News coverage has changed - it never becomes history

Chris Anderson makes the obvious obvious. Your news release can be news for years. Your news release becomes more influential over time.... here is how he describes it:

Online, everything is equally available and relevance is not determined by where something is on a page but by what other people think of it. When you look at it from that perspective, you see that stuff that is deemed ‘good' builds its incoming links over time — that is, the longer it is out there, the more people link to it and the more people discover it.

Google and other search engines measure relevance on the basis of incoming links which will rank it higher and higher, and as a result it will appear higher and higher in search results and therefore get even more traffic. In a weird way, it completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn't matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.

I think it was a surprise to many people that search would be such a powerful driver of demand for news, especially when you consider that canonical search — the regular search rather than news search — doesn't even find stuff until a week or so after the fact because the spiders just take that long to find things. What you're realising is that people care much more about what's relevant than what's new.

Conversation more powerful than a press release

Dan Greenfield commented today: "No longer is a PR person’s reporter Rolodex the gateway to successful corporate communications. Instead, that Rolodex is as big as every customer, vendor, partner and competitor who interacts with your company."

What Dan discovered is that converastion is more powerful than the press release.

I am delighted. It is evidence of values driving public relations. His public is now defined by a convergence of values. The values of his constituency and his and his organisation's values.

In combination this is more powerful.

It is levering value from relationships instead of shouting at market segments.

I hope that thi is a virus that is attacking every PR department in the world and it seems that it is.

Now lets see if we can understand this better. It will inform PR practice and is applicable at the coal face too.

BeebSpace - an acquisition plan at the BBC

e-consultancy were sharp eyed with this one: BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial arm, is apparently looking for an acquisition to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s Myspace, according to the Mail on Sunday.

The paper says the BBC has £350m to spend on acquisitions and wants to target the youth market through a social networking site.

I guess they are impressed with Rupert's claim of 30 BILLION clicks in June.

can I spot PR practitioners are rushing to Bebo to get some idea of what the new domian will look like.

9/11 London

The 67 Britons killed in the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago were remembered today at a memorial garden near the U.S. Embassy.

Before an early afternoon ceremony led by U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle, bouquets of white roses and yellow carnations were piled beneath the oak pergola where the names of the victims are inscribed on three bronze plaques.

Herald Tribune

Free newspapers - the case for

Today Richard Addis argues the case for making newspapers free.

It is well argued and makes a lot of sense for a web 1.0 mind.

Of course he did not factor in the revenue stream from mobile, or interactive posters or other forms of digital signage. There are opportunities to provide content for other media and then there is the podcast ( vidcasts where there is a ton of money to be made.

With a bit more imagination, the day of the free newspaper, a 'marketing device' to get 'digital eyeballs' is not far away.

What then, will be the role of press agentry? Will it be as an aid to driving eyeballs to digital properties?

Creating a print mag to drive web traffic - but sell it online

ASOS.com, the online fashion retailer that sells cheaper versions of celebrity outfits, is to launch a monthly glossy magazine to attract more customers to its website. The Aim-quoted group is to charge £1 for ASOS, which will be sold on its website. Am I sure that I follow this Guardian story?

Long Tail - a reading challenge

Chris Anderson has presented us with a list of papers that are a must read.
They deal with the issue of the 'long tail'.

This is important to PR practice for a range of reasons.

There are the traditional reasons. The long tail is how organisations can generate revenues that are denyied to them when they have to limit their offering because of contraints like warehouse or showroom space (but can offer/display such products online at marginal cost and thereby offer a wider range). Another argument is that the long tail allows small organisations to compete in markets where mass marketing and product bundling is common.

Also the long tail is importnat in areas like the knowledge that an organisation might make available to, for example, journalists and, on the darker side, the long tail is where people will find criticism that could be half a dozen years old.

The Bog Standard Press Release died last week

The 'bog standard' press release is now dead.

What journalist given the choice between a New Media Release and releases currently in use would opt for the old one?

There is no choice. Press releases as we know it will continue for several years but will progressively become less effective, less used and less relevant as the media builds its new publishing model on a combination of on-line and print.

This week the NMR podcast introduced some applications of New Media Release.

The gene is out of the bottle.

Links to the top topics on NMR podcast covered can be followed here:

• Todd Defren’s post, “Top 5 Principles of the Social Media News Release”
• New media release principles applied to Chevy Super Bowl College Ad Challenge
• SpiralFrog new media release #1
• SpiralFrog new media release #2
• Shift Communications new media release on winning the Novell AOR business
• Shift Communications’ social media release for Novell
• New Media Release wiki
• Google Groups mailing list for New Media Release discussion (please join!)

Here is a practical example of how a newspaper generates, re-purposed copy from a NMR. we have to be able to offer content like this as well as the 1000 word backgrounder or knowldege resourse generated via this technology and posed to del.icio.us for added depth.

Enterprise tagging - managing corporate knowledge

From Shel Holtz I find that Cogenz, Niall Cook’s startup that aims to bring social book marking to the enterprise level, is looking for corporate beta testers.

What Cogenz does is offer a capability whereby people can create a knowledge base that links people, departments, places, expertise and knowledge resources in a way that makes it easy to find and re purpose.

It is worth following the whole story from Niall's site to see how useful such a resource can be now and in the future.

To be able to create a New Media Release with such a competence will be easy and will make the whole process much more manageable for the Media Relations specialist.

Of course there are many other applications and some of them will make some organisations fundamentally more competitive.

Beyond the New Media Release

What must we do to our media releases to serve the publishing industry.

First of all we need to be able to offer formats that are helpful. Just as a paper press release is unhelpful to a journalist these days, so too is a format that forgets the media need to use SMS.

There is another consideration which is described byAdrian Holovaty who gives a good idea of what 'repurpose' means and says: "I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

This is important for public relations on a number of counts.

Would we have to provide the wider and broader content? Does this mean that the New Media Release is inevitable? Yes it does in order that we can offer the formats that are realistic for todays' media.

But we have to go further.

For example, suggests Adrian "say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

This goes some way beyond a New Media Release because it uses will use the NMR tags to mix and match news stories.

This is how XPRL and NewsML will be helpful to the media and to readers who want to go beyond the news story to offer more facts.

IPTC G2 Family of Standards (which is the new NewsML) will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.

The PR industry has to work on this to stay with it.

To offer PR services do you need a licence?

Toni Musi Falconi, as always with his finger on the button. He has entered the debate about whether PR practitioners should be licenced.

He makes this comment: Pressed by increasing social and media criticism of our profession and a recent comment by Richard Edelman on the potential merit of licensing, PRSA the other day asked its ethics committee to discuss the issue and make recommendations to the Board.
Criticisms emerged when the Committee decided to keep contents of the meeting confidential and subsequently a brief summary of that discussion was published on the PRSA website.
Interestingly, the debate on licensing of the profession is open also in many other countries. Some have already proceeded (Nigeria, Brazil, Panama, Peru amongst others), others are in the process (Russia for one, but also Puerto Rico…and one may also argue that the 2005 decision of the UK’s CIPR to be the first European Union country to be formally recognized by the national Government could well lead to this result, and this would inevitably influence the ongoing discussion in other EU countries).

A profile of the PR person worldwide

Public relations professionals worldwide are being profiled by the Global Alliance. Toni Musi Falconi reports on preliminary findings.

They are more or less equally divided in three main categories (30%): private industry, public sector, consultancy and services, while the non profit sector is close to 10%.
79% are either directly heads of their organization or report directly to top management, while a solid 79% indicate that the main part of their job consists in developing and implementing communication and relationship strategies and programs.
71% travel intensely in their home country while 36% travel frequently international.
67% earns a minimum of net 40 thousand US dollars per annum, but 12% more than 100 thousand, while 61% also benefit from free health insurance and 47% from a supplementary annual bonus.
58% is in the 25-44 age range, while 34% in the 45-60 one.
68% are women, 80% has a university degree and 98% speaks the English language.

Jamelia and the sun opportunity

Jamelia reveals how she can't wait to get married on Victoria Newton's Bizarre podcast offered by the Sun's web site.

Two things are important here. The first is that the Sun is working hard to get its readers to go on line and is providing simple and easy to follow instruction. second is that the Sun's podcast is another vehicle for communication.

Picture: Hometown AOL

Footbal podcasting

Every self respecting Association Football Club should have a podcast and Sunderland AFC is no exception.

The use of new media by football clubs and their technology uptake makes many businesses in Britain look neanderthal.

Second Life compromised

Second Life, the fast-growing online virtual community has suffered a computer security breach that exposed the real-world personal data of its users.

Linden Lab, the company behind the Second Life site, said in a letter to its 650,000 users this weekend its customer database - including names, addresses, passwords and some credit card data - had been compromised.

Old fashioned hacking has not gone away. Linden labs now has an issue management job to do because so many companies have begun to take space in their virtual world to gain commercial advantage.

Why blogging is becomming maintream in corporate communication

With companies increasingly using blogging to communicate both internally to staff and externally to clients and customers, 10 of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT user panel said corporate blogs are more than just another technology fad that has found favour among senior managers.

Silicon.com have asked for examples.

Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "Like all new technologies corporate blogs are often misapplied but there are valid applications, usually employee communication and not external. We do have a couple in use here in the former category."

New media platforms - old corporate wars

The Enquirer has this take on a YouGov pol. A survey of British directors, carried out by YouGov, has discovered that 29 per cent of them are prepared to steal corporate data when they change employers. But the hidden danger is from the mobile phone.

The chief devices fingered for enabling such data to be stolen are primarily memory sticks (obviously) and also digital music players – like the Apple iPOD. But what the experts appear to have forgotten is that a standard feature of any Nokia Series 60 3rd edition handset is its ability to appear to be a memory stick.

There is no doubt that many platforms offer communication capabilities to steal information from an employer.

Manginging porosity is a public relations issue as this post points out.

A lesson learned

Government minister David Miliband has vowed to continue experimenting with online engagement after his department's first move into wiki-policy ended in disarray, reports c|net.

Miliband commented on his blog: "Since writing this I gather that we have demonstrated the extreme openness of the wiki by playing host to some practical jokes... Strange how some people get their kicks. But the experiment will continue."


This was a brave idea and is an excellent case study. Using Social Media is not just a question of starting a blog or setting up a wiki. It is a serious undertaking offering great benefits but with its own management needs.

Just like starting a press relations campaign, a wiki or blog needs a strategy behind it.

It was not for nothing that I have campaigned for the PR profession to develop a strategy capability and gave an example of how strategy might be developed.

No we can learn the lessons from David Miliband's brave attempt and move on.

More comments from Tech Digest here.

Doctors don't like spin - pubs dont like quacks

A report suggesting Oxford has the biggest binge-drinking problem in the South-East and the highest death rates from liver disease should be treated with caution, health chiefs and pub landlords according to the Oxford Mail.

North West Public Health Observatory use of statistics need a health check and so too should all surveys used in PR. T

According to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, NWPHO provides a resource for Public Health information and intelligence in the North West of England.

I expect the reputation of both organisation is what they deserve. One for rigging results and the other for endorsing quacks.

YouTube vid not fun anymore

The short video blog postings by lonelygirl15 on the YouTube website have attracted millions of viewers since they started appearing in May says Dan Glaister the Guradian's man in Los Angeles. But the postings' polished nature and the intriguing inconsistencies in the stories led many to suspect that lonelygirl15 was fake.

Exposed this week, the responce from Alissa Brooke, a blogger who has hosted a forum on the lonelygirl15 phenomenon wrote: "Well, that's no fun any more."

So fake blogs damage brands - We can take from this that sstroturfing is bad news for PR practitioners.