Disintermediated PR

Erick Schonfeld has an excellent post about disruptive businesses.

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

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

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

1. Netvibes (The new personalized startpage)

2. EEStor (Gentlemen, stop your engines)

3. Coghead (DIY software)

4. NextMedium (Web marketplace for product placement)

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

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

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

8. Clearwire (Craig McCaw's WiMax play)

9. Zopa (Peer-to-peer banking)

10. Jajah (VoIP 2.0)

11. NanoLife Sciences (Cancer-blasting antiprotons)

Thailand coup d'état already on Wikipedia

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

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

There is a significant lesson here for PR practice.

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

The Arts use blogs to get wider apeal

The Stage reports:

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

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

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

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

Citzen Journalism on the reuters Payroll

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

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

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

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

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

Ex Shandwick Chief's new empire ups profits

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

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

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

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

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

Consultancies in the Huntsworth group include:

• Avenue HKM
• Brand Health International Ltd.
• Broadstreet
• Huntsworth Health
• Jago Pearce
• PBC Group
• VB Communications

• Citigate Belgium
• Citigate Cunningham
• Citigate Demuth
• Citigate Dewe Rogerson
• Citigate France
• Citigate Gramma
• Citigate Italy
• Citigate Sanchis
• EHPR
• Grayling
• Harrison Cowley
• Haslimann Taylor PR
• Momentum
• NBS Public Relations
• Park Avenue
• PR Force Belgium
• PR Force Netherlands
• RS Live
• SCPR London
• The Red Consultancy
• Trimedia

• Citigate Public Affairs
• Grayling Public Affairs
• Momentum
• The Global Consulting Group

Public Sector Podcasting

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

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

The Changing nature of Privacy

New Scientist is asking questions about living online.

It accepts, without question, that there is a life that is completely mediated by being online and it ascribes this life to most young people.

Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective action.

It also gives a clue as to what kind of lifestyle is expected of theis generation.

The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, emails answered, messages responded to. In this buzz of activity, there may be losses that we are not ready to sustain. We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. Teens growing up with always-on communication are primed to receive a quick message to which they are expected to give a rapid response. They may never know another way. Their experience raises a question for us all: are we leaving enough time to take one's time?

Much of what NS says has been known for some time and we even saw it coming a decade ago. The big thing we did not anticipate was the level of multi-tasking.

A world of TV

I noted from Always On that Jump TV has gained stock market listing.

Toronto based, Jump TV offers the out put of a considerable selection of Television stations round the world.

It is a place that is worth visiting to see some riveting examples of TV across the globe.

In our global world, this is a channel that is a must to follow the local news. For example, I was able to watch Thai TV Global TV Network the first and only satellite TV broadcasting center in Thailand operated by the Royal Thai Army. There are some very pretty Thai army soldiers on their TV programme.

Here is another demonstration of the many channels for reaching Internet audiences.

CIPR Scotland AGM

The Annual General Meeting of the Scotland Group of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations will be held on Tuesday 26 September 2006 at 6.15pm in George Suite, George Hotel, 19 -21 George Street, Edinburgh. Members of the CIPR are invited to attend and vote.

Is this time to vote for people who see Social Media (blogs, Wikis, RSS etc) as an important part of PR practice?

Issues management case study

Tom Foremski offers us a classic case study of issues management.

Don't miss the next episode.

Every one leaves an online trail - no more

Whenever any computer connects to the net it freely shares information about the address it is using. This is so any data it requests is sent back to the right place.

The Torpark browser has been created by the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation and uses its own network of net routers to anonymise the traffic people generate when they browse the web.

The browser can be put on a flash memory stick so users can turn any PC into an anonymous terminal.

The Tor network tries to stop this information being shared in two ways. First, it encrypts traffic between a computer and the Tor network of routers - this makes it much harder to spy on the traffic and pinpoint who is doing what.

Second, the Tor network regularly changes the net address that someone appears to be browsing from - again this frustrates any attempt to pin a particular browsing session on any individual.

This sort of disruption very quickly skews data used to identify who is doing what and when online.

Who will take the vidcast space. Is it the PR or Ad man

Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, writing in ClickZ offers an insight into the use of movies in advertising. My view is that this is not Advertising Industry territory at all. It is territory for the communicator. The full article is well worth reading but this abstract is germane.

a powerful new video medium is exploding on the scene. It speaks to the traditional agency's core strength: story-telling. Moreover, it's a format that's infinitely more malleable and flexible than the current unit of expression (e.g. a :30 TV spot) affords. That spells opportunity. Indeed, the current TV ad model has put most traditional agencies in an inflexible straightjacket.

The new on-demand video environment opens up a wealth of opportunities to push ad models, well beyond pre-and-post rolls. They include:

• From TV Spots to Branded Plots: Just as thousands of independent films are flowering a cross the Web, brands have the potential to bring their own direct and indirect forms of storytelling online at their own pace, and well beyond the constraints of "paid" media. Moreover, they can leverage their own consumer touchpoints (e.g. packaging) to cross promote such endeavors. The power of feedback loops to inform concept development has the potential to take this to an entirely new level.



• From Fat Middle Standardization to Long-Tail Customization: Too often, TV commercials have no choice but to maximize appeal to the largest number. This omits lots of value in the margins. A key opportunity for agencies is to craft more diverse messages to different audiences. Why, for example, can't electronics firms give iPods or mobile phones to customers pre-loaded with customized or tailored content? Why can't a brand produce multiple variations of an ad copy that speak to a range of cohorts? At P&G, we usually started with a host of excellent concepts, but typically had to boil it all down to one or two that maximized appeal.



• A New Day for Long Play: Who says brands should do their own infomercials, or that agencies are "above" such formats? Yes, there's a stigma, but that's partly because many respectable brands have stayed away from the medium, and we haven't seen much creativity in it for a long time. Fact is, long-play does work, especially if consumers engage and core benefits really get across. At P&G, we'd exhaust huge resources trying to perfect four seconds of a side-by-side demo. We knew from experience such "benefit visualization" and "reason to believe" impacted the ad's convincingness. Imagine the power of a real demo, and not necessarily with the constraints of always having to pay for the time.



• From Channels to Brannels: Beyond long-play ads, agencies have another extraordinarily unique opportunity: to transform Web sites into TV channels. We're already seeing this with a few pioneers like Nike and Budweiser. They're leveraging their brands as stand alone content channels. What's the bigger long-term idea: P&G's HomeMadeSimple porting to TV, or HomeMadeSimple becoming an on-demand advice and expertise video channel? If my baby blog can feature diaper changing videos, why can't Pampers or Huggies? Why – please, tell me why – won't electronics companies' agencies start producing more compelling "how to" videos explaining how to use products? When I'm done with my current job, I'm starting an online channel entitled "UserGuideTV.com."



• CGM as Partner in Catalyzing Change: Far from a threat, consumer-generated media may just be the best thing that ever happened to traditional agencies. Why not allow consumers to "liberate" the process? At P&G, we used interns to open up management thinking. At GM, the Fastlane blog also serves as a catalyst for far broader change and innovation within the organization. As agencies push "co-creation" campaigns, such as what we've seen with GM and Frito-Lay's Super Bowl ad competitions, there's real potential to liberate antiquated copy development processes. Consumer testimonials, properly employed, actually make branded messaging more persuasive. Agencies have always "borrowed equity" from third party influencers, from celebrity spokespersons to known authorities ("dentists recommend"), to make ad copy more compelling. Finally, CGM in particular tends to morph many disciplines in one, i.e. one-to-one relationships, influencer relations, interactivity, planning and research, and increasingly, video. That amounts to a healthy kick in the pants to move traditional agencies to a more integrated, cross-platform future.

What is social bookmarking and what has it to do with PR

Social bookmarking sites generally organise their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. They are percived to be more valuable by users.

The two dominant social bookmarketing services are del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

There is a lot more information at Read/Write Web but some key take aways are:

Current number of people using del.icio.us at 500,000
Blogmarks has a total of 514,205 posts, estimated users 5,000 which is 100 bookmarks per user.

Why is this important for PR?

Read/Write Web give some interesting insights comparing two significant brands (go2web20.net and CNN). Just look at the numbers of users to get some idea of the influence of social bookmarking:

Site	Links to go2web20.net	Estimated users based on go2web20.net	Links to cnn.com	Estimated users based on cnn.com
BlinkList	40	14,800	568	38,200
Blogmarks	5	1,800	56	3,700
del.icio.us	1,354	500,000 (baseline)	7,429	500,000 (baseline)
Diigo	21	7,750	32	2,150
Furl	53	19,600	200	13,500
Ma.gnolia	9	3,300	51	3,400
Shadows	1	370	21	1,400
Simpy	9	3,300	312	21,000
Stumble Upon		1,271,345 (public)		1,271,345 (public)

If your organisation, its values, properties, products or services get highly ranked in say del.icio.us, more people find it and people know what sort of community likes your organisation. It is a trust, reputation and referal advantage all in one.

To get some idea of how brands can become viral Have a look at this one for tesco then look at MySpace. So you can get the idea. Someone puts their bookmarks in Del.icio.us and they are adopted by other people and often by hundreds of people.

Of course, you might consider where you should be here.

Financial Public Relations must get XML to compete

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) is in the final stages of a four-year technology initiative designed to speed up transactions and reduce costs by one fifth. This will lead to 24/7 trading quite soon. Trading round the clock will create added pressures on the PR industry and its suppliers such as information and (even) press clip vendors.

The LSE has already increasing the real-time transfer rate from 30 milliseconds down to just two and the only way that delivering financial information to the Market, Traders, Analysts, Shareholders and the media so they can also benefit is by using XML tagged data.

Financial data is transferred this way using a format called XBRL.

The element that includes statements, reports and backgrounders, the words, now needs to be implemented in XPRL, the PR industry standard which received a major boost with this week's announcements.

While many financial PR companies have failed to invest in interoperability (or in XPRL) they could still have a window of opportunity but time is slipping by and the opportunity out of their grasp.

Right now, of course, they cannot claim to offer comprehensive communication services because they do not have the tools to do it.

WPP and Google partnership

Advertising giant WPP is trying to get into bed with Google.

Sir Martin Sorrell WPP Group PLC chief executive said yesterday:

'We are working very closely with Google Inc but it is very difficult to work out if it is a friend or foe.'

WPP is Google's third largest customer and helps clients maximize their advertising effectiveness in Google's many functions.

About $1.5 billion of WPP's 2005 revenues of $10 billion were related to online: "About 15 percent of our business is internet, and this will be 30 percent in 10 years," he is quoted as saying.

In a Reuters article last march, Sir Martin made this compafrison between the two organisations:

"Google is at $5 billion in revenues and capitalized at $100 billion, we're at $10 billion in revenues and capitalized at $14.5 billion. They have 5,000 people, we have 72,000. They have 25 offices and we have 2,000 offices. Clearly they have a different model and are smarter than we are."

It might also be noted that at the end of August Google had $10 billion of cash sloshing about with no place to spend it.

Google has been on the mind of the WPP chief for a long time. Something is cooking.

WPP has recently taken a 10 pct stake in Spot Runner, a US online business that enables small businesses to customise their own TV ads at a much lower cost than if they used an advertising agency.

Sir Martin also made the comment yesterday that:

'TV is not dead. It is still the most effective medium for reaching the largest number of people in the shortest time at the lowest cost. There are more TV channels but stable viewing figures and fewer mass market vehicles.'

Or put another way, people are making it clear to the Marketers that they are not a 'mass audience' at all.

A real revolution would be WPP involvement in Google Video.


It will be an interesting bed.

This, of course is advertising. PR has a much bigger opportunity. It is tough for a company as big and diverse as WPP to understand the relationship value model and what that means to advertising over the next few years.

Advertising knocks Yahoo value

Yahoo's share price took another hit yesterday as it warned that slowing advertising growth will depress its third-quarter results. Shares fell by more than 11%.

There is an element of 'I told you so' in this response.

Scream marketing has had its day. Many advertising models are just old fashioned.

Now this is a big problem for a whole range of social media initiatives. They try to find way of generating income and advertising seems to be the only solution.

Well, until now, this was OK but people who use online services, just as for all other media, are simply not enthralled by having a marketing managers idea of fun thrust into their eyeballs.
As Ryan Stewart at ZDNet put it:

...the savviest web users have trained themselves to ignore the text and picture ads that they see on nearly every site they visit. Clearly these have become the staple of internet marketing, and they won't go away because they do work for some things. Advertisers can segment their campaigns more effectively, targeting sites that have users with the demographic makeup they want. Search terms will continue to show intent and provide web companies with a healthy revenue stream. But the road to a profitable web application is not paved with simply eye balls and page views.

So what are the alternative.

I think we are near a tipping point where the online community can get to products without advertisers getting in the way.

Building a community of interests (note plural) has considerable mileage.

For example, to get more people to your music site so that you can sell more tracks may mean hosting a lot of 'free' tracks that people can down load and occasionally buy a paid for track. To do this you may want to build a community of podcasters who use the music on your site to get some tracks up the ranking so that they can be included among in the 'paid for' portfolio. Here are two communities. The musician community uploading track for free play and podcasters.

Developing the range of communities is not hard but it is time consuming. It is not cheap and you do need a lot of analysis to hand.

What I need now is a semantic analysis tool to be able to identify the notions that are attractive to the audience. Then I can start building campaigns.

So Girish is building one next month.

Is podcasting the right medium?

Boreing Boring if you are going to use new media you need a strategy... I know I have said it before.

Here is a reasoned argumnet about the use of podcasting to replace lectures.

David Hearnshaw starts by saying:

Academics should consider what they wish to achieve - and that may require going back to first principles. Often the lecturer wishes to impart facts, concepts, methods and approaches to foster knowledge and critical judgement. And this frequently requires more than words.

What do you think?

Flock round new browser

Flock is a new web browser that combines integrated photo sharing with RSS support.

Bloggers are a target audience for Flock, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox, because it has been designed to keep people up to date with news, blogs and when friends appear online.

Political Blogging event in Manchester

An event exploring the way that political blogging is changing the face of the media will be held at in Manchester to coincide with the start of the Labour Party Conference. Sponsored by the Manchester Evening News and starting at 4pm on Sunday, the free discussion will be moderated by Manchester blogger and freelance journalist Kate Feld, who writes The Manchizzle.

Panelists include Norman Geras, a blogger, author and professor emeritus at Manchester University. Martin Stabe, an online reporter for The Press Gazette, (www.pressgazette.co.uk/dog), and Bill Jones blogs at Skipper (www.skipper59.blogspot.com), which covers UK politics, parliament and the press.

The PR Drumbeat - £500,000 to be invested

Over the last week, the biggest thing to hit Public Relations practice for ten years has begun. It includes a $500,000 investment. It is gaining powerful support across the world and it will affect all PR practice from now on.

It is the re-emergence of XPRL.

Imagine, just for a moment that you use an PR agency who produce documents, reports and working papers, a research company, a media list provider, an evaluation company, an events organiser and a photographer. Not an extensive list but they all produce content. They all fit into your planning and management scene.

It is content that you have to manage and integrate. As the media scene grows and you have to deal with the web, on-line news clips, blogs and even more stuff there is more content and it is becoming ever more complex.

You seek tools that allows you to integrate this content, these data.

The tools you seek, these computer programmes, have a problem. The data has to be manhandled, it has to be pasted from one tool to the next. In many cases the data is incompatible. Evaluation data cannot go into your media list. The event organiser data does not go into your calendar or project planning software. You do not have 'interoperability'. Your efforts have been foiled. Its an expensive nightmare.

But... what if.... deep inside these computer programmes there was a PR specific language that did allow these disparate data to be used in PR tools and computer programmes?

This is the big idea.

It's XPRL.

It has been developed as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML initiative.

It is an initiative re-enervated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) in June this year who said "The challenges here are real. The ontologies that will furnish the semantics for the Semantic Web must be developed, managed, and endorsed by committed practice communities."

XPRL.org has responded on behalf of the PR industry world wide. It now seeks the support of the whole industry and its associated value chain.

XML has already been a powerful driver in the sciences, medicine and other areas of research and development. In management its most notable contribution has been in the area of accounting, financial reporting and on the bourses of the world.


The XPRL initiative began in 2001. With its own web site, A scope of PR document.

Ged Carrol, blogging in 2002 provided the first blog post about XPRL.

Alison Clark became chair in 2004 and there are a number of initiatives reported online.

XPRL formally launched in Italy

By 2004, the Global Alliance had accepted the significance of this development with an offer of funding.


In 2004, Fuse PR put XPRL into context in this article.

XPRL based PR tools began to appear.

Its is described by Mike Manuel like this.

What is does is offered in this example.

The 2006 initiative came alive when new media practitioners sought modern day solutions for for PR tools as in the case of the New Media release initiative. People like Brian Solis, Todd Van Hoosear, Chris Heuer , Todd Defren.

More questions and interest came into the public domain.

I commented on the reality for PR practice in August this year.

So, I wrote a paper which, updated by participants today is the latest in the saga. It identifies a $250,000 offer which, if the industry can match it, will be a tremendous boost to PR.

Toni Muzi Falconi, once again became involved.

XPRL is discussed by the New Media Release initiative in this podcast.

The Paper 'XPRL Game On' was considered at an XPRL Meeting last week (a 'minute' was posted by Chris Heuer here).

Further comments here from Anthony and Sally here.


The paper is published here.

xprl