INTERNET PUBLIC RELATIONS - interactivity

INTERACTIVITY

As we go through the aspects of Internet mediated public relations it is noticeable that someone has secretly sneaked into the place where they keep management, public relations and marketing rulebooks and scribbled on most of the pages.

In traditional management teaching, public and stakeholder relations created understanding of the culture or context for a company or organisation. People ‘understood where they were’. This relationship, largely crafted by companies, and other organisation (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations etc) created an environment to allow a company (or organisation) to effectively promote its products and services. This created and context and public knowledge and (sometimes) an empathy with the public. Within this context, advertising and marketing promoted products and services to achieve sales. The chain of supply, production, distribution and payment process took over and distributed the product or service. It was simple.

Figure 1 (c) David Phillips 2007 The Traditional Information Value Chain

This process is now changed – someone has scribbled in the book! The public relations (politicians, church, civil service, charities and Non Governmental Organisations marketing, advertising and value chain transactions) contribution is now increasingly subsumed into an Internet driven context.

This conquest is both overt and hidden.

The overt presence (promotion and interaction between an organisation and its constituency) is now largely transparent and available in the Internet network. This is because of the application of web sites, news distribution, Internet marketing and market makers, in business to consumer and business-to-business environments.
The subliminal influence of the Internet, as the means by which an organisation is evident in the human (and machine) context, is not difficult to uncover.
The presence of information and messages about organisations is spread by, and through, web crawlers, search engines and RSS (note these are technologies not people). They are also distributed by people using email, Mobile text messaging, Instant Messaging, blogs, newsgroups, chat, personal, media and corporate web sites and much more.

Even tracking a new message in cyberspace is daunting. Monitoring all the messages, new and old, is already too difficult. The Internet is thereby in charge of creating context in which an organisation is evident to a broad constituency.

Such change is of the Internet. There is more. This change is affecting the ‘traditional’ context more than most understand.

Because a large part of the physical world is now dependent on information delivered across the Internet and through a range of devices, the once separate relationship between traditional and Internet driven relationships has gone. For example, reporters and news providers have become heavily dependent on the Internet which means that ‘traditional’ newspaper readers are reading Internet driven news by proxy. Traditional banks, manufacturers, logisticians, lawyers, physicians.... (the list is too long to enumerate) and more now depend on the Internet for information to allow them to operate. The context by which an organisation is known is only as good as its ability to use the Internet and to be part of the Internet culture. The web site is now the front window and front door for most organisations.

New employment dependencies are becoming apparent such as the print, publishing and distribution of books and CD’s benefiting from the on-line success of Amazon, Barnes and Noble and their competitors. This true of so many industries.

Progressively, overtly and subliminally, Internet technologies throughout the supply/demand chain, or, more appropriately, the value chain, but more significantly throughout the ‘value network’ have taken charge. Now, the whole population is dependant either directly or indirectly.

The context in which an organisation can thrive is rapidly moving from its ability to create relationships with publics (public relations) to relationships created by and across the Internet – and mostly via third parties beyond its control.

Figure 2 (c) David Phillips 2007 The New Information Value Network

The value network, extending upstream to suppliers and downstream to customers also includes the value added third parties to the transaction as well as other tertiary contributors in a network of networks. At an ever-greater extent they attenuate processes as information flows transparently through the whole of the transaction network. At once the supplier can be customer, partner, social commentator and commercial foe in such a networked structure. The consumer of news is also its author, editor, distributor and promoter as bloggers file their copy, pictures and videos and journalists comment upon them.

The international effort to sequence the human genome resembled an open-source initiative. It placed all the resulting data into the public domain rather than allow any participant to patent any of the results. This has resulted in a wave of new drugs and treatments, criminal investigation techniques, archaeological research and so forth. The information, once made public has created wealth in many directions.

The Internet's capability to allow people to access information comes through the nature and use of search engines, a very popular form of interactivity, but so too is an ability to interact with products and service, buy and sell, to pay taxes and to hold conversations, exchange virtual artifacts like pictures poetry and films.

Any analysis of pages viewed or searches made this century will show that interactive sites get more people involved.

More people have access to the Internet, more people can get 'stuff' faster because they have broadband, people are spending more time online. Industry has responded. It has invested in 'better' web sites. More graphics, eye tracking to optimise page layout and many other methodologies.

The result is disappointing.

Corporate web sites, by and large, have seen little by way of exciting growth in the amount of access by Internet users. Exceptions are those that offer opportunities to play, interact or buy.

Is the relatively poor performance of the generality of institutional web sites just because there are many more sites for people to visit? Is this because search engines have made it easy for people to find new places to go?

The Myspace, YouTube and Second Life phenomena suggests otherwise. Analysis of these types of web site, hugely interactive both in terms of their technologies and as the means for development of social groups, shows dramatic acceleration in numbers of users, frequency of use and interactivity. Even more significant is that these sites are key recommenders. People share information about their favorite web sites.

Conversations have been important for Internet users since it began but now these conversations are among millions, are easy to use and are huge drivers.

Interactivity changes organisations. As users interact with organisations, the organisations have to change. They have to respond. As a result they create systems, protocols and processes to re-act. If an order is placed online, a company has to devise systems to deliver goods, services and interactions with users. The Internet is changing organisations. Processes are included in the intellectual capital of organisations which is one way in which the Internet is changing the asset value of organisations. The online relationships are affecting the value of organisations.

Internet mediated Public Relations adds value in its own right and, additionally, as its evolution as a catalyst for empowering users in their relationship clouds, it becomes a bigger player in changing the value of organisations.

The demographics of the web - broader than you think

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found according to the Daily Telegraph.

Emailing and online chatting to friends and family was the favourite internet activity of the retired people surveyed, followed by researching information, booking holidays and shopping.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes.

Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers.

This are the baby boomer generation. The generation that most marketers do not target online.

Which beggers the questions

Who is no longer part of the Internet generation?

What media is valuable for engaging with these people?

Is the PR industry using it?

Radio as we don't know it

The announcement of the latest Rajar figures is heralded as a great success for radio broadcasting by the broadcasters and the media. It is nothing of the sort.

Radio was dieing.

Then came the Internet

Then came that hackers and illegal file sharing folk

Then came light. Broadcasters found that MP3 was a friend, streaming Internet Protocol radio shows was a friend. The long tail is a friend.

They told the copyright lawyers to go away - well almost.

The shared their shows and find that digital radio is up, Podcasts are up, radio on TV's is up, Radio via mobile phones is up, listening via PC's is up.

Top programmes are up, niche programmes are up, listening to historic programming is up.

As the Independent put it: The digital revolution and the expansion of new ways of accessing information through the Internet has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.

There is one other angle. You can listen to the radio and do other things. It is great multitasking medium.

The research says that we we do things concurrently by switching from one task to another when we multi task so that is worth bearing in mind. This is not full and complete attention for much of the audience for much of the time.

PR practice has a big challenge, alongside the Rajar channels there are all the podcasts. Dozens of them.

Offering content both in terms of talking heads and ready made content is now a very definite part of the communication mix for PR.

Bang! Bang! Marketing

I shudder at a Guardian article about modern day marketing.

I Quote:

"We got a group of 14 or 16 actors, who were all football fans, but pretended to be fans [of the unnamed club]," explains Graham Goodkind, Sneeze's founder and chairman. "And they went round bars and clubs around the ground, in groups of two, saying that one of their mates had been sacked from work because he kept on getting these text messages and talking to everyone about it, and his boss had had enough and given him the boot. So they were going round with this petition trying to get his job back - kind of a vaguely plausible story.

"And then the actors would pull out of their pocket some crumpled-up leaflet, which was for the text subscription service. They'd have a mobile phone in their pocket, and they'd show them how it worked. 'What's the harm in that?' they'd say. And they could have these conversations with lots of people - that was the beauty of it. Two people could spend maybe 20 minutes or half an hour in each pub, working the whole pub. We did it at two home games and reckon we got about 4,000 people on the petition in total."

The petition went in the bin, of course, but subscriptions to the club's texting service soared. "The week after we had done the activity it went up to 120 sign-ups," says Goodkind, who is also boss of the Frank PR agency.

A lot of this is spured by the poor performance of advertising:

A 2004 study by Deutsche Bank found that, in the short term, just 18% of television campaigns in the US actually generated a positive return on investment. In the long term this figure rose, but only to 45%, suggesting that most TV advertising is little more than a fun way for a company to waste its money.

There is much more to this article and it is worth reading iffor no other reason that to look at the ethics of moderndat Marketing, advertising and - I regret to say PR.

Social Media stats keep comming in - and its good to talk

I have been commenting on the rise and rise of social media in the Internet firmament.

I noted Heather Hopkins contribution to this meme on Monday and added BBC news about the phenomenon in Google searches.

If PR really wants to offer an effect for its clients, these are the statistics that should be on the tip of the collective indutry's tounge.

Today Heather offers more evidence.

At the risk of taking her thunder here are some of her facts:

• Adult websites are down 20% in market share of UK Internet visits comparing December 2005 and December 2006.
• Gambling websites are down 11%.
• Music websites are down 18%

• Net Communities and Chat websites are up 34%.
• News and Media websites are up 24%.
• Search Engines are up 22%.
• Food and Beverage are up 29%.
• Education (driven by Wikipedia) is up 18%.
• Business and Finance up 12%.

Google accounted for 25% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in December. The #2 source was Hotmail, accounting for 3%, and #6 was MySpace accounting for 2%.

• Search Engines (including Google) accounted for 35% of upstream visits in December, up 13% year on year.
• Net Communities and Chat accounted for 7% of upstream visits, up 64% year on year.
• News and Media accounted for 5% up 26% year on year.

Where does PR education go now?

The use of communication technology is ubiquitous in contemporary public relations practice, and often there’s no choice but to adopt the newest communication technology. So says the Commission on Public Relations Education in its recent report.

In the preface it says: For example, even the smallest and most traditional businesses require the Web sites that their customers expect, and the submission of a simple news release to a mass medium’s electronic newsroom must satisfy the technological requirements of that medium. Organizations must continually monitor blogs, recognizing that harmful rumors can spread worldwide in minutes. The contemporary practice of public relations requires practitioners to immediately respond to emerging issues and crisis situations via Web sites, blogs and other new media. Today, the choice of communication channels is dictated by technology: a practitioner must seriously consider which message forms and channels would be best for specific publics. Often, new technological forms and channels, such as electronic pitching, podcasting and blogging, prevail over traditional news releases and media kits.

This is recommended reading.

Social media continues to take over

Some time ago I noted how social media is growing compared to traditional media. This post showed how social media page views and reach is dominating web evolution Now there is more evidence from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. She reports that social media search is showing this evolutionary trend too. The BBC has noted the same effect in Google searches.
Social media is a critical area for PR development and we need to embrace it fast.

British companies seem reluctant to create their own web logs, but are they missing out on free exposure?

So asks The Independent and it is an indightment on the PR industry that it has not yet given UK business these tools!

The Indy article notes that "An internet search reveals the rapid growth in online blogging - web and marketing consultants, politicians, journalists, media companies, authors, academics and students are all heavily into blogs (or web logs - online diaries). But it is difficult to find small firms that blog outside of those in the internet and media industries."

So what's the problem guys? The CIPR could start with a more robust attitude I guess which is now down to the survey being conducted by Francis Ingham and it is up to you to make you voice heard.

Edelman discover the Relationship Value model in research

In every region (EU, Asia, North America, Latin America), respondents most often named “shares a common interest with you” as one of the top three characteristics that would increase their trust in a person sharing information about a company reports the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.

This is evidence of how the Relationship Value Model works.

People congregate round people and institutions that share common values. They trust people with such values.

Return on Investment of blogs - a critical examination

It would seem churlish of me to criticise Charlene Li who was brave enough to attempt to gain some idea of Return on Investment of blogging.

In particular, it is with some sadness that I make a number of points after she kindly accepted some of my papers in her initial scoping of the research and then allowing me to see her finished article.

I admire her work and the work of Forrester.

But we do have an endemic problem in marketing and it has insidiously worked its way into the industry's folk law.

At the core is a misunderstanding in the difference between advertising and editorial. I think that Charlene has fallen for this urban marketing myth. My views on the use of advertising equivelents (AVE's) is pretty well known and is based on a lot of work by many reserachers.

People are really quite clever and discerning. They do understand the difference between the two. Research by many people and notably Guy Consterdine had demonstrated time after time that people both see and read advertising, even advertising deeply disguised as advertorial, that is advertisements disguised as editorial, differently.

We also know from his research that there are special relationships between people and the publications they read which, I think we can reasonably extend to blogs. People get different gratification from different publications and that applies to blogs too.

Indeed we know this from online responses to these two forms of communication. People seek information by searching the bloggersphere and through their social links online. People do not seek out advertisements. Click through rates show that only a minute fraction of advertisements exposed to people, however much they are presented in context, are explored by the online community.

Dwell times for advertisements are also different with editorial gaining many times longer than advertising.

This reflects the work many of have done over the years with other media such as newspapers and magazines.

People see and precess editorial and advertising differently.

Then we go to the content and context of the two forms of communication. Advertising presents an semiotic image of the organisation as the organisation would like to be seen. They are offered in context as near to the ideal as the advertiser can achieve. By contrast editorial, especially editorial mediated by the Internet, is presented in the context of the editorial vehicle. It is the context of the blog, discussion list or web site. This has an influence on how people perceive the content.

Then again, the content can be presented in passing or in great detail. It might be the content of a whole and lengthy critique or in passing or it can be a fragmentary comment. It can be offered in approving or critical tones and it can be presented that endorses or subverts a point of view or third party views or analysis.

So not only is editorial different to advertising, it comes in many contexts, in many forms and in many ways. Measuring the value of these different editorial approaches is near to impossible and can at best be an extrapolation after detailed analysis of a huge proposition of a large corpus.

My only experience of attempting this was extrapolation of over a million press articles at Media Measurement and that only gave me for a moment in time some very broad conceptual certainties that could not be measured in simple monetary form.

The problem is this, even if you have some measure of values, they are of value only from the perspective you take. For example, a high value editorial to the Chief finance officer might be a nightmare for the legal team and an inexplicable shot in the foot for the salesman.

In the analysis presented by Forester there is another misconception. This is in how to calculate value.

The research offered attempted to make an assumption that in some way, the cost of advertising reflects the value of editorial. Cost and value are two different measures and should not be assumed to be the same in any way shape or form.

To get some idea of how different forms of media analysis can be used, this paper is perhaps the starting point for a professional communicator in the 21st century.

I then turn to the issue of return on investment.

ROI, even in its simplest form has many faces. The actual investment is, as Forrester found, very difficult to guess. The actual cost and alternative investment or replacement cost can be very hard to identify. Investment in one moment is of different value to another. Online, these changed values can be very quick and so what seemed like a good investment in July can judged a disaster in December. One only has to look at the financial markets to realise this and for a judgement on ROI over a period of, say, a year the numbers seldom stack up. It is fashionable to talk about ROI in marketing circles but there are very few management processes that truly reflect cost.

When ever we seek to identify ROI we have to distinguish between raw return and discounted return. In the case of the Forrester research there does not seem to be a distinction. Before a return can be used in a business context we have to discount the value of the return by the amount of return that could have been archived by using the resource in some other way. Like investing the money in a bank or other parts of the business.

These then, are my two principle issues. First there is no such thing as advertising equivalent for editorial. It is a myth that has entered the heads of the marketing community and second there is no such thing as return on investment unless you take into account the discounted value from a given perspective.

There is a lot of research available for those who wish to follow up on this topic.

Regrettably, Charlene, we differ on this occasion.

New ePR book

This week David Meerman Scott released the second edition of "The New Rules of PR: How to Create a Press Release Strategy for Reaching Buyers Directly,". The second edition of the eBook features a foreword by David McInnis, CEO & Founder of PRWeb and social media expert.

Scott's new eBook provides communications and marketing people with tactics and techniques to take advantage of the new media landscape. It include:

* Optimizing your news release to achieve primary placement in search engines and news portals (SEO)
* Using online news distribution services to reach thousands of Web sites and blogs throughout the Web, and connect directly to your key audiences
* Leveraging interactive features including TrackBacks and tagging to encourage circulation in the social media space
* Developing content to attract key audiences and drive Web site traffic.

I like David's thinking and look forward to a good read.

It is the time of year for surveys

I do not know how many PR students there are in the UK.

Lots seems to come to mind.

A lot of final year students are busy trying to get good evidence that can use in their final year dissertation.

Francesca is a case in point. She has a survey here http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB2263NG2VR9E
and desperately wants PR professionals to complete it ... well?.... go.... complete it for her... she need your input.

It just seemed to me that it would be really cool if we were to get a little round robin going to expose some of these surveys to a wider audience for our students.

What difference does social media make.

I, and no doubt others, have some difficulty trying to explain just how significant the change in marketing and communication, but most notably PR, is in the Internet mediated era.

Once upon a time it was quite easy. There was a framework of interactions that were governed by a range of institutions that allowed the media, governments, and a range of other institutions that offered a link between the dominant coalition and the publics (stakeholders if you like) and it was relatively easy to maintain the status quo.

The model looked like this:


Progressively a number of capabilities have allowed people to comment interact and form ever morphing but culturally close communities. They form round individuals at the nexus of the groups in one of more social media environments.These environments are characterised by MySpace and Digg or Podzinger and Second Life. There are many (oh! so many) forms of community environs. Each forms a relationship cloud. And, as technologies and fashion dictate, these clouds bubble up and absorb energy from participants. The nature of these clouds is that the basic software and service is relatively cheap But the combination of participants, their content, their tagging, their involvement with other participants and their 'Google Juice' created value (Google bought YouTube for $1.6bn and thereby gave us a clear view of how much a corporation values these 'clouds')

This many people have knowledge and insights, a thirst for information and interaction (including buying stuff). To accommodate these people and to gain energising knowledge and interactions, organisations make information ever more transparently available. I agree, not always willingly - as the music industry attests (and is punished for).

The effect is that even the nature of institutions is changed as information empowers different coalitions inside organisations. The wider values of organisations become transparent and all forms of interaction become mediated by the Internet.

In addition, the very interactions in and around the organisation are transparently available for all to see and if not, the newly porous nature of organisations allows the information to leak out into the blazing netshine.

The role then of public relations changes as it navigates the relationship clouds and interacts in such a way that all but the merest whisp of turbulence can be observed. The role is in empowering the relationships in and between the relationship clouds.

The organisation too becomes a relationship cloud and by the marriage of values among the users of the clouds, a merging and morphing of interests, satisfies the newly morphed and combined interests. Sometimes for a fleeting moment or for a long, long time.

Offending in this space brings down the might of the relationships bound together by common values.

Does this help us understand?

Here is just one tiny example that all in PR can understand. Where once a press release would do, the authentic voice of social media is now doing better. More praise is heaped in print on more organisations than ever before without the lifting of a PR finger or, for the most part, its practitioner's knowledge. To see this in action, just look out of the window and see the sparkle.

The end of PR as you know it

Chris Anderson has an interesting post.

He says: I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves. Take Microsoft's 3,000 bloggers who are, for many of us, a welcome substitute for Microsoft PR. Internal project managers like Major Nelson of the Xbox 360 team are a trusted and timely source of information, and have largely replaced the formal press release with blog posts. He and other Microsoft bloggers like him are part of a transparency movement that grew out of the company's developer relations team, but it could have just as easily been driven by an enlightened PR team.

Yes, this is a legitimate argument as far as it goes. It does not take into account the rest of PR such as the analysis and explication of the values relevant to the organisation in relationship clouds among the nexus of values that represent the organisation. Nor does it explore the role in developing the use and application of channels for communication b eyond blogging.

Marketing - the going nowhere debate

JP Rangaswami is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Originally an economist, then financial journalist and, after nearly a decade of working for an investment bank, his futurology skills have been recruited by BT.

He has a view about marketing .....'and when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into versus Long Tails that weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of'.

He notes that... "In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality."

For PR, he has a thought content in which he says "Only the customer can make content king. We must all remember that."

We still argue that the PR industry has to provide content and excellent content at that. Is this still true. When 'we the media' is the new media, all our content is only as good as its acceptance by the commons in their niche and small communities.

For me, the key is the values of the commons. It is here where we can find allegiance, engagements and, for some, customers, vendors, partners and employees.

But don't go and seek the mass market defined by values. That is vanilla marketing. It lacks authenticity and the ingredient of community.

Because marketing is going no where and PR refuses to try to understand the nature of relationships, we now need a new supra profession that seek to weave its way among the relationship clouds (if you like the Myspaces, YouTubes, Blogger, Flickrs and Diggs of this world). These Relationship Cloud pilots have a better chance than those who still keep their feet firmly in concrete booted professions.

Ita a snap (URL Preview)

Snap Preview Anywhere form http://www.snap.com is becomming a great success story. They say that in just 8 weeks, over 45,000 sites worldwide have asked to be included on their sites. hey have generated over 120,000,000 previews.

There are lots of similar products out there but this one is really doing well and I like it and have installed it too. Hope you like it as well.

One of the advantages` for the PR practitioner is that this kind of added value/contnet can be used in releases sent to jounalists and others to show the depth of information available via embeded hyperlinks (because many journalists don't bother to click the links).

Consumers 'get it' - So PR has to as well

"Consumers get it; they understand technology and they are adopting it accordingly," analyst Sean Wargo told the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

More than $155bn (£80bn) in consumer technologies is expected to be sold in the US in the next 12 months.

"Driving the industry is the transition to the new breed, the next generation of technologies," Mr Wargo said.

The industry says consumers' love affair with gadgets will continue despite a US/global economic slowdown and a prediction that growth in the US market would halve in 2007 from last year's figures.

Is this true of the UK?

The evidence is that adoption in the UK is, if anything accelerating. The jump from consumer to corporate application is moving ahead too.

What this means is that ordinary people and corporations are using all manner of new web services, gadgets and widgets

It also means that communication practitioners now need at least a basic understanding of what is involved otherwise the population as a whole will accelerate out of the reach of the press relations oriented practitioner.

The £12 billion economy

Koopa is not the first to be top of the pops online. Its just that the rules for counting what's in and what's not have changed. In fact online markets have been encroaching on the high street fast and for a long time.

What is important is that the power of the online community is such that the dusty institutions like Entertainment Retailers' Association have had to acknowledge the reality of online interactions and sales.

I am still wincing over the UK retailers sluggish response to online markets in the last ten weeks of last year. Not being able to cope because of logistics problems is plain daft.

If one does a quick analysis of each of the sectors in the UK economy, it is possible to get an insight into how much is mediated by the Internet.

I have been doing just that

The current value of the Internet Mediated economy is now approaching £12 billion.

Or, to put it another way more than one £ in 10 of the UK economy is mediated by the Internet. Put another way, if the .net went down for a full year the UK economy would shrink 10% with a knock on effect on all other parts of the economy.

What this means for PR is this. If practitioners are not involved in this part of the economy, they are not part of a big slice of the action and because it is the fastest growing economic mediator (faster even than financial and construction put together - both of which are dependant on the Internet).

This is why the CIPR needs to be taking it much more seriously.

BL Ochman's 12 Marketing Tenets

As always bang on the money B L Ochman has a great view of modern marketing - or is it public relations.

Today, organisations have to be interested in the 'Relationship Cloud'.

Examples of Relationship Clouds could include YouTube and MySpace and we know how valuable they are by looking at the accounts of thier owners. But they are just two among many.

Ita a snap (URL Preview)

Snap Preview Anywhere form http://www.snap.com is becomming a great success story. They say that in just 8 weeks, over 45,000 sites worldwide have asked to be included on their sites. hey have generated over 120,000,000 previews.

There are lots of similar products out there but this one is really doing well.

One of the advantages` for the PR practitioner is that this kind of added value/contnet can be used in releases sent to jounalists and others to show the depth of information available via embeded hyperlinks (because many journalists don't bother to click the links).

CRM sux

We now see the Internet engaging people in evermore interactive ways. It is even closer to the ideas expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto half a decade ago (Searls, D. and Weinberger, D. 2000. Markets Are Conversations. In C. Locke, R. Levine, D. Searls and D. Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto (pp. 73-112). Great Britain: Biddles Ltd. www.cluetrain.com).

In their study The End of Attraction: Why People Stop Visiting Company Online Communities. Tuula Mittilä1 and Maria Mäntymäki (http://www.ebrc.fi/kuvat/25-37_05.pdf) juxtapose the more normal customer relationship management with its online counterpart.

They offer evidence that relationship marketing with online communities differs in two ways from the traditional relationship marketing. Both the medium, i.e. an online community, and the relations vary from the traditional ones. Since online communities enable dialogue between the customer and the supplier as well as among customers the development of online communities has brought a new tool for implementing relationship marketing. Because of the development of the Internet ... interaction has enhanced dramatically. People with similar interests and lifestyles may interact around the clock and the globe. Word-of-mouth has a new scale while customers’ exchange views on goods, services and suppliers. As a consequence of that a customer's power grows as well.

Nosy retailers lost 16 million orders

Keep you nose out of my business and listen to what I want. So say the UK's online shoppers according to Webcredible.

Webcredible, asked Internet users what would be most likely to make them abandon an online purchase. Hidden charges topped the list of frustrations for 36% of respondents followed by having to register before buying a product, which polled 31% of the votes. Other annoyances were: not providing clear delivery details (13%); not offering telephone details (10%); and lengthy checkout processes (9%).

The person in charge of relationship management among retailers need to get gritty with the margin chasers, control freaks, and email address collectors (normally un-reconstructed marketing managers and brand managers).

If the PR manager is not being robust with the control freaks they should be fired. Now!

This year, their soppy attitude cost sales and they did not tell the board to get ready for the boom in online retail sales we all knew was going to boom.

Its simple barriers are breaking down. People are getting active in social media. They share their holiday snaps, videos and location details with millions and so are not going to be shy buying online. PR people should not tolerate ninny heads who want to create barriers because they were taught to collect 'customer information' and do something stupid like have a data base for 'customer relationship management', spam and scream marketing.

I blame the PR industry. It needs something stiff up its spine instead of pink fizzy down its throat.

The biggest cocktail party in the world

he IPA in a report in 2007 suggested that: "In the future agencies must recognize that traditional advertiser/agency/consumer relationships will be challenged with new models of engagement coming to the fore. As traditional advertising continues to decline, by 2016, the hypothesis is that media owners of all kinds, including online search, all networks, gaming environments and interactive digital TV, will be integrating brands directly into content and editorial." (Re-invention is key if agencies are to survive).

Huh! 2016 is too far away. Try the end of next year, or at latest 2009.

The idea that there are market segments and stakeholders as described by Porter and Friedman come up against a mum commenting on social and domestic life, friends and locality for a small family circle. Such a diary, fascinating to son and daughter who have left home, does not describe a demographic segment. Its influence is personal and of limited circulation. If written online in a blog it disappears among the millions of other blogs also written by individuals. But, because it is public and can be viewed by a billion people worldwide, its potential audience is huge. The writer is the nexus of a tiny community but only at a time and in a context chosen by the community. The casual inclusion of a brand in this conversational medium is incidental and yet powerful. One aspect of this power is that the comment can move from beyond the family circle to other friends through the same medium or others and spread viraly. Sometimes at speed and others in a more leisurely fashion. The power is in conscious inclusion in 'small talk' at the biggest cocktail party in the world. Sometime this will be in the 'bloggersphere' and at others in others social media as diverse as YouTube and email. As with such comments there are occasions, from time to time, when the conversational cacophony pauses and the single voice is lone and clear and its message taken up by others. Online, this can count in millions and in seconds.

What we see in these interactions is not a 'market segment' or a 'stakeholder group' we see people with an interest in the values expressed. This convergence of values brings people together in wider, often short lived, social groups, a will-o-the-whisp emergence of both values and relationships. For brand and traditional stakeholder managers, this is too ephemeral, too counter to their training, unmanageable and yet mysteriously familiar.

It is about relationships and is powerful. Where the role of public relations is to interact with latent, aware and active social groups, it can now find them online.

Business leaders underestimate the web

The IMRG figures for online sales in the run up to Christmas show that forecasts underestimated demand. Forecasts of £7.5 billion compared to the actual outcome of £7.66 billion and that is only part of the story. Sales were limited because online retailers could not deliver.

Last year online sales were £30.2 billion with an increase during 10 weeks to Christmas up 54% on 2005.

Well this is not much of a surprise to some of us. What is disturbing is that so many people are still in denial. Online PR is still a fringe activity. Online advertising is inyerface. Web sites are horrid and lack interactivity and response to the power of social media lacks imagination to a degree that makes users cringe and rage.

As an industry the PR business just has to get stuck in.

Poncing around in the hope it will all go away led from behind by the PR institutions is no way to run an economy, industry sector or business.

The response to the power of the Internet in the UK is akin to the response to the realities of manufacturing in the 1960's, R&D and education in the '70's, the global economy in the run up to the millennium and show lack of foresight and fuddy duddy thinking.

The lack of knowledge about online interactivity across UK management and the creative services is appalling.

There is a need for leadership.

Social Media sites are taking over

It is all very well to imagine that social media is significant.

My question is: Is Social Media attracting the interest of Internet users more than traditional serach engine and consumer web sites.

I needed empirical evidence that would prove the point.

One way of doing this is to compare like for like data of page views (see note below) between differnt types of web site.

I examined data over a three year period. In this time the number of Internet users increased and home broadband penetration increased from almost zero to nearly 60% of users. This should mean that there will be a general increase across the majority of web sites.

I took information about site traffic from Alexa and looked at page views of the top 30 Alexa ranked UK sites.

This would indicate both comparative interest in these sites as well as growth of interest among Internet users.

The results are are as follows:

Page views among the sites with top ten ranked pages:

Search engines

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

Page views among the sites with 11-20 ranked pages:

(note: there were no search engines)

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

Page views among the sites with 21-30 ranked pages:

(note: there were no search engines)

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

This evidence would suggest it would be interesting to see what reach these sites enjoyed comparatively and there relative Alexa rank.

My conclusion from this is that:

Social media is among the top rank of web sites of interest to Internet Users.

Social media is making considerable inroads into the pages viewed by Internet users

Search engines are not increasing their traffic in relation to the increase of Internet users.

Retailers are, mostly loosing share of page views

Social media is enjoying an exponential increase of interest.

If someone, at this late stage is looking for a dissertation subject, this one would be stunning.

Alexa Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site. For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site).

Print and digital advertising converge

The Guardian group is merging its print and digital divisions for business operations. The Guardian Unlimited ad sales’ digital and print teams will be merged into one unit, GNM Commercial.

Many newspaper publishers are currently trying (Telegraph Media Group already does) to form cross-platform advertising teams, in order to slow the ad revenue migration to online ( Source: Brand Republic )

"There's no question that the internet represents an enormous challenge to our business models,” said Sly Bailey, Trinity Mirror chief executive.

Yet she also insisted that current problems are cyclical in nature

"We expect the cycle to move back into more positive territory. And we remain convinced that newspapers, as printed products, will remain a powerful medium for many years to come," she said.

She also commented that: "there's little doubt that some of the 'old media' companies will eventually be swept away" said Bailey (Source: Media Guardian).

Meantime, to stem the tide, the FT is going Mobile.

The FT Mobile News reader is free, and gives users access to news, comments and analysis, stock valuations and a 30-day search function.

Planning communication

Planning communication has taken on a new dimention in the last five years.

Developing a communication strategy even two years out means we need to consider a wide range of communications channels and they are changing very fast. For example, YouTube became a mainsteam channel in less than 15 months!

What chance do communications planners have with projects going out just a few years? What will be the important channels for the London Olympics will it be Myspace or YouTube or something else? In truth no one knows. Television may be marginalised by user bandwidth. Even search engines could be marginalised by syndication, social tagging or proprietary sematic web services. It is all guesswork.

Social media has now reach such a critical mass that it has to be part of communication planning for most organisations.

The core prediction of 'Communication - The next decade' published by the UK communications regulator Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/commsdecade/), is that the next generation of upgraded networks (the so-called NGNs) are likely to be based on the IP (Internet Protocol), leaving the historic differences between different network infrastructures far behind. We are already seeing this change in practice. It means that all media except print is competitive and on a level technical playing field. Daily UK domestic IP penetration will move up from 37% to saturation at 89%. Television as well as radio becomes technically indistingushable from the Internet. The commincations channels will have only two paradigms print and IP.

Broadband will not be up to 8meg as now but over 100 meg and the range of devices, especially mobile devices will allow the Internet to escape from the ubiquitous PC.

The timescale is very short. 100 meg broadband, now being rolled out after trials last year, will cover most UK homes served by cable in 2008, meantime of the 86% of the population who use mobile phones 22% already use IP mobile photomessaging and IP based mobile uptake is now showing signs of rapid accerloration.

As the twin cuves of newspaper circulation and online news page views passed each other in Europe last year communicators saw the maginalising of the only competitor to IP based communication. The decline in relevance for old media is now obvious but we know that online media is disruptive even more than its 17th century print counterpart.

Because of the extent and speed of adoption of Internet Procol devices and communications channels, how will professional communicators wrest the technology from geekdom and transpose it into mainstream education and practice.

How do we find new ways to manage communication. It will have to be an approach that factors-in the prospect of new, unknown and yet deeply influential channels for message interactions becomming hugely signifcant in months and will also have to face the prospect of cataclismic communication channel demise, a phenomenon we have not yet encountered except in the trial run, proof of concept demise of Fax.

Finally, what role is there for communications specialists in circumstances requiring integration of the desires and wishes of an online community empowered with huge capacity for distruption and capability to change how organisations are managed at both strategic and proceedural levels?

If you look at the economic contribution of the Internet in the UK, sector by sector, it ranges from a few percent to over 50% and my current guestimate is that Internet mediation contributes between £100 and 150 billion to the UK economy each year. By extrapolation that is something of the order of $4 trillion globally. This commercial power is bound to be a factor affecting communication management.

The Internet is ubiquitous as a means for communication of all kinds for over a third of the population now and this penetration will grow to 80% as broadcast progressively moves towards Internet Protocol based delivery.

Do we, or should we make time to monitor these shifts in communication technology and application. Most people involved in the communication business are busy dealing with the hear and now and are quite successful using traditional techniques anyway.

Before we start making predictions and second guessing the future channels, we will have to use the established management techniques developed for the management of change, the uncertain, crisis and emergencies.


I suppose we first have to deal in what we do know.

What we do know is that all the channels for communication that were available last year, ten years ago and 100 years ago are still there and many of them have high audience penetration as well.

We also know that some media will be much less significant than now. Can we write off fax or will we see it re-emerge in a new form? Among the junk mail, is a letter going to be significant? Will emails just go into the ether because of spam filters? What we know, is that we will have to continue to ask such questions.

What we also know is that there will be many more new channels to use in the next four years. We know that most will be digital?

We know that we don't know how the new channels will be delivered? Certainly some will be delivered by PC's and some will be delivered to browsers that won't have much by way of processing power but which ones? Some communication will use near field communication and so will video and podcasts morph becsue of these developments?

We can be certain that timescales will have changed. Already we have a doppler effect at play. Bloggers will be aware of thier own content comming back at them as news sometimes morphed, added to or truncated sometimes weeks or months later. The frequency and content of messages plus the time it takes for content to be news or part of the long tail will change message perceptions, reach and understanding. That is another thing that we know we have to watch.

Picture: Glooo

Online BOOMS!

In the ten weeks up to Christmas the forecasts for online retailing were wildly out. A twenty percent miss-match between forecast and actual is just awful. The Mad Hatter could do better.

Tesco.com broke all records with 1.3m shoppers buying food and presents on the site in the four weeks before Christmas - up 30% on 2005.

Wetherby-based ecommerce firm NetConstruct, working with Hemingway of Ripon, has provided internet sales sites for many High Street names including Argos, Harvey Nichols, John Lewis and BhS and according to Hemingway's managing director, Andrew Johnson, online sales show an above average increase of 56 per cent over the same period last year.

The number of parcels delivered is also thought to have increased to 200m from the 180m initially predicted.

Online sales over the Christmas trading period - the 10 weeks to December 24 - are expected to be up 50% to £7.5bn. James Roper, IMRG chief executive, who had projected sales of £7bn for the period, revised the figure upward. He said: "This has definitely been an online Christmas."

These numbers are telling us there are more people are spending more online. Twentyfive million people are shopping online in the UK. For those who have got a taste for it, online is now a real option and 80% of white goods are now sold online anyway.


And the influential and Internet savvy e-commerce said of the IMRG lift: Our gut reaction is that it could, if anything, be higher than that. This year was a real coming of age for internet shopping, and practically everybody I know bought some of their Christmas presents online.

I am with e-commerce and in two weeks we will know.

Now, is the PR industry ready to contribute? Are we working on Web 2.0 solutions. Well, it looks like its PR skills that are needed.

Risk management for PR and New Media

Public Relations is not publicity and is not propaganda and, to be effective it has to be planned.

Of course there are routines one can use in the development of PR planning and management but few of the standards include the need for risk analysis to be part of the process.

In social media, the need for proper risk analysis is greater than ever and it occurred to me that it would be fun share some thoughts on this with you.

Of course, first off you might like to see the lecture slides followed by a trial I am trying out.

The slide show below is not the full version but gets the point across.



Here is an experiment in providing a risk assessment matrix for new media. I have taken a standard template that has to be edited for the medium (e.g. Blogs, RSS, Games, Podcasts etc.) and for the organisation/campaign but it does give an idea as to how pretty standard risk management techniques can be applied to PR management.



Let me know what you think.

Jimmy offers wiki software and service

SMEs could stand to profit from a new service from Wikia, the for-profit offshoot of open-source encyclopaedia Wikipedia reports IT Wales.

Its founder, Jimmy Wales, is offering free tools including software, computing, storage and network access to businesses and communities who want to build interactive websites.

"We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue," Mr Wales told Reuters.

The offer aims to tempt special-interest groups hoping to set up sites as well as SMEs looking for the expertise and tools to expand their user base rapidly.

Nice offer. We have been using PB wwik for some time and its nice to know about different products and services out there.

Patent off to use wikis ?

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

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

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

Wow! Gosh! Internet retailing is up

More than 180 million pounds was spent online last Monday, the traditional start of the festive shopping season. This is double the amount of ago year ago.

Predictions of 40% growth seem to have been gazumped. Perhaps the prediction that 25 million people are expected to spend £7bn through the internet - up from £5bn last year and representing £4m every hour, day and night, is too modest.

The driver for the UK where 85 percent of British shoppers preferred clicks to bricks is that they could avoid the "too stressful" high street.

But new research by KPMG and the SPSL Retail Think Tank (RTT) says the internet retailing market "is not as large as many commentators would have us believe" and that traditional high-street retailing still accounts for 2% of the sector's 2.5% growth.

So it may be that the Internet is taking share of sales and is depressing price. I can believe that.

I think that the Internet is taking a big bite out of high street sales perhaps as much as 12%.

What makes me think there is something going on over and above last year is that Woolworths new online offering is making them smile and reach is up for this bellwether UK retailer page views are up 50 since mid November. With two weeks to go M&S is no so dusty either. The high volume low price end of the market is doing very well and top end Debenhams is holding its own. The demographic seems to have changed and that will be a powerful influence.

The bottom line for PR is that online sales are growing and so the Internet is becomming ever more important to organisations and their internet PR activities.



Meantime, French cyber shopping traffic jumped 79 percent in the past week.

Grown-ups need not apply

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

And if they didn't how would they know which CD's to buy?

Doubt if the music industry undersatnds this idea but they haven't got it yet at all.

TV is going to be fine, thank you. But it will look nothing like it does today and it will be open to all of us.

Steve Rubel has been pondering the fate of TV. I think he is right about some of it but has not factored in games and especially WII style interactive TV. To get some idea of how powerful games are in the market imagine selling 50,000 of any product in just one hour. WII did!

Interaction, especially physical interaction in a games style of Internet TV solution is well within his three year timescale.

Of course, he is speaking from an American not European perspective. Life is different on this side of the Atlantic.

Here we have the hotspots of the highest online retailing regions (not California, the UK), higher blog useage per head of population (not New York but Paris) and higest number of people with 100 meg broadband (Leicester - using cable).

In Europe, there are populations with very high uptake of broadband (2-8 meg) which is haveing a dramatic impact on Internet useage.

The PC has come out of the study/bedroom and into the living space in houses and that is where the real challenge lies.

Edelman 'New Media Release' is a PR exercise

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

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

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


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

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

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

Here are some things one might expect in a NMR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some publishers don't get it

"I do think the internet is a problem, but it is also the solution," said Fabrice Rousselot, Libération's internet editor.

"The mistake I think for any kind of media today would be to think they could do anything without the internet.

"You have to integrate the internet as part of your business model."

So far so good.

But then both the editor of the mass selling french newspaper and David Reid, the journalist on the BBC's Click programme fall off their perch.

Reid says:


"There is not much point, for example, putting exactly the same stuff on the website as they put in the paper."

Followed by this quote from Mr Rousselot.

"If you offer on your website the exact same content as in your newspaper, why would people buy the newspaper? It makes no sense economically"

But, Mr Rousselot, you miss the point. People read newspapers and people read web sites. Is a web site the same as a newspaper?

Of course not. They are different. People read newspapers because they are newspapers. They enjoy a sensation. People read articles on-line because it is news and offers them an instant of information.

Why sacrifice half of the users of an article by not having your content online?

UK Two Years ahead of US for online advertsing

In an interesting review and projection for next year Alan Patrick notes that the UK is almost two years ahead of the US in terms of online advertising. At least, that's the conclusion of Terry S. Semel, chief executive of Yahoo!, in a recent New York Times interview. The situation has arisen mainly through the underlying growth of broadband in the UK.

During 2006 broadband penetration increased from about 40 per cent to 50 per cent. In addition, the time people spend online has risen to 23 hours a week and online spending has risen from about £800 per head to £1,100 per head.

As companies have followed customers online, internet advertising has grown rapidly. By the end of June 2006 it was up from 8 per cent to 10 per cent of all UK ad spend and is expected to be nearer 14 per cent by December 2006 - the highest ad spend per head in the world.

Would you believe it of - Marketers!

Dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.

Oh! Thats OJK then its not a 'PR excercise'.
It is a PR issue and I hope that the PR Managers are giving the marketers a real ear bashing or worse.

Finding your people

Stuart Bruce pointed to this 'mashup'.

The numbers of applications for this kind of thing goes on for ever and ever.
IN PR just being able to show whwre shops, representatives, spokespeople etc are located, is one such application..

Thanks Stuart.

Thanks PR. - you did good

This is, for once, a positive story on the public relations professional community. It is able to get its act together and to make an effective impact on the public sphere while promoting a sustainable view of the profession.

What broadband did

Internet usage across western Europe is being driven by cheap broadband deals and social-networking websites, the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) has revealed.

Countries such as the UK and France are now experiencing broadband penetration rates of over 84 per cent, while the average time spent online each week has risen by over ten per cent in the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, social media websites are now visited by almost one quarter of all European internet users every month, with that figure rising to 32 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds.

Being relevant - PR does not need to be

On Friday I will be involved in a CIPR Senior practitioners round table breakfast. Of course it is going to be fun meeting up with Hugh Birley, Justin Hayward, Larry Webber, and Michael Blowers among others.

What can one say in such highly respected company.

I suppose a lot of what I want to (say is summed up in David Dunkley Gyimah's video and web site. The video is the winning International Jury independent video journalist award held in Berlin called 8 Days.

Against a backdrop of:

Declining (media ad) sales figures; increasing pressure from multimedia news deliveries; citizen journalism; Philip Meyer's assertion that newspapers are heading towards redundancy; and the BBC's plans to introduce a more localised form of news in the regions, what do you do if you're a newspaper publisher?

The story is of how eight local newspaper journalists learned to create video news stories.

What I find compelling about this is the speed and extent to which local newspaper journalists can bring television style reporting to their 'newspaper' 'readerships'.

Charlie Westberg , Cleveland Police's veteran media manager was deeply involved (and notes that Cleveland Police now knows it will have to alter the press conference room to accommodate this new breed of print journos with cameras). It was a learning experience for him too and he also found out that the new breed of 'print' journalists could also use CCTV footage because now they are videojournalists.

You see, my view is that the PR professional does not have to change. The 'press release by post or email... phone call... I will get back to you...' model still exists.

It does not have to change.

The journalists and publications will change but PR's don't have to.

They may become less relevant when their unchanging ways are set against Alan Yentob's programme on BBC1 last night. Yentob met Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web - and explored how TBL's creativity has fuelled the creativity of millions of others.

He showed Dandy blogger Dickon Edwards and sex blogger Abby Lee; the hardcore members of the Arctic Monkeys message board; masked animator David Firth - whose cartoons have been watched by millions on the web - and Ewan Macdonald, the young Scot who wrote the millionth entry in Wikipedia - all feature alongside figures such as veteran director Ken Russell - currently making a film to upload to YouTube.

I know there are those in PR who still want to use paper; who believe that this online craze is a fad or marketing or just not for them. So be it.

How will they respond to the video journalist? How will they be relevant to the Arctic Monekey, David Firth and Ken Russell generation? Is it by being relevant to the Daily Telegraph generation housed as it is in a new multi media press centre?

Valerie Grove of The Times puts this point of view:

Like Paxo sneering at Newsnight’s podcast, I recoil at infinite choice/infinite accessibility. If “too much information” is now a conversational mantra, why unleash more of it? Who wants a Christmas round-robin from everyone on the planet? Yentob gave us a glimpse of the website someone has created in his name (Darth Yentob) and countered with his own online version of his virtual self — tall, skinny, smooth-suited, able to dance and fly: “the possibilities are infinite”. What fresh hell is this? He left me baffled, and happy to flee back to my finite world.

It's an understandable argument but its flaw is that she wrote it on The Times web site a long day before the print version hits London's Gentleman's Clubs. Her argument failed in its delivery.

For the publisher it is print, web, sound, video, blog, wiki, virtual space as well as conference, exhibition and bound keepsake annual. Mix and match at will to get eyeballs and those elusive advertising shillings, groats, pounds or euros.

The internet will account for a fifth of all UK advertising revenue by 2009, and will almost match the amount spent on TV advertising, according to figures from ZenithOptimedia. The group's Advertising Expenditure Forecast reveals that the UK has the world’s highest proportion of online ad revenues, at 13.5%. The need for publishers to be online is compelling. It is where to advertise and is a place where tempting people to your web site or other internet medium is critical. More on-line editorial vehicles means more opportunities to sell advertising. Its quite simple.

“Every pound withdrawn from traditional media either to be saved or spent online, where supply is in handsome surplus, exerts more deflationary pressure on the total market,” said Group M in a recent report on the British ad market. “And if online proves more productive, advertisers have the option of investing less.”

These media bucks that are powering the move online is aimed at a very active audience. On average, Britons spend 23 hours a week on the Internet, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, says the New York Times. The Internet accounts for about a quarter of Britons’ time spent with all media, according to Citigroup, nearly double the percentage in the United States. Americans use their computers an average of 14 hours a week, reported by Nielsen Media Research.

Does this mean that the PR industry can afford not to respond. Yes absolutely.

Does this mean that it will be relevant?

Oh yes, perhaps I can suggest that there are compelling reasons for the adoption of social media without the PR industry having to get involved as bloggers or podcasters or vloggers. They have to get involved because their primary journalistic publics have to be online and have to be able to use social media tools. Commercially the driver is too big not to. We just have to create the tools that will make life easier for journalists.

It is just that normal PR practice 20 century style is changing. The press release, for example is being updated and in a variety of forms.

The further opportunity of using social media for direct interactions with our constituencies is just a bonus. A big one, but a bonus.