'Separation Anxiety', a common problem when dogs have to be left outside shops or toilets for brief periods while their owners pop inside. And there are loads of photos of the duo.

Its a new angle for blogging. Niche.

Biofuels blog for farmers

Farmers are some of the biggest adopters of new ideas and technology. Now they have a chance to take part in a new blog from FWi and its sister publication ICIS.

This is a publication useing blogs to cover an emerging interest for an industry. Another application for blogging.

ICIS's Simon Robinson has started a blog about biofuels, looking at how crops could figure in fuelling the planet in the future and talking about non-food crops for power and the potential that farming has to replace large parts of the petrochemicals industry.

Celeb podcast for PR campaign.

Former Senator and health care advocate Bob Dole made available today the tenth and final episode in his podcast series, Ten Things Seniors Need to Know about Medicare's Drug Coverage, reports Medical News Today. In this podcast Dole discusses some of the enhanced features that Medicare is offering beneficiaries to help them prepare for the 2007 enrollment period. This episode can be downloaded at http://www.bobdoleonmedicare.com, as well as on iTunes and other podcast directories.

This is an example of both political application of social media and a practical use of a 'celebrity' to put across a point.

Media or society - what is the new Social Media

Mr web reports that two leading US media analysts have this week announced the formation of a new non-profit institute, iFOCOS, the Institute for the Connected Society. iFOCOS aims to bring thought leaders together to better ‘understand and use the new expanding media and to create better-informed global citizens’.<br>
The goal is to drive innovation around a new definition of ‘media’ which includes traditional and new forms such as social media.

This is doomed to failure. Social media uses channels for communications but can use many channels.

The channels can be a blog, IM, email, Bulletin board, SMS etc. The key here is that using a specific medium the blogger (or other social media channel user) is at the nexus of a group of other people.

Just focusing on the 'media' part of the deal will only offer part of the solution.

Monetising blogs

This item from Reuters set me thinking. The article says:

Bloggers are scoring rich paydays by turning their online diaries into books, but some publishers say the craze could fizzle out with a glut of new titles destined to yield disappointing sales. Penguin became the latest to jump on the bandwagon when it bought "La Petite Anglaise", the memoirs of Catherine Sanderson, who was fired by her company because of her blog, in one of the more hotly discussed acquisitions this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

If an author can turn a blog into a book, so too can a company, or a consultancy. The book can be an e-book, printed book, wiki etc.

Online politics - a book reviewed

David Meerman Scott has been looking at an online book:

As the 2006 political season moves into the home stretch, my friend Colin Delany editor in chief at epolitics.com has released a terrific new free e-book Online Politics 101: The Tools and Tactics of Online Advocacy to help campaigns useful ideas on how to spread the word on the Web. Colin totally gets the online political world and helped me to understand it enough to include some case studies in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Colin's ebook shows how to use the Internet to promote candidates, shape public opinion, motivate supporters and raise money. Read the press release here.

Online Politics 101: The Tools and Tactics of Online Advocacy, looks comprehensively at the online organizing methods that work today -- including cutting-edge applications such as MySpace, viral marketing, text messaging and video distribution.

So much is shifting sands but we have to find out what we can.

Doc Searle on BT

He Says:

There's a buncha high-level IT blather (by quotees, not by Gordon, who's doing the quoting) about ROI and "global networked IT services", and about BT now being in a position to compete with Google... but that's just a red herring sandwich.

The real story is that a major carrier is finally starting to grok, at the top, that the main benefits to incumbency are not just ownership of the pipes. There are countless creative things that an incumbent carrier — with existing relationships with customers, with "plant" all over the place, with science and business advantages out the wazoo — can do to make money, other than just by creating false (or any other kind of) scarcities in the backbone and the last mile (or acre, in the case of wireless).

HSBC goes mobile

From ITPro: Financial services giant HSBC has become the first bank to offer customers mobile banking facilities.

It will start inviting customers to join the new service, developed in conjunction with mobile banking specialist Monilink, Monitise and LINK, immediately.

email Statistics

US email marketing company MailerMailer released its Email Marketing Metrics Report this week, revealing practices to help businesses increase returns from their email campaigns.

Key factors highlighted in the report include the use of shorter subject lines, personalisation of emails, and targeted, well-managed lists. Campaigns using these strategies achieved higher then average open and click rates.

An interestin view of email 'marketing' from e-consultancy

Google to buy YouTube for $1.6bn

Michael Arrington has reported a rumour that Google “may be in the final stages” of a US$1.6 billion deal for video sharing site YouTube.

If the rumour is true and the deal goes through it could be another coup for Google, though it might yet turn out to be a big headache for the search giant.

Source: e-consultancy

User generated content on Sky

Mark Sweney at the Guardian got this story:

Sky is making its first major move into the booming user-generated content market with a deal to bring Al Gore's Current TV, the channel made up of viewer-created clips, to the UK and Ireland.

It is the first deal Current TV, branded "the TV network created by the people who watch it", has made outside the US since launching last year.

I wait the time when a Public Relations practitioner mashes user generated content and sells it to Sky.....

Al Gore knows a thing or two about PR and this is a great brand extension.

Finding out about search

Who is talking about searching and what's new. It matters in PR. Relying on one or two serach engines has its downside. These resources my be useful:

Search resources

Ask Jeeves Blog

Goobile

Google Adwords API Blog

Google Blog (Official)

Google Blogoscope

Google Video Blog

Inside Google

Inside Google Adsense

Inside Google Adwords

JenSense

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo

John Battelle's Searchblog

MSN AdCenter Blog

MSN Search Blog

Search Engine Blog

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Watch Blog

SEO by the Sea

SEO Roundtable

Unofficial Google Blog

Valleywag

Xooglers

Yahoo Search Blog

SEO + Social Media = winner

Search engine marketing firm Spannerworks today launched its Social Media division with services to help brand and media owners implement effective strategy in this area reports e-Consultancy.

With Anthony Mayfield, Head of Content & Media, at Spannerworks involved it will be a really powerful player.

Social media is being positioned as Spannerworks’ third division, joining to its existing paid and natural search marketing specialist teams.

As well as offering research, analysis, training and consultancy services it is making serious investments in developing new software and content services to help brands engage with social media.

PodShow and BT gang up

"A few week back, BT confirmed that they have closely tied themselves with US podcast aggregator, PodShow, so closely in fact, that they've stuck BT at the front of PodShow domain to form BTPodShow," says Digital Lifestyle.

BT aren't making the service exclusive to only their network - their normal approach to try and encourage people to subscribe to their DSL service. BTPodShow will in fact be open to anyone in the UK.

Yet more channels for the practitioner. But this one is really cool.

Social impacts of social media

Mark Vernon at Guradian Unlimited has an interesting article about online social habits.

There is a new verb: "to friend". It is what happens when people link up on websites such as MySpace. It differs markedly from "to befriend" which involves getting to know someone. To friend is just to connect.

As Danah Boyd, a social media researcher for Yahoo, has said: people do not think of meeting their online friends - they only think of connecting, for all sorts of different reasons. Michael Bugeja author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, makes a different distinction: "Friending really appeals to the ego, where friendships appeal to the conscience."

Sociologist Sherry Turkle, in New Scientist, expressed her worries that online living is transforming human psychology by deskilling us from being able to be alone, and managing and containing our emotions. We are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies - a wired social existence, "a tethered self". Conversation becomes merely sharing gossip, photos or profiles, not, on the whole, the deeper aspects of commitment, community and politics.

There is no doubt we need more reserach into the social significance of social media.

Second Life gets voice

With the unveiling of its 'million minutes' promotion on Wednesday, Vivox is now enabling Second Life users to speak to each other via their phones.

That's a big step for Second Life, as the 3D virtual world does not have a default voice feature, as does There, from Makena Technologies. And that's because Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, has so far chosen not to integrate voice directly into the software.

C|Net gives the low down.

A Web TV broadcast gizmo

Always On reports on a new online TV technology:

Itiva Digital Media has created a platform for broadcasting video and live content over the Internet that addresses industry concern over bandwidth management. Itiva’s patented technology, called Quantum Transport™, delivers high definition, full screen, rich media content to millions of viewers in a secure, cost effective manner. Itiva’s broadband broadcast technology breaks content into individual Web pages (called quanta) and sends them over the Internet to be re-assembled at viewers’ computers. Itiva provides a breathtaking video experience on the Web at lower costs for content publishers, ISPs and the consumer.

It is quick and I would like to experiment more.

This may be a very handy way for PR practitioners to create their own TV channels.

Polling tool

Polldaddy, the online poll tool RRW has been testing has just launched as a public beta.

It has one of the best designs I've come across in a while, with functionality to match. Not only does it make it simple to create polls to include on your blog or website, but you can deliver them via widget and RSS feed as well - essential in this day and age. I think polls are are an excellent - and easy - way to bring more interactivity into websites, which is why I wanted to bring this to your attention.

It simple but handy.

New Planning TV and Radio advertising tool

The Guardian reports on a new planning tool for the advertising industry.

Until now, advertisers and their media agencies have had to rely on separate audience measurement tools - such as Barb and Rajar - that don't take into account that consumers are often using multiple media simultaneously and in different ways. Now there is a new advertising campaign planning tool from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

"Before, all the standard industry measurement tools have been limited to individual media, such as TV or radio - this new tool pulls them all together," said Jim Marshall, the chairman of the Media Futures Group at the IPA.

Called the Touchpoints integrated planning database, the new tool has taken almost three years and more than £1m to develop.

Just in time for the podcasting revolution, I wonder how practical it will be for social media?

How bloggers should behave towards companies

Mike Manuel says;

There is an emerging crop of "citizen journalists" that have developed an unrealistic sense of entitlement and have ceased asking and are now demanding, at least in some cases, the same level of access and information from companies that has long been the exclusive privilege of mainstream journalists.

It is worth reading his complete post.

This is a two way street for practitioners who are both bloggers and who also pitch to bloggers and it has huge implications for in-hose and agency practitioners who face calls from the blogging community.

Financial Reporting - using Blogs?

CEO Jonathan Schwartz has sent a letter to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox asking permission to disclose news about Sun Microsystems on the technology company's web site and on his blog, says Red Herring.


Mr. Schwartz made the intention known on his company blog, including the text of the letter he sent to Mr. Cox, on Monday in a posting.

The news would be a major shift in the way business news is distributed.


In order to make sure investors get important information about public companies at the same time, companies are required under so-called “Regulation Full Disclosure” guidelines to distribute such information via press releases and conference calls.

This now brings financial PR right into the heart of social media.

Podcasting is growing - Fast

Frank Barnako tells us.

Feedburner reports the number of subscribers to podcasts, for which his company is managing feeds, is growing 20-30% a month.

Rick Klau, vice president, business development, said that at the beginning of the year Feedburner had 1 million subscriptions to podcasts it helped deliver. That number has now grown to 5 million subscribers for 71,000 podcasts. For you math fans, that means the average podcast has ... ta da!!! ... 70 subscribers.

MySpace silver flirters

More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the site’s demographic composition continues to shift.

Analysis reveals that significant age differences exist between the user bases of these sites.

Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.

The data are interesting for PR people who are involved in social media and for practitioners who have not yet realised how broad the demographic is.